Abstract
The prevalence of the term post-truth suggests that we have, in the last few years, moved from being members of societies dedicated to truth to being members of ones that cannot agree on truth’s parameters and, even worse, have given up trying. But is this really what has happened? The author argues that, under the sway of the Enlightenment, truth has actually been unstable and a source of contention in public life ever since the founding moment for modern democracies in the late eighteenth century; the ‘post’ in ‘post-truth’ elides this complex history even as it accurately describes some of the conditions of our moment. What that means, though, is that rather than attempt to turn the clock back to past models and practices for restoring the reign of truth, we should be looking for new, post-Enlightenment paradigms for how to define and locate truth in the context of democracy, as well as new mechanisms for making this possible.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial: Post-truth and Democracy
- Are we Really Past Truth? A Historian’s Perspective
- Post-deliberative Democracy
- Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Twenty-First Century
- Fitting and Fudging: On the Folly of Trying to Define Post-truth
- Democracy Naturalized: In Search of the Individual in the Post-truth Condition
- Behind the Screens: Post-truth, Populism, and the Circulation of Elites
- Symmetry as a Guide to Post-truth Times: A Response to Lynch
- General Part
- Capital, Ideology, and the Liberal Order
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial: Post-truth and Democracy
- Are we Really Past Truth? A Historian’s Perspective
- Post-deliberative Democracy
- Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Twenty-First Century
- Fitting and Fudging: On the Folly of Trying to Define Post-truth
- Democracy Naturalized: In Search of the Individual in the Post-truth Condition
- Behind the Screens: Post-truth, Populism, and the Circulation of Elites
- Symmetry as a Guide to Post-truth Times: A Response to Lynch
- General Part
- Capital, Ideology, and the Liberal Order