Political Fictions: From the Middle Ages to the Post-Truth Present

An acclaimed historian illuminates today's political situation by examining the relationship between governing and storytelling, from the Middle Ages to the “post-truth” present, in these engaging essays.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, renowned medievalist Patrick Boucheron delivered a powerful, probing series of lectures on “political fictions” in the context of rising authoritarianism and populism. Adapted here for the first time in English, they offer key insights into how we arrived at our current global moment and what history can teach us about moving forward.

Long before Trump parlayed his reality TV character into a presidential victory with the MAGA movement, aspiring rulers have used the art of storytelling and the power of fable to control others. Discussing seminal works from Machiavelli’s The Prince and Hobbes’s Leviathan to Orwell’s 1984 and the writings of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, Boucheron explores the profound interconnectedness of political theory and fiction, and the tension between politics and the political.