Abstract
For some years now, the significance of truth for politics has been intensely debated under the buzzword “post-truth.” However, this cannot hide the fact that political theory and philosophy have systematically neglected the relationship between truth and politics throughout their history. This article intends to remedy this desideratum by differentiating the various modes in which truth is referred to and invoked in the political field. To this end, the main strands of the post-truth debate are reconstructed and their shortcomings are pointed out. Second, based on a contrasting reading of Habermas and Foucault, possible starting points for systematizing the relationship between truth and politics are discussed. Third, and as a prolegomenon to such a systematization, the article proposes a cartography of political truth forms and relations along five fault lines: truth as foundation and de-foundation, truth as coercion and freedom, truth as virtue and scandal, truth as secret and transparency, and truth as knowledge and practice.
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For some years, the significance of truth in politics has been intensely debated. Against the backdrop of the crises of western democracies, the worldwide rise of populism, and the apparent increase in lies, fake news, and propaganda, the relationship between truth and politics proves to be one of the most pressing problems of our time. From Donald Trump’s notorious tweets to the Brexit campaign to far-right conspiracy narratives, corona scepticism, and, most recently, Russia’s war on Ukraine, to name the most prominent examples, political discourse seems to be dominated by an almost unmanageable amount of untruths.
Initially, the terms ‘post-truth’ and ‘post-factual’ (mainly in German-speaking countries) were established to describe these developments. However, the discourse on post-truth refers not so much to new phenomena but combines issues that have been discussed in other fields for some time. In particular, four topics are currently subsumed under the umbrella term ‘post-truth’: the problem of post-democracy and post-politics (see Rancière, 1999; Crouch, 2004; Rosanvallon, 2008; Michelsen & Walter, 2013; Mounk, 2018); the proliferation of a populist style of politics characterized by lies, disinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy theories (see Stanley, 2015; Müller, 2016; Bergmann & Butter, 2020); the fragmentation and polarization of the public sphere through the digitalization of the life-world (see Hendricks & Hansen, 2016; Rieder & Simon, 2017; Cosentino, 2020); and the widespread scepticism toward the sciences, as in climate change denial, creationism, or vaccine hesitancy (see Kitcher, 2001; Oreskes & Conway, 2010).
The buzzwords ‘post-truth’ and ‘post-factual’ suggest that we live in an era after the facts—in an era, that is, in which scientific knowledge and facts are increasingly replaced by ‘felt truths’ and ‘alternative facts’ (see Lepore, 2016). Furthermore, it points to a fundamental crisis of truth and democracy that affects our trust in science and deliberative processes as much as our basic understanding of society and democratic institutions. While the problem’s urgency is widely acknowledged, the various attempts to tackle it differ greatly in how they define post-truth phenomena, what concept of truth they apply, and how they explain the development. What they have in common, however, is that they all implicitly or explicitly address the troubled relationship between truth and politics. It is thus astonishing that political theory and philosophy—except, perhaps, for Hannah Arendt’s essay ‘Truth and Politics’ (1969)—have so far not subjected this relationship to systematic scrutiny. Questions of truth tend to be excluded from political thought or outsourced to epistemology, philosophy of science, or moral philosophy. Indeed, none of the standard handbooks and encyclopedias in political theory and philosophy feature a lemma ‘truth’ (see Dryzek et al., 2006; Gosepath et al., 2008; Bevir, 2010; Hammond, 2009; Badie et al., 2011; Goodin, 2011; Kurian, 2011).
Given the neglect of truth in politics, we argue that a thorough analysis of the truth–politics relation is a necessary precondition for adequately explaining the diverse ‘post-truth’ phenomena. Therefore, we propose to rethink truth—just as freedom, justice, or power—as a political term in its own right not reducible to epistemic or moral aspects. This expresses the conviction that it is neither possible to gain an adequate understanding of politics without considering truth nor to gain a differentiated account of truth without considering politics. Such an approach amounts neither to politicizing truth by turning it a plaything in political power struggles, nor to epistemologizing politics by reducing it to epistemic issues or to moralizing it by relegating it to epistemic virtues such as reliability and truthfulness.Footnote 1 Rather, it is about focusing on the truth–politics relation itself.
Methodologically, this requires a shift in perspective. Instead of starting with pre-defined concepts of truth and politics, we begin with a phenomenon-oriented analysis of the truth–politics relation and map the various ways in which truth—preliminarily understood as a kind of ‘empty signifier’ (Laclau, 1996)—is referred to and invoked in the political arena. This allows to carve out how, as what and in which forms truth is deployed in political conflicts. With this approach, we move both beyond deliberative accounts that link truth to a ‘commitment’ ‘of reaching a common understanding through […] reason-giving in public debate’ (Michelman, 1988, p. 284),Footnote 2 and beyond strands of political epistemology that ‘investigate the ways in which epistemological issues are at the center of our political lives’ (Hannon & Edenberg, 2020).Footnote 3 In contrast, we propose to rethink truth as a genuinely political concept that is neither reducible to consensus-oriented deliberation nor to epistemological questions.
To this end, we proceed in three steps. First, we distinguish between three lines of argumentation in the debates on post-truth: the conservative, the progressive, and the continuity view. We argue that all three remain inadequate, as they de-problematize rather than systematically explore the truth–politics relation. To counter the de-problematization of the truth–politics relation, we refer, secondly, to Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, two authors usually understood as opponents that nevertheless provide resources for a more nuanced account of the truth–politics relation. While Habermas points to the conflictual and thus latently political character of any reference to truth, Foucault aims at a critical genealogy of the intertwining of truth, politics, and subjectivation. Particularly, we draw on Habermas’s early seminal and hitherto untranslated article ‘Wahrheitstheorien,’ as well as Foucault’s influential interview ‘Truth and Power’ and his late lectures on parrhesia. Based on these readings and with recourse to Arendt, we distinguish, thirdly, five fault lines along which truth is referred to in the political sphere: truth as foundation and de-foundation, truth as coercion and freedom, truth as virtue and scandal, truth as secrecy and transparency, and truth as knowledge and practice. Insofar as this cartography turns out to be pertinent, it illustrates the multifaceted functions of truth as a political signifier and may foster a more differentiated and detailed understanding of truth and politics and their particular relation(s).
Three perspectives on the post-truth constellation
The conservative view emphasizes the ideals of science, truth, and rationality. Here, the diagnosis of a ‘post-truth age’ is understood as a historical process of decay in which truth and facts are gradually discredited; accordingly, politics is increasingly based on emotions and ‘felt truths,’ while ‘facts obtained and verified by reliable methods [...] play second fiddle’ (Hendricks & Vestergaard, 2019, p. 104). This involves the notion of a bygone ‘factual age’ in which the relationship between truth, facts, and politics was supposedly still intact. However, this demise is not attributed to the political, economic, and technological transformations of recent decades but blamed on Nietzsche and his ‘postmodern’ successors: by conceiving of scientific knowledge as the result of social practices and power relations; postmodernism, so the argument goes, has paved the way for a post-factual world (Latour, 2003; Boghossian, 2006; Lepore, 2016; see critically Flatscher & Seitz, 2020).
This view is inadequate for two reasons. First, it fails to date the supposed ‘golden age’ when truth and facts still possessed their authority and politics was free of affect and manipulation (Vogelmann, 2018). Thus, the label ‘post-truth’ functions as a grand narrative that laments an ongoing ‘decline of rationality’ and the ‘rise of emotion-driven, authoritarian politics’ (Schaal et al., 2017, p. 36). This narrative is based not only on ‘nostalgia for the past’ (van Dyk, 2017, p. 349) but also on a strict dichotomy of truth and power. Second, by identifying a clear culprit in ‘postmodernism’ and by endorsing an idealized concept of truth free of all power interests, this line of reasoning prevents from the start a well-founded analysis of the social, technological, and economic developments underlying post-truth phenomena.
In contrast, the progressive view understands the post-truth diagnosis as a historical phenomenon of transition leading from the paradigm of facts to that of data (Lepore, 2016; Lynch, 2016). Here, the emphasis is on the new opportunities opened up by digitalization and Big Data (Daub, 2020): facts, having lost their credibility and reliability, are replaced as the central paradigm of truth in science, journalism, law, and economics, by the paradigm of data. Data take over the epistemic function previously assigned to facts, including traditional claims to objectivity, universality, and neutrality. This involves not only a new belief in progress called ‘dataism’ but also in the ‘end of theory’ (Anderson, 2008), since the sheer quantity of data supposedly makes the model-building and interpretive function of theories obsolete.
This view also falls short. Numerous studies have shown that big data’s ‘promise of salvation’ is untenable. Indeed, this promise tends to turn into a new myth by obscuring the complex and power-laden processes through which data are collected and translated into usable knowledge. Big data is just as susceptible to manipulation, bias, prejudice, and selectivity as the sciences based on theory and experiment (Reichert, 2014; Rieder & Simon, 2016). In fact, the hopes for democratization, de-hierarchization, and decentralization accompanying the Internet and social media have turned into their opposite, as recent accounts of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), digital repression (Feldstein, 2019), and digital totalitarianism show (Hendricks & Vestergaard, 2019).
The continuity view rejects the ‘post-truth’ diagnosis as such, arguing that deception and lies have always been part of politics. Often mentioned in this context is Nietzsche’s dictum that truth is but ‘the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established convention, to lie en masse and in a style that is binding for all’ (1999, p. 146), or Arendt’s remark that ‘[n]o one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other’ (1969, p. 227). Yet even the continuity view does not deny that the function and significance of truth and lying in politics have shifted. While some emphasize the changed status of lies in politics, insofar as they no longer seem to discredit politicians or are even seen as a sign of strength, others point to the unprecedented quantity of lies, fake news, and deliberate disinformation, or to the rapid speed with which they spread on social networks, which leaves all attempts at fact-checking behind (see Graves, 2016; Hendricks & Hansen, 2016).
Although all three approaches provide important insights into ‘post-truth’ phenomena, none is ultimately convincing when it comes to accounting for the truth–politics relation itself.Footnote 4 For they presume, from the outset, an external or at best complementary relationship between politics and truth. The conservative position resorts to the common notion of truth as free of power and interest by locating it in a bygone age of facts or an extra-political realm of science; big data apologists propagate the well-known ideals of objectivity, universality, and impartiality to overcome all questions of power and interest; and the continuity thesis that lying has always been part of politics tends to reduce the question of truth in politics to the moral problem of truthfulness, with lying and propaganda being understood primarily as deliberate deceptions and purposeful distortions to be exposed and unmasked.Footnote 5
Against this premature de-problematization of the truth–politics relation, we suggest envisaging truth and politics in their mutual dependency. This approach is supported by the observation that truth and facts have by no means become irrelevant to political discourse. On the contrary, if the talk of ‘post-truth’ and ‘post-facticity’ is currently omnipresent, it may be precisely because truth is today more at stake than ever in the political game. Thus, right-wing extremists repeatedly invoke the ‘courage to tell the truth’ (a slogan of the German AFD) and denounce the alleged mainstream media as ‘lying press,’ while authoritarian populists, such as Donald Trump, who even called his social media platform ‘Truth Social,’ never tire of promising their supporters that they will always tell them the truth. Such emphatic appeals to truth are by no means limited to right-wing currents but can also be found, albeit under different auspices, in deliberative approaches, social movements, or environmental activism. For example, Extinction Rebellion demands to ‘Tell the truth!’ and Fridays for Future rallies under the slogan ‘Unite Behind the Science!’.Footnote 6
Truth and politics revisited: Habermas and Foucault
To adequately describe these phenomena, a systematic analysis of the truth–politics nexus is indispensable. Moreover, it can be assumed that we are currently dealing not so much with a loss of political significance of truth and facts but rather with a transformation of the current truth-regime, which is also reflected in the changed way in which truth is referred to and invoked in the political sphere. To conceptualize the truth–politics relation, while avoiding rash simplifications, we draw on two authors who are usually assigned to opposite camps: Jürgen Habermas, whose discourse pragmatics sketches a truth-theoretical conception of the political based on the consensus-building power of argumentation, and Michel Foucault, who conceives of the societal production of knowledge and truth under varying historical conditions as ‘regimes of truth’ and ‘politics of truth.’ Habermas and Foucault help clarify the various stakes and frontlines in the debates on truth and politics; moreover, both authors, precisely because of their different approaches, provide important indications of how the truth–politics relation can be rethought without succumbing to epistemological or political reductionism.
Habermas’s truth-theoretical approach to politics and society
In his 1971 Lectures on the ‘Linguistic Foundation of Sociology,’ Habermas stresses that ‘[e]very society that we conceive of as a meaningfully structured system of life has an immanent relation to truth’ (2001, p. 26). Consequently, the linguistic turn of sociology that Habermas aims at mobilizes not only the philosophy of language and speech act theory but also requires truth-theoretical considerations. One year later, in his seminal article ‘Wahrheitstheorien’ (‘Theories of Truth’),Footnote 7 Habermas elaborates on this ‘immanent relation [of every society] to truth’ from an epistemological perspective. Scrutinizing traditional truth theories, Habermas develops a consensus theory of truth in which the validity claims of intelligibility, objective truth, subjective truthfulness, and normative rightness take center stage. This allows us to understand Habermas’s project not only in terms of a ‘linguistic foundation of sociology’ but also as a truth-theoretical foundation of social and political theory. Instead of locating truth and facts outside of political conflict, Habermas shows that the reference to truth and facts becomes necessary whenever claims to validity are questioned and their legitimacy is contested.
[O]nly when information is doubted and the content of the information is put up for discussion […], we talk about facts […]. That a traffic light is yellow […] is an information […]; one can also say that it is a fact, but one says it only, i.e., one speaks only of facts [Tatsachen], if after an accident the matter of fact [Sachverhalt] must be clarified: whether the light was on yellow at a certain point in time. (Habermas, 1995, p. 134; our trans.)
Consequently, conflict is at the origin of all talk of truth and facts. We say ‘It is a fact that p’ or ‘p is true’ only if p is disputed and not generally accepted or taken for granted. Habermas therefore rejects redundancy theories of truth that analyze ‘p is true’ as an explicit and hence redundant form of saying ‘p.’ What redundancy-theoretical approaches overlook is precisely the assertoric force of the speech act ‘p is true,’ which becomes relevant as soon as certain assumptions or beliefs are contested.Footnote 8 Consequently, truth and facts come into play whenever conflicting validity claims are problematized; for what is obviously evident or beyond dispute need not be asserted as a fact or as true.
Thus, Habermas shows how truth and facts are inherently conflictual. Talk of truth and facts arises from dissent and has therefore already a latently political edge, which resonates with Arendt’s claim that factual truth ‘is political by nature’ (1969, p. 238). Even if, according to Habermas, consensus is the telos of communication, dissent is, as it were, its driving force and the site where truth and facts are negotiated.Footnote 9 For as soon as a consensus is reached on a certain issue, the recourse to truth and facts becomes irrelevant. Appealing to truth and facts is consequently a conflictual gesture with the aim of reaching understanding, which in turn serves social integration and the forging of the social bond. The reference to truth can assume this integrative function insofar as any claim to truth is associated with a claim to universality. As Habermas argues in Between Facts and Norms: ‘With each truth claim, speakers and hearers transcend the provincial standards of a particular collectivity, of a particular process of communication localized here and now’ (1996, p. 14).
This leads Habermas to a democratic notion of truth in which consensus is the general goal of political deliberation (even if this is often overlaid by strategic action), while objective, subjective, and normative validity claims are always raised within a conflictual social-political horizon. Consequently, a political order is legitimate only if it provides universally recognized procedures for establishing the truth. According to Habermas, ‘every effective belief in legitimacy is assumed to have an immanent relation to truth’ (1988, p. 97). Democracy legitimizes itself by enabling communicative practices in which truth claims must be justified with good reasons. ‘Constitutional democracy, which relies on a deliberative form of politics’ thus represents an ‘epistemically demanding, “truth sensitive” form of government’ (2008, pp. 143–144). In contrast, a ‘post-truth democracy’ that suspends any relation to truth ‘would no longer be a democracy’ at all (2008, p. 144).Footnote 10
Habermas thus assumes a constitutive connection between truth and democracy.Footnote 11 However, even if democracy maintains a special relationship with truth, it is certainly not the only ‘truth-sensitive form of government.’ Rather, every political regime is in some sense truth-sensitive. While modern democracies in particular have learned to deal with conflicting truth claims and therefore have a certain resilience to competing truths, authoritarian regimes usually react quite ‘sensitively’ and often with massive state violence to the expression of the simplest truths. Hence, political rulers, actors, or regimes are at best ‘insensitive’ to certain forms of truth in their efforts to achieve legitimacy but never to truth ‘as such.’Footnote 12 In short, deliberative democracy does not maintain an exclusive relation to truth; no form of government can do without truth, even if what counts as truth may vary greatly (see sect. “Concluding remarks”).
Foucault’s politics of truth
The impossibility to dispense with truth in politics is not only emphasized by Habermas, but much more radically by Arendt when she states that while we can easily imagine a world deprived of freedom, equality, and justice, ‘the same, curiously, is not possible with respect to the seemingly so much less political idea of truth’ (1969, p. 229). This brings us to Foucault’s genealogical analyses of power, knowledge, and subjectivity. Obviously, Foucault’s and Habermas’s projects fundamentally differ not only in their objectives but also in their conceptual frameworks (Flatscher & Seitz, 2019). This is particularly evident in the notion of subjectivation. While Habermas assumes equal rational subjects that settle controversial truth claims by the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ (2001, p. 98), Foucault underscores the normative practices and disciplinary procedures through which we first become rational subjects. Thus, he shows how forms of subjectivation, knowledge practices, governmental techniques, and modes of truth-telling are constitutively intertwined. Put simply, while Habermas’s discourse pragmatics examines the discursive procedures by which problematic truth claims can be consensually redeemed, Foucault’s critical genealogy asks why and how hegemonic modes of establishing the truth become problematic. In the 1977 interview ‘Truth and Power,’ Foucault argues that every society has ‘its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth’ (2000c, p. 131). By such a regime of truth, Foucault understands
the types of discourse which [a society] accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true (2000c, p. 131).
This passage has often been read as relativizing and politicizing truth by reducing it to political strategies and practices of power. This interpretation is not only explicitly rejected by Foucault himself but also misses his actual goal. Far from reducing truth to power struggles, he ponders the ways in which truth has been problematized in the history of western thought (see Lorenzini, 2015; Posselt & Seitz, 2020). Truth here is not understood as a substantial concept but rather as an ensemble of procedures, techniques, and practices that determine how true statements are produced, how they can be distinguished from false ones, which argumentation is correct, who is authorized to tell the truth, which qualifications are required for this, which institutions decide on it, etc. It is thus ‘not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power’ (2000c, p. 133), nor of thinking of power as detached from knowledge and truth. Rather, the object of analysis is ‘the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth’ (2000c, p. 133), that is, the institutional arrangements through which truth and knowledge are produced and become effective in society. This also includes, as Foucault underscores in his later works, the practices through which individuals are constituted as epistemic subjects, and the techniques by which ‘men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth’ (2000a, p. 230).
Foucault explores these questions throughout his oeuvre, starting with his analyses of the history of madness, of sexuality, and of the modern penal system, to governmentality and ‘the government of men by truth’ (2014, p. 11), to parrhesia as a discursive practice ‘in which […] the individual constitutes himself and is constituted by others as a subject of a discourse of truth’ (2011, p. 3). In contrast to Habermas, who overlooks how individuals first become rational and accountable subjects, Foucault shows that governmental procedures, modes of truth-telling, and practices of subjectivation are deeply interwoven. Questioning a certain regime of truth is never merely a matter of rational insight but intervenes in the specific configuration of power relations, modes of subjectivation, and knowledge practices, which in turn produce and stabilize certain forms of rationality. From a Habermasian perspective, however, Foucault cannot convincingly explain how different validity claims (to truth, rightness, or truthfulness) are related and how competing truth claims can be resolved or discursively redeemed.
This allows us to draw a first conclusion. Both Habermas and Foucault provide important insights into the relationship between truth and politics, albeit from different perspectives and with different objectives. Habermas argues that truth claims are always already at stake in deliberative processes. Moreover, he stresses the conflictual and latently political character of truth and facts, while maintaining that only speech oriented toward understanding and the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ (2001, p. 98) can form the normative basis of political judgment and action (see 1995, pp. 174–183). Foucault draws attention to the historical transformations of political truth regimes and shows that questions of truth are intrinsically intertwined with governmental techniques and self-technologies. In contrast to Habermas’s discourse pragmatics, Foucault therefore speaks of a discourse dramatics, that is, a ‘political dramatics of true discourse’ (2010, pp. 68–69), in which the individual constitutes itself as a speaking subject by binding itself to the told truth. This is particularly evident in conflict situations where those who are excluded from the realm of linguistic and political representation constitute themselves as speaking and political subjects in the first place by binding themselves to the truth they invoke (see Posselt, 2013).
Mapping political truth forms
The reconstruction of Habermas and Foucault proposed here paves the way for analyzing the truth–politics relation without having to rely on the simplifications outlined above. Habermas and Foucault offer conceptual resources for examining more closely how truth and politics are interconnected and refer to each other. In doing so, they take a first step toward formulating truth as a political concept in its own right. Furthermore, we need to map out the different roles and functions truth occupies in the political field. In terms of a heuristic device, we propose therefore to speak of truth in politics as an ‘empty signifier’ or a ‘rallying point’ (Laclau, 1996, 2006). From an epistemological perspective, truth seems to be severely underdetermined. However, this changes as soon as we understand truth not as a ‘monolithic’ but as a ‘relational’ concept that fulfills various roles and functions in the political field.
In the following, we outline various modes in which truth is referred to and invoked in the political sphere. We aim to show that truth does not take a single form in the political realm but can fulfill divergent, even contradictory, political functions, without these being mutually exclusive. Consequently, what we offer is not a strict systematization or exhaustive categorization of political truth forms but rather a tentative mapping traversed by a series of fault lines.Footnote 13
Truth as foundation and de-foundation
In the context of political transformation processes, truth looms large in the guise of founding and putting foundations into question. Thus, a first fault line runs between truth as foundation and de-foundation. Here, truth is either referred to as the foundation of political order or invoked to subvert the prevailing conditions.
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Truth as foundation. Perhaps the most familiar truth form in political philosophy is truth as the foundation of social order. Here, truth is invoked to establish a common basis for political community. In this way, truth functions as the polity’s common ground. This is the foundational role of truth in politics: truth founds community by establishing the principles to which all members are aligned and to which everybody is committed. Paradigmatic for this founding role of truth is the opening passage of the US Declaration of Independence. In ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’ the truths in question are not obvious facts or objective knowledge but rather truths that constitute the community’s basis and as such can neither be questioned nor disputed.
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Truth as institution and social bond. In connection with this founding gesture, we have the reference to truth as an instituting force and social bond. Here, truth functions not only ‘vertically’ as a founding principle but also ‘horizontally’ as that which connects all citizens in an ideal communication community, as in Karl-Otto Apel’s and Habermas’s discourse ethics (see Apel, 1998; Habermas, 1990), by committing them to the validity claims inevitably raised in every speech act. This function of truth as the forging of a social bond becomes particularly evident in the nation-building force of the Declaration. The ‘We’ in ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ does not refer to an existing people preceding the Declaration; rather, this people is performatively constituted as a unified entity by the declaration of what is true (see Derrida, 2002): We are and identify ourselves as those who recognize these truths to be self-evident. Our community’s bond is based on our adherence to these truths. The state would then be, as Emmanuel Levinas once put it, ‘the gathering together of men participating in the same ideal truths’ (1999, p. 131).
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Truth as revolutionary force and event. Besides these ‘associative’ invocations, truth can also unleash an essentially ‘dissociative’ force. Here, truth is not the foundation or bond that holds the community together and stabilizes political order, but a force that challenges the given order, as in Foucault’s parrhesia, or even overturns it and dissolves the existing social bond. Alain Badiou speaks of ‘truth events’ when revolutionary truths break with traditional structures and principles, introducing ‘a sudden change of scale’ (2011, p. 24). Truth then ‘interrupts repetition’ (2003, p. 11); it is what ‘locally disrupt[s] the laws of the world’ (2011, p. 92; see Evcan, 2022). Such a truth-event can also be explicated with regard to the Declaration of Independence: it cuts all ties with the British Empire and accomplishes a performative act that not only asserts equality as the undisputable truth of the revolution, but also constitutes it performatively.
This threefold reference to truth in the Declaration of Independence refutes Arendt’s claim that Thomas Jefferson, misled by the attempt to place certain truths, like mathematical axioms, ‘beyond dispute and argument,’ had confused truth with opinion (Arendt, 1969, p. 246). This reading fails to recognize that the Declaration’s invocation of truth in the name of equality serves three distinct but closely connected functions: (1) to provide a foundation for political order, (2) to establish a social bond and the unity of a people, and (3) to break with the existing unequal order imposed by the British crown. Here, equality is not simply asserted but rather performatively declared as a political truth. Consequently, the contradiction Arendt believes to recognize is at best a performative contradiction, without which, in the words of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, neither critique, discussion, and progress (Derrida, 1989, p. 260) nor radical political change would be possible (Butler & Spivak, 2007, p. 66; see Posselt, 2016).
Truth as Constraint and Freedom
Following Arendt, Foucault, and Habermas, a second fault line can be located between freedom and constraint. Here, truth is brought into play as that which both enables and limits our (political) agency but also as that which, as in the form of the courageous use of free speech, bears witness to the ideal of autonomous political subjectivity.
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Truth as a lack of alternatives. If truth is presented as an absolute authority that does not allow for alternatives, it fulfills a de-politicizing function. Truth, then, is the un-political or anti-political par excellence. According to Arendt, truth in this sense has a coercive and almost despotic character, since ‘factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life’ (1969, p. 241).
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Truth as a space of freedom. The compelling character of truth does not mean that the appeal to truth always has a limiting, constraining, or repressive effect, as Habermas’s notion of the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ (2001, p. 98) makes clear. For precisely by recognizing certain facts as true and unalterable, a common space is opened up for political action. Accordingly, Arendt defines truth as ‘that which men cannot change at will’ and, metaphorically, as the ‘ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us’ (1969, p. 264). As such, truth enables politics by providing orientation and a scope for action. Truth is interpreted here as the precondition of political action, retaining a common world to which we can relate. In this way, truth serves to create political space. Thus, the reference to truth implies a dialectic of freedom and necessity: non-negotiable and compelling, truth is at the same time the condition of freedom.
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Truth as liberation. The invocation of truth as the space of freedom can be contrasted with the political gesture of truth-telling, where individuals speak out against the injustices of a given order. While ‘under normal circumstances,’ ‘the mere telling of facts, leads to no action whatever’ (1969, p. 251), as Arendt argues, under totalitarian conditions of systematic lying, the mere assertion of facts can be a courageous and ‘truly’ political act of liberation: ‘Where everybody lies about everything of importance, the truthteller, whether he knows it or not, has begun to act; he, too, has engaged himself in political business, for, in the unlikely event that he survives, he has made a start toward changing the world’ (1969, p. 251). In light of Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia as the ‘courage of the truth,’ it can furthermore be shown that truth-as-freedom not only occurs in totalitarian regimes. Far from being limited to rare and extreme political events, truth-telling is a fundamental practice and self-technology through which individuals constitute themselves as political subjects by binding themselves to the truth they speak (see Alford, 2001; Lagasnerie, 2017).
Truth as Virtue and Scandal
The subject-constitutive aspect of truth-telling, as it appears in parrhesia, leads us to a third fault line, which touches upon the relationship between politics and ethics. In this case, the focus is on the moral status of those who speak the truth and stand up for it. Here, invoking truth underscores the truthfulness and sincerity of the speaker; conversely, speaking the truth can be an outrageous scandal and breach of taboo.
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Truth as truthfulness. Truthfulness and sincerity loom large in political discourse, even though genuine truthfulness may be rare in political reality. Arendt famously states that ‘no one […] has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues’ (1969, p. 227). However, truthfulness is certainly one of the most common ways in which political actors refer to truth. Hardly does a campaign speech go by without declaring the candidate’s own credibility and trustworthiness while ostracizing the lies and false promises of their political opponents. Foucault shows that since antiquity, truthfulness figures as a ‘moral and social qualification[]’ (2019, p. 73), which—alongside the institutionalized right to free speech (isegoria)—is the precondition for political truth-telling.
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Truth as scandal. The idea of truth as a moral or epistemic virtue is in tension with truth as a political-ethical scandal. For truth-telling—as ‘bearing witness by one’s life’ (Foucault, 2011, p. 184)—can be pursued to excess. Foucault traces the history of this excessive truth from ancient cynicism to modern revolutionary life and (politically or religiously motivated) terrorism (see Sonderegger, 2019; Wieder, 2019). Terrorism is, thus, a political excess of truth: the terrorist chooses a destructive form of life, a life ‘taken to the point of dying for the truth.’ Truth here becomes, in Foucault’s words, a ‘bomb which kills the person who places it’ (2011, p. 185). Although this self-destructive truth is extreme, it is not alien to western political philosophy: ‘Going after the truth, manifesting the truth, making the truth burst out to the point of losing one’s life or causing the blood of others to flow is in fact something whose long filiation is found again across European thought’ (2011, p. 185).
Truth as Secrecy and Transparency
A fourth fault line extends between truth as secrecy and truth as transparency. Here, we can distinguish between ‘esoteric’ references to truth that are covertly addressed to a particular political collective and ‘exoteric’ proclamations of truth that achieve the truth effect precisely by being addressed to a broad public.Footnote 14
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Truth as secret. A long tradition in political philosophy views truth as hidden from most people, accessible but to a few selected initiates, attainable only through special effort, hard work, and practice. This conception of truth goes back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which the one freed from his chains not only has to tread the long path to real truth and knowledge, but also runs the risk of being killed when he tries to free ‘his fellow-citizens […] from falsehood and illusion’ (Arendt, 1969, p. 229). Moreover, the secret plays a pivotal role in political theory, both as arcanum and as secretum. Whereas the arcanum denotes that which is withdrawn from knowledge and communication, thus stabilizing and preserving power, the secretum ‘is inextricably linked to communication’ and ‘structures social or political relations of exclusion and inclusion’ (Horn, 2011, p. 109).
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Truth as transparency. Contrary to the conception of truth as secret runs the conviction that any secrecy is detrimental to the well-being of the polity and must be countered by radical transparency, as is evident in the current debates about WikiLeaks, whistleblowing, and freedom of information (see Birchall, 2011; Han, 2015; Alloa & Thomä, 2018; Weiskopf, 2021). Although the idea of truth as ‘disclosure’ and ‘unconcealment’ is already implied in the Greek term aletheia, it was not until the philosophy of the Enlightenment that the idea of truth as publicity was put forward, most notably by Jeremy Bentham (1962), also known for his Panopticon, and John Stuart Mill (1977). From now on, according to Foucault, the ‘universal communication of knowledge and the infinite free exchange of discourse’ is opposed to the ‘monopolized and secret knowledge of oriental tyranny’ (1981, p. 62). At the same time, however, it were precisely the secret lodges and the protected space of the salons that made the formation of bourgeois society and the public sphere possible, as Koselleck (1988) and Habermas (1989) have shown (see Dean, 2001).
Truth as Knowledge and Practice
A fifth fault line, closely interwoven with the political truth forms already mentioned, erupts between truth as knowledge and truth as practice. Here, we are dealing, on the one hand, with truth as theoretical and empirical knowledge that forms the basis of political decision-making and, on the other hand, with truth as a social practice that can manifest itself in epistemic and deliberative procedures as well as in revolutionary action.
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Truth as knowledge. If truth is claimed in terms of empirical knowledge and scientific facts, the aim is to provide reliable foundations for political action. However, where data, facts, and figures are elevated to the exclusive principle of political judgment, political action dwindles to a technocratic form of post-politics in which political decision-making processes are reduced to expert knowledge or referred to data-based algorithms. Where, conversely, truth and facts are themselves ‘politicized’ in the popular understanding, that is, reduced to tokens in power struggles, the result is a post-factual politics that suspends any relation to truth (Habermas, 2008, p. 144) or in which facts are transformed into mere opinions, as Arendt (1969, p. 236) notes.
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Truth as social practice. If truth and knowledge are understood as social practices, this implies that truth and knowledge are not simply found or given but rather generated through collective procedures that include discursive and deliberative elements as well as scientific, political, and legal institutions. Think of Habermas’s (1995) consensus theory of truth, Bruno Latour’s & Steve Woolgar’s (1986) sociological analysis of the ‘social construction of scientific facts’ in laboratory practice, or Foucault’s analyses of how governmental techniques, modes of truth-telling, and self-practices are interconnected in different societies.
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Truth as revolutionary activity. Moreover, as shown above, truth plays an important role in the mobilization of collective political subjectivities. Here, Karl Marx’s shift of the concept of truth from knowledge to historical practice is of particular interest. Marx understands truth not primarily as theoretical knowledge but as a ‘revolutionising practice’ and a ‘practical-critical [...] activity’ through which collective subjects are formed (1998, pp. 572–573). Currently, truth as a revolutionary practice is also discussed under the heading of ‘prefigurative politics,’ which can be traced back to nineteenth-century anarchism (Boggs, 1977, p. 100) and can be defined as ‘a political action, […] in which certain political ideals are experimentally actualised in the “here and now,” rather than hoped to be realized in a distant future’ (Sande, 2013, p. 230).
Concluding remarks
Three considerations have been guiding us up to this point. First, in view of the present debates on post-truth, we differentiated between a conservative, a progressive, and a continuity view, arguing that all three tend to de-problematize the truth–politics relation. In contrast, we argued that the alleged ‘truth crisis’ can only be adequately analyzed within a methodological framework that accounts for the intertwining of truth and politics. To this end, we turned, second, to Habermas and Foucault as resources for countering these de-problematizing tendencies. While Habermas stresses the conflictual character of all truth and validity claims and shows that dissent is the driving force of any invocation of truth, Foucault points toward the close entanglement between practices of truth-telling, power relations, governmental techniques, and modes of subjectivation. On this basis, we made the case for conceiving of truth as a political category, not reducible to epistemological or moral issues. Finally, as a first step toward such a reconceptualization, we have sketched a cartography of the various modes in which truth is referred to and invoked in the political sphere.
Such a mapping, of course, can only be exploratory and preliminary. It neither claims to be comprehensive nor to provide a strict classificatory scheme that assigns a unique place to each truth form. Instead, we face an ambivalent and conflictual field that allows for intersections, contrasts, and transitions. Moreover, the cartography reveals that there is neither a uniform nor an exclusive way of referring to truth in the political sphere. Rather, it shows how different truth forms overlap, condense, or demarcate themselves from one another.
Nevertheless, we believe that this cartography can serve as a starting point for a more detailed account of the truth–politics relationship by laying out the multifaceted references to truth in the political arena. Instead of arguing beforehand for a particular concept of (political) truth or postulating a ‘political criterion of truth,’ the cartography sensitizes for multiplicity of invocations of truth in the political filed. Thereby, the cartography shows that truth in politics is neither indeterminate nor void—even as we ourselves provisionally employed the ‘empty signifier’ concept—but rather overdetermined, in the sense that in the political, a plurality of truth-related claims and trajectories of foundation and de-foundation, of constitution and subversion, are intertwined. Thus, to rethink truth as a political concept means first to systematically elaborate its multiple functions, forms, and relations.
This conception entails that political struggles are always also fought over which forms or regimes of truth can claim legitimacy and recognition. In this sense, all politics is—not exclusively, but always also—a ‘politics of truth.’ Thus, we are not so much dealing—in analogy to Claude Lefort’s (1988) ‘empty place of power’—with an ‘empty place of truth’ within the political; rather, the place of truth is as populated as contested. Indeed, the notion of ‘the’ place of truth falls short of the cartography established here, insofar as the latter has shown that there is neither the one place of power nor the one place of truth in the political. Rather, we face a rough terrain that has yet to be explored further.
Thereby we take into account the insight of thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Foucault, and Arendt, that political action in general and democracy in particular can only occur where the place of truth is not occupied once and for all but remains contestable. Where the place of truth is definitively occupied or absolutzied, such as the market as the site of truth production in the context of (neo)liberalism, political agency is curtailed. Against this background, the cartography should deliver a kind of matrix for describing and analyzing concrete historical truth regimes as well as the causes and reasons leading to the contestation of a society’s regimes of truth, as the post-truth debates seem to suggest.
Notes
According to this reasoning, politics is less about truth than about truthfulness and epistemic virtues such as sincerity and accuracy (see Williams, 2002). Similarly, Nida-Rümelin (2019), echoing Cicero (1991, p. I.23), considers truthfulness and reliability as the two basic communicative norms or virtues.
For a nuanced account of political epistemology, which, in addition to analytic approaches, also draws on critical theory and poststructuralist theories, see Vogelmann (2020).
This also applies to approaches that reject the post-truth diagnosis altogether and argue for a narrow, deflationary concept of truth (see Bufacchi, 2021, p. 358). Here, it is argued that references to truth only make sense where it can be clearly defined, as, for example, when we say that a statement is ‘true’ (or ‘false’). Politics, however, so the argument goes, is less about truth than about truthfulness and its corresponding epistemic virtues such as sincerity and accuracy (see Williams, 2002).
See https://extinctionrebellion.uk/the-truth, and https://fridaysforfuture.org/what-we-do/our-demands (accessed 28 July 2023). On the overlaps between rhetorics of truth and post-truth, see Strassheim (2022, p. 6).
The article ‘Wahrheitstheorien’ is untranslated and hardly received in English-speaking academia. On its importance in Habermas’s oeuvre, see Bohman and Rehg (2017) and Habermas (2009). Although Habermas revised the consensus theory of truth, his early reflections are not only rich for clarifying the truth–politics relation, but also anticipate considerations currently discussed in political epistemology.
Similarly, John Stuart Mill (1977) argued that truth is best served when it is ‘fearlessly discussed’ (p. 243) and ‘vigorously and earnestly contested’ (p. 258). Consequently, dissent not only gives rise to the raising of explicit truth claims, but also strengthens the ‘living apprehension of a truth’ (1977, p. 251).
On the relation between truth and democracy, see Habermas (2006), Nida-Rümelin (2006), Elkins and Norris (2012), Rosenfeld (2019). According to Vogelmann and Nonhoff (2021, p. 8), three positions can be roughly distinguished: liberals see truth as unnecessary and/or even harmful to politics; republicans consider universal truth claims indispensable; the deliberative model mediates between both positions.
Similarly, Bradford Vivian argues that ‘authoritarian power does not abandon ideals of rational truth; it rationalizes available forms of truth conducive to the legitimation of autocratic rule’ (2018, p. 419). Arendt points out that not only in authoritarian societies but also in democratic ones, obvious factual truths that oppose certain interests are often fought more fiercely than political views (Arendt, 1969, p. 236).
With this, we take Foucault’s proposal to consider ‘juridical forms and their development in the field of criminal law as the generative locus for a certain number of forms of truth’ (2000b, p. 4) and transfer it to the political field. And like Foucault, we understand this proposal ‘as working hypotheses, with a view to a future work’ (2000b, p. 1).
See Foucault’s distinction between secret doctrines ‘which function to preserve or produce discourses […] in a closed space’ and societies of discourse which ‘tend[] to be diffused’ (1981, pp. 62–63).
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Acknowledgements
Preliminary versions of this article were presented in the lecture series Politische Falschheiten: Diagnosen und Konzepte (Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, 21 June 2021), the Political Theory Colloquium at the University of Vienna (18 November 2021), the interdisciplinary workshop Theorie im postfaktischen Zeitalter (University of the Bundeswehr, Munich, 8-9 July 2022), and the Philosophical Research Colloquium at the University of Hildesheim (12 July 2022). We are grateful to Frieder Vogelmann (Frankfurt/M.), Oliver Marchart (Vienna), Jenni Brichzin (Munich), Rolf Elberfeld, and Katrin Wille (Hildesheim) for having provided us with these great opportunities for discussion. Further helpful suggestions came from Astrid Engl, Mareike Kajewski, Lars Leeten, Matthias Lorenz, Alexander Kurunczi, Johann Szews, Daniela Voß, and Anna Wieder. A preliminary German-language version of the third part of this article, introducing the cartography, has been published as "Prolegomena zu einem politischen Begriff der Wahrheit". Behemoth 16(2) 2023: 12–25. Sergej Seitz’s work on this article has been funded by the European Union (ERC, PREDEF, 101055015). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
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Posselt, G., Seitz, S. Truth and its political forms: an explorative cartography. Contemp Polit Theory (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00669-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00669-7