Lea Ypi has become something of a master of shifting identities. When we meet for coffee to discuss her new book Indignity at the London School of Economics (LSE), where she’s a professor of political theory, she’s in the middle of juggling her teaching load and various fellowship applications. Fiercely intelligent, the 46-year-old Ypi is a polyglot who speaks French, Italian, German and Spanish, in addition to English and her native Albanian. She’s also a friendly and enthusiastic interlocutor, who peppers her animated, winding answers about philosophy, politics and literature with plenty of unpretentious “you know”s.
We had just sat down when her mobile rang and, seeing that the caller was her children’s school, Ypi slipped out of philosopher mode. With a quick apology for taking a call, she answered – was the nanny meant to do the pick-up? After a brief flurry of follow-up phone calls, the situation was sorted and her children were, presumably, collected from school. She turned back to our discussion of her work – though for Ypi, the line between personal and professional lives is often blurred.
In Indignity, Ypi focuses her attention on the life of her paternal grandmother, Leman Ypi, who helped raise her. She was first drawn to investigate her grandmother’s life when an anonymous social media account posted an old photograph she’d never seen before of Leman on her honeymoon in 1941. War might have been raging across Europe at the time, but the image shows Leman reclining in a sun lounger beside her new husband, Asllan, outside the Hotel Vittoria, an Italian luxury ski resort. Ensconced in a white fur, Leman is smiling widely.
The comments under the image were savage; Leman was branded “morally bankrupt”, a “bitch”, somehow both a “communist spy” and a “fascist” one. Ypi decided to research her grandmother’s life in order “to rescue her from the trolls” and “restore her dignity”. But she was also disturbed by the callousness the image seemingly depicted. She recalled her grandmother telling her that her honeymoon was when she felt like “the happiest person alive”. What did it mean to be the happiest person alive in the winter of 1941? Indignity, which Ypi describes as a “hybrid sort of non-fiction/fiction family history”, is an attempt to answer this question.
Leman was born in 1918 in Salonica (today’s Thessaloniki), the grandchild of high-ranking officials and part of the Albanian diaspora. She moved to Tirana on her own at the age of 18, where she met and then married Asllan, the son of the fascist-sympathising former prime minister of Albania, Xhafer Ypi. Her in-laws’ political ties came to haunt her after the Second World War ended and Albania’s communist regime came to power: Asllan was sent to prison for 15 years for propaganda, while Leman was accused of being a spy for the Greek authorities and forced to work in labour camps.
It became clear once Ypi started her investigation that the communist regime’s surveillance records weren’t very reliable; holes in Leman’s story remained stubbornly unplugged. So, Ypi crafted the narrative out of the research she did in the former security services archives and an imagined, novelistic recreation of her grandmother’s life, weaving biography, political history and fiction.
She might not have succeeded in pinning down exactly what her grandmother was thinking and feeling when that honeymoon snapshot was taken – she never found the original photograph – but Ypi found the exercise of imagining Leman’s life freeing. Whereas in philosophy and academic writing she’d been trained to discuss her theories and ideas with rock-solid certainty, a more literary, fictionalised approach demanded ambiguity. “I think literature can only be successful if it inhabits points of view that are not yours,” she told me. “And that’s why you have to make a real effort to actually identify even with the most flawed character that you’re creating. So on the one hand, you begin to think that maybe this position has much more rationality behind it than I thought.”
The book, Ypi said, ultimately ended up being a “vindication of storytelling and imagination and literature – and the fact that reconstructing perspectives about the past might teach you something about how to navigate the conflicts of contemporary society”.
Lea Ypi was born in Tirana in 1979, under Enver Hoxha’s communist regime. Her family were privileged, secular Muslims (religion was banned in communist Albania) and during her earliest years she believed she was living in one of the most free societies in the world. She didn’t realise her father had been barred from studying mathematics at university because of his family’s political history, or that her mother had secreted away a trove of literature and philosophy texts so that the authorities would never find them.
Ypi was still a child when the country underwent its seismic transition to a multi-party political system, which embraced economic shock therapy at the insistence of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as part of its shift to liberalism. By the time Ypi was preparing to graduate from high school, Albania was in economic freefall – pyramid schemes had destroyed many people’s savings and civil unrest marred the country.
In 1997 Ypi moved to Italy to study political philosophy at Sapienza University of Rome. Her father had made her promise not to study Marxism before she left Albania – a promise she broke (she has routinely described herself as a Kantian Marxist). Ypi’s interest in the concept of freedom has been a constant theme in her professional life: much of her scholarly work has centred on the Kantian idea of freedom, while her personal experiences living through the fall of communism were later recounted in her 2021 bestselling memoir Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History, in which she exposes the false promises of both communism and liberalism.
Upon moving to Italy to study, she found her sense of identity shifting. “Where I came from in Albania, I had a much stronger class identity,” she told me. But in Rome, her class no longer seemed as important to those around her as her status as a foreigner – and an Albanian one at that. “This was my first time seeing that actually you can be viewed based on nationality as opposed to based on class, which had been the story of my life until that point.”
After moving to the UK in 2009, she once again found herself defined by class. Working as a professor at the LSE and married to a British academic, she knows she enjoys a level of material comfort that largely shields her from the harsh reality of being an immigrant in a country that is increasingly hostile to the idea of migration. “On the one hand, yes, we are all migrants, but on the other hand, it makes a huge difference what resources you have as a migrant to navigate the constraints… If you’re actually working class or a poor migrant, this is a very, very different predicament from someone like me who is on a skill-based, point-based programme.”
Still, even Ypi can’t escape the impact of the UK’s rigid immigration rules. She wrote movingly in these pages in 2022 about “the cruelty, the contempt, the moral arbitrariness of the immigration authorities”, as well as of the government’s refusal to grant her mother a tourist visa so that she might visit Ypi after she had her second child. The problem: the Home Office didn’t believe her mother would leave the UK once allowed in.
It was years before her mother was able to travel to the UK, and then only because they made clear on the visa application that she was a wealthy Albanian landowner who wanted to visit London to shop at Harrods. Even today, Ypi told me, “my brother still hasn’t been able to get a visa because it’s really impossible for an Albanian man to come to the UK for whatever reason. And he’s wealthy in Albania, he has no intention of staying in the UK. He cannot make a convincing case [to the Home Office] just because he’s a young man.”
Political hostility towards immigration has only grown since 2023. Ypi believes that centre-left parties in Europe and other Western nations have lost their way and embraced a particularly poor strategy. “It’s a problem of treating politics like marketing,” she said. “So [they think] all they need to do is have a leader that’s marketable: that’s presentable and looks nice and behaves well and can speak to anyone, from finance people to lay voters across constituencies – and then the party sees itself as just understanding what the voters want.” The problem with this approach to politics, however, is that it too easily leads to abandoning any kind of core value or overarching vision of how to create a narrative of society.
[See also: Farage rises. Burnham watches. But Starmer fights on]
It’s an acute problem for the Labour Party, of which Ypi was once a member. Under Keir Starmer, she said, the party has fallen for the narrative established by the online far right and politicians such as Nigel Farage, whereby it seems to believe that “the only way they can win elections is by pandering to the right” when it comes to dealing with immigration. It’s a self-defeating strategy, Ypi said. “If you just make this very, very short-term electoral calculus, maybe you do get a vote here, vote there,” she said. “But I think over the long term, it just condemns you to always chasing someone else’s narrative and not having your own analysis of the world.”
It’s not just a matter of moral drift, either, she argued. The public sees through attempts to mimic right-wing rhetoric by politicians who for years argued the other side. “If I cared about avoiding migrants, why would I vote for a party that is insincere and hypocritical and incoherent, as opposed to a party that has always said that they wanted to fight migration? Why would I go for the bad copy?” she asked. “I think they’re kind of, over the long term, committing suicide.”
Is she still a member of the Labour Party, I ask? She shakes her head firmly, her mouth set in a line as she sets down her coffee cup. She is not.
As her career in academia has progressed, Ypi has also been acutely aware of another part of her identity that shapes how others perceive her: her gender. In a 2024 Spectator article, the title’s theatre critic wrote that at a lecture by Ypi in Cambridge, “blonde hair spilling over her shoulders absorbed far more of my attention than her political reflections and I was desperate to speak to her afterwards”. Unable to do so, he instead visited a sex worker, an encounter he recounts in the piece.
On the one hand, Ypi told me, the piece was unsurprising – “yet another instance of sexism thatI had experienced”. Gender discrimination and sexual harassment, after all, have long been rampant in academia. And yet, “it’s sort of depressing that, regardless of all the discourse that you hear about, like equality and this illusion of progress…” She trailed off. “The public sphere is not as enlightened as you might like to think.”
While Ypi was tempted to ignore the entire episode, she believes that “with sexism, with racism, with xenophobia, if you experience it in the first person, you have a responsibility to talk about it”. So she called it out: “Advice for scholars: next time you lecture on Kant and revolutions,” she posted on X, “make sure your hair is neatly tied and that you’re not blonde. Or else your research impact will be on the Spectator libido section.”
The story took on a life of its own. The headlines proliferated; reporters from right-wing papers door-stepped her. Ypi grew frustrated with this fixation, because “it wasn’t about me or about the Spectator guy, or about the Spectator as such”, she said. As she saw the incident, it was just one instance of a structural problem; commentators were missing the bigger picture. “I think it actually prevents people from seeing that this is a political issue – it’s not an individual issue, it’s not a moral issue.”
She confessed to being cynical about claims of progress when it comes to sexual politics – a rare pessimistic admission for the philosopher who argues that “hope is a moral duty”. She believes that cynicism is an understandable response to the political landscape: “If all you have around you is ideology and propaganda and attempts to manipulate, that’s where the cynicism comes from because then people say: ‘OK, well then it’s not worth believing in anything because surely there is no morality.’”
Yet it was her grandmother, Leman, who impressed upon her the importance of moral agency, of having something to believe in. It’s an echo of the Kantian philosophy Lea Ypi has studied her entire career. “Kant says that what gives dignity to humans is this capacity of the will to assert itself even against circumstances that might be adverse to the will,” she told me. Her grandmother put it even more succinctly. Near the end of Indignity, Ypi recalls what Leman once told her: “I think we’re only free when we try to do the right thing.”
[See also: Max Caller: The man who tried to fix Birmingham]
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This article appears in the 10 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fight Back
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