The Truth Society

Noelle Molé Liston's The Truth Society seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. Liston scrutinizes Italy's late twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, she examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving.

With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the "post-truth" world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. Liston argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. The Truth Society offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.

Noelle Molé Liston is a Senior Lecturer at New York University. She is the author of Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy. Follow her on X @MoleListon.

This notion of truth lies at the heart of Noelle Molé Liston's inquiry into recent developments in Italian politics and society.

Jane Cowan, Chair of the 2021 William A. Douglass Prize selection committee:

We live in age when concerns about disinformation, fake news, and media bubbles continue to reverberate across the globe. In The Truth Society, Noelle Mole Liston develops a timely and highly original anthropological analysis of the politics of post-truth. Across its vibrant chapters, the book takes Italian anxieties around truth—the lack of truth, the emptiness of truth, the threats against truth—and treats them as an ethnographic object. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis, the book takes readers through the rise and fall of Berlusconi and his brand of political aesthetics. Creative both in its subject matter and its approach, and with an astounding wealth of empirical detail, the book illuminates the Italian case but also the larger politics of truth that has come to afflict so many, ostensible democracies in the present, from the US to Brazil to the UK to India.

Jason Pine, Purchase College, State University of New York, author of A Decomposition:

The Truth Society eloquently synthesizes complex literatures on climate change and the climate of truth-making to generate the perfect milieu for understanding the Aquila trial (figured as an act of war against science), pro-science activism, and contemporary Italian populist politics.

Emanuela Guano, Georgia State University, author of Creative Urbanity:

By weaving together only seemingly disparate concepts and ethnographic scenarios, Molé's The Truth Society provides a brilliant exploration of how contemporary Italian publics negotiate truth in political discourse, science, and the media.