About Mark Lilla
American historian of ideas (b. 1956), professor of humanities at Columbia University and a longtime essayist on political and intellectual history. A self-described liberal, Lilla provoked sharp debate with his post-2016 argument that identity politics had become a liability for the American left.
Books by Mark Lilla
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The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics
A short, controversial argument from the center-left that identity politics is a dead end for liberalism. Lilla contends that by fragmenting into ever-narrower identity groups, the American left abandoned the unifying l…
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The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West
A sweeping intellectual history of how the West learned to separate political life from divine revelation — and how fragile that achievement is. Lilla calls this separation 'the Great Separation,' begun by Hobbes, and t…
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