Facts,Arte-Facts,and Fabrications: The Crisis of Public Epistemic Authority

Abstract

Amid increasing anxiety about the fate of truth in politics, Hannah Arendt is often invoked to gain purchase on the ways in which lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories are overwhelming the public realm and paralyzing political discourse. This article reconstructs Arendt’s often misunderstood account of factual truth via a new interpretation of her seminal 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics.” While many theorists have charged Arendt with hostility to truth tout court, others defend her account of factual truth by way of her unfinished theory of judgment. I locate Arendt’s notion of “publicly known” facts within a different context: first, her understanding of knowledge as produced by work and anchored in the human artifice and, second, her account of authority and its modern crisis. By reinscribing “Truth and Politics” within this broader framework, my reading both clarifies its unique place in Arendt’s oeuvre and shows that the focus on judgment must be paired with a (re)turn to the neglected concept of authority. To that end, I propose an account of “public epistemic authority” as housed within inherited knowledge infrastructures and outline the new perspective this offers on the so-called post-truth crisis.