Jan-Werner Müller

Jan-Werner Müller is Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He studied in Berlin, Oxford, and Princeton; from 1996 to 2003 he was a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Müller has been a visiting professor at the EHESS in Paris and numerous other universities; he delivered the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford and the Tanner Lectures at Cambridge; he is lecturing on “Europe and the Defense of Democracy” at the Collège de France in summer 2024. Müller is a co-founder of the European College of Liberal Arts (today: Bard Berlin), Germany’s first English-language liberal arts college. His recent books include What is Populism? (2016), which has been translated into more than 20 languages, Furcht und Freiheit (2019), which won the Bavarian Book Prize, and Democracy Rules (2021), a Foreign Affairs Best of the Year book. Street, Palace, Square: Making Space for Democracy, a short volume on democracy and architecture, is forthcoming in 2025. At Princeton, Müller directs the Program in Political Philosophy, the Forum for the History of Political Thought and the Academic Freedom Initiative. His public affairs commentary appears mostly in the London Review of Books, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy.