Keynote

Democracy and Common Sense in the Post-Truth Age

Friday, October 15, 2021 | 8am EDT / 14Uhr MESZ

It is a commonplace these days to say that we have entered a post-truth age and that, as a result, democracy itself is unusually in peril. And to an extent, this is right. But the roots of the present crisis are deep—or at least considerably deeper than the history of Facebook and Twitter. The longer story, going back all the way to the Enlightenment and the birth of modern democracy, requires reassessing both the rise of expertise and the continued appeal of the common sense of ordinary people its chief antagonist. This talk will try to sketch why we need to think of social identity and epistemology together now.

Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches European and American intellectual and cultural history with a special emphasis on the Enlightenment, the trans-Atlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy.