When Lea Ypi was growing up in communist Albania, her family seemed to be obsessed with universities. It was only with a change of regime that she understood what they had really been discussing.
Throughout her schooling, as she explains in her celebrated 2021 memoir Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, the future professor in political theory at the London School of Economics was subject to constant propaganda about how the country was the freest in the world and the eternal virtues of its first communist president, “uncle” Enver Hoxha. Her parents and paternal grandmother had the kind of “biography”?that made them politically suspect – it was no coincidence that her father shared his name with the prime minister of the short-lived Albanian puppet state controlled by fascist Italy – so they kept any dissident views to themselves for fear she might repeat them.
With the end of communism at the start of the 1990s, therefore, it turned out that everybody had been lying to her and that she had been protected from reality by an elaborate system of euphemisms. Talk of relatives who had “graduated” meant they had been released from prison. “Studying international relations” referred to treason charges. “Literature” translated into crimes of “agitation and propaganda”...
Ypi is a rare example of an academic who has produced both major scholarly monographs and a genuine best-seller which topped non-fiction lists in England and was acclaimed all over the world. Few books about Albania secure a wide readership, but Free offers an exceptionally vivid and poignant account of a young woman’s “coming of age” in extraordinary circumstances whose engaging characters and sharply observed detail made it a hit even among people who couldn’t find the country on a map.
Many academics were also enthusiastic. Lindsey Stonebridge, interdisciplinary chair in humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, for example, ?in the New Statesman as “deliciously smart...a brilliant disquisition on the meanings of freedom – its lures, false hopes, disappointments and possibilities – in our time”.
The book was generally well received in Albania but, according to Ypi, there was a small but vociferous group of critics who “probably wanted me to give a much clearer sense that there was unfreedom in communism and now there is freedom in capitalism”. Instead, it describes how people-smugglers, drug-dealers and sex-traffickers began, for the first time, to be “mentioned as normal occupations”. A friend ended up as a prostitute in Italy. And with Albania overrun with experts on “societies in transition”, Ypi’s father – by then the general manager of the largest port in the country – was required to make hundreds of Roma redundant in the name of what the World Bank called “structural reforms”. Many gathered in his garden with heartbreaking stories to beg him not to. “Freedom” turned out to be “like a dish served frozen”.
Free was published in the same year as one of Ypi’s major monographs, , which is based on detailed textual analysis. So where does she see the link between her strictly academic writing and work aimed at a much broader audience?
“Academic writing about freedom has some constraints,” she replied, “in that you can’t really talk about individuality, about how certain ideas impact on individual lived experience.” Although she initially planned to write a book driven by “a very abstract interest in different ideas of freedom”, she soon realised that in her life “these abstract categories were embodied by real people, with whom you also have feelings and attachments and conflicts that are not reducible to the contrast between ideas. This became a way for me to explore freedom in context.”
Writing the book made clear to her how conflicting views on freedom within her immediate family, as well as the experience of living through political transformations, chaos and civil war, helped shape her own theoretical interests. So, while she remains “very pluralistic about methods when it comes to political theory”, she firmly believes that there is “something valuable in opening up and exploring ideas” in a more biographical way.
Free has also “opened up new academic audiences for me”, noted Ypi, and “put me in touch with literary scholars, psychologists, experts in law, memory and life writing. I am going to give a keynote lecture at an anthropology conference. Because of its form, it travels far wider within academic circles than a straight political philosophy book. And that has been a gain for my academic work.”
There are currently major debates about freedom within universities as well as the impact of external forces?that curtail their own freedom.
So where does Ypi stand on such issues?
She disputed claims that certain things had become “unsayable”, although disciplines tended to define their own forms of “common sense” (which didn’t always align with “the common sense of the general public”), and “challenging such ‘common sense’ can be difficult. But I personally feel that we have a lot of academic freedom and, to the extent that we have constraints, it actually comes more from funding – we can’t be open with or challenge potential donors – particularly as universities get more and more dependent on external funding.”
Recent developments in the United States, however, had clearly revealed that “even our liberal democratic societies are not immune” to direct political interference in universities, “just because they have declared themselves to be liberal and democratic. Democracy is a process and it is more or less robust depending on how it is defended and how much mobilisation there is in the public sphere. Otherwise, the elite can come in to enforce the ‘common sense’ of the general public.”
On many topics, Ypi sees it as her role to “encourage people to think critically” without always drawing out “the policy implications of my ideas”. Yet she has appeared on breakfast television to challenge the stereotypes about Albanian criminality regularly thrown around by populist politicians and sometimes tries to use her position as a prominent British Albanian to intervene with the authorities when fellow Albanians appeal to her for help. (Although Ypi has lived in the UK for 15 years, her brother has never been granted a visa to visit her.)
She was also happy to deliver what she describes as an “activist” on migration and citizenship, as part of a series in Vienna earlier this year, because “I have empirical expertise in migration, so I have more ideas about how you can connect philosophy and political theory with policy issues...I only reach out when I feel that politics is getting too far away from a plausible way of handling important challenges. Migration is one of the cases where I feel a lot of the discussion is very badly informed and that a lot of dominant mainstream assumptions are not grounded in research.”
Last year, Ypi got dragged, briefly and unwillingly, into controversy when she was the subject of a salacious article which doesn’t deserve a link but in which a journalist described the experience of attending a lecture of hers and getting so excited that he had to head straight for a massage parlour.
What had she felt about that??“I think I tweeted to call it out,” Ypi replied. “It’s an example of the kind of sexism that women face to this day and, when you encounter that, you have a responsibility to highlight it so people can see it’s still ongoing. It’s a huge social problem because it makes it hard for women to articulate and make their voices heard in the public sphere.
“I don’t really know there is much more to say. You use the personal to highlight the political, structural problem. I didn’t want to talk to journalists about it afterwards, because I had done my bit. It becomes clickbait stuff. People aren’t really interested in the political problem but the personal dynamic.”
Indeed, Ypi feared that a certain amount of harassment was par for the course “if you are a blonde East European woman and – maybe I’m too cynical – I don’t really expect it to be different”. Here she rather shared the attitude of her mother, who had a pessimistic view of human nature and, according to Free, always carried a knife – and once gave a truck-driver “a little tickle on his hand” when she had to hitch-hike home at night from work in a remote village.
A concern with how women struggle to survive in dangerous times is one of the themes of Ypi’s bold new book,? (published by Allen Lane on 4 September). This too is aimed at a wide general readership and arises out of both personal and philosophical concerns.
When someone posted a photograph of Ypi’s paternal grandparents’ honeymoon on social media, it attracted much interest in Albania. One comment asked whether the woman shown was “related to Lea Ypi, the philosophy professor”. Someone else chipped in to say: “Ypi lectures around the world about how capitalism is wrong because it turns everything into a commodity...Meanwhile, she conveniently forgets her own grandfather, who rotted for decades in a communist prison.” (For the record, Ypi sees herself as “a kind of liberal socialist” and tends not to call herself a Marxist, though she admits that her “critique of capitalism is quite compatible with Marxist theory”.)
The thread then turned to direct personal abuse: “You dishonoured not just your grandmother but all the victims of communism, you communist bitch.” Others chimed in with further comments: “The grandmother too was a bitch” and “Perhaps not a bitch, but a communist spy. And before that, a fascist collaborator.”
“I wasn’t really worried about what people were saying about me, because I can defend my views,” Ypi told Times Higher Education, “but with someone who is no longer there, it raised the question of who has authority over their legacy. If it’s someone you were very close to, you feel a kind of immediate instinct to respond...”
When Ypi was young, her grandmother was her primary caregiver, since “my parents were just never around, they were more like flatmates”. She also acted as a kind of moral anchor who “saw freedom as connected to moral responsibility” and so inspired her granddaughter to embrace the ethical theories of Immanuel Kant precisely because they gave her “a philosophical elaboration of this idea I had inherited from her”. Now, she writes, “the insinuation that my grandmother might have been a collaborator – a communist or a fascist, or, most disturbingly, both – lingers like a shadow. I may be wrong to think of her as a paragon of virtue.”
In order to reconstruct the life of this remarkable but unknown woman, Ypi drew on the stories she had grown up with and “tried to imagine and put in character and plot and detail, to reconstruct what these stories were and what they meant to her and how they fitted together in her life”. She also consulted archives in Albania and four other countries, so that “even where a character is fictionalised, the life of that character is constructed on the basis of historical records of all kinds which you can find in the archives, with the awareness that the archive never gives you all the answers”.
There is some rich comic detail. Particularly entertaining is her grandmother’s exuberantly frivolous cousin and best friend “Cocotte”, whom Ypi remembers as “completely obsessed with mascara and hair dye even at the age of 80”.
Yet the dominant tone is sombre. Leman Ypi spent her early life in what is now Thessaloniki – her grandfather was a high-ranking Ottoman official who ate himself to death on baklava shortly after she was born. She lived through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the creation of new nations, the traumatic transfer of populations between Greece and Turkey, the persecution of minorities and – after moving to Albania at the age of 18 – the various horrors of Italian, German and communist control.
Although her granddaughter has a novelist’s instinct for dramatic incident and psychological nuance, Indignity is very much a philosopher’s book as well, since the different characters embody different attitudes – Kantian, Stoic, Nietzschean, more cynical and pragmatic – to dignity and morality. One of its central themes, she explained, was “the Kantian notion of asserting one’s will, a moral agency shaping the world – which we call dignity – as the distinctive thing which makes us human, in very traumatic circumstances. It is a way of testing that idea of freedom.” There are clear links with the more strictly academic work Ypi continues to produce.
Indignity is also a book about a topic crucial to many academic careers, namely the challenges and complexities of archival research.
Working in the archives, as a history student in Thessaloniki suggests in the book, is both “thrilling” and “like going on a blind date every week” but “never finding the right partner”. He also warns Ypi against wasting her time by asking for information about her grandmother: “If you know her father’s name, her grandfather’s, any uncles, ask for them instead. Basically, they have to be men. I gave up researching women. Women and archives. Good luck with that.”
When she discusses the themes of Indignity in an academic context, Ypi points to issues of “historical injustice, reconciliation and the standpoint from which you can reconstruct historical injustice. Do only victims or members of oppressed groups have the right to tell a story about their group and reconstruct their story? Who has authority to tell the story of a life? There is a very vibrant discussion in historical injustice around this.”
Every source, continued Ypi, is the survivor of a period of propaganda and ideology. A lot of the archive is about what you don’t find. What you find is often what an authority of some sort wants you to find.” This was very obvious in communist archives, where paid informants often just made things up if they hadn’t got anything else to report, but engagement with any form of archive “can’t avoid the question of the ideology which is pervading the results you get. You think you are going to get the truth, but you get someone’s else’s interpretation. The question is how you engage with all these different layers of interpretation in a way that is as least biased as possible.
“Where I end up in the book is that the truth you reconstruct with imaginative effort and with literature may be more reliable than just reporting evidence from the archives...”
Free achieved a complex and highly unusual balancing act, combining memoir, historical analysis and reflection on some major political and philosophical debates in the form of a “page-turner” which appealed to people all over the world. Indignity is in some ways even more radical. Yet Ypi might just have managed to write another book with equal appeal to historians, fellow political philosophers and those who have never read a word of Kant.
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