PanCity JournalYpi’s presentation of the post-Communist world, is decidedly objectivist. The reality that unfolds is of Albanian society: elections, waves of immigration, Ponzi schemes, political turmoil. The personal ingredient is there, to be sure, but the author’s story goes far beyond what she herself experienced ... What is unusual is that someone with Ypi’s biography would not only turn to Marxism but also treat it as an intellectual key to understanding freedom. I would rather imagine that such a person would turn to non-Marxism—that is, to the enormous area of human thought that the Marxist apparatchiks kept closed or downgraded with their ideological clichés. Marxism, after all, is a tiny island in the ocean of philosophy and far from the most interesting one. I could more easily imagine such a person learning about freedom from Aristotle, the Stoics, St. Augustine, Hobbes, Descartes, Burke, Tocqueville, Hegel, Bergson, and others ... I do not understand Ypi’s decision, and her book, interesting as it is, doesn’t give a satisfactory explanation. My only guess is that it has to do with some form of continuity or consistency. The Albanian world she depicts, both before and after the political change, was drab, arid, socially and intellectually impoverished, and closed off to all but a few simplistic formulas. I cannot resist the feeling that the author, having liberated herself from the Albanian environment, failed to move to a much richer and livelier philosophical world. Whether she was unable to do so, whether her Albanian upbringing killed any interest in this world, or whether it was Western academia that did the job, I cannot say.
