Rereading `Truth and Politics'

Abstract

Hannah Arendt develops an immensely attractive account of `judgment', both as a supremely important human mental capacity and with respect to its place in political life, and this account rightly draws attention from a broad array of political theorists. Her essay `Truth and Politics' is one of the texts in which she first articulates this account of judgment. However, the account of truth offered in that essay is full of both puzzles and problems — notably, the puzzle of why Arendt, committed as she is to elevating the dignity of political life, thinks she needs to drive a wedge between politics and truth to the extent that she does in her account of the relation between them. The question pursued in this article is: why does Arendt think that, in order to give judgment and opinion the dignity that are appropriate to them, she needs, as it were, to slander truth as `coercive', `tyrannical', and so on?