Egon Flaig

In 2017, Flaig published Die Niederlage der politischen Vernunft (The End of Reason in the Public Sphere), in which he argues that the rise of political correctness has made rational discussion of important public issues such as immigration impossible, undermining an essential characteristic of liberal democratic societies.

These views have been criticized by other historians like Heinrich August Winkler, who accused Flaig of being an apologist for German nationalism. In 2014, on the day of a colloquium in Flaig's honour, student protestors organized a 'counter-colloquium,' aiming at 'taking action against the propaganda of the New Right - thinly disguised as scholarship - and against its spokesmen/women on our campus.' In January 2017 Flaig gave a lecture to the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf chapter of Alternative für Deutschland on the concept of racism in antiquity.

In 2013 Flaig published the 628 page long Die Mehrheitsentscheidung ('Majority Decision-Making'), a world-historical treatment of the topic that had been fifteen years in the making. For Flaig, majority decision-making is a necessary condition for democracy: 'without majority decision-making,' he states, there can be 'no democracy.' This leads Flaig to make a sharp distinction between democracy and consensus systems; democracy, in fact, should be viewed as 'a specific variant of dissensual decision-making.' Systems in which disagreement is possible, but in which the whole community feels bound by an eventual majority vote, obtain a greater capacity for effective action (what Flaig calls their 'Handlungsfähigkeit'). Flaig argues that a systematic use of majority decision-making emerged in only a small set of cultures, including pre-exilic Judaism, Buddhist India, ancient Greece and Rome, and medieval Iceland.

His Weltgeschichte der Sklaverei ('A World History of Slavery') appeared in 2009. Flaig views slavery as an institution that emerged in several different cultures, in particular Islam, which he describes as 'the largest and longest-lasting slave-system in world history.' Uwe Walter praised the book for what he saw as its lack of moralism, its conceptual clarity, and it mass of historical detail. Ulrike Schmieder thought the book over-simplified a complex topic, and showed a tendency to exaggerate the evils of Muslim slave-holding while whitewashing European colonialism.

From 1970 to 1976, Flaig studied history and romance languages and cultures in Stuttgart, Berlin, and Paris. He gained a doctorate in 1984, with a thesis on Jacob Burckhardt's Hellenism. After stints teaching in Freiburg, Göttingen, and Paris, Flaig became Professor of Ancient History at the University of Greifswald in 1998, moving to Rostock in 2008 and retiring in 2014.

Egon Flaig (born 16 May 1949 in Gronau, Baden-Württemberg) is a German ancient historian and public intellectual, currently Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Rostock. Flaig's research has ranged from ancient Greek and Roman history to world-historical treatments of topics such as slavery and democracy. He has also been an active commentator on issues such as democracy, national identity, and religion, especially as pertaining to his home country.