Between common-sense and critique: thinking post-truth politics with Arendt and Ricoeur

The matter of post-truth and the irrelevance of social facts for democratic politics have become a key point of reflection within political theory. While some argue that factual truth and rationality must regain supremacy once again over mere assertions, affective polarization and performative rhetoric (Muirhead & Rosenblum 2019), others claim that post-truth politics is a value-laden, rhetorical concept that delegitimizes the epistemic status of political opponents (Hannon 2023). More positively, post-truth can be seen as a form of critical contestation that challenges overshot expertise and rationality within democratic politics (Fuller 2018). This discussion lends itself to a ‘breaking open’ by means of a phenomenological analysis of the political. Post-truth politics is not a problem to overcome but rather provides a site of contestation and criticism in which participants determine and evaluate the role of factual truth in democratic politics. It is – in short – a battle for common sense. To illustrate this, we undertake an analysis of truth within democratic politics by means of two political-phenomenological authors, namely Hannah Arendt and Paul Ricœur. The question we will answer is the following: what conceptual tools do the works of Hannah Arendt and Paul Ricœur provide to lay bare the problematic as well as productive aspects of post-truth politics? These two authors both provide differing, yet complementary phenomenological accounts of the role of truth in politics as well as the importance of critical narratives. Based on these authors, we will argue that although procedures of determining facts within democracy are important, precisely the process of construction of and critiquing facts and common sense is what grants democracy its truly democratic nature. We will then illustrate what contributions judges, fact-checkers and conspiracy theorists can make to determining (and contesting) the truth within a democratic marketplace of ideas anno 2025, as well as what the limitations of these ideal-typical roles are. We base these analyses on legal theory on factuality of legal procedures, philosophical theory on truth-determination by experts and sociological theory on the challenge conspiracy thinking poses on truth-constructions in democratic societies.