Books by Sophia Rosenfeld

In this lively and illuminating book, historian Sophia Rosenfeld explores a 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.

What is the relationship between the ideas of the Enlightenment and the culture and ideology of the French Revolution? Rosenfeld takes up that classic question by concentrating on changing conceptions of language and signs during the second half of the eighteenth century.