The power of speech: persuasion, propaganda and falsehood

Undergraduate / Graduate

The course is devoted to an examination of the persuasive power of speech. We will start with the Sophists, who first insisted on the importance of persuasion and rhetoric and questioned the notion of 'truth' as correspondence with an outside reality. We will then examine the emergence of mass psychology and the study of collective behaviour in the 19th century. We will conclude with 20th-century theories on propaganda, subliminal persuasion, and falsehood. The first classes will be devoted to a clarification of the notion of 'political philosophy' and to an account of the methodology in the history of political thought.