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.

Patrick Boucheron is a renowned French historian. He previously taught medieval history at the École normale supérieure and the University of Paris, and is currently a professor of history at the Collège de France. He is the author of twelve books, including Trace and Aura: The Recurring Lives of St. Ambrose of Milan (Other Press, 2022) and Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What to Fear (Other Press, 2020), and the editor of five, including France in the World (Other Press, 2019), which became a bestseller in France.

Willard Wood grew up in France and has translated more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction from the French. He has won the Lewis Galantière Award for Literary Translation and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation. He lives in Norfolk, Connecticut.