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- Title
Power, Truth and Politics.
- Authors
Lukes, Steven
- Abstract
Let me begin with two sentences in the opening paragraph of Hannah Arendt's famous essay "Truth and Politics." This relation of truth and power in politics that dominated the mid-twentieth century also, of course, preoccupied Arendt, but in the essay from which I have quoted she focuses rather on the way in which truth in politics is always perspectival and entangled with opinion, and if it is to be successfully transmitted and thus acknowledged, this depends upon free agreement and consent. We can now begin to see why, if politics is a "field", it is distinctive in a way that renders plausible Arendt's claim that I political i power and truth are on rather bad terms - though, as I shall suggest, how bad those terms will be will depend on two broad conditions. According to self-described "realists", these conditions are so distant from actual conditions of political life in most places that they (some or most of them) are irrelevant to an understanding of what the practice of politics, even democratic politics, really amounts to.
- Subjects
PUBLIC spaces; DECISION making in law; TRUTH; POLITICAL participation; SOCIAL forces; PRACTICAL politics; EMPATHY
- Publication
Journal of Social Philosophy, 2019, Vol 50, Issue 4, p562
- ISSN
0047-2786
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/josp.12320