ADVENTURES IN DEMOCRACY will be published with Penguin Allen Lane in February 2024
Erica Benner is a political philosopher and historian of ideas. She was born in Tokyo and grew up in Japan and the UK. Benner has published widely on nationalism, Machiavelli, political ethics, and democracy. Her writings have been translated into many languages including Simple and Complex Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, and Turkish. After earning her D.Phil from Oxford in 1993, she taught at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, where she was tenured in 2000. As a Fellow in Ethics and Political Philosophy at Yale University from 2007, she wrote three highly acclaimed books on Machiavelli. The biography BE LIKE THE FOX was shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize and a BBC Book of the Week. In 2016-17 she was a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Central European University, working on democracy's past and present discontents. Penguin Press will publish her new book TRUE DEMOCRACY in 2023.
Benner currently teaches at LSE Ideas in London and for graduate programmes in several countries. She gives talks to both academic and general audiences around the world. She is President of the European Society for the History of Political Thought (ESHPT), and a founding editor of the Brill series History of European Political and Constitutional Thought.