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Patrick Weil

Elections 2024: The Madman in the White House

Thursday, October 10, 2024, 4:00–5:30pm

Foster 107
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In 2014, Patrick Weil happened upon a manuscript buried in the archives of Yale University. Written by a US diplomat named William C. Bullitt and Sigmund Freud between 1930 and 1932, the text presents an extraordinary psychobiography of President Woodrow Wilson, whose mental capacity Bullitt had come to question in light of Wilson’s disastrous handling of the Treaty of Versailles. It was not until 1966 that Bullitt and Freud’s book was published as a heavily redacted and ultimately much-criticized edition that Weil found to differ from the original manuscript in over three hundred instances.

Weil presents a major reassessment of Bullitt and Freud’s project in his recent publication, The Madman in the White House (Harvard University Press, 2023). In this lecture, he will share insights from his research and analysis of the 1932 manuscript and reflect on their implications for how we assess the character of our leaders today.

3CT fellow Jennifer Pitts will serve as respondent, and we invite you to join us for a reception in Foster 108 following the event. 

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This is the first in a series of Theorizing the Present events on the 2024 US elections.

Patrick Weil is Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Fellow at Yale Law School and a research professor at the National Center for Scientific Research in France. The founder and president of Libraries Without Borders, he is the author of The Sovereign Citizen and How to Be French.

Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and in the Committee on Social Thought, and a fellow of 3CT. Her research and teaching interests lie in the fields of modern political and international thought, particularly British and French thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; empire and post-colonial theory; the history of international law; and global justice.

Co-sponsored by the France Chicago Center and the Interdisciplinary Workshop on France and the Francophone World.

This event is free and open to the public, and registration is recommended. Please email us at ccct@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.