Each year the Centre for Social Critique at Humboldt University invites a leading critical theorist to Berlin to give the public Walter Benjamin Lectures. On three consecutive nights, the lectures present  an up-to-date analysis of the crises of our time and ways to overcome or grapple with them. Named after the Berlin-born philosopher Walter Benjamin, the lecture series is dedicated to his intellectual integrity and political commitment in the face of historical catastrophe.The list of lecturers since 2019 comprises Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, and Sally Haslanger.

Since 2024, political theorist Lea Ypi from the London School of Economics holds the Center’s Benjamin Chair. In her Benjamin lectures, she presents her ideas on what is essential for a moral socialism. Ypi offers a critique of capitalism and a defence of socialism that focus on the Enlightenment idea of freedom as moral agency.

Detailed programme information on criticaltheoryinberlin.de

Lea Ypi is a political theorist at the London School of Economics. In her work, she combines theoretical acuity with narrative power. Her award-winning memoir Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (2021) has been translated into more than thirty languages. Ypi is inter alia the author of The Architectonic of Reason: Purposiveness and Systematic Unity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2021) and Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (2017). Her op-eds appear, among others, in The Guardian and Financial Times.