Mark Lilla (born 1956) is an American political scientist,historian of ideas,journalist,and professor of humanities at Columbia University in New York City. A self-described liberal,[1] he typically,though not always,presents views from that perspective.
He was born in Detroit,Michigan,and was educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. After holding professorships at New York University and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago,he joined Columbia University in 2007 as Professor of the Humanities. He has been awarded fellowships by the Russell Sage Foundation,the Institut d’études avancées (Paris),the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center,the Guggenheim Foundation,the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton),and the American Academy in Rome. He lectures widely and has delivered the Weizmann Memorial Lecture in Israel,the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University,and the MacMillan Lectures on Religion,Politics,and Society at Yale University. In 1995 he was inducted into the French Order of Academic Palms.
From 1980-86 he was executive editor of the public policy quarterly,The Public Interest.
He is married to the artist Diana Cooper and is father of Sophie Marie Lilla (1994).
Career
Mark Lilla’s most recent book,Ignorance and Bliss:On Wanting Not to Know,is an essayistic examination of the human will to ignorance. Ranging from the Book of Genesis and Plato’s dialogues to Sufi parables and Sigmund Freud,he explores the many paradoxes of hiding truth from ourselves,as well as the fantasies this impulse lead human beings to entertain―the illusion that the ecstasies of prophets,mystics,and holy fools offer access to esoteric truths;the illusion of children’s lamb-like innocence;and the nostalgic illusion of recapturing the glories of vanished and allegedly purer civilizations.
Lilla sees this work as the fruit of his lifelong engagement with the contested heritage of the modern Enlightenment. His first book,G.B. Vico:The Making of an Anti-Modern examines an early figure in the European Counter-Enlightenment,and has an affinity with the works of Isaiah Berlin;with Ronald Dworkin and Robert B. Silvers,he edited the memorial volume,The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin in 2001.
In the 1990s he wrote widely on twentieth-century European philosophy,editing with Thomas Pavel the New French Thought series at Princeton University Press,and writing The Reckless Mind,a meditation on the "tyrannophilic" bent of twentieth-century continental philosophy. His wide-ranging study of modern political theology,The Stillborn God,based on the Carlyle Lectures delivered at Oxford University in 2003,was named one of the "100 best books of the year" by The New York Times Book Review and one of the 150 best books of the year by Publishers Weekly.
In recent years he has also been involved in public debates over the future of American liberalism and the Democratic Party,which is the focus of The Once and Future Liberal.
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