Jan‐werner Müller
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3963687 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jan‐werner Müller |
| NOMBRES | Jan‐werner |
| APELLIDO | Müller |
| FIRMA | MULLER J W |
| AFILIACIONES | Princeton University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 64 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 294 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 64 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1986 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Political Trust in the New Age of Autocratization
Today’s crises of democracy and the corresponding rise of autocracies are often connected to a lack of trust. This article argues first that distrust also has many legitimate places in democracies, but that, ultimately democracies do indeed require a certain basic political trust: one needs to assume that one’s fellow citizens are committed to democracy as an ongoing project of free and equal people; they need to be “reasonable” in the Rawlsian s…
On the square
Mass assembly on squares tends to be associated both with democracy and authoritarian as well as populist regimes (where assembly is connected to acclamation). The article elucidates the specific democratic functions of mass assembly, and how they can be facilitated both legally and spatially. In case of the former, it provides a critical analysis of indispensable core components of the right to assemble (which has recently been hollowed out in m…
Streaming and blocking
The Climate Crisis as a Challenge to Democracy
This essay, a postscript to the Common Knowledge symposium "Antipolitics," analyzes the particular challenges that the climate emergency poses for representative democracy. It asks how ways of conducting political conflict can be shaped in a broadly speaking climate-friendly way. It also probes an institutional alternative to representative assemblies of winners in free and fair elections among political parties: mini-publics of citizens chosen a…
Building Autocracy in the Twenty-First Century
This article discusses the question how autocracies in the twenty-first century try to use the built environment to increase their legitimacy. It first briefly discusses whether monumentality is distinctly autocratic or not. It then endorses the argument recently made by social scientists that autocracies in the twenty-first century differ significantly from dictatorships in the twentieth century. Three strategies of autocratic construction are t…
Not just defending, but deepening democracy
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
Just how is architecture ideological
This research note suggests a number of ways in which architecture and the built environment more broadly might be understood as ideological. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). In the original, the chapter is entitled Ceci tuera cela. The chapter, for which he has consulted architects, was included in the second, 1832 addition; Hugo…
Response to Sofia Näsström’s Review of Democracy Rules
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Citizens as Militant Democrats, Or
Militant democracy calls for pre-emptive measures against political actors who use democratic institutions to undermine or outright abolish a democratic political system. Born in the context of interwar fascism, militant democracy has recently been revived by political and legal theorists concerned about the rise of authoritarian right-wing populists. A long-standing charge against militant democracy—also articulated with renewed force in our era…
What, If Anything, Do Populism and Conspiracy Theories Have to Do with Each Other
What, If Anything, Do Populism and Conspiracy Theories Have to Do with Each Other? Jan-Werner Müller (bio) populism and conspiracy theories are often mentioned in one breath.1 Populists, it is frequently claimed, are characterized as being "critical of elites" or "angry with the establishment." And "the elites," or so populists claim, are all conspiring against "the people" somehow: a simplistic and, above all, Manichean picture, with good and ev…
The Constitution as a Pedagogical Project
Madhav Khosla’s excellent study invites us to reflect more deeply – in light of the Indian experience – on what, on the very last page of the book, Khosla calls ‘the global unravelling of constitut
Democracy’s critical infrastructure
Ever since the 19th century, political parties and free media were widely deemed indispensable for the proper functioning of representative democracy. They constituted what one might call the critical infrastructure of democracy, an infrastructure which enabled citizens to use their basic rights effectively and also to reach each other (and be reached). Both intermediary institutions are undergoing major structural transformations today (or might…
Qu'est-ce qui menace la liberté de la presse aujourd'hui
Ce sont les régimes autoritaires qui menacent la liberté de la presse dans le monde. Mais les réseaux sociaux alimentent également la haine et manquent de transparence
Élections allemandes
Usages de la peur
En s'inspirant des travaux de Judith Shklar, il est possible de s'appuyer sur la sensibilisation aux expériences de dépendance et d'oppression pour réarmer le libéralisme face au populisme et de repenser l'État de droit adossé à l'engagement démocratique des citoyens
The Contours of Cold War Liberalism (Berlin’s in Particular)
Democracy and disrespect
The essay takes the widespread complaint that societies today are deeply divided and polarized as a starting point. Affirming that there is no democracy without division, it asks what it means for conflict and disagreement to be dealt with in a respectful and civil manner. As an illustration of the main argument, the way that liberals (in the broadest sense) have engaged with populist leaders is criticized on both a strategic and normative level.…
What Spaces Does Democracy Need
The article asks what role different types of physical spaces play for democracy, based on an understanding of democracy as being in need of both a central site of decision making and informal spaces for deliberation and contestation. It then further asks whether the latter functions can be fulfilled by online spaces and also whether the internet might have something like an elective affinity with populism
What the dictum really meant—and what it could mean for us
Populism and Constitutionalism
Many scholars hold that populism and constitutionalism cannot go together: populists, it is claimed, are against institutions in general, and against checks and balances as provided for in constitutions in particular. Instead, so the conventional wisdom goes, they assert an unrestrained popular will, or an unmediated relationship between a charismatic leader and the people. This chapter disputes this picture, building on a definition of populism …
Contesting Democracy
This book is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, to appear since the end of the Cold War. Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Müller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly…
Europe’s Intellectuals and the Cold War
Qu’est-ce que le populisme ? Définir enfin la menace
The EU's Democratic Deficit and the Public Sphere
The EU will not become something like a traditional nation-state anytime soon, and no supranational public sphere is likely to ever replace national public spheres
What Is Populism
The People Must Be Extracted from Within the People
Protecting Popular Self-Government from the People? New Normative Perspectives on Militant Democracy
This article assesses recent normative theorizing on militant democracy—the idea that, to protect themselves, democracies might under some circumstances have to restrict the rights of those set on undermining or outright destroying democracy. Particular attention is paid to new justifications of militant democracy that seek to avoid the danger of militant democracy itself damaging democracy, as well as to the question of who the agent deciding on…
Fear and Freedom
This article identifies a distinct strand of 20th-century liberal thought that was exemplified by Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron and, to a lesser extent, Karl Popper. I offer a stylized account of their common ideas and shared political sensibility, and argue that their primarily negative liberalism was a variety of what Judith Shklar called the `liberalism of fear' — which put the imperative to avoid cruelty and atrocity first. All three founded th…
On the Origins of Constitutional Patriotism
Defending Democracy within the EU
Recent illiberal turns in Hungary and Romania have prompted the question what, if anything, the EU could and should do to protect liberal democracy within Member States. The article discusses four principled concerns about democracy-saving EU interventions in Member States: that an institution which is itself largely undemocratic cannot credibly protect democracy; that there are in fact no common European standards which could be used to determin…
Comprehending conservatism
This essay argues against the view—frequently put forward by conservatives themselves—that conservatism cannot be analyzed as a coherent political ideology. It then proposes a multidimensional approach to understanding conservatism, defining (and defending a particular interpretation of) four dimensions which are termed sociological, methodological, dispositional and philosophical. It is argued that only if two of these four dimensions are presen…
The triumph of what (if anything)? Rethinking political ideologies and political institutions in twentieth-century Europe
This note explores new ways of thinking about the history of political thought in twentieth-century Europe. It argues that more attention ought to be paid to the interaction between political thought or imagination on the one hand and, on the other, actual political institutions as they were designed, sometimes destroyed, an often re-designed in the course of twentieth-century European history. With this comes a clearer focus on 'in-between figur…
Towards a new history of Christian Democracy
Political thought grouped under the rubric 'Christian Democracy' is often considered as profoundly unoriginal and as the product of politicians and party activists (rather than political philosophers). This note puts forward the argument that there is an important—and in parts original—body of thought responding to the challenge of how to reconcile Christianity and modern democracy in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. In rather schematic f…
A “Practical Dilemma Which Philosophy Alone Cannot Resolve”? Rethinking Militant Democracy
Is Europe Converging on Constitutional Patriotism? (And If So
In public justifications, but even more in state practice, it is argued that European countries are converging on a notion of membership and political attachment that is best theorized in terms of the category of constitutional patriotism. What once appeared as a highly idiosyncratic construct for the very specific situation of post‐war West Germany is now becoming an accepted norm and practice across Western Europe at least. A number of specific…
European Intellectual History as Contemporary History
The first part of this essay examines the peculiar role European intellectual history played in coming to terms with the twentieth century as an ‘Age of Extremes’ and the different weight it was given for that task at different times and in different national contexts up to the 1970s. The second part looks at the contemporary history of politically focused intellectual history — and the possible impact of the latter on the writing of contemporary…
Democracy’s critical infrastructure
Ever since the 19th century, political parties and free media were widely deemed indispensable for the proper functioning of representative democracy. They constituted what one might call the critical infrastructure of democracy, an infrastructure which enabled citizens to use their basic rights effectively and also to reach each other (and be reached). Both intermediary institutions are undergoing major structural transformations today (or might…
Democracy and disrespect
The essay takes the widespread complaint that societies today are deeply divided and polarized as a starting point. Affirming that there is no democracy without division, it asks what it means for conflict and disagreement to be dealt with in a respectful and civil manner. As an illustration of the main argument, the way that liberals (in the broadest sense) have engaged with populist leaders is criticized on both a strategic and normative level.…
Citizens as Militant Democrats, Or
Militant democracy calls for pre-emptive measures against political actors who use democratic institutions to undermine or outright abolish a democratic political system. Born in the context of interwar fascism, militant democracy has recently been revived by political and legal theorists concerned about the rise of authoritarian right-wing populists. A long-standing charge against militant democracy—also articulated with renewed force in our era…
The Paradoxes of Post-War Italian Political Thought
This article examines the complex nature of post-war Italian political thought, stressing the importance of Italy's unusual institutional and historical political arrangements, but also the vibrancy of its political ideologies in this period. In the past it has often been argued that the dysfunctional nature of post-war Italian democracy with its rapidly changing governments, and widespread corruption—which nonetheless coexisted with the one part…
Three Objections to Constitutional Patriotism
Julien Benda’s Anti-Passionate Europe
In the early 1930s, Julien Benda provided one of the most uncompromising visions for a united Europe. In line with his rationalist universalism, Benda sought a continent that was cleansed of passion and particularism, and called on European intellectuals to act as a rationalist vanguard in constructing such a Europe. However, Benda fatefully wavered between polity-building strategies of reshaping and redirection. For the most part, Benda seemed t…
Myth, law and order
The Kingdome of God is gotten by violence: but what if it could be gotten by unjust violence? (Hobbes, Leviathan). Heidegger and next to him Carl Schmitt, author of public law...publications and to a
Qu’est-ce que le populisme ? Définir enfin la menace
As Event, Milieu and Ideology
This article analyses the peculiar nature of the political thought of the leading activists of the German '68. It first discusses—and then partially dismisses—a number of common interpretations of the 'events', not least because previous accounts have paid insufficient attention to the actual political thought of the protagonists of '68. Three strands of '68 theorizing (and their limits) are then analysed: the legal road to socialism proposed by …
Streaming and blocking
What, If Anything, Do Populism and Conspiracy Theories Have to Do with Each Other
What, If Anything, Do Populism and Conspiracy Theories Have to Do with Each Other? Jan-Werner Müller (bio) populism and conspiracy theories are often mentioned in one breath.1 Populists, it is frequently claimed, are characterized as being "critical of elites" or "angry with the establishment." And "the elites," or so populists claim, are all conspiring against "the people" somehow: a simplistic and, above all, Manichean picture, with good and ev…
What the dictum really meant—and what it could mean for us
Rawls in Germany
This article analyses the reception of John Rawls's thought by Otfried Höffe, Jürgen Habermas and other political theorists on the German liberal left. It argues that, ironically, as Rawls's theory has become more historically self-conscious and sociologically oriented since A Theory of Justice, Habermas, while denying any fundamental difference between him and Rawls in this `neo-Kantian family quarrel', has moved in the opposite direction. One m…
Another Country
Die prinsipiële plek van oudiovisuele middele in die erediens
Tot 70% van wat ons sê, sê ons sonder woorde! Ons gebare, houding, gesigsuitdrukking, kleredrag, stemtoon, selfvertroue of gebrek daaraan, oogbeweging — die duur van 'n kyk, die posisie van die oë (m.a.w. loer ek, of gluur ek, of kyk ek met deernis), ensovoorts, dra alles betekenis oor en sê geweldig baie. Wanneer daar gepreek word is dit nie slegs die inhoud wat van belang is nie
Another Country
Memory and Power in Post-War Europe
How has memory - collective and individual - influenced European politics after the Second World War and after 1989 in particular? How has the past been used in domestic struggles for power, and how have 'historical lessons' been applied in foreign policy? While there is now a burgeoning field of social and cultural memory studies, mostly focused on commemorations and monuments, this volume is the first to examine the connection between memory an…
Another Country
As Event, Milieu and Ideology
This article analyses the peculiar nature of the political thought of the leading activists of the German '68. It first discusses—and then partially dismisses—a number of common interpretations of the 'events', not least because previous accounts have paid insufficient attention to the actual political thought of the protagonists of '68. Three strands of '68 theorizing (and their limits) are then analysed: the legal road to socialism proposed by …
Rawls in Germany
This article analyses the reception of John Rawls's thought by Otfried Höffe, Jürgen Habermas and other political theorists on the German liberal left. It argues that, ironically, as Rawls's theory has become more historically self-conscious and sociologically oriented since A Theory of Justice, Habermas, while denying any fundamental difference between him and Rawls in this `neo-Kantian family quarrel', has moved in the opposite direction. One m…
German Ideologies Since 1945
The contributors of this volume seek to answer such questions as: 'How did the Germans overcome 'Germanic Ideology', or did they?' 'Why is there no libertarianism in Germany?' 'What do German conserva
The Politics of Pedagogy
Myth, law and order
The Kingdome of God is gotten by violence: but what if it could be gotten by unjust violence? (Hobbes, Leviathan). Heidegger and next to him Carl Schmitt, author of public law...publications and to a
Toleration in Contexts
L'ordre mondial selon Joschka Fischer
Julien Benda’s Anti-Passionate Europe
In the early 1930s, Julien Benda provided one of the most uncompromising visions for a united Europe. In line with his rationalist universalism, Benda sought a continent that was cleansed of passion and particularism, and called on European intellectuals to act as a rationalist vanguard in constructing such a Europe. However, Benda fatefully wavered between polity-building strategies of reshaping and redirection. For the most part, Benda seemed t…
Comprehending conservatism
This essay argues against the view—frequently put forward by conservatives themselves—that conservatism cannot be analyzed as a coherent political ideology. It then proposes a multidimensional approach to understanding conservatism, defining (and defending a particular interpretation of) four dimensions which are termed sociological, methodological, dispositional and philosophical. It is argued that only if two of these four dimensions are presen…
On the Origins of Constitutional Patriotism
Le terrorisme n'est pas un « troisième totalitarisme
Fin de la constitution, fin du patriotisme constitutionnel
L'Europe peut-elle se poursuivre sans constitution ? Sans doute, car on aurait pu éviter de remuer les lourds symboles de l'idée constitutionnelle pour mettre de l'ordre dans les institutions. Mais s'il ne faut pas attendre d'une constitution l'adhésion des citoyens à l'Europe, alors quel type de sentiment d'appartenance le projet européen peut-il favoriser
Is Europe Converging on Constitutional Patriotism? (And If So
In public justifications, but even more in state practice, it is argued that European countries are converging on a notion of membership and political attachment that is best theorized in terms of the category of constitutional patriotism. What once appeared as a highly idiosyncratic construct for the very specific situation of post‐war West Germany is now becoming an accepted norm and practice across Western Europe at least. A number of specific…
Three Objections to Constitutional Patriotism
Complexités de la mémoire
Our Philadelphia›? On the Political and Intellectual History of the ‹European Constitution›
«Unser Philadelphia?» Über die politische und Ideengeschichte der «europäischen Verfassung»«Unser Philadelphia?» Über die politische und Ideengeschichte der «europäischen Verfassung»In Plänen zur europäischen Einigung in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts – ob von Politikern oder Intellektuellen initiiert – spielte die Idee einer geschriebenen Verfassung eine eher marginale Rolle. Seit den 1950er Jahren entwickelte die Europäische Gemeinschaf…
Fear and Freedom
This article identifies a distinct strand of 20th-century liberal thought that was exemplified by Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron and, to a lesser extent, Karl Popper. I offer a stylized account of their common ideas and shared political sensibility, and argue that their primarily negative liberalism was a variety of what Judith Shklar called the `liberalism of fear' — which put the imperative to avoid cruelty and atrocity first. All three founded th…
Constitutional Patriotism
Constitutional Patriotism offers a new theory of citizenship and civic allegiance for today's culturally diverse liberal democracies. Rejecting conventional accounts of liberal nationalism and cosmopolitanism, Jan-Werner Müller argues for a form of political belonging centered on universalist norms, adapted for specific constitutional cultures. At the same time, he presents a novel approach to thinking about political belonging and the preconditi…
The triumph of what (if anything)? Rethinking political ideologies and political institutions in twentieth-century Europe
This note explores new ways of thinking about the history of political thought in twentieth-century Europe. It argues that more attention ought to be paid to the interaction between political thought or imagination on the one hand and, on the other, actual political institutions as they were designed, sometimes destroyed, an often re-designed in the course of twentieth-century European history. With this comes a clearer focus on 'in-between figur…
Re‐imagining Leviathan
Both Michael Oakeshott and Carl Schmitt were deeply preoccupied with what Oakeshott called 'the experience of living in a modern European state'; both felt that the state's proper origins and trajectory had not been grasped, that proper statehood had profoundly been put into doubt in the twentieth century, and that state authority and legitimacy needed to be shored up in an age of 'mass politics'. Not surprisingly, then, both developed their conc…
European Intellectual History as Contemporary History
The first part of this essay examines the peculiar role European intellectual history played in coming to terms with the twentieth century as an ‘Age of Extremes’ and the different weight it was given for that task at different times and in different national contexts up to the 1970s. The second part looks at the contemporary history of politically focused intellectual history — and the possible impact of the latter on the writing of contemporary…
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