Emanuela Guano
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.
Jane Cowan
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
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.
