Interviews
Democracy and the New World Order
Michael Ignatieff’s speech at Amerikahaus München
— March 2025
Princess of Asturias Award in the Social Sciences
Michael Ignatieff wins the 2024 Princess of Asturias Award in the Social Sciences
— October 2024
All articles
academic freedom authoritarianism authority Canada Central European University CEU China citizenship civil society cold war democracy democratic empire Europe exceptionalism freedom Hannah Arendt human rights imperial power Isaiah Berlin legitimacy liberal liberal democracy liberalism market moral nation-building ordinary virtues politics populism power public Quebec responsibility rights rule of law Russia society state totalitarianism Ukraine United States Universal Declaration of Human Rights virtues welfare state
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Canada, Trump and the new world order
The Trump presidency signals shifts in US-Canada relations and the global order, challenging Canadian sovereignty amid America’s hemispheric strategy.
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The History of My Privileges
We cannot help thinking of our own lives as uniquely our own, but if we look more closely, we begin to see how much we shared with strangers of our own age and situation. If we could forget for a moment what was singular about our lives and concentrate instead on what we experienced with…
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Universal Values at Bay
The moral universalism enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights obliges us to recognize the humanity of others and the reality of their suffering. If that doctrine sounds naive in today’s world, it is because we have allowed malignant spoilers to smother this foundational intuition.
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Isaiah Berlin – The promise of freedom
Berlin would have warned us against hubris and intolerance, but also against fatalism. In the battle to come, history is on no one’s side. The outcome of this struggle over who owns the meaning of freedom will come down, as it always does, to the eternal question that decides history’s shape: who is prepared to…
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Epistemological Panic, or Thinking for Yourself
Thinking for yourself has never been easy, but the question of whether it is still possible at all is of some moment. The key ideals of liberal democracy—moral independence and intellectual autonomy—depend on it, and my students will not have much experience of either if they end up living in a culture where all of…
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After Paradise
How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of portraits of writers, artists and musicians searching for consolation—from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, and Primo Levi—writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each…
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A Shared truth
Democracies cannot function without some shared truth: the truth that we should live in peace with each other, that we should try to understand each other as best we can, that we should obey just laws and change unjust ones peacefully; and that we should share the land we love together.
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Democracy and the Legacy of Revolutionary Violence
Once founded in a moment of revolutionary upheaval, democracies must manage their legacy: to ensure that revolutionary violence, sanctioned as a sacred necessity at the beginning, does not legitimize violence when democracy faces a moment of crisis, deadlock or extreme polarization.
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In Praise of a Life Cut Short
Trevor Harrison was emblematic of [that] youthful optimism. In 2006, just out of Queen’s University, he showed up in my office on Parliament Hill.
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A tale of four cities
Russia tried to crush the will of the people in Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 and Warsaw in 1981, and failed each time. Kyiv in 2022 will be the same – the question is how long it will take, and at what cost.
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Populism and the Future of Democracy in Europe
Populism is one of those words that is dying from promiscuous over-use. […] I think what it means it is a general descriptor of any course of political action that does not command assent from a centrist elite of experts. Which means that it is not necessarily a bad thing at all. So we must…
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Liberalism in the Anthropocene
We must be unafraid to confront the dark side of progress now, but without losing faith in the human campaign to make life better. This is the conviction that we need to save our planet and ourselves.
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Rethinking Open Society
Upholding open society means accepting the “strain of personal responsibility, of carrying the cross of being human.” An open society is very demanding. It asks us to respect the dignity of others, especially of those with whom we may disagree and to make choices for ourselves and our community.
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Academic Freedom From Without and Within
Academic freedom is too important to be left to universities to defend by themselves. Universities need to rebuild public confidence in their mission.
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Human Rights, Global Ethics, and the Ordinary Virtues
Although globalization of our economies has not produced globalization in our hearts and minds, the geography of our virtues has changed. We now play out local conflicts before the whole world; and when we justify ourselves, we do it to strangers linked to us by new media. That is what moral globalization means—the steady enlargement…
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Second Thoughts of a Biographer
I certainly expected to walk away. Yet it soon became obvious that my work was not done, that closure is the last thing one should expect a completed biography to deliver. Once one role is completed, a new role emerges: defender and guardian of the flame. Here loyalty and truth come into conflict once again.
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A letter to a young liberal
Politics is not a vulgar means to a goal, it’s a noble life unto itself, and unless you love it, you can’t do it well. I didn’t get there, but I hope you will.
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The End of Intervention?
In 2014 we’re in a new world, split in two between authoritarian regimes and democratic ones, a world so split over the use of force to protect civilians that both sides serve each other parodic versions of the other’s argument. All the countries that face Putin will now want security guarantees.
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Civil Courage and the Moral Imagination
Goodness is fragile, a philosopher once said. Cleveringa’s example is respected best when we acknowledge how rare it was. We should ask ourselves whether we have the capacity to believe so fervently in a better future that we make it our judge.
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Cold War Liberalism
We can begin to understand why the barbarians were a kind of solution. They forced us to remember what freedom was and to imagine what it could be once again. Now we face a new challenge: how to conserve liberal freedoms once our citizens feel safe enough to take them for granted.
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Representation and Responsibility: Ethics and Public Office
Representation is the contested relationship at the heart of our democracy. It is contested because the theory and practice of democratic representation have never been in close alignment. In theory, representatives should be either the trustees or the delegates of the citizens who elect them. In practice citizens do not usually share collective interests.
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The Price of Everything
As long as money is moralized as speech, and not understood as power, there is little chance that the republic can put money in its proper place. Without a politics—of redistributive taxation, public goods investment for growth, and rules controlling money in politics—any critique of what money has done to American life is just moralizing.
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Canada in the World: The Challenges Ahead
My subject is “Canada in the World: The Challenges Ahead”. We’re in a struggle to reinvent our country, to maintain our unity at home and project our influence abroad. Before we can reinvent ourselves tomorrow, we need to understand how this country was made. One of my themes is the way in which the national…
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American Exceptionalism and Human Rights
Since 1945 America has displayed exceptional leadership in promoting international human rights. At the same time, however, it has also resisted complying with human rights standards at home or aligning its foreign policy with these standards abroad.
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Arendt’s Example
When Hannah Arendt received a prize in Denmark at the end of her life, she said she accepted it with “the fundamental gratitude which leaves us helpless whenever the world offers us a true gift.” She thought of honor as form of luck, rather than anything with a connection to justice or desert. So I…
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American Empire: The Burden
The age of empire ought to have been succeeded by an age of independent, equal and self-governing nation-states. But that has not come to pass. America has inherited a world scarred not just by the failures of empires past but also by the failure of nationalist movements to create and secure free states—and now, suddenly,…
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The Attack on Human Rights
Shared among equals, rights are not the universal credo of a global society, not a secular religion, but something much more limited and yet just as valuable: the shared vocabulary from which our arguments can begin, and the bare human minimum from which differing ideas of human flourishing can take root.
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On Civil Society: Why Eastern Europe’s Revolutions Could Succeed
In Western Europe, civil society took centuries to emerge from the bottom up. But these societies need it immediately. Without a robustly independent society, it is hard to see how they can withstand political demagoguery and the shocks of economic transition. On the other hand, the experience of the East European dissidents in the 1970s…
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The Myth of Citizenship
Citizenship is a myth in both the noble and the ironical sense. On the one hand, the Western political imagination remains haunted by the ideal of citizenship enunciated in Aristotle’s Politics. On the other hand, to the modern western political tradition, citizenship has seemed a fanciful conception of man and his political nature.
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Is Nothing Sacred? The Ethics of Television
Television has become the principal mediation between the suffering of strangers and the consciences of those in the world’s few remaining zones of safety. No matter how assiduously its managers assert that the medium’s function is merely informative, they cannot escape the moral consequences of their power.
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Needs and justice in the ‘Wealth of Nations’: an introductory essay
“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable […]” — Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
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