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

In this erudite collection of lectures, medievalist Boucheron (Trace and Aura) considers the origins and features of “political fictions,” or the “stories, values, images, and partially imagined memories” that may facilitate a tyrant’s rise to power. Such fictions “pervade in advance of any exercise of political power,” Boucheron asserts, “anticipating” the world to come, and as such have been wielded by dictators from Alexander the Great to Adolf Hitler. Through close readings of such varied cultural artifacts as Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s 14th-century paintings and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, Boucheron charts how political fictions operate, drawing liberally on theorists like Michel Foucault. Many such fictions revolve around an “imagined collective identity” tied to the literal “body” of a ruler, from the “Eucharistic metaphor” that dominated the Middle Ages to Hobbes’s early-modern Leviathan. One intriguing tangent Boucheron follows involves a turning point in Western political history surrounding Machiavelli, who punctured medieval philosophy’s reliance on “probable certainties” and instead pivoted to “actual truth,” or definitive statements about reality made by politicians—which, Boucheron notes, could easily turn into “orthodoxies” requiring subjects to “obediently” believe them. While the analysis is theory-heavy and bounces a bit between subjects, it’s nonetheless conveyed with elegance and enthusiasm. This glitters with jewels of insight.