With the global rise of authoritarian populism and the ubiquity of lies and fake news in the public sphere, the conflict between truth and politics has emerged as one of the most pressing issues of our time. Surprisingly, political philosophy and theory have paid little attention to this topic. Instead, there are still strong reservations about treating truth as a politically significant notion, whether from a liberal, republican, pragmatic or radical-democratic perspective.

The project takes a new approach by rethinking truth as a genuinely political concept that cannot be reduced to epistemic, moral, or power-related issues. The central thesis is that social crises and conflicts affect not only the political sphere but also a society’s regime of truth, understood as the interplay of governmental techniques, practices of subjectivation, and modes of truth-telling, so that previously self-evident norms, practices, and institutions are called into question. Against this backdrop, the issues currently discussed under the buzzword ‘post-truth’ – such as the crisis of democracy, the rise of authoritarianism, the fragmentation of the public sphere, or attacks on science – are not so much separate phenomena as symptoms of a crisis of the current regime of truth. From a historical perspective, however, this development is by no means new; rather, it can be traced back to the crisis of liberalism in the early 20th century, to which socialist, fascist, and neoliberal movements each responded in different ways.