1

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

(not for citation without permission)

To a dedicated public servant, whose rise and fall exemplifies all of the issues
raised by political mendacity: I. Louis Libby, Jr.

“We demand that there be a legal campaign against those who propagate deliberate

political lies and disseminate them through the press.” So began the twenty-third of twenty-five

points in a crisp and uncompromising program promulgated by a nascent political party in l920

with a remarkable future before it. There is no small amount of irony in the fact that the party

in question was the National Socialist Party of Germany, whose most lasting contribution to

the theory and practice of political mendacity was announced in the autobiography of its leader

only three years later. The so-called “big lie” introduced in Mein Kampf quickly became

known as the favored technique of totalitarian states. But what is often forgotten by those who

identify the “big lie” with Nazi propaganda is that Hitler was referring to its alleged use by

Jews and others who had claimed that Germany had lost World War I in the field and not

because of a “stab in the back” at home, and was by no means explicitly advocating the

technique himself. 1

The point, however, is not to focus on the Nazi case, which is too extreme and ineffable

to be considered typical. Railing against the “lies” of one’s opponents while privately granting

1
Hitler continued, “The foremost connoisseurs of this truth regarding the possibilities in the use of falsehood and
slander have always been the Jews; for after all, their whole existence is based on one single great lie, to wit, that
they are a religious community while actually they are a race – and what a race! One of the greatest minds of
humanity [Arthur Schopenhauer] has nailed them forever as such in an eternally correct phrase of fundamental
truth: he called them 'the great masters of the lie.' And anyone who does not recognize this or does not want to
believe it will never in this world be able to help the truth to victory.” (Mein Kampf, p. vol I, chap 10??)
 2

to oneself the right to commit one’s own in the name of a higher cause than truth-telling was,

after all, not an invention of the Nazis, indeed of any 20th-century political movement. Instead,

it has been in play ever since Plato’s controversial notion of the “gennian pseudos” from The

Republic (414c), which is traditionally—although not without controversy--translated as

“noble lie,” noble both in the sense of well-bred and lofty in intention. 2

This justification was revived with considerable embellishment by Machiavelli, whose

name has been identified with it ever since. In The Prince (1513), his manual for the art of

ruling unconstrained by moral scruple or Christian piety, he made a powerful case for what

became known as the doctrine of raison d’état. “Those princes,” he shrewdly observed, “have

done great things who have held faith of small account, and who have known, with their

cleverness, to trick men’s brains, and at the end they have surpassed those who founded

themselves on sincerity.” 3 In the notorious l8th chapter of the book, “In What Way Faith

Should Be Kept by Princes,” he urged rulers to model themselves on the cunning fox more

than the powerful lion, “for the one who has known better how to use the fox has come out

better. But it is necessary to know how to color this nature well, and to be a great pretender and

dissembler.” 4

Soon after, Machiavelli’s name was transformed into a generic term of opprobrium,

initially because the Catholic Church identified him with the secularization of politics

threatening Christendom in the early modern era. 5 Its Protestant enemies turned the accusation

around and Catholic political tactics were themselves accused of being no less based on deceit

2
For a thorough rehearsal of the debate, which canvasses other places in Plato’s writings where similar ideas are
discussed, see Carl Page, “The Truth about Lies in Plato’s Republic,” Ancient Philosophy 11 (l991).
3
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince with Related Documents, trans. and ed. William J. Connell (Boston, 2005), p.
93.
4
Ibid, p. 94. The classic treatment of the idea of raison d’état and its development is Friedrich Meinecke,
Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Ėtat and its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Stark (London,
1957),
5
William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance (New Haven, 2000), p. 220.
 3

and manipulation. Groups like the Politiques in France, who hoped to end religious strife

through compromise, were also slandered for their efforts by being called Machiavellian (and

as a result giving the very word “politics” a negative connotation it has labored ever since to

escape). 6 Not surprisingly, when a 21st-century sociobiologist like David Livingstone Smith

looked around for a label to define the hard-wired tendency towards mendacity he saw in the

human psyche, he called it “the Machiavellian Mind.” 7

One of the distinguishing marks of the new experiment in politics called The United

States was its steadfast rejection of Machiavellian duplicity. The Republican tradition of civic

virtue stemming from the Florentine’s political philosophy may have had a powerful impact on

the nascent American polity, as John Pocock has famously argued, but it did not include a

principled embrace of the abandonment of moral principles, such as the censuring of

mendacity. 8 ‘The Machiavellian moment” did not linger for very long in a context in which

suspicion of self-aggrandizing central government survived the Revolution dedicated to

overthrowing it. 9 The powerful legacy of Puritan self-examination and insistence on

interpersonal transparency—the anti-monastic defense of “holy watchfulness” designed to root

out signs of sinful behavior—left a greater mark on the political culture of the new nation.

Living in John Winthrop’s famous “city on a hill” made constant surveillance all the easier.

Ruthless sincerity and plain speaking emerged as an antidote to the feigning and dissembling

6
J.A. Fernández-Santamaria, Reason of State and Statecraft in Spanish Political Thought, 1595-1640 (Lanham,
Md., 1983), chapter 2.
7
David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind (New
York, 2004), chapter 4,
8
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1075).
9
As the historian Bernard Wishy has argued, “if beyond The Prince there was another Machiavelli, the advocate
of virtuous republicanism, that influence remained far more limited than his portrait as the vile one, teaching that
lies, fear and cruelty were to be judged only for their effectiveness in keeping power and enhancing control by the
ruler of the state.” Good-bye Machiavelli: Government and American Life (Baton Rouge, 1995), p. 1.
 4

of overly polite courtier life. 10 Popular American culture soon reflected these values. The

celebrated fable of six-year old George Washington’s inability to lie about felling a cherry

tree—first circulated in the fifth edition of Mason Locke “Parson” Weems’ hagiographic

rendering of his life in 1806 11 —signaled a higher standard for truthfulness among the

politicians on this side of the Atlantic. Although ironically Weems had in fact made up the

anecdote, or more accurately, plagiarized it from a story by James Beattie called “The

Minstrel,” published in London in l799, it quickly became a staple of American folklore. Soon

after his martyrdom, “Honest Abe” Lincoln joined Washington as the apogee of that ideal. 12

Americans prided themselves on being transparent, open and above board. 13 Publicity

and accountability rather than opacity became the dominant values of social and political

interaction; constitutions had to be written and explicit, not tacit or invisible. A quest for

perfect legibility manifested itself in a readiness to confess that easily moved from the religious

to the secular world, as evidenced in the popular reception of psychoanalysis in the 20th

century. Or so it has often been argued.

10
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), chapter 1.
11
The famous passage from Mason L. Weems, The Life of Washington, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, Mass,
1967) reads:
'George,' said his father, 'do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry-tree yonder in the garden?'"
"This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself;
and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-
conquering truth, he bravely cried out, 'I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my
hatchet.'--Run to my arms, you dearest boy, cried his father in transports, run to my arms; glad am I,
George, that you killed my tree, for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in
my son is worth more than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver and their fruits of purest gold."
(p. 12).
12
Lincoln’s legendary honesty was expressed in a series of apparently real anecdotes, stretching back to his days
as a clerk in a store, when he realized he had overcharged a customer 6.25 cents and walked a considerable
distance to return the right change. American children were often regaled with these exemplary anecdotes,
including by Horatio Alger, Jr. in his Abraham Lincoln: The Backwoods Boy (New York, 1883).
13
Michael T. Gilmore, Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture (New York, 2003). In
contrast, British culture was less obsessed with transparency. See David Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy in
Britain l832-l998 (Oxford, 1999). Bernard Williams also notes that “in the British Parliament, there is a
convention that ministers may not lie when answering questions or making statements, but they can certainly
omit, select, give answers that reveal less than the whole truth, and generally, give a misleading impression.”
Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, 2002), p. 108.
 5

But in the past few years, it has become a familiar lament that lying in American politics

has radically increased, the infamous “credibility gap” introduced during the l960’s growing

ever wider. 14 A steady drumbeat of major examples at the highest levels of government have

been adduced to support this judgment: the initial denial of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the

Tonkin Gulf incident tricking us into the Vietnam War, the multiple deceptions of Watergate,

the Iran-Contra scandal, the Monica Lewinsky affair, and most recently, bogus claims about

Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Bookshelves fill up with titles accusing one or another

opponent of lying. 15 The comedian Stephen Colbert’s tongue-in-cheek notion of “truthiness,”

defined as a gut feeling about the truth in the absence of any evidence or logic to support it,

was named in two different surveys in 2005 and 2006 as “word of the year.” 16 On the internet,

you can buy coffee mugs and t-shirts adorned with George W. Bush’s face and the motto “Got

Mendacity?” We seem, in fact, to have got it to the point of an obsession, which threatens to

crowd out a serious discussion of substantive issues in favor of catching the discussants

uttering falsehoods.

But despite the current furor over an alleged increase in frequency, it has also been hard

to deny that politics and mendacity have been on cordial terms for a very long time indeed. As

early as l710, the great Irish satirist Jonathan Swift wrote “An Essay upon the Art of Political

Lying,” and others like John Arbuthnot, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde later followed with
14
See for example, Lionel Cliffe, “Explanation: Deception in the US Political System” in The Politics of Lying, p.
56. The alleged increase in political lying has been detected in other contexts as well. For a recent account that
focuses on political falsehood during the Major and Blair governments in the United Kingdom, see Peter Osborne,
The Rise of Political Lying (London, 2005), which claims that “Britain now lives in a post-truth political
environment.” (p. 6).
15
Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulation of William Jefferson Clinton; Ann Coulter,
Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right; Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and
Balanced Look at the Right; Jon Conason, Big Lies: The Rightwing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the
Truth; Sheldon Rampton and John C. Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s
War on Iraq, David Corn, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception; Nicholas von
Hoffman, Hoax: Why Americans are Suckered by White House Lies, and Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie: A
History of Official Deception and its Consequences, just to name a few.
16
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness.
 6

clever variations on the theme. However one takes their often tongue-in-cheek ruminations, it

is hard to gainsay the worldly judgment of Hannah Arendt about the perennial nature of the

problem: “No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each

other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.

Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician’s or

the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade.” 17 In short, to put it in the pithy terms of the

great muck-raking journalist I.F. Stone, “all governments lie.” 18

But however ubiquitous, lying in politics may be, it still occasions enormous unease,

especially among those who hold out hope for a liberal democratic polity ideally based on

transparency, trust and accountability. Broadly speaking, reactions to the entrenched

persistence of lying in politics have taken two predictable turns. First, moralists, who want to

apply to politics the same high standards they insist should be followed in private affairs, argue

that public life must be purged as much as possible of mendacity. Especially those who see

democratic politics as inherently more ethical than any alternative insist that an enlightened,

open society must be based on the truth-telling of those entrusted with the power to rule. The

second contrary response, that of consequentialists, argues instead that a realistic, non-

moralistic politics is a politics that understands that even a democracy involves an inevitable

struggle for power among irreconcilable adversaries, a struggle which at times will necessitate

and even justify duplicity. What matters, they will say, are outcomes and effects, rather than

abstract moral principles. And truth-telling is only one possible means to bring about desired

and beneficial results, a means with no intrinsic superiority over its rivals. Moreover, as the

Nazi example show, denouncing your enemies as liars is no guarantee of political virtue.

17
Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York, 2000), p. 545.
18
The phrase was used as the title of Myra MacPherson’s biography All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of
Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone (New York, 2006).
 7

Framing the question of lying in politics in these conventional terms—moralism vs.

realism, principles vs. consequences, ethical absolutism vs. relativism—must serve as an

inevitable starting point for any discussion. 19 But what quickly becomes apparent in any

serious treatment of the problem is that these two predictable positions have battled each other

without producing a victor since the issue was first raised. Instead of rehearsing them yet again,

I want to ask if there is something about the realm of human behavior that we call politics that

weakens the normal moral disdain for lying. And if so, to push into more provocative territory,

is it part of what makes politics valuable rather than merely an unedifying spectacle of human

depravity?

This afternoon I can only begin to sketch an adequate answer to these questions, which

would necessitate a thorough vetting of the larger debate about lying in general, involving

theologians and philosophers, sociologists and psychologists, linguists and aestheticians for

centuries. Even sociobiologists have recently entered the fray, making broad claims about the

important role of deception in nature as a whole. What has come to be called “Pseudology”—

the first use I have seen of the term is in the work of John Arbuthnot--has exercised some of

the most prominent minds in our tradition, from Augustine and Montaigne to Rousseau and

Kant, and continues to do so in our day, in the writings of figures as disparate as Hannah

Arendt, Sissela Bok, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Bernard Williams. To do it justice,

we would have to explore the distinctions between truth and error and truthfulness and lying,

as well as the gradations of duplicity that take us from intentionally saying what is known to be

false to dissembling by omission and all the varieties of spin and distortion in between, as well

19
This is not to say, to be sure, that those who stress consequences as opposed to principles always defend lying
as a necessary expedient. Examining four cases of presidential mendacity—Roosevelt after Yalta, Kennedy and
the Cuban Missile Crisis, Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal—
Alterman tries to demonstrate in When Presidents Lie that lying produces unanticipated negative political
consequences.
 8

as the thorny issue of self-deception and its paradoxes. In the larger book I am writing, I want

to provide an overview of these issues, but obviously can’t do so here, where our concern is

with the political realm alone.

To enter it will require a quick detour into another vast and intractable discourse

surrounding what has come to be called “the political.” For before we can make sense of the

role of lying in politics, we have to at least open the question of what politics actually is. In

l927, the right-wing German political theorist Carl Schmitt published a short, but enormously

influential book entitled The Concept of the Political,20 which quickly became a controversial

classic of 20th-century political theory. With the claim that Das Politische deserved its own

concept went the implication that it was a categorical mistake, and perhaps even a dangerous

one at that, to reduce “the political” to anything else, such as the social, the economic, the

aesthetic, the moral or the legal. 21

In the decades since Schmitt’s book appeared, the substantive idea of “the political” as

distinct from mere politics has attracted a lot of attention. Many French thinkers would come to

distinguish between ‘le politique” and “la politique” to signify the difference.22 Although some

commentators still hold out for the reintegration of “alien politics” into a less fractured social

totality, beyond the differentiations of modernity, 23 many others have come to celebrate or at

20
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. Georg Schwab (Chicago, 1996).
21
In a later edition of the book, Schmitt tacitly dropped this claim, possibly under the influence of Leo Strauss or
Hans Morgenthau, and argued instead that political relations permeate those other spheres as well. See Heinrich
Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago, 1995), for an
interpretation stressing Strauss’s role and the l933 edition; see William L. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of
Law (Lanham, Md., 1999), chapter 9 for an alternative emphasis on Morgenthau and the l932 edition
22
For example, in Denis Kamoucher et al, Le retrait du politique (Paris, l983). As might be expected, it enjoyed
an earlier popularity in Germany and France than in Britain, where more empirical inclinations ruled. Thus, for
example, Bernard Crick entitled his 1962 book simply In Defense of Politics (London, 1962).
23
See, for example, Paul Thomas, Alien Politics: Marxist State Theory Retrieved (New York, 1994).
 9

least urge the “the return of the political” to what they see as its rightful status as an irreducible

realm of its own. 24

The importance of theorizing “the political” rested on two controversial premises. The

first is the claim that a transcendental notion of “the political” can be discerned beneath all the

various institutional forms and cultural practices that have been called political throughout

history. Rather than identifying the political with statecraft or rulership or governmentality or

participatory democracy or even power as such, it seems for some to hover somewhere above

or beyond all of them. “The Political” was an autonomous and autotelic realm, following its

own laws and pursuing its own purposes. As Chantal Mouffe puts it, “if we wanted to express

such a distinction in a philosophical way, we could, borrowing the vocabulary of Heidegger,

say that politics refers to the ‘ontic’ level while ‘the political’ has to do with the ‘ontological’

one” 25 A less philosophically inflected definition is offered by Pierre Rosenvallon: “To refer to

“the political” rather than to “politics” is to speak of power and law, state and nation, equality

and justice, identity and difference, citizenship and civility—in sum, of everything that

constitutes political life beyond the immediate field of partisan competition for political power,

everyday governmental action, and the ordinary functioning of institutions.” 26

Although Schmitt acknowledged that contemporary politics had roots in medieval

theology, 27 once it became secularized, it operated according to its own internal logic,

constituting an independent “value sphere” separate from those designated moral (where good

and bad reigned), aesthetic (ruled by the beautiful and the ugly) or economics (dominated by

profitability and unprofitability). It was, to use a term from political theory itself, “sovereign”

24
Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London, 1993) and On the Political (London, 2005).
25
Mouffe, On The Political, p. 5-6.
26
Pierre Rosenvallon, Democracy Past and Future, ed. Samuel Moyn (New York, 2006), p. 36.
27
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
 10

in its own house, unbeholden to norms or moral constraints from elsewhere. Although he may

have smuggled in his own crypto-normative standard of value, Schmitt vigorously argued

against its being subordinated to what he saw as external standards, such as those derived from

Christian morality.

A generation later, Hannah Arendt likewise sought to protect the integrity of the

political as a special form of the vita activa from its absorption into “the social,” which she saw

as characterized by mundane material concerns and petty interests, 28 and resisted as well the

reduction of the political to philosophical or technical rationality. The atrophy of the political,

whose highest moment had come in the agora (marketplace or forum) of the Athenian polis,

ultimately led, she argued, to the modern phenomenon of totalitarianism. Once the political

was subordinated to the imperatives of labor, reproducing the species, or fabrication, the

making of a world of human objects, it lost its raison d’être, which was a valuable activity in

itself, the very mark of human freedom, and not a means to produce something outside it, even

the material welfare of citizens. Le politique, we might say, pour le politique.

The second controversial premise underlying the concept of “the political” is that a

boundary can be drawn between it and its various others, preserving its purity from external

pollution. Here the literal and metaphorical spatial qualities of political life are mingled.

Whether identified with a special location such as the agora within the ancient Greek city-state

or with the general territorial limits of a community, politics is understood to happen—to “take

place”--in a defined space. Whether a clearing or a container or an elevated site, that space is a

privileged locus of political activity. It had, in fact, been categorically distinguished by

Aristotle from the different space identified with the household—the oikos in classical

28
See Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago, 1998).
 11

Greek—which was occupied by more domestic tasks and populated by other kinds of people,

specifically women and slaves.

Let us examine more closely each of these premises in turn in order to prepare our

discussion of the more specific matter at hand, the role of lying in politics. First, if there is an

ontological nature of politics, as opposed to its various ontic manifestations, can we identify its

essence, either as a thing or as a domain? If we can, is it timeless and transcendental or

historical and contingent? And second, if there is an essence of “the political,” even for finite

periods of history, how permeable is the boundary separating it from what is outside its

territorial limits, whether we define that putative exterior in moral, legal, technical, economic,

aesthetic or other terms. What are the dangers of going too far in the opposite direction and

collapsing the political entirely into the larger ensemble of human relations, call it society or

the totality? Is there, for example, a cost to be paid by saying, as the catchword of the l960’s

asserted, “the personal is the political?”

All arguments for the essence of “the political” struggle to provide a common

denominator for everything normally called politics, or failing that, banish certain versions by

definition from a normative or ideal typical model. One strategy, employed by Schmitt in The

Concept of the Political, is to argue that only during moments of exception or emergency,

when legal order breaks down and fundamental questions of legitimacy are raised, do

underlying principles manifest themselves. The political reveals itself at moments of exception

as the continuation of war by other means, following the inexorable logic of friend and foe.. Of

the utmost seriousness, it is one of the few human pursuits worth putting one’s own life at risk,

and is therefore existentially meaningful. Contrary to those who see political interaction as

potentially collaborative or irenic, a way to solve common problems peacefully, Schmitt sees it
 12

as an antagonistic struggle for domination, in which there are always both friends and enemies,

winners and losers. In this sense, it is an existential condition that is irreducible to anything

more fundamental.

But if the violence of war cannot so easily be imposed on most other modes of political

behavior as their revealed essence, perhaps the fluid and delicate relations among those entities

that have come to be called “states” will serve instead. International relations, the realm of

diplomatic compromise and maneuvering, becomes the model for a second version of “the

political.” It stresses the never-ending process of building fragile alliances and forging

friendships of mutual convenience among mutually suspicious meta-individuals, who resist

being subordinated to binding international law and observe the imperatives of raison d’état. In

the European state system established after the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years

War in l648, interference in the sovereign affairs of other states was banished to avoid endless

religious strife, and with it the claim that states were subject to the moral authority of an

international organization like the Catholic Church.

Although war remains an ultimate resort, this version of “the political” prefers to solve

or at least postpone the inflammation of problems by less violent means, drawing on the

lessons in politesse nurtured in more intimate settings of sociability. As we know, the adjective

“diplomatic” has come to mean observing the protocols of tact and decorum, which often

involve avoiding the direct expression of hurtful truths. The champions of this version of the

political never fool themselves into thinking that a permanent consensus can be built that will

resolve conflicts of interest or value forever. “The political” in this acceptation may be

agonistic and pluralistic rather than antagonistic and based on the stark opposition of friend and

foe, but it is not at the deepest level collaborative or cooperative.

 13

In both of these instances, the key operative unit of “the political” is a collective entity,

usually a state, which can neither be subordinated to larger sovereign institutions, such as a

universal world government or a morally binding universal church, nor dissolved into its

constituent elements understood in social or economic terms. This version of “the political”

privileges those meta-individuals of history that find their justification in themselves, their self-

preservation and perhaps expansion of power. Following a post-cosmopolitan version of the

state, which was most clearly articulated in the German historicist critique of Enlightenment

natural law theory, 29 its champions argued that such entities were valuable expressions of the

infinite creative genius of the species, which manifested itself in particular rather than

universal forms, each with an ethical value in itself. The right to individual self-realization was

now bestowed on the state itself. It was perhaps in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that the most

elaborate defense of the ethical state was mounted. 30

An alternative tradition, which we can broadly call liberal, often followed the

nominalist Hobbes in construing the state of nature to be comprised of single individuals rather

than collective entities like tribes, nations or states. Hoping to escape the bellicose state of

nature, with all of its insecurities, they contrived a contract among individuals, whose self-

preservation was a higher goal than that of the state understood as an autotelic end in itself. For

many liberals, the political begins, whether logically or historically is not always clear, with a

contractual arrangement—or in some cases a broad “compact,” to use a word with less legal

force--among equals in a pre-political state of nature. Believing that the essence of the political

29
The classic positive account is Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State, trans.
Robert B. Kimber (Princeton, l970). For a critical rejoinder, see Georg G. Iggers, The German
Conception of History: The National Conception of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present
(Middletown, Ct., 1968).
30
For discussions, see Z.A. Pelczynski, ed., Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives
(Cambridge, 1971) and Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge, 1972).
 14

can be found in domestic rather than international relations, liberals favor voluntary

agreements resting on mutual trust and loyalty rather than countervailing fear. 31 Borrowing the

language of common law, John Locke could talk of governments as “fiduciary trusts,” which

earned the obedience of their citizens only so long as they carried out the mandate on which

they were founded. 32 As in the case of contractual arrangements in other areas of human

interaction, the element of trustworthiness, the keeping of one’s word, was paramount. After a

while, trustworthiness becomes valued as intrinsically good, as more than just a tactic in a

game of mutual convenience.

Other versions of “the political” besides contractualist liberalism have also privileged

domestic over international relations. These, however, are skeptical of the fiction of a pre-

political state of nature in which individuals band together to create the polity through a

contractual alienation of their autonomy. The so-called republican tradition, which we have

already encountered in connection with Machiavelli, privileges the role of the active citizen

able to leave behind his or her petty interests and selflessly serve the whole. It honors the code

of civic humanism generated in Florence and other Renaissance city-states, and supports a

view of patriotic virtue that transcends narrow economic advantage. 33 Whether in its classical

guise, stressing the importance of a small state like Sparta, or its modern, more expanded

version, it identifies freedom with positive political involvement. Here the implied notion of

“the political” is one seeking a consensus about the public good or common interest, a belief

31
On the importance of trust for the liberal tradition, see Allan Silver “’Trust’ in Social and Political Theory,” in
Gerald D. Suttles and Mayer N. Zald, eds., The Challenge of Social Control: Citizenship and Institution Building
in Modern Society: Essays in Honor of Morris Janowitz (Norwood, NJ, 1985).
32
For a discussion of the issue of trust in Locke, see J.W. Gough, John Locke’s Political Philosophy: Eight
Studies, (Oxford, 1950), chapter 7. A fiduciary trustee has no conflict of interest with his beneficiary, whose
interests he unselfishly serves. Fiduciary comes from the Latin “fides” or faith.
33
For a discussion of its impact on America, see J.G.A. Pocock, “Civic Humanism and its Role in Anglo-
American Thought,” Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York, 1973).
For more extensive treatements, see Quentin Skinner and Martin Van Gelderen, eds. Republicanism: A Shared
European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2002).
 15

that “acting in concert,” to use Arendt’s definition of power, is preferable to an antagonistic

struggle without end or the selfish pursuit of individual interest against that of the community

as a whole.

Still other versions of the political might easily be adduced, but I want to conclude this

section of my argument by focusing on only one more, which will have special relevance for

the issue of mendacity in politics, what might be called an aesthetic or symbolic variant. Often

aesthetic politics is taken to mean the coercive imposition of organic beauty on the messiness

of the real world. At other times, it signifies the performative constitution of political identities

or the introduction of irrational ecstatic emotion into the public sphere, thus undermining

procedural norms and instrumental policy-making. The version of aesthetic politics I want to

discuss is somewhat different from all of these; it foregrounds the tension between illusion and

reality self-consciously cultivated by art. A number of recent political theorists, such as

Claude Lefort, Frank Ankersmit and Pierre Rosenvallon, 34 have drawn our attention to what

they see as a fundamental split between levels of political reality, which operate very much like

the medieval distinction between the “king’s two bodies,” famously explained by the historian

Ernst Kantorowicz as a political offshoot of the double nature of Christ and the Eucharist. That

is, there is both a mystical and a real body of Christ, and both an invisible and visible Church,

which when secularized produce a distinction between the symbolic institution of monarchy,

the head of an immortal body politic, and the actual living body of the king who happens at the

moment to be its incarnation but who will ultimately die.

34
Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John b.
Thompson (Oxford, l986); Writing the Political Text, trans. and ed., David Ames Curtis (Durham, 2000); F.R.
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford, Ca., l996); Pierre
Rosenvallon, Democracy Past and Future, ed. Samuel Moyn (New York, 2006).
 16

This duality survives the fall of the monarchy in democratic states as well, in terms of

the gap between something designated “the people” and its representatives, those who speak

for the national interest or the general will, but are never its literal incarnation. Believing in

direct democracy as what is called an “isonomy,” in which rulers and ruled are one, is, pace

Arendt, a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that. It is in fact when attempts are made to close the

gap between symbol and reality and overcome the distinction between the people’s two bodies

that the danger of totalitarianism, a political version of real presence embodied in one location,

such as a dictator or vanguard party, first emerges. That is, a political onto-theology that wants

to literalize the symbolic is far more problematic than one that acknowledges that the ultimate

place of the symbolic people is precisely a no-place, a utopian locus always on the horizon of a

future that never arrives. The “people” in a democracy, they argue, should never be an entity

identical to itself, never incarnated in a full presence, never able to close the gap between a

mystical and living body. The represented and those who represent them should remain

distinct, not even mimetically related.

It may well be possible to suggest other candidates for the essence of “the political” in

addition to the ones I have just hastily outlined. But I hope it will suffice now simply to stress

depending on which of them is privileged, different conclusions about the relationship between

politics and mendacity may be reached. For example, a classical liberal version of the political

will tend to privilege the trust involved in contractual agreements, which is based on truth-

telling. As Bernard Williams pointed out in Truth and Truthfulness, there is a shared

etymological root for the words trust and truth, at least in English, which suggests the link. 35

Other versions of “the political” will have different implications. In my book, I hope to spell

35
Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, 2002), p. 93-94.
 17

this out in detail, but can now only make it clear that no discussion of the role of mendacity in

politics can avoid tackling the question of which version of the political is at stake.

Let me now turn instead briefly to the second major issue raised by the concept of the

political, the question of the boundaries between it, however we define it, and its others. How

porous or watertight are they? Are they necessary or contingent? What will their status be if we

define “the political” one way or another? The categorical boundary asserted by Aristotle and

revived by twentieth-century theorists like Schmitt and Arendt may, in fact, never have been as

solid as they assume. As Michael McKeon has recently argued in The Secret History of

Domesticity, the antithesis between polis and oikos was itself based on “a confusion of two

distinct ‘family’ categories: the oikos, the household of persons and property; and the genos,

the cult-oriented blood kin or clan. When the tension between ancestral genos and emergent

polis in preclassical Greece is taken to bespeak also a historical estrangement of polis from

oikos, the ongoing correlation of the latter two entities becomes obscured.” 36 Similarly, the

distinction between politics and the theological has never been easy to maintain for very long.

After all, even Schmitt claimed that all modern concepts of politics, such as the idea of a

sovereign power whose will trumped the restrictions of law, were secularized versions of

theological concepts, such as that of a God able to suspend the laws of nature to make miracles.

The persistence of “political theologies” in the “post-secular world” of the 21st century has

made it harder to deny the enduring imbrication of the political and the religious. 37

But having thus called into question the categorical distinctions between the polis and

the oikos, as well as its other alleged opposites such as religion, I would caution against the

36
Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity (Baltimore, 2005), p. 7.
37
For a wide variety of approaches to this issue, see Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds., Political
Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York, 2006). Even resolutely secular theorists like
Jürgen Habermas have acknowledged the role of religion, for good or ill, in the political realm. See his
contributions to Eduardo Mendieta, ed., The Frankfurt School on Religion (New York, 2005).
 18

conclusion that there is nothing distinctive about “the political,” however we may define it. To

think otherwise is to risk dissolving all differences into an indiscriminate soup in which

“everything is political.” Because binary oppositions may not be absolute, they need not be

utterly effaced. Just one telling example will, I hope, make this point, and does so with special

reference to the issue of lying of politics. The American constitution postulates a crucial

boundary between the political and other realms of human endeavor. Article I, Section 6 says

of Senators and Representatives: “They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach

of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their

respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate

in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.” The purpose of this clause

may have been to assure unfettered political debate without fear of lawsuits, but as Eric

Alterman has noted, “the result, as in the case of Senator McCarthy, has been the assertion of

the right to lie with impunity.” 38 That is, when inside the confines of the explicitly political

space of Congress, no charge of perjury can be brought against a member of either house. The

penalty they may suffer for lying, to be sure, can be severe, but it is a political not legal

punishment. Not all political activity takes place, of course, within the confines of a privileged

space like that of the floor of the American Congress, but in providing that immunity from

prosecution for perjury, the Founders were acknowledging the special nature of political

speech.

This returns us at long last to the main point of this exercise: pondering the ways in

which politics—or perhaps more ambitiously, “the political”—has an affinity for mendacity,

38
Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences (New York,
2004), p. 13. Joseph McCarthy, it will be recalled, made wild accusations against alleged Communist influence in
government. Alterman claims that the willingness to believe him was an unintended consequence of lies President
Roosevelt had told about the Yalta agreement with Stalin a few years earlier (p. 76).
 19

which no amount of moralizing can efface. In addition to specifying which version of “the

political” was in play, any serious answer would also have to pay careful attention to the

directionality of the lying and the nature of the liars and their victims. Most of the outrage in

recent literature has been directed against the lying of governments from above to the people

they supposedly represent. The recent hostility directed towards Leo Strauss and his neo-

conservative progeny, for example, is aimed at their alleged invocation of Plato’s argument for

a “noble lie” to justify the rule of a benign elite that imagines itself to have the best interests of

the polity at heart. Although they may defend their actions by saying they lie not out of

protective self-interest, but rather out of concern for the welfare of those they lie to, the

suspicion remains that the latter may really only be a cover for the former.

But what if political lying goes in the other direction? What if it is used by the

relatively powerless to protect themselves against those in authority? As students of religious

history have shown, many faiths have decided to countenance lying, despite their general

damning of it as sinful, when it is a matter of resisting persecution by those of a different faith

then in power. Medieval Waldensians and other heretics were famous dissimulators. During

the Reformation, Catholics were permitted falsely to proclaim their allegiance to a Protestant

prince, but with mental reservations that allowed them to tell God their true beliefs. Although

Calvin denounced them, the groups who became known as Nicodemists included Protestants as

well. A split between mouth and heart was justifiable if martyrdom was the likely consequence

of absolute candor. Likewise the Shiite minority in Islam developed a doctrine called “takiya”

which permitted outward expressions of Sunni fidelity to hide their inward beliefs when

revealing the truth about them would be dangerous. And the crypto-Jews called Marranos

during the era of the Spanish Inquisition could keep their true faith hidden for the same reason.
 20

In short, it has sometimes seemed both prudent and justifiable to reverse the now reigning

cliché and “tell lies to power” in order to resist intolerance, religious and political.

But let us assume that mendacity cannot always or even normally be defended in these

terms. What of the cases when it involves equals in a political struggle, say antagonistic nation

states at war or more agonistic diplomatic rivals? Or in domestic politics, what of the cases

when the assumption of elite rule—the noble status of those who selflessly tell lies for the

benefit of others—doesn’t obtain, in other words, in modern democracies? How are we to

judge lying by supposedly responsible and accountable governments to those they govern?

How should we assess it in the give and take of adversarial party politics, when vying for

power is the name of the game? In the voluminous literature on the theme, there have been a

number of suggestive responses to these questions that render any simple denunciation of

mendacity inadequate:1) the argument for strategic advantage in an existential struggle,

perhaps even to the death 2) the argument for diplomatic coalition-building based in part on

hypocrisy in a context of shifting and fragile alliances 3) the argument for rhetorical

persuasion in a pluralist field of irreconcilable opinions 4) the argument for the inherently

aesthetic nature of the political itself.

The first of these is perhaps the easiest to treat. As Hiram Johnson told the United

States Senate in l917, “the first casualty when war comes is the truth.” It may, of course, be

that simply defining the political in Schmittian terms as a war-like struggle to the death

between friend and foe can be a cynical ploy to justify a totally amoral politics of naked power

aggrandizement when polities are not in a state of explicit or even latent belligerency. But in

certain instances, it is hard to deny that obliteration is a real threat and lying can be justified if

it helps to ensure survival. Can anyone question, for example, that the Allies’ deliberate
 21

deception of the Nazis about their plans for the D-Day landing on the beaches of Normandy in

l944 was an entirely justifiable—and fortunately effective--act?

What of those cases when diplomatic alliances are forged to avoid being surrounded by

threatening enemies, either foreign or domestic? Is hypocrisy an inevitable tool in the forging

of those alliances? Is it true, as Sir Henry Watton famously claimed, that “an ambassador is an

honest man sent abroad to lie for his country/” In Hypocrisy and Integrity, the political theorist

Ruth Grant reads Machiavelli and Rousseau as having stressed the inevitability in all politics,

domestic as well as international, of dependency in creating coalitions of partners with

different interests,. “Politics,” she argues, “is characterized by relationships of mutual need

among parties with conflicting interests. To enlist the support of the other party requires

flattery, manipulation, and a pretence of concern for his needs.” 39 That is, because there is no

fully homogenous majority in which a total congruence of values and interests creates

complete solidarity, it is necessary to build coalitions on the basis at least in part of imaginary

commonalities. This involves inevitable hypocrisy, which means the public proclamation of

shared values and interests combined with a private acknowledgment of their hollowness.

“Machiavelli and Rousseau,” she explains, “appreciate the necessity of political hypocrisy,

which is to say, they appreciate the importance of appeals to genuine public moral principles.

Hypocrisy requires moral pretense, and that pretense is necessary because politics cannot be

conducted solely through bargaining among competing particular interests.” 40 In other words,

moral values, such as the prescription of lying, can never be abandoned, but never fully

observed.

39
Ruth W. Grant, Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli and the Ethic of Politics (Chicago, l997), p. 13.
40
Ibid., p, 14.
 22

In democracies in particular, where fragile coalitions need to be created to avoid

minority rule, the function of hypocrisy is especially important, despite the rationalist hope that

the better argument can rally disparate factions around the common interest. The liberal faith in

trust in a pluralist society may not be enough to overcome the stubborn persistence of real

differences in values, passions and interests. The wholesale moralistic condemnation of

hypocrisy only masks a partial interest that pretends to be a universal one, and therefore has the

potential to employ violence to enforce its will on others. “Political relations,” Grant argues,

“are neither enmities nor friendships but friendly relations sustained among nonfriends.” 41

Again an easy example comes from World War II, when the Allies pretended to share common

values and interests in their fight against the Axis, while all the time being deeply divided

about such basic issues as the superiority of socialism to capitalism or the legitimacy of

colonial empires. Moreover, as Judith Shklar notes in Ordinary Vices, “the paradox of liberal

democracy is that it encourages hypocrisy because the politics of persuasion require, as any

reader of Aristotle’s Rhetoric knows, a certain amount of dissimulation on the part of all

speakers….the democracy of everyday life, which is rightly admired by egalitarian visitors,

does not arise from sincerity. It is based on the pretense that we must speak to each other as if

social standings were a matter of indifference in our views of each other.” 42

Introducing the issue of rhetoric brings us to the third of our justifications for political

mendacity, which I’ve called “the argument for rhetorical persuasion in a pluralist field of

irreconcilable opinions.” Its most eloquent defender was Hannah Arendt in her two classic

essays “Truth and Politics” of 1967 and “Lying in Politics” of 1971. 43 Arendt’s main point is

41
Ibid., p 175.
42
Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 48 and 77.
43
Hannah Arendt, “Truth in Politics,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt Reader, ed. Peter Baehr (New York, 2000)
and “Lying in Politics,” Crises of the Republic (New York, 1972).
 23

that a search for the truth is inherently a quest for a single, monologic consensus about what is

the case, a search that may make sense in scientific inquiry, whereas politics operates precisely

in the realm of pluralist, dialogic dissensus. Unlike rationalist philosophy or modern science,

politics is a realm of diverse opinion and belief, what the Greeks called doxa, not cognition, or

episteme, a constant struggle of values and interests, not a greater and greater approximation to

a single truth. Sophistic rhetoric rather than Platonic dialectic is the essence of “the political.”

Even the quest to establish empirical rather than rational truths are in tension with politics,

Arendt argues: “factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and

precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. The modes of

thought and communication that deal with truth, if seen from the political perspective, are

necessarily domineering; they don’t take into account other people’s opinions, and taking these

into account is the hallmark of strictly political thinking.” 44 Thus, although political judgment

may involve the enlargement of one’s own initial opinion by acknowledging and incorporating

those of others in the public realm, the telos of perfect truth can be sought only at the peril of

losing what makes politics an inherently agonistic struggle acknowledging irreducible

difference among those who enter it.

The final argument derives from the inherently aesthetic or symbolic nature of the

political itself, the gap between concepts like “the people” and its inevitably imperfect

representation. Pierre Rosenvallon identifies this gap with the fundamental distinction between

and yet entanglement of “le politique” and “la politique,” “the political” and everyday politics:

“it is first of all thanks to the impossibility of dissociating the political from politics that a

certain kind of disappointment with the modern regime comes about. For it is never simple to

separate the noble from the vulgar, the great ambitions from the petty egotistical calculations,
44
Arendt, “Truth in Politics,” p. 556.
 24

the trenchant language of truth from the sophistry of manipulation and seduction….there grows

up around the political, as a result, a longing that in a certain sense is impossible to fulfill.” 45

That longing is for a politics of full transparency, integrity, honesty and truthfulness.

It is doomed to fail because at the very heart of political life is an often

unacknowledged tension between ideal unity and real dissensus, which can never be overcome,

even through totalitarian efforts. Parallels between aesthetic and political modes of behavior

abound, as is often noted, if no less often bemoaned. Not only do we use the vocabulary of

representation for both, but we often see politics as deeply theatrical, and habitually chastise

our opponents for “playing politics,” as if that were somehow a betrayal of what they should be

doing. But if there is a fundamental affinity between politics and aesthetics, no matter how

much we strive to make it the arena for the triumph of rational argumentation over coercion,

manipulation and mystification, there will always be resistance to a regime of transparent truth-

telling.

I don’t want to leave you, however, with a sense that there are no limits and costs to

mendacity in the political realm. A lie works, after all, only against the horizon of normative

veridical practices that make it plausible. Although liberal contractualism may be unpersuasive,

if trust were utterly lost and no word were taken as truthful, hypocrisy would not be possible. It

is, as Rochefoucauld wisely said, the homage vice pays to virtue, even in politics. That is, the

default position in the political arena as everywhere else has to be the use of speech truthfully,

even if it is often violated in practice. Another important check on the ubiquity of lying is the

porosity of the boundary between politics and its others, either cognitive or moral. However

useful it may be to isolate the special circumstances of “the political,” it is also important to

acknowledge that no impermeable firewall can be built between it and other spheres of human
45
Rosenvallon, Democracy Past and Future, p. 54.
 25

endeavor. Thus, more veridically inclined institutions like the academy, the judiciary and a free

press inevitably intersect with politics, as we saw during the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Perjury in a court of law, where you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the

truth, can damage or bring down a politician, despite that protection for mendacity within the

walls of Congress provided by Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution. Conclusive scientific

evidence like a semen stain on a dress can trump all the rhetorical defenses put up by even the

most eloquent of special pleaders.

Still, within the realm of the political, however leaky its boundaries, the search for

perfect truthfulness is not only vain but also potentially dangerous. For ironically, the reversed

mirror image of the Big Lie may well be the ideal of Big Truth, singular, monologic truth,

which silences those who disagree with it. Instead of seeking to realize such an ideal, it may be

healthier to tolerate lots of little countervailing lies, as well as the ability to test and see through

them, rather than hold out hope for ending mendacity once and for all. Trust may best be

placed in the likelihood that all players in the game are imperfect moral actors rather than in

their being fully honest. This is not a brief for cynicism or immorality, just a recognition that

politics will never be a fib-free zone of authenticity, integrity, transparency and righteousness,

and ultimately that’s a good thing.

One final irony, to return to the figure to whom this talk was dedicated: As we know,

Scooter Libby is on trial for perjury and obstruction of justice, and as such has become a

metonym for all of the lies told by the Bush administration in connection with the war of

aggression it unleashed on the people of Iraq. But in a larger sense, in fact, his real crime was

betraying a classified secret and disclosing the truth or at least helping to disseminate it about

Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, thus lifting the veil that surrounded her
 26

work as a CIA agent. A truth-telling leak not a lie and cover-up is the real transgression. It

turns out that honesty, after all, may not always be the best policy in politics.

Martin Jay

History Department

U. of California, Berkeley