In reaction to recent political unexpected victories of radical right, authoritarian politicians, the concept of post-truth politics is often used. This highlights the role of the politics of knowledge in anti-justice projects. Given that most political sciences is still based on an assumption of existing democratic quality in Western democracies, on the one hand, and that the role of epistemological dynamics in political trouble is understudied, there is a need for a conceptual framework that integrates ‘politics’ with the politics of knowledge. This is the aim of this paper.
This paper argues that social complexity theory (Walby 2009) is a promising way of addressing issues related to this, if a domain of episteme is added to the classical four of polity, economy, violence and civil society. Understanding episteme to be a system that produces and organizes knowledge and truth, located strongly in social fields such as education, media and research enables investigating whether and how changes in the domain of episteme are related to changes in the (democratic) polity.