This paper approaches the contemporary post-truth problem as developing out of a conflict over the political meaning of truth and the kind of political order that different theories of truth create. Instead of asking whether we have entered a post-truth moment, or whether contemporary politics has simply abandoned truth as such, I focus on the dominant form of truth that many post-liberal critics on the so-called "new" left and right take themselves to be challenging: a distinctly modern form of political reason grounded in the separation of facts and values, knowledge and politics. Working through a relatively neo-Weberian account of this settlement, I reconstruct modern political reason as a modern liberal political order that treats the separation of facts and values as something like a separation of powers: an attempt to preserve some authority outside politics itself, capable of containing the collapse of truth into political power. Reading Wendy Brown and Linda Zerilli on the post-liberal left alongside Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule on the post-liberal right, and situating them through foundational figures such as Weber, Foucault, Arendt, and Strauss, this paper examines how both sides challenge this modern settlement. Because there is limited scholarship that directly compares these thinkers through their shared critique of modern political reason, I read widely across their work and the intellectual traditions they draw on in order to clarify both their differences and their deeper convergence. Despite their distinct political values, I argue thinkers on the post-liberal left and right draw on a similar critique of modern political reason's separation of facts and values in order to expand their interpretive freedom and power over and against the political order of truth it instantiates, and toward a post-liberal world—all of which results in a number of novel similarities. In the end, I argue that the critique of modernity within the critique of liberalism and modern political reason by post-liberal thinkers is doing a great deal of work for both traditions, each of which draws from historically postmodern and premodern schools of thought on the left and right, respectively. By foregrounding modern political reason's capacity to contain a Nietzschean will to truth from dominating knowledge and politics, and to sustain a more stable and pluralistic common ground for political life, I ultimately defend modern political reason while taking seriously the critiques against it.
Lenin Hernandez (Fri,) studied this question.