Erica Benner is a political philosopher and historian of ideas. Born in Tokyo, she grew up in Japan and the UK. After earning her D.Phil from Oxford, she taught at Warsaw University and the Polish Academy of Sciences, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. Her first book, Really Existing Nationalisms, was published in 1995. As a fellow in ethics and political philosophy at Yale she published three further acclaimed books including Be Like the Fox, a biography of Machiavelli that 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. Her new book ADVENTURES IN DEMOCRACY: The Turbulent World of People Power is coming out with Allen Lane in February 2024 and is one of the Financial Times' picks for What to Read in 2024.
Erica currently teaches at the Hertie School for Governance in Berlin, LSE Ideas in London, and for academic programmes in Sweden and China. She is President of the European Society for the History of Political Thought and a founding editor of the Brill series History of European Political and Constitutional Thought. Her writings have been translated into many languages including Simple and Complex Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, and Turkish.