Tom E. Moses Memorial Constitution Day Lecture

The fifteenth annual Tom E. Moses Memorial Lecture on the U.S. Constitution will be given by Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld, author of Democracy and Truth: A Short History.  Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on European and American intellectual and cultural history, the Age of Revolutions, and the History of Democracy.  Rosenfeld’s 2011 book Common Sense:  A Political Historywon the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Society for the History of the Early American Republic book prize.  Her essays and articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History, and the William and Mary Quarterly, as well as the New York Times, Washington Post, Dissent, and The Nation.

Citizens in democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way.  But while some details of this issue may be novel, the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In exploring the major trends that have led to the rise of our “post-truth” public life, Sophia Rosenfeld will discuss the longstanding and largely unspoken tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts.