In his lecture, Jan-Werner Müller will talk about what he sees as a major concern today: the crisis of intermediary powers, political parties and the media in particular. The problem is with institutions, not with the masses, contrary to what some liberal observers often claim. After a normative assessment of what a democracy needs from intermediary institutions, he will make a number of concrete suggestions for institutional reform.

The lecture will be held in English with simultaneous translation into Ukrainian.

Jan-Werner Müller, born 1970, teaches in the Politics Department, Princeton University. He has been a Member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, and a visiting fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute of Advanced Study, Collegium Helsinki, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Remarque Institute, NYU, the Center for European Studies, Harvard, as well as the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence. Müller is a co-founder of the European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA; today: Bard Berlin). He is the author of Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (Yale UP, 2000), A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (Yale UP, 2003), Constitutional Patriotism (Princeton UP, 2007) and Contesting Democracy (Yale UP, 2011). He is also the author of What is Populism? (Penguin Press, 2017), which has been translated into 25 languages. His forthcoming books are Democracy Rules! and Street, Palace, Square: What Spaces for Democracy?