'Must Distinguish Between Freedom as an Ideal and Freedom as an Ideology': Lea Ypi
New Delhi: Dr Lea Ypi, a philosopher and a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, is a thinker, academic, public intellectual and the author of a stunning memoir about life in communist Albania as a child and then, as a regime collapsed, as a young person in the new world that the 1990s ushered in. That memoir is called Free. Her new book, expected in September, is called Indignity. She was in India this month, on her first trip to the country.
In conversation with The Wire, Ypi spoke of her forthcoming book being called ‘Indignity’: “I wanted to in some ways suggest with the title of the book that dignity is a kind of ephemerous quality and that it's very hard to see it materialised and in fact the world in which we live now is very much a world of indignity and the book documents the struggle for dignity but it remains very much a struggle and very much an ideal and so I wanted the title to actually be much closer to the reality of the world that we observe and that the book documents.”
On her older memoir on growing up in communist Albania and watch the system change, she spoke of freedom as an ideal and not ideology. Ypi has broken free of the binary created between an unfree socialism and a free capitalist order.
She said, “The book [Free] really is about freedom in different political systems and the effort to distinguish between freedom as an ideal and freedom as an ideology, and it's in two part as you say. The first part is about growing up in a communist country. The standpoint of the book is that of a child who is surrounded by people who convince her that she lives in the freest country in the world, and she's a child and she believes that. Then only very slowly with the transition, with the fall of the Berlin wall and with the transition of the '90s, does she realise that actually what she believed was freedom was in fact something very different and that many things about the kind of context that she lived in had been concealed from her. What she finds for herself is another world with another narrative of freedom, with its own ideology, and with another struggle to try and distinguish between those ideals of freedom that are now presented as though they have been realised and the difficulty and the hardship of everyday life and the absence of that freedom and the search that continues even though it takes a different form.”
She speaks of the book being “about the disappointments or disillusionments of two different systems which take different forms but are equally far from freedom and in many ways tries to capture precisely this idea that freedom is actually something that we are always looking for.”
“It's something that as I think is suggested also by one of the characters in the book (that's my grandmother) is connected to our moral dimension to our capacity for moral agency and if you think of freedom in that way then the one the first thing to do if you think of freedom in this kind of critical way, the first thing to do is to try and tell to ask yourself questions about what kind of society do you live what kind of propaganda are you surrounded by how are we always continuously manipulated and how is ideology always playing a role in our life even when we are told that this is now the end of ideology. This is the end of history. This is the end of a world in which it was only oppressive and finally this dream of freedom has been realised and how that itself could be a form of ideology.”
How easy was it for her intellectually and emotionally to develop her ideas about such a complex journey, to think clearly through the haze and the slogans of the ‘end of history’ and ‘end of ideology’? Both as an academic and as a person who experienced the times and the transition?
Ypi said, “It took me a really long time. In the '90s there was something wrong about this discourse that we are now finally free and the discomfort of everyday life ,you know we didn't have books for example, the Berlin wall had fallen, the textbooks had changed in school, we had no electricity there was real hardship. The material reality was clearly not satisfying for a lot of people, there was a lot of immigration, unemployment and so at the immediate experiential level it was very clear that this dream of freedom had not been delivered yet.”
She said her leaving Albania helped her get more clarity. “I don't think I was able to articulate that intellectually at that point. It was only when I went to Italy and studied philosophy and began to really think about freedom, maybe in a more philosophical, but also more detached and more critical way. And that's where this intellectual effort to then think about freedom and to distinguish it from ideology started to take shape.”
“And I don't know that that process is complete because we're always asking ourselves questions. And one of the things about freedom I think is that it is constantly, it's a search and so we don't really have a final answer to what it is and how it's realised.”
“But I think that journey continues. It started in Albania at the level of kind of real life and then continued in Italy at the intellectual level.”
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