In politics, truth has taken a beating in recent years, and from two directions. From one side, the very idea of truth has been attacked as, at best, an unnecessary, grandiose, and distracting superfluity and, at worst, a remnant of metaphysical foundationalism, an enemy of democracy, and a tool of political domination. From the other side, we have seen truth, never very secure to begin with on the battlefield of ordinary politics, suffer a series of especially cruel beatings: at the hands of a previous presidential administration—perhaps the most contemptuous of truth of any in American history, for whom...

A writer who made the problem of truth central to his literary and non-literary work, George Orwell controversially captured the opinion of his generation of thinkers when he identified truth as the major casualty in totalitarian regimes. But if totalitarianism spelled the death of objective truth, the threat to truth was not restricted to totalitarianism. Most scholars of Orwell’s day blamed relativism, both historical and cognitive, for the rise of totalitarianism and the slowness of the allied forces to recognize the extent and nature of the threat.¹ Relativism, as Peter Novick has argued, was seen by scholars during World War...

The fine and instructive essays by Jeremy Elkins and Linda M. G. Zerilli seem inspired by the thought that American politics in the past decade has become intolerably indifferent to truth. Elkins insists that “we cannot do without considerations of truth in our political life.” He urges that we “foster institutions in which questions of truth are treated responsibly and not wantonly sacrificed to other considerations.” Zerilli fears “that truth is quickly becoming a casualty of liberal democratic regimes, not just totalitarian ones.” Concerned with “the truth deficit in our current political context,” she longs for a form of “citizen...

“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other,” Arendt begins her essay on the subject. As these fine papers by Elkins and Zerilli illustrate, the truth-politics relation is not only old and vexed but has a protean and inconstant shape and refers to quite diverse corners of the field we call political. In the West, it could be said to make its first written appearance with the Greek tragedians’ accounts of political knavery and Thucydides’ narrative of the Peloponnesian wars, at whose nadir, it will be remembered, “words lost their meanings,”...

The relationship between truth and democratic politics has never been a particularly easy one.¹ The large role played by rhetoric and, in the modern world, political advertising in the generation of the will of the people or the consent of the governed makes it difficult for a democrat to insist upon strict veracity in public discourse. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the demos as a whole, unlike at least some elites, is not always well-educated enough to consistently discern when such rhetoric or advertising is systematically misleading or misrepresentative. But if it is little surprise that truthfulness...

A familiar complaint by those who defend creationism is that the opposition’s views are no more or less founded on reason than their own. Science, the thought goes, rests on its own principles, unproven “yet Sovereign,” as Cardinal Newman once put it. If there is a point here, it is this: scientific opposition to teaching biblical stories of creation in schools naturally assumes scientific standards of justification. Those standards can themselves be open to question. Using scientific standards to defend them would be circular. Consequently, it would seem that we must admit that science itself rests on some assumptions not...

All political systems need truth to some extent. Democracies need it in a special form—namely, easily available and widely dispersed. And they need it for a special reason: democracies cannot function without public trust, which depends on the public belief that officials are competent to ascertain relevant truth and committed to presenting it candidly. This does not means that democratic officials are always obligated to declare the truth, because doing so may sometimes undermine other important objectives, such as national security. It does mean that truth-telling enjoys a strong if occasionally rebuttable presumption.

Some of the truths relevant to...

How are the concepts of truth and democracy related? On the one hand, they could well seem to be as unrelated as apples and oranges: truth is an issue for the philosophy of language to determine, whereas democracy is a political and social arrangement usually discussed under the rubric of value theory. On the other hand, the connection of truth and democracy seems self-evident: How could democracy not presuppose the truth? How could democracy function without trust in the truthfulness of our fellow citizens?

Kant gives us a useful allegory for this topic in “Perpetual Peace” (1795). In reflecting on...

Yes, george w. bush was a liar, but that is not all. His foul administration spread an infectious mood of mendacity, aggression, indecency, callousness, self-indulgence, and stupidity over the land. One could say that the “Bush Doctrine” that Sarah Palin was unable to identify (in her ABC interview with Charlie Gibson) consists in the affirmation of all of these practical dispositions together and not merely in the defense of preemptive violence in foreign policy. Or let us name it “Bushism,” to denote an assemblage of bodies and forces that exceeds the narrow intellectual bonds of a “doctrine.”

I think that...

There can be few more predictable denunciations in the history of political discourse than those directed against the deleterious effects of mendacity and hypocrisy. When it comes to democratic politics, they are even more passionately delivered by those who argue that honesty, accountability, transparency, and trust are the bedrock premises of popular rule. Truthfulness in a politician, as the essays considered in this response demonstrate, is often associated with the more ambitious ideal of ascertaining the truth as a prerequisite to sound judgment in political decision making, which itself is often tied to rational procedures of deliberation to reveal that...

Most lovers of truth find democratic elections rather hard to stomach. So many words, so much sound, so much fury—so little effort to improve our understanding of who we are and where we stand in the world. Periodic elections ensure that democracy remains, among other things, “an aristocracy of orators,” since they hand the greatest powers to those who have mastered—or purchased—the arts of persuasion rather than to those who make the best arguments.¹ They provide an extraordinarily exciting spectacle for political junkies and journalists, the type of people whom Plato takes pleasure in deriding as “lovers...

In common political debate a belief in absolute values is often opposed to relativism.¹ Those who uphold the importance of “truth” in politics are usually on the side of the absolutists, and relativism tends to attract skeptics who deny that truth has much to do with politics or morality. John Stuart Mill was an unusual philosopher in adopting a historically based (and hence relativist) system of ethics and politics, a strong commitment to individual liberty, and, at the same time, a robust idea of truth.

His commitment to truth was developed primarily, though by no means exclusively, in his major...

If i used to be even partly right, the perceptive reflections on democracy and truth provided by Bernard Yack and Frederick Rosen do not bode well for the American Political Science Association, and perhaps not for humanity more generally. Years ago I argued that the leaders of the discipline of political science in the United States had always professed that they were equally dedicated to pursuing truth via science and to serving American democracy, and disciplinary leaders like Robert Putnam continue to make that case today.¹ I thought then that political scientists needed to acknowledge that pursuing truth and serving...

Philosophers never loved democracy. Yet their scorn of the government of the many kept alive the interest for democracy throughout the centuries and was an invaluable source of knowledge of that unique democratic experiment that was Athens. Consolidation of democracy in contemporary Western societies seems to have interrupted philosophy’s ancient hostility toward democracy. Today, Bernard Yack reminds us, philosophers are also democrats. Does this mean that modernity was able to sanctify the marriage of truth and majority rule? No, it does not. Indeed the unusual fact of contemporary philosophers who are also democrats reverberates with a paradox: like their Greek...

Democratic politics comprises, among other things, public discussion about laws and policies on the basis of reasons of justice.¹ How large a part is not my concern here. I assume that such reasoning, mixed with bargaining and hectoring, confession and accusation, self-pity and compulsive self-display, provides some part of democratic politics. Focusing on this deliberative part, I want to consider the role that the concept of truth might properly play in it.

I will defend two conclusions about that role.

First, the concept of truth, and judgments and assertions deploying that concept—including judgments and assertions that apply the concept...

Our democratic age tempts us to think that everything is up to us. Of course, as Hannah Arendt insists, the proposition “Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914” is a permanent truth, and nothing we decide can change it.¹ So not everything is up to us. Still, that historical fact is not a truth that affects what is right, or just, or good. So it might be held that these evaluative matters are the ones that are entirely up to us. By analogy with regicide and democratic revolution we might try to cast off the bogus boss-like order of moral and...

Truth and democratic politics are very big topics; the papers by Cohen and Estlund are concerned with a set of analytic questions at their intersection. Before we enter the domain of public reason—a space posited by Rawlsian liberalism in which reasonable justifications are offered in favor of binding rules—must we first check our conceptions of truth (like guns without permits) at the door? Or might permits be issued allowing at least some sorts of truth-claims to be brought inside?

The fact that this clearly defined philosophical problem is situated in a larger field is signaled by the first...

Much as i admire these essays by the philosophers Joshua Cohen and David Estlund, I approach the task of commenting upon them with trepidation. Though perhaps less philosophically challenged than other historians, intellectual historians pride ourselves on bracketing questions of the truth of the ideas of those we study—let alone the truth of any particular conception of what it means to say an idea is true—in favor of putting both the truths and the falsehoods alike that human beings may have told in the past into a context that helps us to understand how they came, rightly or...