Renowned professor and political theorist Lea Ypi, celebrated for her acclaimed memoir “Free,” returns with a captivating new book that confronts the challenges of surviving and finding meaning in an age of extremes.

Recently released, “Indignity” reconstructs the life of Leman Ypi, an educated, ethnic Albanian woman from Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki), one of the most important cultural and economic centers of the Ottoman Empire. The book follows the author’s grandmother as she struggles to preserve her freedom and dignity while shifting between collapsing and emerging empires. Through rigorous and extensive archival work in Albania, Greece, the UK and beyond, Ypi opens a window onto the vivid, tumultuous and ever-shifting realities of 20th-century Europe: from the rise and fall of fascism to the iron grip and eventual collapse of communist regimes. In doing so, she not only maps Albania but the broader region of Southeastern Europe, blending scholarly precision with a feminist gaze and the richness (at times, even the contradictions) of her own family history.

Ypi’s latest work achieves three things: it offers a philosophical exploration of the concept of dignity, intertwines historical research with memoir to produce a deeply personal form of historiography, and invites readers to rethink how the past shapes our understanding of freedom, morality and political responsibility today.

Born and raised in Albania, Lea Ypi is a Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her scholarly contributions, rooted particularly in Kantian and Marxist philosophy, have been recognized with the British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science. Meanwhile, her memoir “Free” won the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize, and has been translated into more than thirty-five languages.

K2.0 spoke with Ypi about the concept of dignity, both its philosophical and practical relevance in today’s world, the merging of archival research with personal memory, the importance of taking an inclusive approach to historical narratives and her upcoming projects.

K2.0: In some ways, “Indignity” can be seen as a follow-up to your previous book, “Free,” with characters who appear here in greater depth first being introduced there. From another perspective, “Indignity” could also be read as a fuller prelude to “Free,” which captures the last days of Albania’s communist regime and the transition that followed. How do these two books speak to each other?

Lea Ypi: “Indignity” is a kind of prequel to “Free,” but it goes more deeply into the idea of freedom as moral agency, which already surfaces in “Free” through the character of my grandmother. In “Free,” Leman (or Nini) has a conception of freedom inspired by Immanuel Kant’s view of freedom as moral agency. Kant thought that it is this capacity for morality that gives human beings their dignity, and this is the philosophical thread that links the two books. In “Free,” this idea is presented through lived experience, the excavation of personal memory and in conversation with other ideas of freedom. In “Indignity,” it is explored with a heavier reliance on fiction and the novel as a form. Historically, “Free” begins with the end of the socialist world, while “Indignity” traces the moral and political conditions that made that world possible by going deeper into the history of the Twentieth Century, from the collapse of empires to the end of the Second World War.

Leman and Asllan Ypi in Cortina d’Ampezzo. Image courtesy of Lea Ypi.

The emergence on social media of a long-lost photograph of your grandparents’ honeymoon in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, in the winter of 1941, set you on an archival journey throughout the continent. You sought to understand why Leman was smiling as Europe was engulfed by war, why she later recalled that moment as the happiest of her life, and how the story of a single family in Tirana could reveal broader patterns and tensions in modern Albanian history. Did you find what you were searching for?

No, not in the sense of a simple explanation or a single cause, and also, I did not find the photograph until the book was finished. In fact, much of the book became as much about what I did not find as what I did. In many societies traumatized by the past, there is a sort of dogmatic reliance and faith in the truth of the archive. But, I discovered that archives are not as reliable as we like to think: there is only a truth to find if you can trust the mechanism through which that truth is transmitted. Reality is much more complex, especially if you approach the question of the authority of the archive in ordering facts from a critical perspective. What emerged for me was a more unsettling picture: fragments, silences, competing interpretations — and the realization that dignity is not something waiting to be recovered from the past, but something we struggle to preserve in the present, against distortion, forgetting and the instrumentalization of memory.

If, as you suggest, the archive is itself a site of power rather than a repository of truth, how do you engage with its partiality and silences without reproducing the distortions it contains?

I approach the archives not as repositories of objective truth, but as a source for developing the search in different directions: sometimes by interrogating the validity of archival statements, sometimes by complementing with wider philosophical or historical reflections, sometimes with the help of imagination and what researchers have called “critical fabulation.” Literature has a unique capacity to hold multiple perspectives and give voice to the silences of historical records, and it offers a powerful tool to fill the gaps and reconstruct a more complex history. It also enables the author to capture psychological perspectives, moral motivations and epistemological clashes – in short, the more subjective perceptions that give life to abstract ideas. 

In “Indignity,” you seem to extend that practice by weaving historical research with personal memory. Some might argue that blending intimate recollections of past events and personal experiences with extensive archival research risks introducing a degree of subjective bias. How would you respond to that?

I don’t think subjectivity is something to be eliminated; it should be acknowledged and worked through. Historical archives themselves are not neutral — they are mediated, partial, often shaped by power, ideology and propaganda. By placing my personal narrative alongside these records, I’m not claiming to escape bias but to make it visible, to show how interpretation is always situated in a specific context, and the researcher needs to both acknowledge the potential for bias and make an effort to rise above it. At the end of “Indignity,” I return to [Friedrich] Schiller’s reflections on the power of art in bringing reconciliation and suggest that the way to overcome partiality is through a kind of literature which is always particular yet strives for universality.

To what extent does Leman’s story reflect the broader history of Albania, and where does it remain exceptional to her own life?

The personal history is, of course, deeply entangled with the history of modern Albania — from the collapse of empires and the rise of nation-states to fascism, communism and their afterlives. Her life mirrors many of the ruptures and transitions that shaped the country: displacement, surveillance, repression and the search for dignity under shifting regimes. At the same time, her cosmopolitan background, education, political engagement and feminism made her trajectory unusual. I would say her story is both representative and exceptional. She is a woman operating in a man’s environment, a cosmopolitan in a world where identity defines who you are and someone whose personal politics does not necessarily mirror that of her social class. She is an interesting figure through which to explore the complexity of identity.

In both “Free” and “Indignity,” you employ a feminist gaze on history and memory. In “Indignity,” beyond Leman, we are introduced to other strong female figures, such as Selma, Leman’s aunt, and Cocotte, her cousin. These women belonged to the aristocratic administrative elite of the Ottoman Empire, yet they were still constrained by the conservative, authoritarian and patriarchal norms of their time. How do the lives of these women challenge dominant narratives of Balkan history in the twentieth century, and what does centering their perspectives reveal about the gendered nature of historical memory?

The stories of all these women show that aristocratic privilege did not shield them from the constraints of patriarchal, nationalist and authoritarian structures — but it did give them distinctive ways of navigating and resisting them. Through their voices, the history of the Balkans can also be seen not just as a passive periphery of empires but as a site of agency, negotiation and struggle, sometimes at the cost of personal happiness. Bringing their perspectives to the center is a way of reclaiming history from mainstream interpretations and giving voice to the silence that the archives do not capture. It is also a way of unpacking the philosophical question of human dignity that animates the book, where each female character brings her own distinctive perspective: Stoic, Kantian, Epicurean and so on.

Similarly, in “Free,” each character offers a distinct interpretation of freedom based on distinct schools of thought. By personifying these political and philosophical ideas through your characters, do you see yourself as making political philosophy more accessible to a broader audience — or is your aim rather to show how these abstract concepts gain meaning only when lived and experienced?

It’s not just a question of accessibility. When abstract concepts like dignity or freedom are not discussed from a purely philosophical perspective but are embodied in characters, they acquire emotion, tension and contradiction. Each character becomes a way of seeing how different political or philosophical perspectives fare when confronted with history and with contingent circumstances. This narrative approach allows readers to engage with complex ideas intuitively, through human experience, in the way they would also encounter these dilemmas in their daily lives, rather than only as theoretical arguments. I think literature adds an element of doubt to philosophical certainty, but philosophy adds orientation to practical dilemmas. It seems to me a productive dialectic.

Have you ever considered fully transitioning from academia to literature, or do you see the two as closely interconnected rather than strictly separate?

I don’t see academia and literature as separate worlds — for me, they are different ways of asking the same fundamental questions. Philosophy gives me the conceptual tools to interrogate the world, while literature allows me to capture its complexities, contradictions and silences. Academic writing often demands clarity and precision, but literature creates space for ambiguity, for inhabiting perspectives that theory alone can’t fully grasp. I don’t feel the need to choose between them.

In your academic work, you engage heavily with both Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx. While Kant’s concept of dignity is rooted in a person’s capacity for rational action, independent of their socio-economic status, the Marxist perspective ties human dignity to the material conditions that can either constrain or enhance one’s social and personal potential. How do you navigate and balance these philosophical tensions in your literary work?

Both Kant and Marx, in my view, start from a universal idea of reason, and from a radical reading of the Enlightenment stance as necessary to the critique of the institutions of their time. In Kant, this stance is expressed through the effort to overcome the dogmatism of religious or monarchic authority; in Marx, it’s situated within a richer discussion of property, material conditions and how capitalism limits the human potential. I find it fruitful to read these two traditions not in opposition but as complementary to each other, because it allows us to give a reading of the socialist critique of capitalism not as dogmatic or authoritarian, but as part of a broader emancipatory project and a necessary complement to the liberal idea of freedom. In my literary work, this means showing how dignity is both an inner capacity grounded in moral agency and something shaped and constrained by concrete social and historical conditions.

If dignity, as you suggest, is at once a moral capacity and a condition constrained by history and society, what space remains for freedom? Is freedom, in your view, dependent on the realization of dignity, or can it exist in its absence?

I believe that freedom and human dignity are connected by a certain understanding of the distinctive ways humans act, even in very difficult circumstances. Freedom is not about doing whatever strikes your fancy, but about acting in accordance with moral imperatives. Dignity for human beings resides in having this capacity for moral agency, the freedom to rule oneself through reason rather than impulse. Without that moral freedom, dignity becomes impossible, and without dignity, freedom loses its ethical meaning.

Considering the blend of democratic and authoritarian systems in the Western Balkans, with some countries such as Albania or Serbia leaning more authoritarian and others like Kosovo barely maintaining democratic norms, how can one maintain a dignified life? What does dignity mean in practical, everyday terms here?

Perhaps the same as in other historical circumstances: dignity means preserving one’s moral compass even when the world seems to conspire against it. It is about remaining critical in whatever role one inhabits, refusing to be reduced to a passive observer, and working with others to build spaces for the contestation of power and reimagining alternatives. I think that in post-communist societies, the greatest danger to preserving one’s dignity is cynicism and nihilism, a stance that risks becoming complicit with the status quo by claiming that all options have been tried and failed, that some societies will never change or that politicians will always be corrupt. But, I think the experience of these societies is a very rich and productive one if one is willing to learn from failure. It is also an experience that proves itself increasingly relevant in a world of the decline of democratic standards overall. In many ways, we have moved away from the transition narratives that saw liberal Western countries as a paradigm of development to imitate, and now live in a world where the tensions between democracy and capitalism are more exposed. In that sense, learning processes are no longer one-sided or unilateral; both the postcommunist world and the liberal one can learn from each other’s failures.

Lea Ypi, Image courtesy of Lea Ypi

At the beginning of your book, you depict a world marked by ethnic and religious diversity, where Balkan communities lived in harmony with one another despite their differences, and where what we now understand as national identity carried little weight in a landscape of fluid borders. Today, however, Balkan societies remain hostage to nationalism, regularly instrumentalized by corrupt and semi-authoritarian governments as a tool of division and control. In this context, how can we politicize memory without romanticizing it and in a way that can help us approach each other with curiosity and compassion, instead of fear?

We must approach memory without either imagining a lost golden age of harmony but also without examining the past with an arrogant stance that presumes the present is always superior to it. In “Indignity,” I try to emphasize the complexity of identity, and what we can learn from the past to avoid repeating the tragedies of history, but also to shed light on the lies of the present. Resisting the instrumentalization of national memory means insisting on the ambiguity of every social role and uncovering simplistic notions of belonging. It means engaging with different layers of exclusion, manipulation and propaganda while also making space for shared histories, cross-border affiliations and moral interconnectedness. It means telling stories that unsettle the dominant narrative and show us the artificiality of boundaries of all kinds. I think it is a risk worth taking, even if one sometimes risks upsetting existing equilibria or polarising the debate.

You speak of memory as a space of ambiguity and moral risk. “Indignity” captures these tensions while feeling profoundly timely. Do you see today’s divisions as an extension of those historical wounds?

History doesn’t repeat itself in identical ways, but the unjust structures that have led to the political crises of the past century are reproducing themselves with similar effects. In “Indignity,” reconstructing the world of the 1930s reveals how the “unmixing of peoples,” in Lord Curzon’s phrase, destroyed the fragile cosmopolitan and multicultural coexistence of the empire and paved the way for nationalism and exclusion. International institutions, like the League of Nations, failed to prevent this unraveling, while the left abandoned its internationalist commitments and retreated into the compromises of the nation-state. What followed — the “minority question,” scapegoating and the escalation into fascism — mirrors dynamics we can recognize today: political fragmentation and authoritarianism, a crisis of democratic ideals and the instrumentalization of difference. What makes the past feel so timely is precisely this continuity — the way unresolved tensions return, demanding that we confront the same moral and political dilemmas once again.

Are you currently working on a new academic or literary project? What should your readers expect?

I’m currently working on a book on moral socialism, bringing Kant and Marx into conversation to rethink questions of freedom and democracy in the aftermath of the 20th-century crises of both social democracy and state socialism. At the same time, I’m considering a sequel to “Free” called “Equal” that would explore migration, integration and the meaning of equality in contemporary capitalist societies. I hope to manage to weave again political theory with personal and historical narratives that show how large structural forces shape individual lives.

Lastly, what do you think Leman would have said about the book?

She might have disagreed with some of my interpretations, but I believe she would have recognized the spirit behind them: the attempt to reflect on dignity and moral choices in difficult circumstances. I think she would have also appreciated that the book isn’t just about her life, but an effort to reflect on the relation between history and literature to convey stories that were fractured, silenced or misrepresented — people who lived through collapsing empires, rising nationalisms and authoritarian regimes. What matters is not preserving her as an individual heroine, but showing how a life reimagined can speak to broader histories of displacement, survival and moral agency that are still relevant to learn in the present.

This article has been edited for length and clarity. The conversation was conducted in English.

Feature Image: Cover of “Indignity” by Lea Ypi