Marx and Mendacity: Can There Be a Politics without Hypocrisy?
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Martin Jay
Abstract
As demonstrated by Marx’s fierce defence of his integrity when anonymously accused of lying in 1872, he was a principled believer in both personal honesty and the value of truth in politics. Whether understood as enabling an accurate, ‘scientific’ depiction of the contradictions of the present society or a normative image of a truly just society to come, truth-telling was privileged by Marx over hypocrisy as a political virtue. Contemporary Marxists like Alain Badiou continue this tradition, arguing that revolutionary politics should be understood as a ‘truth procedure’. Drawing on the alternative position of political theorists such as Hannah Arendt, who distrusted tin; monologic and absolutist implications of a strong notion of truth in politics, this paper defends the role that hypocrisy and mendacity, understood in terms of lots of little lies rather than one big one, can play in a pluralist politics, in which, pace Marx, rhetoric, opinion and the clash of values resist being subsumed under a singular notion of the truth.
© 2015 by Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart
Articles in the same Issue
- Contents
- Editorial: The Normative Turn from Marxism
- I. Marx and Ethics: Coherent Company?
- Marx and Mendacity: Can There Be a Politics without Hypocrisy?
- Why Marxism Still Does Not Need Normative Theory
- The Moral Legacy of Marxism
- II. G. A. Cohen’s Development
- G. A. Cohen and Marxism
- Thoughts on G. A. Cohen’s Final Testament
- Equality, Community, and Diversity in Cohen’s Socialist Ideal
- G. A. Cohen, Constructivism, and the Fact of Reasonable Pluralism
- III. Marx and Liberalism
- The Theory of Marxian Liberalism
- Freedom in Times of Struggle: Positive Liberty, Again
- Libertarianism on the Brink
- Sterba on Liberty and Welfarism
- A Response to Jan Narveson: Why Libertarians Are and Are Not Like Turnips
- IV. Repercussions
- Myths about the State of Nature and the Reality of Stateless Societies
- Horkheimer, Religion, and the Normative Grounds of Critical Theology
- Exploitation, Labor, and Basic Income
- In Company of the Funny Sunny Surfer off Malibu: A Response to Michael Howard (and Some Others)
- Authors
Articles in the same Issue
- Contents
- Editorial: The Normative Turn from Marxism
- I. Marx and Ethics: Coherent Company?
- Marx and Mendacity: Can There Be a Politics without Hypocrisy?
- Why Marxism Still Does Not Need Normative Theory
- The Moral Legacy of Marxism
- II. G. A. Cohen’s Development
- G. A. Cohen and Marxism
- Thoughts on G. A. Cohen’s Final Testament
- Equality, Community, and Diversity in Cohen’s Socialist Ideal
- G. A. Cohen, Constructivism, and the Fact of Reasonable Pluralism
- III. Marx and Liberalism
- The Theory of Marxian Liberalism
- Freedom in Times of Struggle: Positive Liberty, Again
- Libertarianism on the Brink
- Sterba on Liberty and Welfarism
- A Response to Jan Narveson: Why Libertarians Are and Are Not Like Turnips
- IV. Repercussions
- Myths about the State of Nature and the Reality of Stateless Societies
- Horkheimer, Religion, and the Normative Grounds of Critical Theology
- Exploitation, Labor, and Basic Income
- In Company of the Funny Sunny Surfer off Malibu: A Response to Michael Howard (and Some Others)
- Authors
