Nikos Sotirakopoulos

Dr Nikos Sotirakopoulos is the director of the Ayn Rand Institute Europe and a visiting fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. He holds a PhD in political sociology from the University of Kent and taught in UK universities for a decade.

A frequent commentator in the British media, he is the author of two books, The Rise of Lifestyle Activism: From New Left to Occupy and Identity Politics and Tribalism: The New Culture Wars.

His work on identity politics has a different character from most commentary on the subject: he studied activist movements as a sociologist before he began arguing with them, having spent more than a decade in British universities, at Kent, Loughborough and York St John.

His case is that the individual gets squeezed from both directions, by a left that sorts people into groups and a right that sorts them into nations, and that the Enlightenment premises underneath a free society are precisely what both are discarding.