Biography

Danilo Scholz specializes in the history of modern political thought and European intellectual history.
After earning a BA in History at the University of Cambridge, Danilo moved to Paris where he obtained the diplôme of the École normale supérieure and a master’s degree in History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). His MA thesis on Alexandre Kojève and German interwar philosophy won the Raymond Aron prize in 2011 and the EUI’s Marc Bloch prize in 2013. During the academic year 2012-2013, he was a visiting student researcher at UC Berkeley.
His PhD, which he completed in 2018 at the EHESS, investigated how insights from ethnological, psychoanalytical and geographical research profoundly renewed concepts and critiques of the state in twentieth-century postwar French thought.
As a Max Weber Fellow, Danilo will work on his first book manuscript, which is under contract with C.H. Beck. This monograph focuses on the administrative career of Alexandre Kojève. If his Hegel lectures of the 1930s continue to garner widespread attention, Kojève's career as a French bureaucrat after 1945 has gone largely unnoticed. The book will show how Kojève’s Hegelian convictions guided him through the corridors of European and global power and shaped French policy.
At Sciences Po and the EHESS, Danilo has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of political thought from Machiavelli to Kant and the changing views on war European intellectuals held throughout the twentieth century. Other classes investigated modern state theories and the conceptual history of borders and frontiers.