Conservatives versus Reactionaries. Discuss.

Walters Memorial Lecture Series

“So I did not study America just to satisfy curiosity . . . I sought there lessons from which we might profit” (Democracy in America, Vol 1, Introduction).

Mark Lilla (Columbia University)

Mark Lilla is Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Before moving to Columbia in 2007, he taught in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and New York University. He earned his AB at the University of Michigan and MPP and PhD at Harvard University. Lilla has been awarded fellowships by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Institut d’études avancées (Paris), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the American Academy in Rome. In 1995, he was inducted into the French Order of Academic Palms. He is the author of The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (2017); The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (2016); The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (2007); The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (2001); and G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (1993). His latest book is Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (2024). He has also edited The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (2001) with Ronald Dworkin and Robert Silvers, and The Public Face of Architecture (1987) with Nathan Glazer. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Lilla lectures widely and has delivered the Weizmann Memorial Lecture in Israel and the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Liberties, and publications worldwide. In 2015, the Overseas Press Club of America awarded him its prize for Best Commentary on International News in Any Medium.