Timo Jütten is a Professor of Philosophy who specialises in social and political philosophy. From 2020 to 2025, he was the Principal Investigator of the Competition and Competitiveness Project, an interdisciplinary research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He currently works on two book manuscripts that draw on his work on the project: a short book on The Critical Theory of Authoritarianism, and a book on The Ethics of Competition.
Timo’s research falls into four broad areas. He is interested in supervising PhD students in any of these areas.
Timo’s current research is on competition and competitiveness, including conceptual issues,…
Timo Jütten is a Professor of Philosophy who specialises in social and political philosophy. From 2020 to 2025, he was the Principal Investigator of the Competition and Competitiveness Project, an interdisciplinary research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He currently works on two book manuscripts that draw on his work on the project: a short book on The Critical Theory of Authoritarianism, and a book on The Ethics of Competition.
Timo’s research falls into four broad areas. He is interested in supervising PhD students in any of these areas.
Timo’s current research is on competition and competitiveness, including conceptual issues, competition in different areas of social life (markets, sports, education), and the ethics of competition. He is also interested in competitiveness as a character or personality trait, and the role it plays is our lives. He has written on the use of experimental economics to understand competitiveness (Jütten 2024) and on Adam Smith’s views of competition (Jütten 2023)
Timo is interested in the moral status of capitalism and markets, and understanding the concepts that we use to describe and evaluate modern capitalist societies. He has written on esteem (Jütten 2017) and solidarity (Jütten 2016). He has just designed a new module on the Politics, Ethics and Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (CS202), which covers the impact of AI on education, privacy, and work.
Timo has published a number of papers on Frankfurt School critical theory, which offer rigorous reconstructions of some central analytical concepts of this tradition, e.g. Habermas’ and Honneth’s conceptions of the market (Jütten 2013, 2015), recognition (Jütten 2022), reification (Jütten 2011a, 2011b, 2010), and Adorno’s relationship to Kant, his conception of hope, and his view on freedom and determinism (Jütten forthcoming, 2019, 2012). For his take on the Frankfurt School as a school of thought, wait for his chapter in the Cambridge Handbook of Continental Philosophy (Jütten, forthcoming).
Finally, Timo is interested in some topics related to Feminism. He has published a short piece on “Sexual Objectification” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Jütten 2025) and a longer article in the world-leading philosophy journal Ethics (Jütten 2016).
Timo originally studied Politics and Hebrew at SOAS and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It soon became clear to him that he was most interested in the philosophical foundations of politics and society. A year-long module on Kant’s three Critiques led to an enduring interest in Kant’s critical philosophy and his German Idealist successors. Timo completed an MA in Social and Political Thought and a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Sussex, where he focused on German social and political philosophy, especially on Hegel and the Frankfurt School, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Adorno’s Critique of Kant’s Practical Philosophy.
After teaching for two years at UCD in Dublin and in Groningen (in the Netherlands), Timo came to Essex as a Lecturer in moral and political philosophy in 2011. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2016 and to Professor in 2019.
Timo is a member of the Human Rights Centre and has contributed to two research projects on Human Rights. From 2015-21 he was a researcher on the ESRC-funded Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project, where he contributed to a workstream on consent. In 2014, he was co-investigator on an AHRC Follow on Fund for Impact and Engagement grant, Achieving UNCRPD Compliance, under the auspices of the Essex Autonomy Project (EAP).
