Contact
Biography
Hugo Drochon is a political theorist and historian of political thought, with interests in Nietzsche's politics, democratic theory, liberalism, centrism and conspiracy theories. He studies the different facets of modern democracy to develop a 'dynamic' theory of democracy.
Before coming to Nottingham he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Conspiracy and Democracy research project at CRASSH, Cambridge, where he also completed my PhD. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Remarque Institute at NYU, the MacMillan Center at Yale, the Centre Raymond Aron at the EHESS, the Politics Department at Princeton and the Department of History at the EUI. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society for the Arts and the Higher Education Academy, and has won a number of prizes, including the Nottingham Reward Scheme and the St John's Mansergh History Prize at Cambridge.
His first book Nietzsche's Great Politics came out with Princeton University Press in 2016 (paperback 2018). It was reviewed in a number of popular and scholarly publications including the New Yorker, TLS, New Statesman, Dissent, LARB, Times Higher Education and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. It also featured in interviews with Vox and the Irish Times. It was selected as one of CHOICE's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017, longlisted for the Bronislaw Geremek First Academic Book Prize and has been translated into Spanish (Adriana Hidalgo, 2023) and Chinese (Commercial Press, 2023).
His current research is on elite theories of democracy - Mosca, Pareto and Michels - and the impact their thinking had on the development of democratic theory in the US and Europe after WWII, notably on figures such as Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, C Wright Mills and Raymond Aron. He has a book entitled Elites and Dynamic Democracy under contract with Princeton University Press.
He regularly writes for the TLS, Guardian, New Statesman, The Nation, Project Syndicate, Irish Times, Persuasion, Unherd, The UnPopulist, RSA Journal, Le Grand Continent and the Cambridge Journal, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4, France Culture, Al Jazeera and Talking Politics. He has spoken at the Hay and Cheltenham Literary Festivals.
Teaching Summary
Left and Rights in Contemporary Politics (POLI3132)
Democracy and Its Critics (POLI2013)
Introduction to Political Theory (POLI1013)
PhD Supervision
I am interested in supervising students who want to work in the following areas:
- Nietzsche's politics
- Democratic theory
- Liberalism
- Centrism
- Conspiracy theories
I am currently supervising the following students:
Gareth King: 'Red Tories and Blue Labour'
Selim Koru: 'Ressentiment in Nietzsche's politics'
Fraser Logan: 'Nietzsche on Honesty' (viva passed 12/06/23)