Yascha Mounk

Yascha Benjamin Mounk^[2] (born 10 June 1982) is a German-American political scientist and author. He is Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. In July 2020, he founded Persuasion, an online magazine devoted to defending the values of free societies.

Yascha Mounk
Mounk in 2016
Born	Yascha Benjamin Mounk (1982-06-10) 10 June 1982 (age 43) Munich, West Germany
Occupations	Academic journalist
Political party	Social Democratic Party of Germany (c. 1990s – 2015)
Academic background
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge (BA) Harvard University (PhD)
Thesis	The Age of Responsibility (2015)
Doctoral advisor	Michael Sandel[1]
Academic work
Discipline	Political science
Website	yaschamounk.com

As a freelance journalist, Mounk has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Slate, and the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit.

Biography

Early life

Mounk was born and raised in Munich. His mother was Jewish and a socialist^{[citation needed]}, and she left Poland in 1969 after the purge of Jews from positions in the Communist apparatus. Much of his mother's side of the family had been killed in the Holocaust.^[3] He has said that he felt like a stranger in Germany, and though German is his native language, he never felt accepted as a "true German" by his peers.^[4]

Mounk read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2003.^[5][6] He then received a PhD from Harvard University in the US, with the dissertation The Age of Responsibility: On the Role of Choice, Luck, and Personal Responsibility in Contemporary Politics and Philosophy.^[2] He remained in the US as a lecturer on government, and he was named a senior fellow in the Political Reform Program at the think tank New America.^[7][8] Mounk became an American citizen in 2017.^[9]

Career

He was executive director of the Renewing the Centre team at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. As a freelance journalist, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, Slate, and Die Zeit.

He runs a podcast called The Good Fight.^[10]

In July 2020, he founded Persuasion, an online magazine.^[11][12] On 5 February 2024, The Atlantic cut ties with Mounk after he was accused of rape by writer Celeste Marcus, but did not file charges.^[13][14] In September 2024, Mounk took up a role as visiting professor at Sciences-Po Paris, before returning to Johns Hopkins in 2025.^[15]

Political views

Mounk joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as a teenager. In 2015, he resigned from the party by publishing an open letter to then-chairman Sigmar Gabriel. He cited the lack of helpfulness of German institutions to refugees, the passive attitude of SPD leaders and other parts of the party during the Crimea crisis in 2014, and the SPD's policy on Greece, which he called a "betrayal of the social democratic dream of a united Europe."^[16][17]

In a February 2018 interview published in Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mounk stated that he had changed his position on nationalism. He initially considered it a relic of the past that must be overcome, but he now advocates an "inclusive nationalism" to head off the threat of aggressive nationalism.^[18] On the German television newscast Tagesthemen, he stated that Germany is on a "historically unique experiment, namely to transform a mono-ethnic and mono-cultural democracy into a multi-ethnic one."^[19] In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Mounk advised the "liberal camp" to adopt this inclusive nationalism to foster a multi-ethnic and democratic society: "The key ... is the adoption of the populist demand that people and nations should again feel they have control of their lives or their destiny."^[20]

Bibliography

Books

• Stranger in my own country: a Jewish family in modern Germany. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2014.
• The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. Harvard University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0674976825
• The Age of Responsibility – Luck, Choice and the Welfare State, Harvard University Press, 2019.
• The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, Penguin Press, 2022.
• The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time Penguin Press, 2023.