About
Yascha Mounk is a writer and academic known for his work on the crisis of democracy and the defense of philosophically liberal values.
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Born in Germany to Polish parents, Yascha received his BA in History from Trinity College Cambridge and his PhD in Government from Harvard University. He is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, where he holds appointments in both the School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute. Yascha is the Founder of Persuasion and the host of The Good Fight podcast. He writes a weekly column for his over 100,000 subscribers on Substack, is a Contributing Writer at The Dispatch, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute for Humane Sciences in Vienna, and servers as a publisher (Herausgeber) at Die Zeit.
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Yascha has written five books: Stranger in My Own Country - A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, a memoir about Germany’s fraught attempts to deal with its past; The Age of Responsibility – Luck, Choice and the Welfare State, which argues that a growing obsession with the concept of individual responsibility has transformed western welfare states; The People versus Democracy – Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, which explains the causes of the populist rise and investigates how to renew liberal democracy; The Great Experiment - Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, which argues that anybody who seeks to help ethnically and religiously diverse democracies thrive has reason to embrace a more ambitious vision for their future than is now fashionable; and his latest, The Identity Trap - A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which tells the story of how a new set of ideas about race, gender and sexual orientation came to be extremely influential in mainstream institutions, and why it would be a mistake to give up on a more universalist humanism. Yascha also occasionally writes for newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and The Spectators. He is also a regular contributor to major international publications including Le Point, La Repubblica and El País, among others.
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