She wasn’t endorsing lying or embracing liars. The bottom line, for me, about Arendt’s treatment of lies and liars is this: One of the reasons she was so unnerved by liars was that the way they did politics was so close to how she thought politics ought to be done. I think it suggests why Kakutani’s gloss is too simple, but also why Jay’s gloss (at least the earlier version of it again, I didn’t read the final book) may be too simple, too. So I dug up my comment, and thought I’d reproduce it below. I remember being a little discomfited by Jay’s treatment of Arendt. It was the Lionel Trilling Seminar, and I, along with Princeton poltical theorist George Kateb, was asked to be one of the discussants. I haven’t read Jay’s book, but I did read a draft of it, or part of it, for a talk he gave at Columbia years ago. Sam also urged folks to read Martin Jay’s book on the question of lies and politics, which includes an extensive discussion of Arendt. This is an Arendt quote that gets thrown around a lot these days, for obvious reasons, but it gives a very partial view of Arendt’s position on truth and lies. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.â€Īrendt’s words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling description of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today… Two of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the 20th century, and both were predicated on the violation and despoiling of truth, on the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. A long piece by Michiko Kakutani on “The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump” is making the rounds.