About me

I’m Mihail Neamțu — writer, entrepreneur, and, since 2024, a Member of the Romanian Parliament, where I chair the Committee on Culture, Arts, and Mass Media. Yes, all at once.

Eastern Europeans don’t believe in choosing one lane. I was born in Făgăraș, at the foot of the Carpathians, and raised by a grandfather who played the violin, read the Bible, and hated Communists — in that order.

On the morning of December 21, 1989, I was a boy listening to armored vehicles rumble past the house while my father protested in the city square. That was my first lesson in political philosophy, and it didn’t come from a textbook.

I studied philosophy at Babeș-Bolyai in Cluj, earned my Master’s at Durham, and completed my doctorate in Theology at King’s College London, where I spent several years arguing that fourth-century Egyptian monks understood freedom better than most modern parliaments.

I’ve held fellowships at New Europe College under Andrei Pleșu, the University of Notre Dame, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. I’ve lectured at Oxford (as a postgraduate student), Cambridge, the United Nations, Guatemala, Hong Kong or Jordan.

I’ve written more than twenty books. I founded Elite Communication, where I teach rhetoric the way Cicero would have if he’d had a microphone and a YouTube channel.

I run the Great Books Club — a publishing house built on the dangerous premise that Dostoevsky, Marcus Aurelius, and the Bible still have something to say.

And my channel, Vocea Libertății, reaches over 125,000 subscribers who, for reasons I find both flattering and slightly alarming, keep coming back.

Now — why should you, wherever you are, care what an Eastern European has to say?

Because we lived through the twentieth century’s worst ideas from the inside.

We didn’t read about totalitarianism in seminars; we buried relatives because of it.

We watched Marxism promise paradise and deliver the gulag.

We saw what happens when a civilization cuts itself off from God, from tradition, from the accumulated wisdom of centuries — and we survived to tell the story.

That gives us a kind of diagnostic clarity the West sometimes lacks.

When you’ve watched an ideology devour a continent, you develop a certain instinct for recognizing the early symptoms — the utopian rhetoric, the assault on language, the quiet erosion of institutions that took generations to build.

Eastern Europe is the West’s memory of what happens when ideas go wrong.

And memory, as any theologian will tell you, is not nostalgia. It is the immune system of a civilization.

I live in Bucharest with my family.

My passions remain books, freedom, and horses that refuse the bridle.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​