This episode explores the complex and contradictory relationship between liberalism and illiberalism in a historical framework. It speaks to several key questions about the emergence of illiberal practices today: What is the nature of the illiberal challenge to an understanding of liberalism as individual freedom? Is there a natural affinity between liberalism and democracy? How do populist illiberal trends exploit the weaknesses of liberal constitutional regimes? And from where do threats to liberal principles in universities emerge?
Guests featured in this episode:
Renata Uitz, is the co-editor of Handbook of Illiberalism, who has contributed two chapters to it as well. Renata is also professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at the Central European University, Vienna, as well as the co-director of its Democracy Institute in Budapest.
Helena Rosenblatt is a professor of history, French, and political theory at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York, and the author of both Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion andThe Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. Helena has also submitted an article on “The History of Illiberalism” in the Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism (2022).
Glossary
What was the Reign of Terror?
(pg. 2 of the transcript or 00:7:58)
The Reign of Terror (June 1793 – July 1794) was a period in the French revolution characterized by brutal repression. The Terror originated with a centralized political regime that suspended most of the democratic achievements of the revolution, and intended to pursue the revolution on social matters. Its stated aim was to destroy internal enemies and conspirators and to chase the external enemies from French territory.The Terror as such started on September 5, 1793 and, as the Reign of Terror, lasted until the summer of 1794, taking the lives of anywhere between 18,000 to 40,000 people (estimates vary widely). Thousands would die by means of the guillotine, including many of the greatest lights of the revolution, like Georges Danton.. The deaths can be explained in part by the sense of emergency that gripped the revolutionary leadership as the country teetered on the brink of civil war. Source
Who was John Stuart Mill?
(pg. 3 of the transcript or 00:12:19)
John Stuart Mill, an English philosopher, economist, and exponent of utilitarianism. He was prominent as a publicist in the reforming age of the 19th century, and remains of lasting interest as a logician and an ethical theorist.The influence that his works exercised upon contemporary English thought can scarcely be overestimated, nor can there be any doubt about the value of the liberal and inquiring spirit with which he handled the great questions of his time. Beyond that, however, there has been considerable difference of opinion about the enduring merits of his philosophy. Source
Who was Alexis de Tocqueville?
(pg. 3 of the transcript or 00:12:27)
Alexis de Tocqueville, French sociologist, political scientist, historian, and politician, best known for Democracy in America (1835–40). Tocqueville traveled to the United States in 1831 to study its prisons and returned with a wealth of broader observations that he codified in “Democracy in America”, one of the most influential books of the 19th century. With its trenchant observations on equality and individualism, Tocqueville’s work remains a valuable explanation of America to Europeans and of Americans to themselves. Tocqueville’s works shaped 19th-century discussions of liberalism and equality, and were rediscovered in the 20th century as sociologists debated the causes and cures of tyranny. Source
What does cancel culture mean?
(pg. 6 of the transcript or 00:32:27)
Cancel culture refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming. Source
Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:
• Central European University: CEU
• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD
• The Podcast Company: Novel
SR: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. This is the first episode of season four, and today I have the pleasure to welcome two guests. Helena Rosenblatt is Professor of History, French and Political Theory at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She's the author of "Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion", and most recently, "The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century", a book that I will discuss with her today. Her latest article is a seminal entry on the history of illiberalism in "The Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism" , which has just been published. My other guest is Renáta Uitz, She is the co-editor of this Handbook of Illiberalism, who has contributed two chapters to it as well. Renáta is a Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at the Central European University in Vienna, as well as the Co-Director of its Democracy Institute in Budapest. Her work focuses on the transition to and from constitutional democracy and the rise of illiberal constitutionalism.
With Helena Rosenblatt and Renáta Uitz, I situate and interrogate the complex, contradictory relationship between liberalism and illiberalism in a historical framework. Liberalism, as we will see, is itself plural and polysemic, contested and driven by internal contradictions, thus potentially generative of its own enemies. By focusing on the genealogy of liberalism, we will answer several key questions about the emergence of illiberal practices today. What is the nature of the illiberal challenge to our understanding of liberalism as individual freedom? Is there a natural affinity between liberalism and democracy? Or can we discover the sources of illiberal drift and democratic backsliding in the very tension between democratic principles and liberal ones? How do populist illiberal trends today exploit the weaknesses of liberal constitutional regimes? And where do the threats to liberal principles in universities today come from? With Helena Rosenblatt and Renáta Uitz, we seek answers to these questions in today's episode. Helena and Renáta, welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for joining me today.
HR: Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here.
RU: It's excellent to be here, Shalini.
SR: So, let me begin with the handbook, which I referred to, the magisterial "Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism" published recently, co-authored and co-edited by you, Renáta. Let's start from the very real predicament of how exactly to define illiberalism. You and András Sajó, who was also a recent guest on my podcast, state that: Illiberalism as a set of social, political, cultural, legal, and mental phenomenon and I quote you, "reflects liberal practices and related beliefs negatively, but not necessarily by negating them." You insist that illiberalism cannot be reduced to a mere denial of liberalism but should be defined relationally vis-à-vis liberalism. So, Renáta, let's begin by trying to understand what you mean by the relationality of this definition. Why does illiberalism not necessarily negate liberal practices?
RU: Thank you, Shalini. That is really the core of the premise of the handbook and the entire collection. We argue in our preface, that illiberalism and illiberal democratic practices could not exist without the foundations of liberal democracy, without the very governmental practices and premises on which liberal democracy is based. The practitioners of illiberal democracy, whether you look at a Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Viktor Orbán in Hungary, are democratically elected leaders. They contested elections in which they faced opponents and they won all of them, at least one, free and fair democratic election. And then they continued to build that rule, which is a strong personalistic leadership regime with the help of constitutional tools that were provided to them by revered constitutions. This explains how the infrastructure of liberal democracy and also the actors who make it operate, bureaucrats, civil servants, and also deputies or representatives in Parliament can become architects, engineers, and performers of illiberal practices.
SR: I come back to this whole question of illiberal practices and how they are really nested into liberal constitutions and institutions but let me turn to Helena with her wonderful book, "The Lost History of Liberalism," where she traces two-and-a-half centuries of the history of liberalisms in the plural. Helena, you show that our present understanding of liberal democracy and the pivotal role ascribed to the protection of individual freedom, rights, and property are all relatively recent inventions and you argue that it is the result of defensive reorientation during the decades of the Cold War, when liberalism was reconfigured as the ideological other of totalitarianism. Let me then ask you to historicize our current conception of liberalism defined primarily in terms of individual personal freedom.
HR: Well, thank you for that question. I think it's so very important today to understand that liberalism and democracy are actually two different traditions. We tend to use the term liberal democracy as if it's unproblematic, as if the two words go together easily, but this is just not true. The traditions are very different. If you look at democracy, for example, the concept goes back to and the practice goes back to ancient Greece and referred then to direct democracy. Every citizen participates in the assembly and participates in lawmaking. For thousands of years, this was considered the worst form of government, mob rule basically, anarchy, and how could it possibly be applied to large countries like France or like the United States. And liberalism was really, as a cluster of terms, as a cluster of concepts; was conceptualized and theorized as a result of the French Revolution. That is when the word liberalism was actually coined. In the wake of the revolution and in the rule of Napoleon I, they had seen the actions of the crowd during the revolution, during the Great period of the Terror, famous for the guillotine, and saw the crowd, the people, the common people as irrational, prone to violence, and unaware of their real rights. So, what they advocated, therefore, was not democracy. Early liberals were not democrats. They wanted people with capacity to have the vote, and they stressed things like constitutional representative rule, not direct democracy, and safeguards for individual rights, including dismantling obstructions to the economy, and so on.
As you say, liberalism has been reconfigured several times. In the middle of the 19th century, it was reconfigured to address new economic problems. If the first liberals were very concerned with establishing constitutional government and these individual rights, this second wave, let's say, was very concerned with the new problems associated with the industrial revolution, for example, and urbanization, and what they saw as endemic poverty in the cities. But it actually caused a division among liberals. You speak about the internal divisions among liberals, and some promoted and believed in more government regulation, even some redistribution, and others became more committed to free markets and more extremist, you might say. This is when two streams of liberalism were formed, and is the reason why we have, for example, in America today, liberalism colloquially means large government, big government and in Europe and the rest of the world, it tends to mean, small government. So, there's this internal discussion among the liberals as to what liberalism really means. But nobody means democracy by this. Liberal democracy, as a term, was invented in the late 1860s.
SR: I want to take you back one step to what you call the lost history of liberalism because I think what you point out to there are two internal contradictions on which I'd like to draw you out. One, the fact that classic liberalism was an ethical-moral project aiming at general improvement, civic-mindedness, the struggle for common good, etc. And the 19th-century liberal thought was trapped in the doctrines of unfettered free trade, laissez-faire and narrow utilitarian calculus. But what you point out are two internal divisions here, which are interesting for me within liberalism. One, that the disenfranchised working-classes had already turned then against liberalism to its radical challenger, socialism. So, already within Europe, you had a challenge to liberalism, which was not illiberalism but socialism. On the other hand, there was another side to liberalism, as practiced in the colonies. So, there is something Janus-faced about the liberal tradition, as it was practiced in the European metropoles on the one hand and its darker side as part of the colonial project of expansion. So, if I quote you here, and I'd like to hear your comments on this, you write, "Liberals could also display a good deal of inconsistency and hypocrisy on the issue of colonies, for most European liberals took for granted that they had the right to subjugate backward populations, which was still barbarous." So, in this historical perspective, the question would be, how do we address such inherently illiberal traits?
HR: Yes, a great question. One mustn't forget or whitewash the dark side, the ugly side of liberalism. Early liberals did not, for example, advocate rights for women. They were very late to do that. They were many of them, if not most of them, quite racist. They were imperialists as I think you mentioned as well. We have liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill, who say that it's okay to rule natives despotically. We have Alexis de Tocqueville, another founding father who made light of atrocities in Algeria, Uday Mehta, my colleague at the Graduate Center has spoken in a very pathbreaking important book about how there is something within liberalism, is view of history as a kind of progress and a view of reason that justified their thinking of natives and the colonized as children, as less civilized, as needing to be raised up, and that this is what the colonizers were going to do. So, this is a very dark side of liberalism, but I always kind of insist on saying that it is not what distinguished liberalism. It's not distinctive or peculiar to liberalism. Unfortunately, across the political spectrum, there were racism, sexism, and the support for eugenics. And within the liberals, there was constant debate about these issues. So, there were plenty of liberals who stood up and said to other liberals who are advocating such things, as eugenics, or even imperialism, that you are betraying your own principles. You are being hypocrites. So, they used the liberal language, the liberal concept, to argue for their own rights.
SR: So, I think this is an important point, especially because many of the anti-colonial movements also used the language of liberal rights and liberalism and turned it against the colonizers. So, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, "This is the question of using the master's tool to dismantle the master's house" and the question is in how far one can really do this? Liberal democracy as a term was invented late in the 1860s to counter, in fact, the threat of direct or plebiscitarian democracy. But the revival of that kind of democracy is, in fact, today a hallmark of some illiberal regimes so that it's not liberalism, but democracy itself, which also has a dark side. And the question for me and that let me pose it to both of you: how can we adequately respond to the challenge of certain illiberal regimes? These are ethno-nationalist populist regimes who claim, like fascists before them, that they are the ones who are more authentically democratic, because, as you said, the infrastructure of liberal democracy is something which they know how to use very well. So, they used the toolbox, but to very different ends.
HR: Liberal democracy, the term was really coined and became part of the common vocabulary in around 1860, really as a response to Napoleon, the III, Louis-Napoléon, the nephew of the first Napoleon. And a characteristic of these sorts of leaders is to appeal directly to the people. They say, "I don't really need representative institutions because I embody the will of the people. You can trust me." They are elected democratically, or they rule by plebiscite, they remain popular, and in that sense, are democratic, I suppose. They are elected. But then once they're in power, they dismantle these protections of the individual, freedom of the press, and so on. Napoleon the III, some scholars call his type of rule a police society, even the beginning of a kind of police state. Really, liberalism, in a sense, was a way to stop the despotism of the Napoleonic type. It was precisely to tame democracy and channel it in a healthy direction.
RU: I believe that the way you put this, the picture of the authentic democrat describes many, many of the illiberal populist leaders who we encounter today. And they are authentic because, at a minimum, they challenge the shared wisdom of polite society that, for instance, the European Union is a good thing, or that cosmopolitan and global ideas of citizenship are to be cherished, or some of them simply deny facts, call the mainstream media fake news, à la President Trump, present fiction as facts, core facts fiction, or engaging in insults and threats of violence. Think about Bolsonaro and Duterte. And these gestures, especially when addressed on social media directly to the voters, so without the mediation of representative democracies’ institution, without the filtering of newspapers, journalists, and traditional media, are taken to be signs of authenticity. Now, you add to it that they very often present these positions in the name of the real people that is questioning the very humanity and equal dignity of those members of society who do not fit the picture that they envisioned to be the imaginary political community that they lead. So, in this conception of authenticity, essentially, we see at the very heart of it a suspicion of reason, and especially a suspicion of public reason. This is when civility is questioned in order to unseat the status quo. And the status quo is replaced, in these political practices, by a reference to the real people without actual participation of the actual people and the actual voters. So, you see societies, democracies, where genuine public participation is replaced by mobilization, usually in favor of slogans in support of messages that were carefully crafted on social media and promoted by these leaders, and public participation or mobilization doesn't have any accountability function. So, these real people, in illiberal democratic settings, do not stand a chance of actually using elections to unseat the leader and see the opposition rising to take over government.
SR: So, let me just dip in that point a little bit, because one of the most disturbing insights, Renáta, of "The Handbook of Illiberalism" is that illiberalism is quite compatible with the political rituals of competitive democracy. And, indeed, as one of the co-editors of the handbook, András Sajó said in a recent episode of this podcast that many illiberal democracies undeniably belong to the democratic family. And we would forget this at our own peril because this may signal a problem with the family itself. And he insisted that we should take the self-description of illiberals as democrats extremely seriously. So, let's think a little bit together about, in what ways, in a sense, is it possible to produce these illiberal effects by combining and abusing liberal democratic norms? And in your particular field of expertise, Renáta, why do you think can and how do illiberal rulers use the building blocks of liberal constitutionalism? Why are they so wedded to the constitution and the law?
RU: Well, the constitution and the law are very helpful tools for power maximization and political self-perpetuation. I'd like to emphasize from the outset that illiberal rulers, their crowning achievement is not drafting a new constitution or writing a new constitution. Even when they have the majority to prepare one, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, this is a tool for much greater political purposes. So, this is one of the tools in the kitchen, or the toolkit to do the constitution. It's not the crowning achievement because their political aspirations to bring about a cultural change or change of minds and change of hearts, to ensure that people accept living in a society that they are not actively shaping public debates and the public understandings of the good and the good life. There are also constitutional rules and legal rules help solve coordination problems because, ultimately, any kind of governance structure with many people will have little internal fights. Legal rules help sort those things out. They also help to legitimize sometimes unexpected turns of events. If you change your mind, that doesn't sound terribly good. If you change or need to change legal rules, that sounds like you are doing the most prestigious public exercises and rituals of exercising power.
So, the legal form is extremely helpful for these leaders. And don't forget that so long as they have parliamentary majorities, the rituals of producing laws also display and transmit a sense of normalcy. And it's very important for the recipes of hybrid regimes that they feel normal, they settle gradually, and everyday illiberalism is becoming a normal, a very, very normal daily experience. The result is that you have an apathetic public, who have zero interest or inclination in holding the government accountable. And having such an apathetic public that is living with the very banality of illiberal democracy was a harm which already Tocqueville warned about when he traveled in America and Hannah Arendt warned about the exact same phenomenon decades later when talking about the forces that helped totalitarian regimes thrive.
SR: So, let's go back, again, to this question of the sources and forces of illiberalism. Because one of the things both of you have emphasized strongly is that various sources of illiberalism were endemic to various liberal traditions in the plural. But what about the tension between political liberalism and economic neoliberalism? Because as Helena's historical study shows, this tension is not new. It's always been there, but, of course, it has come to the fore in the last two, three decades since the 1970s, '80s, the Thatcher and Reagan neoliberal policy imperative, and the negative societal effects of the neoliberal dogma of marketization, privatization, financialization. Do you think that is one major cause of the disaffection today, which fuels so much of popular support for illiberal rules and practices?
HR: I would think so. I think that many of Trump's supporters, for example, in the United States feel that the economy has left them behind, or they are worried about being left behind. There are statistics that show that they're actually not the poorest of the poor, right? But they are worried about the economy. And I would say about this issue of neoliberalism. And for me, neoliberalism is also a kind of a vague, contested term, often used by its critics in a way that simplifies the message. But I would say that this turn to rights happened very much in the 20th century. The turn to free-market ideas as being a supreme liberal value is something that we owe to the Americanization of liberalism in the 20th century and to the world wars and the Cold War. I think this comes out of this idea that liberalism is very much about free-market ideas and the forgetting of that social dimension, the duty to your fellow man, because this was thought, as you see in Hayek, a slippery slope to socialism. If you spoke about government responsibility to protect citizens, to regulate industry, to redistribute wealth, then you were on the slippery slope to socialism and you could point to the totalitarian regimes and say, "That's where we don't want to head. America is not about that." So, they really emphasize individual rights.
SR: So socialism may be a good stepping stone back to Renáta with my question of, do you think that it is, in a sense, the negative effects of the neoliberal dogma, which really have contributed all over Eastern and Central Europe to the rise of these illiberal regimes, people's deep disappointment that capitalism did not bring the hoped-for riches, and that democracy was not paying the dividends they expected it to?
RU: Let me answer this question and the previous one with two interrelated responses, and probably starting about disappointments, and also hopes, which were never delivered on. I think that it's crucial to understand that, in most of these illiberal or hybrid regimes, you have very well-pronounced and deep inequalities, economic inequalities in society. And now the way that this is weaponized, is turning a sense of being left behind into existential anxieties across the board. So, what liberal theories and liberal takes very often understands is under-representation or lack of voice is exaggerated and turned into existential anxieties, and then into a sense of victimhood. There are wonderful chapters by psychologists in the volume explaining the mechanics of victimhood and how, with an illiberal flip or an illiberal twist, all of a sudden the majority of the population say a white, male, Anglo man can claim to be the ultimate victim of the U.S. political regime, and I'm talking about President Trump, how in a Christian majority country, a Christian majority Prime Minister can run on a ticket of Christian victimhood. And so, we share in a universal experience of persecution that resonates in a very strong sense of existential fears and also builds a sense of community. There is ample social science research to show that in order for these narratives of victimhood to stick, the individuals who subscribe do not need to have suffered trauma themselves, which is a quite stunning discovery.
Now to come to socialism and, again, to twist on internal inconsistencies: What we very often see about these illiberal regimes is their streaks of corruption, crony capitalism, the oligarchic structures in societies which support the likes of President Putin, or Prime Minister Orbán. Equally importantly, and there are chapters in the handbook that describe it, very often, although there is no illiberal economic policy as such, because of internal inconsistencies what we do see are formats of economic control and organizing the economy that are very closely reminiscent of the planned socialist economies. You see price controls, you see monopolies picking up, which, of course, feed cronies. But you also see, for instance, in Poland, that when you go after media control then the label for that is “re-Polonizing” Polish media. So, you very often have in these countries formats of economic control that are reminiscent of socialist planned economies with increasing centralization, centralization meaning state control and also centralization meaning valves being held by a smaller and smaller circle who have vested interests in the success of the leader, who is then reelected, in regular, if not free, and definitely not fair elections.
SR: So I'd like to come back to the idea of focusing on illiberal practices and their varieties on the ground. Renáta, you called in the handbook, and rightly so for developing new analytical tools within a comparative interdisciplinary perspective, which is sensitive to both historical similarities and key differences. And our scholarship can only succeed if it is self-reflexive about its own position in the world. So, let's conclude with a question about illiberal practices within universities, which have really become acute of late. So, we are seeing a return to irrationality in these times of media manipulation, polarization, and post-truth, which is increasingly undermining the legitimacy of our scholarly activities. And this is an attack, particularly from the right. But at the same time, our practices inside the institutional space of academia may also themselves generate tensions with the assumed principles of openness and free-thinking. So, let me turn to both of you with the question. What dangers does academic freedom face today, both from outside and inside our universities, in your view?
HR: Many of us are worried about what's been called a creeping illiberalism on American college campuses, where, under the guise of defending liberal values, students are, in fact, being illiberal in their enforcement of political correctness. For example, we speak of cancel culture. There is something that we're calling language policing today, in other words, actually coming up with lists of words that we are supposed to avoid. Now, all of this is having a chilling effect on openness and debate in general. I know that my colleagues and I are kind of self-censoring because we are very worried that we might offend someone. We would think that the university would be a place for open debate where we can exchange opinions without fear, that this can be a learning process where people can - yes, say things that could possibly be offensive to someone, but then let's work it out. Let's discuss why it is and so on and so forth, not silence debates, which I fear is happening. So, this is what I would call the liberalism of the left, and it is a sad thing and a dangerous thing.
SR: Renata, would you like to come in on this?
RU: So, when it comes to illiberal practices and higher education, we very often focus on the professors who were fired and all the silencing of dissent that is happening in hybrid regimes. We also equally have to be mindful of how academic freedom and the university itself is becoming a tool of illiberal soft power. Very often illiberal anti-intellectualism hides how the soft power operates and hides the instrumental use of higher education for the perpetuation of illiberal rulers. Universities are not often used as direct tools of social controlling in these countries, so, it's not thinking of universities as brainwashing camps. We definitely see funds being poured into universities in order to build alternative intellectual networks of a new elite. Think about fellowships paid by the Hungarian government in the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, where prominent American conservative thinkers get to spend time in Budapest and write positive pieces about the regime in leading conservative media. So, the chilling effect of illiberal rule travels extremely fast on university campuses and it becomes part of the normal student experience as soon as you enter the university campus. So, this brings me back to normalization on the one hand. And when students are demanding at the same time a safe space, they are literally asking for active censorship from their faculty. And this is where I think that it does make good sense to call attention to the illiberalism of liberal intellectuals themselves and their propensity to self-silencing, and thus stopping critical debate.
SR: So, thank you very much, Helena. Thank you very much, Renáta, for this wide-ranging conversation, both historical and contemporary aspects of illiberalism and liberalism in the ways in which they're intertwined with one another. So, thanks for being with me today.
RU: Thank you.
HR: Thank you very much.
SR: So, what we have heard is that illiberal democracies are based on governmental practices and premises of liberal democracy. The infrastructure of liberal democracy and its personnel are part of the architecture of these illiberal regimes. Illiberal rulers are all elected, and they built their rule using constitutional democratic tools.
Historically, interestingly, liberalism and democracy are two different traditions. Liberalism and democracy didn't necessarily belong together. Many liberals abhorred democracy, which they equated with chaos, anarchy, and also mob rule. In fact, one could almost say liberalism was originally invented to contain democracy. It's also important to recall the ugly side of liberalism entangled as it was in racism, imperialism, sexism, eugenics, but it's equally important to remember that this was not particular to liberal traditions of thought. Looking at illiberal rule and their practices more recently, it's striking to see the use that these rulers make of constitutions and the law. Constitutions are tools in their hands of power maximization and self-perpetuation, just as their use of law signals normalcy and law and the constitution is used to normalize these practices of governance.
The structural vulnerabilities, which lie at the very heart of both liberalism and democracy, therefore, need constant scrutiny. And one effect of this kind of rule is the production of apathetic citizens who do not any longer hold their governments accountable.
One other aspect needs to be stressed, and that is, the ways in which illiberal rule weaponizes economic inequality in order to fuel and feed on the anger and resentment of ethnic and religious majorities, which begin to see themselves as the victims of both historical and current injustices.
This was the first episode of season four of "Democracy in Question." Thank you very much for listening. Join us also for the next episode next fortnight. My guest for that will be Georgi Derlugyan. He is professor of social research and public policy at NYU Abu Dhabi, and I will discuss with him the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Please go back and listen to any episodes you might have missed and, of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu, and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.