Jason Stanley

Jason is a descendant of Holocaust survivors–his uncle served several years in Auschwitz, his mother was raised in a Siberian labor camp, and his father experienced the madness of Kristallnacht. The impact of his family’s experiences led him to dedicate much of his work to studying the ideology and structure around injustice and how it is enabled and concealed. In his book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Jason identifies the ten pillars of fascist politics, and charts their horrifying rise and deep history. By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, he reveals that the stuff of politics—charged by rhetoric and myth—can quickly become policy and reality. How Fascism Works is a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Claudia Rankine says of the book, “No single book is as relevant to the present moment.”

His most recent book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future was published in 2024. This urgent, piercing, and altogether brilliant book exposes how the fight to learn from our past is ultimately a fight about the promise of our future.

Jason’s oeuvre is an insightful look into the philosophy of language and epistemology. His first book, Knowledge and Practical Interests, was the winner of the 2007 American Philosophical Association Book Prize. Language in Context (2007) is a collection of his papers in semantics published between 2000 and 2007 on the topic of linguistic communication and context. His third book, Know How, was published in 2011. Jason’s fourth book, How Propaganda Works, was the winner of the 2016 PROSE award for the subject area of philosophy. More recently, he has co-authored a book with David Beaver, The Politics of Language, which offers a radical new approach to the theory of meaning.