Date: April 9, 2026
Time: 5:00 pm -
Speaker: Dr. Hugo Drochon
Location: Hamilton School, 5th Floor, Room E581 (CSE Building)
Hugo Drochon is a political theorist and historian of political thought, with interests in Nietzsche's politics, democratic theory, liberalism, centrism and conspiracy theories. He studies the different facets of modern democracy to develop a 'dynamic' theory of democracy. His first book Nietzsche's Great Politics came out with Princeton University Press in 2016 (paperback 2018). It was reviewed in a number of popular and scholarly publications including the New Yorker, TLS, New Statesman, Dissent, LARB, Times Higher Education and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. It also featured in interviews with Vox and the Irish Times. It was selected as one of CHOICE's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017, longlisted for the Bronislaw Geremek First Academic Book Prize. His current research is on elite theories of democracy - Mosca, Pareto and Michels - and the impact their thinking had on the development of democratic theory in the US and Europe after WWII, notably on figures such as Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, C Wright Mills and Raymond Aron. He has a book entitled Elites and Dynamic Democracy under contract with Princeton University Press. He regularly writes for the TLS, Guardian, New Statesman, The Nation, Project Syndicate, Irish Times, Persuasion, Unherd, The UnPopulist, RSA Journal, Le Grand Continent, the Cambridge Journal and Engelsberg Ideas, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4, France Culture, Al Jazeera and Talking Politics. He has spoken at the Hay and Cheltenham Literary Festivals.
