The Hegel Lecture 2026

Lepore’s lecture “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” will explore what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state for rule by automation and government by machine. Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of what Lepore calls the “artificial state.” This lecture, richly illustrated with visual material, chronicles the rise of the artificial state, attempts to reckon with what it has cost the natural world, and anticipates its fall.

The welcoming address will be held by Executive Vice President of Freie Universität Berlin Professor Verena Blechinger-Talcott. The lecture will then be introduced by Professor Sebastian Jobs, a historian at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and has authored several books. These include These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), an international bestseller that was named one of Time magazine’s top ten non-fiction books of the decade, and We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, a New York Times bestseller that was published last year. Her latest publication The Deadline is a collection of essays. Her next book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, is forthcoming this year.

Much of Lepore’s scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the histories and technologies of evidence. A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, the humanities, the history of technology, and American political history.

Lepore is the recipient of many honors and awards, including honorary degrees from Yale, New York University, and Tufts. Her research has received funding from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2021, she was granted the Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought.