‘Post-Truth: A European Problem?’

Pundits claim that, in the age of Trump and Brexit, political life no longer depends on any shared sense of truth. This talk will consider the validity of this claim, exploring the role of truth in democracies going back to the eighteenth century, but also the changed circumstances of the present in Europe and the US.

Sophia Rosenfeld is an American professor of intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania. She specialises in European intellectual and cultural history with an emphasis on the Enlightenment, the transatlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy. Her book Democracy & Truth – A Short History was described by The Nation as “brilliantly lucid”. “Rosenfeld provides the historical background necessary to understand our current truth crisis.”