The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

This lecture is an inquiry into 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. Yet little seems more inevitable than its eventual fall. 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.

Event in English.

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 also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), an international bestseller, named one of Time magazine's top ten non-fiction books of the decade. Her latest book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, is being published in September 2025. Lepore is currently writing a history of the rise and fall of what she calls the Artificial State.

Lepore received a B.A. in English from Tufts University in 1987, an M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1990, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1995.

Much of her 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, NYU, and Tufts. Her research has been funded by 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 awarded the Böll Stiftung‘s Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

Plese register by February 8, 2026.

On the dy following the Hegel Lecture, Jill Lepore offers a workhop for a limited number of M.A. students and doctoral candidates in the humanities. Prerequisite for participatiation in the workshop is attendance of the Hegel Lecture on February 12th. Further info to follow.