Misinformation and the Public Sphere in Napoleonic France
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9TH, 2021
David O'Brien
4:00pm CST
Zoom presentation
Eighteenth-century Paris is at the center of Jürgen Habermas’s famous account of the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in Europe. Habermas saw in this sphere the possibility of a discourse characterized by reason, inclusion, and truth. This lecture examines some of the ways in which the arts in Napoleonic France defied Habermas’s expectations, offering misinformation, exclusion, and distraction, and speculates on some of the lessons to be learned.
https://cas.illinois.edu/node/2568
This might be interesting; O'Brien is an art historian, not a historian, which is fine, up to a point. But I tend to give anything that claims to provide "speculation" on "lessons to be learned" a definite side-eye.