Neoliberalism and Post-Truth: Expertise and the Market Model

Abstract

Contrary to widespread assumptions, post-truth politicians formally adopt a rhetoric of ‘truth’ but turn it against established experts. To explain one central factor behind this destructive strategy and its success with voters, I consider Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek, who from 1922 onwards helped develop and popularize a political rhetoric of ‘truth’ in terms of scientific expertise. In Hayek’s influential version, market economics became the crucial expert field. Consequently, the 2008 financial crisis impacted attitudes towards experts more generally. But even sweeping rejection of experts continues to use the rhetoric, by now dominant, of expert truth. Paradoxically, this bipartisan language fuels division as opponents accuse each other of disregarding ‘truth itself’. Against the underlying metaphysics of context-free ‘facts’, John Dewey and Alfred Schutz recommend understanding truth as ‘presumptive’ knowledge produced within human practices, which can be robust but requires a readiness to engage in pluralistic and open-ended processes of (re-)contextualization.

Introduction

It is often said that for ‘post-truth’ politicians like Donald Trump, ‘truth itself has become irrelevant’, a diagnosis so widespread that it has been enshrined in dictionaries. ¹ Intellectuals have linked this supposed indifference to truth and its success with voters to the influence of academic critiques of truth, ² which some celebrate as a democratizing force (Fuller, 2018) and others rebuke in defense of truth (Cuevas-Badallo and Labrador-Montero, 2020). Some argue that democracy itself is failing and should be replaced by ‘epistocracy’, the ‘rule of the knowledgeable’ (Brennan, 2016: 14). Contrary to the dominant diagnosis thus circumscribed, I will characterize post-truth in terms of a political rhetoric built around a specific notion of truth. This rhetoric stifles debate precisely because both post-truthers and many of their critics use it.

The two groups identified here (ideal-typically) as the ‘post-truth camp’ and the ‘truth camp’ share a language game which revolves around ‘truth’ in the sense of facts produced by scientifically trained experts. I will exemplify the development of this idea in Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek, who from the 1920s onwards harnessed the modern trend towards scientific rationalization to build an influential political rhetoric. In Hayek’s version, the ‘neoliberal’ epistemology behind this rhetoric paradoxically combines a subordination of democracy to expert ‘truth’ with a sweeping criticism of experts.

To delineate a way out of the resulting impasse in the post-truth debate, we need more academic critique of truth, not less. I will refer to two philosophers who opposed the view offered by their contemporaries. John Dewey and Alfred Schutz argued that a metaphysical misinterpretation of scientific facts produces the kind of paradox seen in Lippmann or Hayek. Unlike the ideal of ‘facts’ beyond all human contexts, a viable notion of ‘presumptive’ truth embraces a pluralistic and open-ended process of contextualization.

While I will argue that the political rhetoric of truth is a central factor in the complex phenomenon of post-truth, it is only one among others. Moreover, I will trace that factor only as far as necessary to state my argument without going further into theories or genealogies of truth, philosophy of science, or rhetorical analysis. Finally, while I will suggest that the 2008 financial crisis catalyzed how neoliberal epistemology both motivates and stifles the post-truth debate, my concern is with this underlying constellation of ideas, which transcends the 2008 crisis and does not depend on my reading of it.

The Rhetoric of Truth: From Lippmann to Hayek

Jason Brennan (2016: 14f.) cites Plato’s vision of a philosopher kingdom and argues that political decisions should be based on expert knowledge rather than popular majorities. This type of argument was pioneered by US journalist and political writer Walter Lippmann. In his 1922 Public Opinion, he rhetorically invokes Plato’s argument that only experts have the knowledge required to take decisions in the interest of all. Plato’s critical assessment of democracy, Lippmann thinks, is even more valid in our technologically advanced and globalized world. Ordinary citizens follow emotions, tribes, and media distractions; thinking in ‘stereotypes’, they remain blind to ‘reality’. Fortunately, Lippmann contends, modernity also provides a solution not yet available to Plato and very different from his ideal of philosopher kings: the scientific method. Political decisions should be based on hard, neutral, objective ‘facts’ established within independent research institutions.

It is easy to forget that Lippmann was writing this a century ago. His analysis appears to foreshadow today’s ‘post-factual world’ (Bybee, 1999: 60). Yet his rhetoric is not aimed at something lost, as the prefix ‘post’ would suggest, but at something new, something to be built in the future. To be sure, the modern sciences had by then long played a key role in processes of ‘rationalization’ that transformed Western societies (Weber, 1968 [1921]; Husserl, 1970 [1954]). Even the more specific idea of basing politics on modern science had been around since the 18th century. But Lippmann, who had experienced the propaganda battles of the First World War and was well-versed in coining effective political language himself, widely popularized the idea of scientific truth as a political rhetoric. His Public Opinion became a bestseller, and Lippmann served as an adviser to several US presidents.

Nevertheless, Lippmann acknowledged a difficulty in his proposal. Its anti-democratic thrust is justified by a dichotomy between experts and ordinary citizens. He claims that while most people have at best vague and shaky ideas of their society, the knowledge that trained experts bring to political decisions is precise and certain. Using ‘quantitative analysis’ and ‘exact measurements’, experts can present facts in mathematical formats such as ‘statistics’, ‘curves’, ‘graphs’, or ‘index numbers’. Lippmann’s models for such facts are ‘exact sciences’ like physics. But physics, he recognizes, does not deal with society. For facts about society to be as compelling as physical facts, social scientists would first need to work out an equivalent ‘method’. As Lippmann admits with discernible skepticism, this has never happened. Still, he pleads, we should believe that it can be done. He asks his readers for a ‘belief in reason’, itself rooted in ‘intuition’ rather than science (Lippmann, 1922: 416f.), that his proposal will succeed in the future. His description of this as a ‘noble counterfeit’ (1922: 417) echoes Plato’s ‘noble lie’ (Rep.: 414c), a myth invented to make ordinary citizens believe that philosophers should rule because they are literally made of different stuff. The reference already indicates how Lippmann’s proposal could itself be used in new ways to manipulate public opinion.

Lippmann’s own ‘belief in reason’, however, soon began to waver. In the sequel to Public Opinion published only three years later, he writes that ‘all human eyes’ – experts not excluded – ‘have habits of vision, which are often stereotyped, which always throw facts into a perspective’ (Lippmann, 1925: 163). By 1937, he has given up any fundamental distinction between experts and non-experts. He discards his earlier hopes for a future government based upon expert truth and explicitly rejects the vision of Plato’s Republic (Lippmann, 1937: 22–5). Science is now merely one profession among many. The titular ‘good society’ of Lippmann’s 1937 book is no longer planned from the top with the help of superior knowledge to realize the common good. Instead, its heart is the marketplace, where people with different skills and interests, including scientists and other experts, meet on an equal footing. The market may not give us truth, but it serves the common good.

It fell to another author to argue that the market can provide a more sophisticated rhetoric of truth in politics that combines the early Lippmann’s belief in expert truth with the later Lippmann’s skepticism. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek attended a 1938 colloquium on Lippmann’s Good Society in Paris, where the term ‘neoliberal’ was coined to describe a new type of thinking in which Hayek would become a central figure.

Hayek (1937) starts by criticizing the idea of expert planning. If a ‘good society’ is one that benefits all, how would an expert go about designing such a society? The ‘objective facts’ relevant to the task would include information about every single citizen’s standpoint (their views, skills, goals, preferences, etc.). Furthermore, since people change, all this information would need to be updated in real time. But no human expert can possibly acquire such knowledge. Nor will future social scientists be able to do so, since the aim of science is precisely to establish ‘generalized rules’ by abstracting away from individual variations (Hayek, 1945: 521). Hayek rejects expert government because he deeply distrusts scientific expertise.

However, Hayek goes on, every individual knows their own standpoint at any given time. In other words, the relevant knowledge is there, but it is scattered among all citizens. The problem then is to find a mechanism for this knowledge to come together in a way that is best for all. According to Hayek, such a mechanism already exists, albeit so far only in the economic sphere: the market. Prices reflect the current global distribution of supply and demand, allowing every participant to relate her decisions to the standpoints of many other people unknown to her as if she knew them. Through prices, a market coordinates the standpoints of countless individuals by embodying a knowledge that none of them has on their own and that not even the best expert could attain.

At the same time, Hayek’s criticism of experts is itself presented as based on a special kind of expertise. His argument, he claims, relies on ‘economics as an empirical science’ of markets (Hayek, 1937: 44) and on ‘facts which we know to be common to all human thought’ (1937: 46). On this basis, the economist realizes she cannot gather all the knowledge that would be needed to plan an economy that satisfies everybody. But the economist also realizes that she need not gather this knowledge where it is embodied by the market. Her task is to identify the conditions under which a market optimally reflects the interests of all participants, and to help decision-makers bring these conditions about. For Hayek, neither ordinary citizens nor even most economists but only a small group of what he calls ‘philosophers’ grasp this paradoxical epistemology in which experts reject expertise on expert grounds (Ötsch, 2021).

Importantly, the epistemological case for the market is presented as valid beyond the economic sphere proper. In Hayek’s view, not only economists but experts in general (e.g. political scientists or trained administrators) lack the knowledge that would be needed for top-down planning in the interest of all. In the market, the economist sees a solution to this problem that can be generalized. Supporting market-like mechanisms in other areas of society might help all experts inform decisions that serve the common good. This would make economics (rather than philosophy or physics) the key field of expertise. As meta-experts, economists have identified the general problem of expert truth in politics; as experts on markets and prices, they offer a solution.

Hayek’s model of expertise incorporates both the early and the later Lippmann’s tendencies. On the one hand, it reaffirms that scientific methods allow an expert – the economist – to uncover facts unknown to ordinary citizens; and as markets revolve around prices, these can even be precise mathematical facts as Lippmann had envisioned them. ³ On the other hand, ordinary citizens possess a knowledge (i.e. knowledge of their own standpoint) which is as crucial as the experts’ but which the experts lack, and here the experts’ ignorance should be emphasized. A sharp distinction between ordinary citizens and experts is maintained. But both sides must complement each other if political decisions are to serve the interests of all, and the market provides a general mechanism for this to happen.

While Lippmann himself never embraced the Hayekian model, it had broad influence, especially through the Mont Pèlerin Society that Hayek founded in the wake of the Lippmann colloquium (Foucault, 2008 [2004]; Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009). In the 1980s, Hayek advised Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, influencing New Right policies. When the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1991, free-market thinking was introduced to former socialist countries; left-of-center parties in the West like the US Democrats and the British Labour Party also adopted market-oriented styles of government (Mouffe, 2005; Biebricher, 2019). By the 2000s, a rhetoric of truth which had come a long way from Plato’s vision was firmly established across the political spectrum. It centered on highly decontextualized ‘objective facts’, often in mathematical formats, established by scientifically trained experts, most of all economists, which were difficult to understand for ordinary citizens but supposedly essential for political decisions to reflect the interests of all.

Truth and Post-Truth

In the political debate that erupted in 2016, ‘post-truth’ was primarily a politically charged label rather than a tool for analysis. Also, it polemically describes an opponent, as evident from the fact that nobody calls their own stance ‘post-truth’. We should not expect such a label to give a full and accurate description of the phenomenon. Nevertheless, I will try to extract an analytical concept of ‘post-truth’ by focusing on the rhetorical dimension of the debate.

Lexicographers aim to capture how people commonly use a word, which may or may not capture a real phenomenon. When the Oxford Dictionary added ‘post-truth’ to its 2017 edition, it was defined – less than accurately, I will argue, with respect to the real phenomenon – as ‘[r]elating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. Against the background sketched so far, we may note that this definition sounds as if it were taken straight from Lippmann’s Public Opinion. Notably, we learn that the common use of ‘post-truth’ implies a specific idea of ‘truth’ in terms of ‘objective facts’. ⁴

‘Objective facts’ in turn are linked to scientific expert authority. This is reflected in the negative by politicians emblematic of 2016 ‘post-truth’. Donald Trump denied scientific findings, especially on climate change. The UK Brexit campaign contradicted established economists, with Michael Gove stating in an interview that ‘the people of this country have had enough of experts’. Conversely, people who criticized ‘post-truth’ politics demanded a stronger reliance on expertise. About a million joined the 2017 March for Science, with 97 percent of participants saying they wished to encourage ‘policies based on scientific facts and evidence’. ⁵

In short, use of the label ‘post-truth’ in political debate resembles the rhetoric discussed earlier: The ‘truth’ in ‘post-truth’ is construed in terms of ‘objective facts’ established by scientifically trained experts; this ‘truth’ is opposed to the subjective and emotional standpoints of many ordinary citizens; and it is offered as something that should have a central place in politics. As this rhetoric had become a mainstream element of the language of politics across the spectrum since the 1990s, it makes sense that it was taken for granted by 2016.

Then what about targets of the label ‘post-truth’? According to the Oxford Dictionary, ‘post-truth’ expresses the ‘implication that truth itself has become irrelevant’. ⁶ On this interpretation, one would expect someone like Trump to have abandoned the rhetoric of truth endorsed by his critics, perhaps in favor of pure ‘bullshit’ (Frankfurt, 2005 [1986]). But has he? On the day of the 2017 March for Science, Trump countered with an official statement: ‘Rigorous science is critical to my Administration’s efforts to achieve the twin goals of economic growth and environmental protection.’ ⁷ At a 2017 rally, he told supporters: ‘We are here today to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’ ⁸ In 2018, he used a speech to the UN General Assembly to attack ‘so-called experts who have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again’. ⁹ In 2021, he even founded a social media platform called ‘TRUTH Social’ under the motto ‘Follow the Truth’. Trump is not on record saying that ‘the truth’ has ‘become irrelevant’ to him (what he thinks about the truth is another matter). On the contrary, he keeps invoking ‘the truth’ and ‘facts’. When he attacks experts, he refers to ‘so-called experts’, to people who, according to him, miss the facts and should therefore not be considered experts at all.

Moreover, Trump presents ‘facts’ of his own and even makes them central elements of his rhetoric. The purported facts are often expressed in mathematical formats signaling hard, scientific expertise. Trumpian ‘facts’ can be sums (China ‘lost 15 to 20 trillion dollars in value since the day I was elected’), timescales (the US economy’s 2019 first-quarter growth of 3.2% ‘is a number that they haven’t hit in 14 years’), or percentages (‘we have lousy health-care, where it’s going up 35, 45, 55 percent’). ¹⁰

Given that this quintessential ‘post-truth’ politician insists on the political relevance of ‘truth’, ‘facts’ and ‘science’ and even phrases his own claims in expert formats, it would be difficult to distinguish his rhetoric from that of his critics who also insist on expert truth (let us call them, ideal-typically and ignoring for the moment all nuance, the ‘truth’ camp) – were it not for the fact that his claims wildly differ in content from the broad consensus in established expert communities.

This suggests a concept of ‘post-truth’ rhetoric defined in relation to the ‘truth’ rhetoric. Whether or not a Trump knows or even cares in private about whatever we think of as the truth, ¹¹ his public self-presentation relies on the same rhetoric of truth as that of his critics. The difference concerns the level of content, the sets of descriptions presented as true by each camp, which in turn is connected to the ascription of expertise. The post-truth camp rejects the consensus of established expert authorities as untrue, implying that the ‘so-called experts’ are not really experts. The truth camp, in contrast, closely follows the established experts. This leads to an analytic interpretation for the ‘post’ in ‘post-truth’ which differs from its popular meaning reported by the Oxford Dictionary as ‘belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant’. On the contrary, the concept of truth is an important element of post-truth rhetoric. It is the extension of that concept that sets the post-truth rhetoric apart. We can capture this imitative relationship if we understand the prefix ‘post’ as indicating that a previous situation is continued in some respects but discontinued in others. In a post-truth rhetoric, a specific established rhetoric of truth continues in form but discontinues in substance (i.e. in the experts and descriptions accepted). ¹²

The Inner Logic of a Post-Truth Rhetoric

With any rhetoric, speakers aim to have a certain effect on their audience. On the speaker’s side, the inner logic of post-truth rhetoric cannot be the same as that of simply lying, which follows a slightly different strategy. A rational liar would seek to blend in with established experts or at least avoid openly contradicting them. Also, a rational liar would say things that are hard to pin down or verify; they would not – like Trump – choose mathematical formats to make claims an audience can ‘fact-check’ unequivocally and often with the help of easily accessible sources. If it were a simple lie, post-truth rhetoric would find a fringe audience at best. In reality, it appears to resound with nearly half of the population. Trump was elected US president with more than 46 percent of the popular vote. And despite having made more than 30,000 ‘false or misleading claims’ during his presidency, ¹³ he received over 11 million more votes in 2020. To explain this success, we should look once again at some historical background.

The rhetoric of truth pioneered by Lippmann became a dominant element of political language after it was transformed into Hayek’s market model of expertise. A core claim of that model is that economists know the conditions under which markets serve the interests of all. The 2008 financial crisis cast unmissable doubt on this claim. The collapse of markets took leading economists by surprise, and what would become known as the Great Recession made it painfully clear that the market did not work in everybody’s favor.

The dominance of a Hayekian model would account for the fact that the crisis (whether or not economists at the time followed Hayek’s specific precepts) influenced how not only economists but politically relevant experts generally were perceived. Hayek had helped entrench a view of economists as ‘the experts’ par excellence. Their special expertise, he claimed, enables them to understand how market-like mechanisms can bring together the knowledge of experts and that of ordinary citizens in ways that further the common good – not only in the market but also in other areas of society. But where economists are proven wrong even on their home turf, this argument for an ‘economicized society’ (Ötsch, 2021) starts to collapse. Once the market fails to hold together expert knowledge and ordinary citizens’ knowledge, the model reveals the internal tensions that already troubled Lippmann. When experts are wrong, ordinary citizens begin to doubt that expert knowledge is fundamentally superior to theirs, which in turn raises the question of why the opinions of a small class of experts should receive special weight in a democratic society.

This would help explain why post-truth politicians reject established experts, but not yet why they clothe this rejection in the very rhetoric of expert truth that the 2008 crisis had challenged. A possible answer lies in another trait of Hayek’s model. Hayek himself had stressed that economists never have all the knowledge that would allow them to plan or even foresee concrete market developments. The economists’ failure of 2008 was therefore consistent with his view and could even be interpreted as a confirmation of it (Davies and McGoey, 2012). In the end, his model survived the crisis and continued to inform government decisions. The rhetoric of expert truth remained part and parcel of political debate.

It makes sense to assume that the crisis and its aftermath had a similarly ambivalent impact upon public sentiment. On the one hand, the crisis raised doubts as to whether economists as the quintessential ‘experts’ could be trusted, and when governments continued to rely on those same experts after the crisis, ‘economic anger’ (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018) and suspicions of a wider ‘elite’ as part of a ‘representation crisis’ (Hahl et al., 2018) grew. But on the other hand, criticism of experts is compatible with Hayek’s model and even vindicates it. Therefore, when governments continued to rely on the model after the crisis, they strengthened the impression that it was simply without alternative. As a result, even those who criticized ‘the experts’ were nevertheless likely to go on accepting the general model of expertise. In this situation, a politician looking for a successful rhetoric would attack the claims of established experts in content but express this criticism in the experts’ language. The result is the post-truth rhetoric.

If we assume such a logic at work, otherwise puzzling aspects of post-truth rhetoric make sense. First, numbers become the format of choice. Adopting the experts’ language makes the head-on attack on the content of what they say as glaring as possible. Even where such utterances are perceived as lies or ‘bullshit’, they may still be welcomed as attacks on an ‘establishment’ which is more fundamentally in the wrong (Hahl et al., 2018). At the same time, using an expert language signals that the speakers themselves are experts, and even ‘real’ experts as opposed to the established, ‘so-called’, experts.

The latter pretense may seem laughable, but it conforms to a rhetoric of (post-)truth. A consensus of authorities does not guarantee ‘objective’ truth. Like Lippmann’s hero, the physicist Galileo, the renegade ridiculed today might be a harbinger of what will be recognized as the truth tomorrow. Even a well-established system of expertise can be denounced wholesale as a self-interested ‘elite’ if the ‘so-called’ experts are cast in the role of the theologians sent by the Church to oppose the astronomer who stands up for truth.

Paradoxically, the outsider’s sweeping attack on experts can even serve as a hallmark of deeper expertise once this outsider harnesses the flexibility of the Hayekian model. That all experts are to some degree ignorant was Hayek’s verdict as a meta-expert. His argument against scientific knowledge – that the abstract rules of science cannot capture concrete developments in society – was itself presented as part of a scientific theory. Hence, the image of Galileo standing up to the Church could even be marshaled against an overreliance on science: ‘Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge’ (Hayek, 1945: 521, my emphasis).

But most importantly for the post-truth politician, the ‘real’ expert speaks in the name of ordinary citizens. For Hayek, the abstract knowledge of experts is ‘not the sum of all knowledge’ because it requires as its complement all citizens’ knowledge of their own standpoints, unique information possessed by even the most ignorant person. In this optics, only those experts who factor in what ordinary citizens want and believe will understand society. ‘So-called’ experts who forget this overlook ‘philosopher’ Hayek’s more comprehensive ‘truth’: that the knowledge of experts and that of non-experts belong together as two sides of a coin. Within such a model, a Trump or Gove can appear as a ‘real’ expert because he rejects ‘experts’ on behalf of ‘the people of this country’.

It is not surprising then if a post-truth rhetoric relies on ‘appeals to emotion and personal belief’. But these are framed not as appeals to irrational impulses or pure subjectivity but as part of a more complex objective ‘truth’. If a post-truth audience value their individual standpoints higher than the opinions of established experts, this is not because they have lost interest in ‘objective facts’, as their critics would have it, but because they reject the ‘so-called experts’ who, in their view, miss the objective facts. ¹⁴

How the Bipartisan Rhetoric of Truth Stifles Debate

I suggested that proponents and many critics of post-truth politics share the same rhetoric of truth. Sharing a language might at first seem like a good basis for a debate, especially when that language stresses a rational consensus based on neutral facts. However, the rhetoric of truth specified above stifles meaningful debate between those who share it.

The crucial difference between the ‘truth’ camp and the ‘post-truth’ camp concerns their respective attitude towards expert authorities. For the truth camp, truth aligns with what established experts hold true. In their eyes, therefore, people who attack experts attack ‘truth itself’; they must be irrational or reckless. However, as I argued, post-truth attacks on experts are connected to the belief in a deeper expertise and a more comprehensive truth. For the post-truth camp, the established experts are merely ‘so-called’ experts, and people who follow those experts must be either too naïve to see the bigger picture or they must be part of the ‘elite’ who profit from the status quo.

This mutual disqualification is driven by the same ideal on both sides: good policies are based on objective ‘facts’ which ought to produce bipartisan agreement. Any persistent disagreement on policy is then taken to indicate that one side fails to grasp ‘the facts’. Conversely, if ‘the truth’ provides the basis for a rational consensus on what is best for all, people who stubbornly deny what ‘we know’ to be the truth must be unable or unwilling to work towards a rational consensus. This is part of why the political debate around ‘post-truth’ does not seem to have led anywhere. A seemingly irrational or corrupt opponent cannot be convinced by argument but must either be forced by other means or simply ignored. Where both sides perceive each other in this way, debate ends. If anything, each side’s insistence on ‘their’ truth will incite the opposing side to double down on ‘theirs’, feeding into a spiral of mutual distrust or contempt. As Hannah Arendt (1968 [1967]: 241) puts it (though with a different thrust), ‘factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life’.

The reciprocity between the two camps is also reflected in how ‘post-truth’ and related expressions are used as political labels. Since the post-truth camp rely on a rhetoric of truth, they refuse to apply the ‘post-truth’ label to themselves. Moreover, they turn the label back against their critics who, in their view, only pretend or believe to seek the truth. Trump made a habit of assailing ‘the Fake News’, ‘the Corrupt Media’, and even ‘so-called judges’. But where each side calls the other’s attitude ‘post-truth’, the label ceases to be distinctive either as a rallying cry or as an accusation. Small wonder that the 2016 ‘Word of the Year’ is seldom heard just a few years on.

Still, one may ask what keeps both camps from seeing the other’s logic. An explanation could be found in Lippmann’s idea that public opinion is shaped by ‘stereotypes’. Lippmann likens stereotypes to tinted glasses that make us see the world in a specific color by blinding us to other parts of the spectrum. Lippmann wants stereotyped experience to be replaced by expertise, by an indubitable knowledge of the ‘facts’ that make up ‘reality’. But this distinction is more subtle than he makes it out to be. Stereotypes too produce the belief that one is dealing with ‘reality’ and with ‘incontrovertible fact fortified by irresistible logic’ (Lippmann, 1922: 127). In effect, the only difference between such a belief and the early Lippmann’s own ‘belief in reason’ is the latter’s reliance on experts. I surmise that a century later, his belief in an objective expert truth that carries political decisions based in ‘reason’ has, through dissemination and repetition in political rhetoric across party lines, itself hardened into a stereotype that now shapes public opinion.

If this is correct, it would account for the impasse in the post-truth debate. The mutual disqualification between the two camps bears a striking resemblance to the encounter Lippmann describes between people with incompatible stereotypes. Each side confidently presents ‘anecdotes about the real truth and the inside truth, the deeper and the larger truth’ (Lippmann, 1922: 118f.). And each believes that the opponent must be ‘unreasonable or perverse’, a ‘dangerous fool’ or a liar; even the existence of ‘plots’ or ‘conspiracies’ may be assumed to explain the opponent’s resistance to truth (1922: 125–9). Paradoxically, when the ideal of a politics based on expert truth becomes a stereotype, it can divide those who share it. Hayek’s model of expertise allows for different attitudes towards established experts, but the overarching belief in a single compelling truth prevents meaningful dialogue between these attitudes.

A Counterproposal: Dewey and Schutz

If post-truth and the failure of the post-truth debate are related to a specific rhetoric, a way out of the impasse will require reconsidering that rhetoric and re-examining the role of truth and expertise. Without pretending to have a fail-proof solution, I will sketch a starting point marked by American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and Austrian-American phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, who criticized their contemporaries Lippmann and Hayek.

The early Lippmann hoped that future social scientists would follow in the footsteps of physics by discovering objective truths of undeniable certainty. But this hope is untenable. The social sciences differ fundamentally from the natural sciences, as they must take into account the perspective of their ‘objects’, human beings who experience the world and act within it (Schutz, 1962 [1953]). What is more, Lippmann’s ideal misses even the natural sciences. According to Dewey (1930), the belief in undeniable ‘certainty’ goes back to a metaphysical split, represented by Platonism, between a realm of eternal truth and the fleeting stage of everyday life. The modern scientific method, Dewey stresses, renounced eternal truth, but the split-world metaphysics endured and was projected upon the sciences. Indeed, Lippmann explicitly calls for a renewal of Plato’s vision through science. Also, his ideal of mathematization harks back to the main historical medium for this projection: numbers and formulae, originally tools of counting and measuring practices, were re-interpreted as echoes of an eternal, abstract order (cf. also Husserl, 1970 [1954]). But the same metaphysics leads to the kind of despair the later Lippmann displays. Searching for absolute truth, we soon realize that mere mortals cannot reach it. As human beings, scientists cannot grasp purely ‘objective’ facts which have been severed from any human context. Lippmann’s mistaken ideal of science is the single source for both his early faith in expertise and his later skepticism.

Dewey too uses physics as his main example but reaches a different conclusion. Scientific facts are formulated in relation to specific questions, theories, methods, and experimental settings. As modern scientists are aware, their truths always remain provisional. All findings need to be questioned and tested again and again in subsequent inquiry. This is an argument not against truth or facts, but against their metaphysical misinterpretation. Truth is not the impossible correspondence of a human perspective to something independent of any human perspective. As argued more recently with reference to Dewey and other pragmatists, truth is an outcome of human practices (Misak, 2000; Cuevas-Badallo and Labrador-Montero, 2020). ¹⁵ Scientific facts are produced through practices of decontextualization (including mathematical formalization). While decontextualization is essential to modern science and technology, its products never leave behind human context. Decontextualization is a practice of interpretation; hence there are no ‘facts, pure and simple’, but only ‘interpreted facts’ (Schutz, 1962[1953]: 5).

If we reject the early Lippmann’s ideal of science, his ‘noble lie’ of a fundamental dichotomy between experts and ordinary citizens collapses with it. A way of rethinking the role of experts and their relation to ordinary citizens is offered in a 1946 essay by Schutz (1964 [1946]), who had criticized Hayek in the 1930s and participated in the 1938 Lippmann colloquium. Schutz distinguishes the ‘man on the street’, who ‘accepts his sentiments and passions as guides’ (Schutz, 1964 [1946]: 122, 134), from the ‘expert’, who follows the methods accepted in their field. Schutz thinks expertise is important, but he does not recommend it as the sole basis for politics. ¹⁶ The reason is a troubling resemblance between the ‘expert’ and the ‘man on the street’. For both, what they treat as ‘fact’ is pre-selected and shaped by ‘systems of relevance’ ¹⁷ (Schutz, 1970 [1951]) accepted in their social group:

• (1) The ‘man on the street’ follows routines, beliefs, and values taken for granted in his culture, nation, class, generation, gender, etc. Like Lippmannian ‘stereotypes’, these patterns blind him to possible alternatives.

• (2) The ‘expert’ suffers from a similar partial blindness or ‘tunnel vision’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005; Strassheim, 2016). She too follows relevancies established in her community. Taking for granted, first, the boundaries of her field that limit in advance what can become an object of her expertise, she then treats every object according to the problems, methods, and aims standardized within that field. As a result, she is in constant danger of reducing the whole of society, and with it the facts relevant to policy, to what is relevant in her field. Where the economist sees a fiscal target, the medical expert sees a public health hazard, and the climate scientist sees an environmental crisis – and each may be oblivious to what the others see.

How can we overcome both types of blindness? Schutz points to a third figure:

• (3) The ‘well-informed citizen’ is prepared to look beyond established relevancies, including those accepted in their own group or professional field.

Crucially, the capacity to do so exists in each of us, Schutz argues. This is because his three figures do not represent kinds of people, as in Lippmann and Hayek, but idealized traits present together in every person. We all behave as ‘men [or women] on the street’ in some areas and as ‘experts’ in others. But since we can also behave as ‘well-informed citizens’, we are able to transcend the limitations of both. Schutz recommends that modern democracies encourage this latter behavior.

As ‘well-informed citizens’, we recognize a partial blindness in all human knowledge. Common-sense truths but also scientific facts are embedded within an infinite ‘horizon’ (Husserl) of potentially relevant context, much of which was not even considered in the formation of our knowledge. Therefore, ‘well-informed citizens’ are ready to question the relevancies which shape their knowledge at any given time. But this does not make them despair of knowledge. As Dewey argued, not even science can reach absolute ‘certainty’, but in science as in everyday life, we can reach ‘presumptive knowledge’ (Dewey, 1930: 179), or ‘presumptive certainty’ (Husserl, 1973 [1939]: §77), knowledge that we may ‘take for granted until further notice’ (Schutz, 1962 [1953]), that is, unless and until we find reasons to doubt it. ¹⁸ Such knowledge can be quite robust, but it always remains in need of scrutiny from a fresh perspective. The process of (re-)contextualization never comes to a definitive end. Accordingly, ‘the well-informed citizen’ is an abbreviation for ‘the citizen who aims at being well informed’ (Schutz, 1964 [1946]: 122).

Unlike the dream of shedding all human perspective, this stance involves taking advantage of the multiplicity of human perspectives by consulting the views of others and debating with them. Experts can be expected to have far better knowledge of their field and should be included in democratic deliberation either directly or through ‘testimony’ (Benson, 2019). But experts too are fallible and, as noted, limited by their very expertise. Moreover, expertise does not come from a detached realm of pure objectivity but from a constitutive interplay of politics and knowledge (Strassheim, 2017). A plurality of perspectives, be it in democratic deliberation (Misak, 2000) or within expert communities (Reiss, 2020), serves an indispensable epistemological function.

In the post-truth impasse, that function is blocked – on both sides – by claims to definitive truths which exclude other views in advance as irrational or corrupt. While ‘fact-checking’ is critical, it is not a conclusive comparison of claims with an absolute ‘reality’ but a continuous effort to test claims by contextualizing them. Post-truth audiences who dismiss established expertise in the name of ‘truth’ are clearly misguided, but disqualifying them as irrational and responding with counterclaims of ‘truth’ only feeds into the rhetoric that stifles the debate. Instead, we should address the problem by first examining the inner logic that drives post-truth and its political success. Such an examination (itself an exercise in contextualizing) should consider the role of neoliberal epistemology. If the early Lippmann’s faith in experts and the later Lippmann’s skepticism both stem from a misunderstanding of truth, then Hayek’s market model of expertise, which reconciles both sides, solves an artificial problem that should never have arisen. The impact of market models, economic crises, and inequality on post-truth audiences requires further investigation.

Encouraging citizens to ‘aim at being well informed’ is a different matter today than in Schutz’s 1946, as the internet increasingly replaces the newspaper. Digital technology even facilitates the production and dissemination of post-truth (Pörksen, 2018). However, if the motivation to do so is linked to a mistaken idea of truth, efforts to stimulate ‘well-informed’ citizenship, e.g. through education, political communication, or science outreach, might help change the use of digital media and even put their ease of access to a wide range of information sources to use in the task of open contextualization that a more adequate idea of truth requires.

Conclusions

Lippmann and Hayek helped develop a political rhetoric of expert truth which has become dominant across party lines since the 1990s. This rhetoric combines faith in expert truth with skepticism of experts through the claim that the market mechanism serves the common good. The 2008 financial crisis reinforced doubts about this claim and, consequently, about the role of experts. Politicians like Trump harness dissatisfaction with experts by couching it in the language of expert ‘truth’ itself. The resulting ‘post’-truth rhetoric attacks established expert communities and instead appeals to what it claims are ‘real’ experts. On a formal level, the post-truth politician and many of their critics who defend established expert communities share the same language. This bipartisan language, however, stifles meaningful debate, as both sides disqualify each other as unable or unwilling to follow ‘the truth’.

A possible way out of the impasse was proposed. Dewey argued that the paradox of faith in expert truth and skepticism of experts stems from a metaphysical misconception of science. Dewey and Schutz understand both scientific and everyday truth in terms of ‘presumptive knowledge’ which can be robust but forever remains in need of scrutiny from fresh perspectives. Scientific ‘facts’ are produced through practices of decontextualization but remain connected to human contexts. Schutz therefore advocates a pluralistic and open-ended process of (re-)contextualization. His ideal of the ‘citizen who aims at being well-informed’ transcends Lippmann’s dichotomy between experts and ordinary citizens and should be encouraged in the public sphere.

I have singled out only one factor which may nevertheless be central. If post-truth audiences are inherently conflicted in their assessment of experts, their stance is unstable, likely to merge with external motivations, and readily co-opted by vested interests and corporate lies. A sweeping rejection of established experts in favor of renegade ‘facts’ and fringe experts easily spills over from economics to fields such as climate science or medical research. Vague suspicions that experts are part of a wider ‘elite’ (whether based on social criticism, on the higher ‘truth’ of conspiracy theorists, or on the Hayekian idea that ‘real’ experts listen to ‘the people’) may find meaning and direction in existing anti-democratic ideologies and propaganda, such as fascism, racism, or sexism. ‘Economic anger’ readily translates into ‘reactionary anger’ (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018), as a ‘representation crisis’ mutates into a ‘power-devaluation crisis’ (Hahl et al., 2018).

The bipartisan dominance of a rhetoric of truth inspired by neoliberal epistemology may be part of a wider ‘truth regime’ that binds truth and power even more closely to the market form than in Foucault’s day. Harsin (2015) has even argued that a ‘regime of post-truth’ produces multiple ‘truth markets’. This disintegration might be driven by an overarching notion of ‘truth’, itself wedded to a market model of expertise. The argument presented here would suggest that theoretical and practical approaches to the post-truth phenomenon should further interrogate the role of economic thought, market optimism, and inequality. ¹⁹