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

This book, which is really a series of lectures given in 2017, may be beyond the reach of the average reader, as the topics and discussions are really designed for those who have degrees in history and the larger humanities. Professor Patrick Bourcheron, who teaches at College de France, gave a series of lectures at the beginning of 2017, when President Trump was beginning his first term, examining what it means to be living in a “post-truth” world and whether we have always been living in such a world ever since the written word was put to paper. Each lecture, which is fairly short by book chapter standards, looks at a different time frame, topic, and theme. In most of the lectures, Boucheron starts off with a modern example and then dovetails into how this was also present during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and other epochs of European history, as that is where his focus is. While the lectures are intriguing, they are intriguing as a historical artifact of a different time. Sadly, this book did not come out during the first Trump term.