Rumors

When Socrates was standing before the Athenian tribunal in 399 BC, he said in his defence that the opponents he feared most were the invisible ones, those who had been spreading rumours against him for years but none of whom were being brought to court – it was like fighting shadows. The moment was iconic: Socrates, the harbinger of logos and true knowledge, was eventually defeated by rumours and mendacious slander.

Where does the strange power of rumours come from? Everyone knows that rumours are unfounded and based on thin air, but still they pass them on: rumours spread, and what appeared as a small breeze can grow into a mighty whirlwind and produce serious effects, ruin people’s lives and change the course of events.

Rumors scrutinizes the mysterious power of rumours and seeks to analyse it philosophically, examining along the way some key moments of our cultural history concerning rumours, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Gogol and Kafka. It also underlines the fact that, although rumours are as old as humankind, the advent of the internet and social media has raised the spreading of rumours to an entirely new level, to the point where we could speak of the rumourisation of the social. The more communication there is, the more the social fabric threatens to fall apart – and the more urgent it becomes to find strategies to counteract this.