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TCS0010.1177/02632764221119726Theory, Culture & SocietyStrassheim

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Theory, Culture & Society
1­–17
Neoliberalism and Post-Truth: © The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/02632764221119726
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Jan Strassheim
University of Hildesheim

Abstract
Contrary to widespread assumptions, post-truth politicians formally adopt a rhetoric
of ‘truth’ but turn it against established experts. To explain one central factor behind
this destructive strategy and its success with voters, I consider Walter Lippmann and
Friedrich Hayek, who from 1922 onwards helped develop and popularize a political
rhetoric of ‘truth’ in terms of scientific expertise. In Hayek’s influential version, market
economics became the crucial expert field. Consequently, the 2008 financial crisis
impacted attitudes towards experts more generally. But even sweeping rejection of
experts continues to use the rhetoric, by now dominant, of expert truth. Paradoxically,
this bipartisan language fuels division as opponents accuse each other of disregarding
‘truth itself’. Against the underlying metaphysics of context-free ‘facts’, John Dewey and
Alfred Schutz recommend understanding truth as ‘presumptive’ knowledge produced
within human practices, which can be robust but requires a readiness to engage in
pluralistic and open-ended processes of (re-)contextualization.

Keywords
democracy, expertise, knowledge, neoliberalism, post-truth, science and policy

Introduction
It is often said that for ‘post-truth’ politicians like Donald Trump, ‘truth itself has become
irrelevant’, a diagnosis so widespread that it has been enshrined in dictionaries.1
Intellectuals have linked this supposed indifference to truth and its success with voters to
the influence of academic critiques of truth,2 which some celebrate as a democratizing
force (Fuller, 2018) and others rebuke in defense of truth (Cuevas-Badallo and Labrador-
Montero, 2020). Some argue that democracy itself is failing and should be replaced by

Corresponding author: Jan Strassheim. Email: strassheim@uni-hildesheim.de

TCS Online Forum: https://www.theoryculturesociety.org
2 Theory, Culture & Society 

‘epistocracy’, the ‘rule of the knowledgeable’ (Brennan, 2016: 14). Contrary to the domi-
nant diagnosis thus circumscribed, I will characterize post-truth in terms of a political
rhetoric built around a specific notion of truth. This rhetoric stifles debate precisely
because both post-truthers and many of their critics use it.
The two groups identified here (ideal-typically) as the ‘post-truth camp’ and the ‘truth
camp’ share a language game which revolves around ‘truth’ in the sense of facts pro-
duced by scientifically trained experts. I will exemplify the development of this idea in
Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek, who from the 1920s onwards harnessed the mod-
ern trend towards scientific rationalization to build an influential political rhetoric. In
Hayek’s version, the ‘neoliberal’ epistemology behind this rhetoric paradoxically com-
bines a subordination of democracy to expert ‘truth’ with a sweeping criticism of experts.
To delineate a way out of the resulting impasse in the post-truth debate, we need more
academic critique of truth, not less. I will refer to two philosophers who opposed the
view offered by their contemporaries. John Dewey and Alfred Schutz argued that a meta-
physical misinterpretation of scientific facts produces the kind of paradox seen in
Lippmann or Hayek. Unlike the ideal of ‘facts’ beyond all human contexts, a viable
notion of ‘presumptive’ truth embraces a pluralistic and open-ended process of
contextualization.
While I will argue that the political rhetoric of truth is a central factor in the complex
phenomenon of post-truth, it is only one among others. Moreover, I will trace that factor
only as far as necessary to state my argument without going further into theories or gene-
alogies of truth, philosophy of science, or rhetorical analysis. Finally, while I will suggest
that the 2008 financial crisis catalyzed how neoliberal epistemology both motivates and
stifles the post-truth debate, my concern is with this underlying constellation of ideas,
which transcends the 2008 crisis and does not depend on my reading of it.

The Rhetoric of Truth: From Lippmann to Hayek

Jason Brennan (2016: 14f.) cites Plato’s vision of a philosopher kingdom and argues
that political decisions should be based on expert knowledge rather than popular major-
ities. This type of argument was pioneered by US journalist and political writer Walter
Lippmann. In his 1922 Public Opinion, he rhetorically invokes Plato’s argument that
only experts have the knowledge required to take decisions in the interest of all. Plato’s
critical assessment of democracy, Lippmann thinks, is even more valid in our techno-
logically advanced and globalized world. Ordinary citizens follow emotions, tribes, and
media distractions; thinking in ‘stereotypes’, they remain blind to ‘reality’. Fortunately,
Lippmann contends, modernity also provides a solution not yet available to Plato and
very different from his ideal of philosopher kings: the scientific method. Political deci-
sions should be based on hard, neutral, objective ‘facts’ established within independent
research institutions.
It is easy to forget that Lippmann was writing this a century ago. His analysis appears
to foreshadow today’s ‘post-factual world’ (Bybee, 1999: 60). Yet his rhetoric is not
aimed at something lost, as the prefix ‘post’ would suggest, but at something new, some-
thing to be built in the future. To be sure, the modern sciences had by then long played a
key role in processes of ‘rationalization’ that transformed Western societies (Weber,
Strassheim 3

1968 [1921]; Husserl, 1970 [1954]). Even the more specific idea of basing politics on
modern science had been around since the 18th century. But Lippmann, who had experi-
enced the propaganda battles of the First World War and was well-versed in coining
effective political language himself, widely popularized the idea of scientific truth as a
political rhetoric. His Public Opinion became a bestseller, and Lippmann served as an
adviser to several US presidents.
Nevertheless, Lippmann acknowledged a difficulty in his proposal. Its anti-democratic
thrust is justified by a dichotomy between experts and ordinary citizens. He claims that
while most people have at best vague and shaky ideas of their society, the knowledge that
trained experts bring to political decisions is precise and certain. Using ‘quantitative
analysis’ and ‘exact measurements’, experts can present facts in mathematical formats
such as ‘statistics’, ‘curves’, ‘graphs’, or ‘index numbers’. Lippmann’s models for such
facts are ‘exact sciences’ like physics. But physics, he recognizes, does not deal with
society. For facts about society to be as compelling as physical facts, social scientists
would first need to work out an equivalent ‘method’. As Lippmann admits with discern-
ible skepticism, this has never happened. Still, he pleads, we should believe that it can be
done. He asks his readers for a ‘belief in reason’, itself rooted in ‘intuition’ rather than
science (Lippmann, 1922: 416f.), that his proposal will succeed in the future. His descrip-
tion of this as a ‘noble counterfeit’ (1922: 417) echoes Plato’s ‘noble lie’ (Rep.: 414c), a
myth invented to make ordinary citizens believe that philosophers should rule because
they are literally made of different stuff. The reference already indicates how Lippmann’s
proposal could itself be used in new ways to manipulate public opinion.
Lippmann’s own ‘belief in reason’, however, soon began to waver. In the sequel to
Public Opinion published only three years later, he writes that ‘all human eyes’ – experts
not excluded – ‘have habits of vision, which are often stereotyped, which always throw
facts into a perspective’ (Lippmann, 1925: 163). By 1937, he has given up any funda-
mental distinction between experts and non-experts. He discards his earlier hopes for a
future government based upon expert truth and explicitly rejects the vision of Plato’s
Republic (Lippmann, 1937: 22–5). Science is now merely one profession among many.
The titular ‘good society’ of Lippmann’s 1937 book is no longer planned from the top
with the help of superior knowledge to realize the common good. Instead, its heart is the
marketplace, where people with different skills and interests, including scientists and
other experts, meet on an equal footing. The market may not give us truth, but it serves
the common good.
It fell to another author to argue that the market can provide a more sophisticated
rhetoric of truth in politics that combines the early Lippmann’s belief in expert truth with
the later Lippmann’s skepticism. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek attended a 1938
colloquium on Lippmann’s Good Society in Paris, where the term ‘neoliberal’ was coined
to describe a new type of thinking in which Hayek would become a central figure.
Hayek (1937) starts by criticizing the idea of expert planning. If a ‘good society’ is
one that benefits all, how would an expert go about designing such a society? The ‘objec-
tive facts’ relevant to the task would include information about every single citizen’s
standpoint (their views, skills, goals, preferences, etc.). Furthermore, since people
change, all this information would need to be updated in real time. But no human expert
can possibly acquire such knowledge. Nor will future social scientists be able to do so,
4 Theory, Culture & Society 

since the aim of science is precisely to establish ‘generalized rules’ by abstracting away
from individual variations (Hayek, 1945: 521). Hayek rejects expert government because
he deeply distrusts scientific expertise.
However, Hayek goes on, every individual knows their own standpoint at any given
time. In other words, the relevant knowledge is there, but it is scattered among all citi-
zens. The problem then is to find a mechanism for this knowledge to come together in a
way that is best for all. According to Hayek, such a mechanism already exists, albeit so
far only in the economic sphere: the market. Prices reflect the current global distribution
of supply and demand, allowing every participant to relate her decisions to the stand-
points of many other people unknown to her as if she knew them. Through prices, a
market coordinates the standpoints of countless individuals by embodying a knowledge
that none of them has on their own and that not even the best expert could attain.
At the same time, Hayek’s criticism of experts is itself presented as based on a special
kind of expertise. His argument, he claims, relies on ‘economics as an empirical science’
of markets (Hayek, 1937: 44) and on ‘facts which we know to be common to all human
thought’ (1937: 46). On this basis, the economist realizes she cannot gather all the knowl-
edge that would be needed to plan an economy that satisfies everybody. But the econo-
mist also realizes that she need not gather this knowledge where it is embodied by the
market. Her task is to identify the conditions under which a market optimally reflects the
interests of all participants, and to help decision-makers bring these conditions about.
For Hayek, neither ordinary citizens nor even most economists but only a small group of
what he calls ‘philosophers’ grasp this paradoxical epistemology in which experts reject
expertise on expert grounds (Ötsch, 2021).
Importantly, the epistemological case for the market is presented as valid beyond the
economic sphere proper. In Hayek’s view, not only economists but experts in general
(e.g. political scientists or trained administrators) lack the knowledge that would be
needed for top-down planning in the interest of all. In the market, the economist sees a
solution to this problem that can be generalized. Supporting market-like mechanisms in
other areas of society might help all experts inform decisions that serve the common
good. This would make economics (rather than philosophy or physics) the key field of
expertise. As meta-experts, economists have identified the general problem of expert
truth in politics; as experts on markets and prices, they offer a solution.
Hayek’s model of expertise incorporates both the early and the later Lippmann’s ten-
dencies. On the one hand, it reaffirms that scientific methods allow an expert – the econ-
omist – to uncover facts unknown to ordinary citizens; and as markets revolve around
prices, these can even be precise mathematical facts as Lippmann had envisioned them.3
On the other hand, ordinary citizens possess a knowledge (i.e. knowledge of their own
standpoint) which is as crucial as the experts’ but which the experts lack, and here the
experts’ ignorance should be emphasized. A sharp distinction between ordinary citizens
and experts is maintained. But both sides must complement each other if political deci-
sions are to serve the interests of all, and the market provides a general mechanism for
this to happen.
While Lippmann himself never embraced the Hayekian model, it had broad influence,
especially through the Mont Pèlerin Society that Hayek founded in the wake of the
Lippmann colloquium (Foucault, 2008 [2004]; Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009). In the
Strassheim 5

1980s, Hayek advised Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, influencing New Right
policies. When the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1991, free-market thinking was introduced
to former socialist countries; left-of-center parties in the West like the US Democrats and
the British Labour Party also adopted market-oriented styles of government (Mouffe,
2005; Biebricher, 2019). By the 2000s, a rhetoric of truth which had come a long way
from Plato’s vision was firmly established across the political spectrum. It centered on
highly decontextualized ‘objective facts’, often in mathematical formats, established by
scientifically trained experts, most of all economists, which were difficult to understand
for ordinary citizens but supposedly essential for political decisions to reflect the inter-
ests of all.

Truth and Post-Truth

In the political debate that erupted in 2016, ‘post-truth’ was primarily a politically
charged label rather than a tool for analysis. Also, it polemically describes an opponent,
as evident from the fact that nobody calls their own stance ‘post-truth’. We should not
expect such a label to give a full and accurate description of the phenomenon.
Nevertheless, I will try to extract an analytical concept of ‘post-truth’ by focusing on the
rhetorical dimension of the debate.
Lexicographers aim to capture how people commonly use a word, which may or may
not capture a real phenomenon. When the Oxford Dictionary added ‘post-truth’ to its
2017 edition, it was defined – less than accurately, I will argue, with respect to the real
phenomenon – as ‘[r]elating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are
less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
Against the background sketched so far, we may note that this definition sounds as if it
were taken straight from Lippmann’s Public Opinion. Notably, we learn that the com-
mon use of ‘post-truth’ implies a specific idea of ‘truth’ in terms of ‘objective facts’.4
‘Objective facts’ in turn are linked to scientific expert authority. This is reflected in the
negative by politicians emblematic of 2016 ‘post-truth’. Donald Trump denied scientific
findings, especially on climate change. The UK Brexit campaign contradicted estab-
lished economists, with Michael Gove stating in an interview that ‘the people of this
country have had enough of experts’. Conversely, people who criticized ‘post-truth’ poli-
tics demanded a stronger reliance on expertise. About a million joined the 2017 March
for Science, with 97 percent of participants saying they wished to encourage ‘policies
based on scientific facts and evidence’.5
In short, use of the label ‘post-truth’ in political debate resembles the rhetoric dis-
cussed earlier: The ‘truth’ in ‘post-truth’ is construed in terms of ‘objective facts’ estab-
lished by scientifically trained experts; this ‘truth’ is opposed to the subjective and
emotional standpoints of many ordinary citizens; and it is offered as something that
should have a central place in politics. As this rhetoric had become a mainstream element
of the language of politics across the spectrum since the 1990s, it makes sense that it was
taken for granted by 2016.
Then what about targets of the label ‘post-truth’? According to the Oxford Dictionary,
‘post-truth’ expresses the ‘implication that truth itself has become irrelevant’.6 On this
interpretation, one would expect someone like Trump to have abandoned the rhetoric of
6 Theory, Culture & Society 

truth endorsed by his critics, perhaps in favor of pure ‘bullshit’ (Frankfurt, 2005 [1986]).
But has he? On the day of the 2017 March for Science, Trump countered with an official
statement: ‘Rigorous science is critical to my Administration’s efforts to achieve the twin
goals of economic growth and environmental protection.’7 At a 2017 rally, he told sup-
porters: ‘We are here today to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’8
In 2018, he used a speech to the UN General Assembly to attack ‘so-called experts who
have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again’.9 In 2021, he even founded
a social media platform called ‘TRUTH Social’ under the motto ‘Follow the Truth’.
Trump is not on record saying that ‘the truth’ has ‘become irrelevant’ to him (what he
thinks about the truth is another matter). On the contrary, he keeps invoking ‘the truth’
and ‘facts’. When he attacks experts, he refers to ‘so-called experts’, to people who,
according to him, miss the facts and should therefore not be considered experts at all.
Moreover, Trump presents ‘facts’ of his own and even makes them central elements
of his rhetoric. The purported facts are often expressed in mathematical formats signal-
ing hard, scientific expertise. Trumpian ‘facts’ can be sums (China ‘lost 15 to 20 trillion
dollars in value since the day I was elected’), timescales (the US economy’s 2019 first-
quarter growth of 3.2% ‘is a number that they haven’t hit in 14 years’), or percentages
(‘we have lousy health-care, where it’s going up 35, 45, 55 percent’).10
Given that this quintessential ‘post-truth’ politician insists on the political relevance
of ‘truth’, ‘facts’ and ‘science’ and even phrases his own claims in expert formats, it
would be difficult to distinguish his rhetoric from that of his critics who also insist on
expert truth (let us call them, ideal-typically and ignoring for the moment all nuance, the
‘truth’ camp) – were it not for the fact that his claims wildly differ in content from the
broad consensus in established expert communities.
This suggests a concept of ‘post-truth’ rhetoric defined in relation to the ‘truth’ rheto-
ric. Whether or not a Trump knows or even cares in private about whatever we think of
as the truth,11 his public self-presentation relies on the same rhetoric of truth as that of his
critics. The difference concerns the level of content, the sets of descriptions presented as
true by each camp, which in turn is connected to the ascription of expertise. The post-
truth camp rejects the consensus of established expert authorities as untrue, implying that
the ‘so-called experts’ are not really experts. The truth camp, in contrast, closely follows
the established experts. This leads to an analytic interpretation for the ‘post’ in ‘post-
truth’ which differs from its popular meaning reported by the Oxford Dictionary as
‘belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrele-
vant’. On the contrary, the concept of truth is an important element of post-truth rhetoric.
It is the extension of that concept that sets the post-truth rhetoric apart. We can capture
this imitative relationship if we understand the prefix ‘post’ as indicating that a previous
situation is continued in some respects but discontinued in others. In a post-truth rheto-
ric, a specific established rhetoric of truth continues in form but discontinues in sub-
stance (i.e. in the experts and descriptions accepted).12

The Inner Logic of a Post-Truth Rhetoric

With any rhetoric, speakers aim to have a certain effect on their audience. On the speak-
er’s side, the inner logic of post-truth rhetoric cannot be the same as that of simply lying,
Strassheim 7

which follows a slightly different strategy. A rational liar would seek to blend in with
established experts or at least avoid openly contradicting them. Also, a rational liar would
say things that are hard to pin down or verify; they would not – like Trump – choose
mathematical formats to make claims an audience can ‘fact-check’ unequivocally and
often with the help of easily accessible sources. If it were a simple lie, post-truth rhetoric
would find a fringe audience at best. In reality, it appears to resound with nearly half of
the population. Trump was elected US president with more than 46 percent of the popu-
lar vote. And despite having made more than 30,000 ‘false or misleading claims’ during
his presidency,13 he received over 11 million more votes in 2020. To explain this success,
we should look once again at some historical background.
The rhetoric of truth pioneered by Lippmann became a dominant element of political
language after it was transformed into Hayek’s market model of expertise. A core claim
of that model is that economists know the conditions under which markets serve the
interests of all. The 2008 financial crisis cast unmissable doubt on this claim. The col-
lapse of markets took leading economists by surprise, and what would become known as
the Great Recession made it painfully clear that the market did not work in everybody’s
favor.
The dominance of a Hayekian model would account for the fact that the crisis (whether
or not economists at the time followed Hayek’s specific precepts) influenced how not
only economists but politically relevant experts generally were perceived. Hayek had
helped entrench a view of economists as ‘the experts’ par excellence. Their special
expertise, he claimed, enables them to understand how market-like mechanisms can
bring together the knowledge of experts and that of ordinary citizens in ways that further
the common good – not only in the market but also in other areas of society. But where
economists are proven wrong even on their home turf, this argument for an ‘economi-
cized society’ (Ötsch, 2021) starts to collapse. Once the market fails to hold together
expert knowledge and ordinary citizens’ knowledge, the model reveals the internal ten-
sions that already troubled Lippmann. When experts are wrong, ordinary citizens begin
to doubt that expert knowledge is fundamentally superior to theirs, which in turn raises
the question of why the opinions of a small class of experts should receive special weight
in a democratic society.
This would help explain why post-truth politicians reject established experts, but not
yet why they clothe this rejection in the very rhetoric of expert truth that the 2008 crisis
had challenged. A possible answer lies in another trait of Hayek’s model. Hayek himself
had stressed that economists never have all the knowledge that would allow them to plan
or even foresee concrete market developments. The economists’ failure of 2008 was
therefore consistent with his view and could even be interpreted as a confirmation of it
(Davies and McGoey, 2012). In the end, his model survived the crisis and continued to
inform government decisions. The rhetoric of expert truth remained part and parcel of
political debate.
It makes sense to assume that the crisis and its aftermath had a similarly ambivalent
impact upon public sentiment. On the one hand, the crisis raised doubts as to whether
economists as the quintessential ‘experts’ could be trusted, and when governments con-
tinued to rely on those same experts after the crisis, ‘economic anger’ (Wahl-Jorgensen,
2018) and suspicions of a wider ‘elite’ as part of a ‘representation crisis’ (Hahl et al.,
8 Theory, Culture & Society 

2018) grew. But on the other hand, criticism of experts is compatible with Hayek’s model
and even vindicates it. Therefore, when governments continued to rely on the model after
the crisis, they strengthened the impression that it was simply without alternative. As a
result, even those who criticized ‘the experts’ were nevertheless likely to go on accepting
the general model of expertise. In this situation, a politician looking for a successful
rhetoric would attack the claims of established experts in content but express this criti-
cism in the experts’ language. The result is the post-truth rhetoric.
If we assume such a logic at work, otherwise puzzling aspects of post-truth rhetoric
make sense. First, numbers become the format of choice. Adopting the experts’ language
makes the head-on attack on the content of what they say as glaring as possible. Even
where such utterances are perceived as lies or ‘bullshit’, they may still be welcomed as
attacks on an ‘establishment’ which is more fundamentally in the wrong (Hahl et al.,
2018). At the same time, using an expert language signals that the speakers themselves
are experts, and even ‘real’ experts as opposed to the established, ‘so-called’, experts.
The latter pretense may seem laughable, but it conforms to a rhetoric of (post-)truth.
A consensus of authorities does not guarantee ‘objective’ truth. Like Lippmann’s hero,
the physicist Galileo, the renegade ridiculed today might be a harbinger of what will be
recognized as the truth tomorrow. Even a well-established system of expertise can be
denounced wholesale as a self-interested ‘elite’ if the ‘so-called’ experts are cast in the
role of the theologians sent by the Church to oppose the astronomer who stands up for
truth.
Paradoxically, the outsider’s sweeping attack on experts can even serve as a hallmark
of deeper expertise once this outsider harnesses the flexibility of the Hayekian model.
That all experts are to some degree ignorant was Hayek’s verdict as a meta-expert. His
argument against scientific knowledge – that the abstract rules of science cannot capture
concrete developments in society – was itself presented as part of a scientific theory.
Hence, the image of Galileo standing up to the Church could even be marshaled against
an overreliance on science: ‘Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowl-
edge is not the sum of all knowledge’ (Hayek, 1945: 521, my emphasis).
But most importantly for the post-truth politician, the ‘real’ expert speaks in the
name of ordinary citizens. For Hayek, the abstract knowledge of experts is ‘not the
sum of all knowledge’ because it requires as its complement all citizens’ knowledge of
their own standpoints, unique information possessed by even the most ignorant person.
In this optics, only those experts who factor in what ordinary citizens want and believe
will understand society. ‘So-called’ experts who forget this overlook ‘philosopher’
Hayek’s more comprehensive ‘truth’: that the knowledge of experts and that of non-
experts belong together as two sides of a coin. Within such a model, a Trump or Gove
can appear as a ‘real’ expert because he rejects ‘experts’ on behalf of ‘the people of this
country’.
It is not surprising then if a post-truth rhetoric relies on ‘appeals to emotion and per-
sonal belief’. But these are framed not as appeals to irrational impulses or pure subjectiv-
ity but as part of a more complex objective ‘truth’. If a post-truth audience value their
individual standpoints higher than the opinions of established experts, this is not because
they have lost interest in ‘objective facts’, as their critics would have it, but because they
reject the ‘so-called experts’ who, in their view, miss the objective facts.14
Strassheim 9

How the Bipartisan Rhetoric of Truth Stifles Debate

I suggested that proponents and many critics of post-truth politics share the same rhet-
oric of truth. Sharing a language might at first seem like a good basis for a debate,
especially when that language stresses a rational consensus based on neutral facts.
However, the rhetoric of truth specified above stifles meaningful debate between those
who share it.
The crucial difference between the ‘truth’ camp and the ‘post-truth’ camp concerns
their respective attitude towards expert authorities. For the truth camp, truth aligns with
what established experts hold true. In their eyes, therefore, people who attack experts
attack ‘truth itself’; they must be irrational or reckless. However, as I argued, post-truth
attacks on experts are connected to the belief in a deeper expertise and a more compre-
hensive truth. For the post-truth camp, the established experts are merely ‘so-called’
experts, and people who follow those experts must be either too naïve to see the bigger
picture or they must be part of the ‘elite’ who profit from the status quo.
This mutual disqualification is driven by the same ideal on both sides: good policies
are based on objective ‘facts’ which ought to produce bipartisan agreement. Any persis-
tent disagreement on policy is then taken to indicate that one side fails to grasp ‘the
facts’. Conversely, if ‘the truth’ provides the basis for a rational consensus on what is best
for all, people who stubbornly deny what ‘we know’ to be the truth must be unable or
unwilling to work towards a rational consensus. This is part of why the political debate
around ‘post-truth’ does not seem to have led anywhere. A seemingly irrational or cor-
rupt opponent cannot be convinced by argument but must either be forced by other means
or simply ignored. Where both sides perceive each other in this way, debate ends. If
anything, each side’s insistence on ‘their’ truth will incite the opposing side to double
down on ‘theirs’, feeding into a spiral of mutual distrust or contempt. As Hannah Arendt
(1968 [1967]: 241) puts it (though with a different thrust), ‘factual truth, like all other
truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate consti-
tutes the very essence of political life’.
The reciprocity between the two camps is also reflected in how ‘post-truth’ and related
expressions are used as political labels. Since the post-truth camp rely on a rhetoric of
truth, they refuse to apply the ‘post-truth’ label to themselves. Moreover, they turn the
label back against their critics who, in their view, only pretend or believe to seek the
truth. Trump made a habit of assailing ‘the Fake News’, ‘the Corrupt Media’, and even
‘so-called judges’. But where each side calls the other’s attitude ‘post-truth’, the label
ceases to be distinctive either as a rallying cry or as an accusation. Small wonder that the
2016 ‘Word of the Year’ is seldom heard just a few years on.
Still, one may ask what keeps both camps from seeing the other’s logic. An explana-
tion could be found in Lippmann’s idea that public opinion is shaped by ‘stereotypes’.
Lippmann likens stereotypes to tinted glasses that make us see the world in a specific
color by blinding us to other parts of the spectrum. Lippmann wants stereotyped experi-
ence to be replaced by expertise, by an indubitable knowledge of the ‘facts’ that make
up ‘reality’. But this distinction is more subtle than he makes it out to be. Stereotypes
too produce the belief that one is dealing with ‘reality’ and with ‘incontrovertible fact
fortified by irresistible logic’ (Lippmann, 1922: 127). In effect, the only difference
10 Theory, Culture & Society 

between such a belief and the early Lippmann’s own ‘belief in reason’ is the latter’s
reliance on experts. I surmise that a century later, his belief in an objective expert truth
that carries political decisions based in ‘reason’ has, through dissemination and repeti-
tion in political rhetoric across party lines, itself hardened into a stereotype that now
shapes public opinion.
If this is correct, it would account for the impasse in the post-truth debate. The mutual
disqualification between the two camps bears a striking resemblance to the encounter
Lippmann describes between people with incompatible stereotypes. Each side confi-
dently presents ‘anecdotes about the real truth and the inside truth, the deeper and the
larger truth’ (Lippmann, 1922: 118f.). And each believes that the opponent must be
‘unreasonable or perverse’, a ‘dangerous fool’ or a liar; even the existence of ‘plots’ or
‘conspiracies’ may be assumed to explain the opponent’s resistance to truth (1922: 125–
9). Paradoxically, when the ideal of a politics based on expert truth becomes a stereotype,
it can divide those who share it. Hayek’s model of expertise allows for different attitudes
towards established experts, but the overarching belief in a single compelling truth pre-
vents meaningful dialogue between these attitudes.

A Counterproposal: Dewey and Schutz

If post-truth and the failure of the post-truth debate are related to a specific rhetoric, a
way out of the impasse will require reconsidering that rhetoric and re-examining the role
of truth and expertise. Without pretending to have a fail-proof solution, I will sketch a
starting point marked by American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and Austrian-
American phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, who criticized their contemporaries Lippmann
and Hayek.
The early Lippmann hoped that future social scientists would follow in the footsteps
of physics by discovering objective truths of undeniable certainty. But this hope is unten-
able. The social sciences differ fundamentally from the natural sciences, as they must
take into account the perspective of their ‘objects’, human beings who experience the
world and act within it (Schutz, 1962 [1953]). What is more, Lippmann’s ideal misses
even the natural sciences. According to Dewey (1930), the belief in undeniable ‘cer-
tainty’ goes back to a metaphysical split, represented by Platonism, between a realm of
eternal truth and the fleeting stage of everyday life. The modern scientific method,
Dewey stresses, renounced eternal truth, but the split-world metaphysics endured and
was projected upon the sciences. Indeed, Lippmann explicitly calls for a renewal of
Plato’s vision through science. Also, his ideal of mathematization harks back to the main
historical medium for this projection: numbers and formulae, originally tools of counting
and measuring practices, were re-interpreted as echoes of an eternal, abstract order (cf.
also Husserl, 1970 [1954]). But the same metaphysics leads to the kind of despair the
later Lippmann displays. Searching for absolute truth, we soon realize that mere mortals
cannot reach it. As human beings, scientists cannot grasp purely ‘objective’ facts which
have been severed from any human context. Lippmann’s mistaken ideal of science is the
single source for both his early faith in expertise and his later skepticism.
Dewey too uses physics as his main example but reaches a different conclusion.
Scientific facts are formulated in relation to specific questions, theories, methods, and
Strassheim 11

experimental settings. As modern scientists are aware, their truths always remain provi-
sional. All findings need to be questioned and tested again and again in subsequent
inquiry. This is an argument not against truth or facts, but against their metaphysical
misinterpretation. Truth is not the impossible correspondence of a human perspective to
something independent of any human perspective. As argued more recently with refer-
ence to Dewey and other pragmatists, truth is an outcome of human practices (Misak,
2000; Cuevas-Badallo and Labrador-Montero, 2020).15 Scientific facts are produced
through practices of decontextualization (including mathematical formalization). While
decontextualization is essential to modern science and technology, its products never
leave behind human context. Decontextualization is a practice of interpretation; hence
there are no ‘facts, pure and simple’, but only ‘interpreted facts’ (Schutz, 1962[1953]: 5).
If we reject the early Lippmann’s ideal of science, his ‘noble lie’ of a fundamental
dichotomy between experts and ordinary citizens collapses with it. A way of rethinking
the role of experts and their relation to ordinary citizens is offered in a 1946 essay by
Schutz (1964 [1946]), who had criticized Hayek in the 1930s and participated in the
1938 Lippmann colloquium. Schutz distinguishes the ‘man on the street’, who ‘accepts
his sentiments and passions as guides’ (Schutz, 1964 [1946]: 122, 134), from the ‘expert’,
who follows the methods accepted in their field. Schutz thinks expertise is important, but
he does not recommend it as the sole basis for politics.16 The reason is a troubling resem-
blance between the ‘expert’ and the ‘man on the street’. For both, what they treat as ‘fact’
is pre-selected and shaped by ‘systems of relevance’17 (Schutz, 1970 [1951]) accepted in
their social group:

(1) The ‘man on the street’ follows routines, beliefs, and values taken for granted in
his culture, nation, class, generation, gender, etc. Like Lippmannian ‘stereo-
types’, these patterns blind him to possible alternatives.
(2) The ‘expert’ suffers from a similar partial blindness or ‘tunnel vision’ (Dreyfus
and Dreyfus, 2005; Strassheim, 2016). She too follows relevancies established in
her community. Taking for granted, first, the boundaries of her field that limit in
advance what can become an object of her expertise, she then treats every object
according to the problems, methods, and aims standardized within that field. As
a result, she is in constant danger of reducing the whole of society, and with it the
facts relevant to policy, to what is relevant in her field. Where the economist sees
a fiscal target, the medical expert sees a public health hazard, and the climate
scientist sees an environmental crisis – and each may be oblivious to what the
others see.

How can we overcome both types of blindness? Schutz points to a third figure:

(3) The ‘well-informed citizen’ is prepared to look beyond established relevancies,

including those accepted in their own group or professional field.

Crucially, the capacity to do so exists in each of us, Schutz argues. This is because his
three figures do not represent kinds of people, as in Lippmann and Hayek, but idealized
traits present together in every person. We all behave as ‘men [or women] on the street’
12 Theory, Culture & Society 

in some areas and as ‘experts’ in others. But since we can also behave as ‘well-informed
citizens’, we are able to transcend the limitations of both. Schutz recommends that mod-
ern democracies encourage this latter behavior.
As ‘well-informed citizens’, we recognize a partial blindness in all human knowl-
edge. Common-sense truths but also scientific facts are embedded within an infinite
‘horizon’ (Husserl) of potentially relevant context, much of which was not even consid-
ered in the formation of our knowledge. Therefore, ‘well-informed citizens’ are ready to
question the relevancies which shape their knowledge at any given time. But this does
not make them despair of knowledge. As Dewey argued, not even science can reach
absolute ‘certainty’, but in science as in everyday life, we can reach ‘presumptive
knowledge’ (Dewey, 1930: 179), or ‘presumptive certainty’ (Husserl, 1973 [1939]:
§77), knowledge that we may ‘take for granted until further notice’ (Schutz, 1962
[1953]), that is, unless and until we find reasons to doubt it.18 Such knowledge can
be quite robust, but it always remains in need of scrutiny from a fresh perspective.
The process of (re-)contextualization never comes to a definitive end. Accordingly,
‘the well-informed citizen’ is an abbreviation for ‘the citizen who aims at being well
informed’ (Schutz, 1964 [1946]: 122).
Unlike the dream of shedding all human perspective, this stance involves taking
advantage of the multiplicity of human perspectives by consulting the views of others
and debating with them. Experts can be expected to have far better knowledge of their
field and should be included in democratic deliberation either directly or through ‘testi-
mony’ (Benson, 2019). But experts too are fallible and, as noted, limited by their very
expertise. Moreover, expertise does not come from a detached realm of pure objectivity
but from a constitutive interplay of politics and knowledge (Strassheim, 2017). A plural-
ity of perspectives, be it in democratic deliberation (Misak, 2000) or within expert com-
munities (Reiss, 2020), serves an indispensable epistemological function.
In the post-truth impasse, that function is blocked – on both sides – by claims to
definitive truths which exclude other views in advance as irrational or corrupt. While
‘fact-checking’ is critical, it is not a conclusive comparison of claims with an absolute
‘reality’ but a continuous effort to test claims by contextualizing them. Post-truth audi-
ences who dismiss established expertise in the name of ‘truth’ are clearly misguided, but
disqualifying them as irrational and responding with counterclaims of ‘truth’ only feeds
into the rhetoric that stifles the debate. Instead, we should address the problem by first
examining the inner logic that drives post-truth and its political success. Such an exami-
nation (itself an exercise in contextualizing) should consider the role of neoliberal epis-
temology. If the early Lippmann’s faith in experts and the later Lippmann’s skepticism
both stem from a misunderstanding of truth, then Hayek’s market model of expertise,
which reconciles both sides, solves an artificial problem that should never have arisen.
The impact of market models, economic crises, and inequality on post-truth audiences
requires further investigation.
Encouraging citizens to ‘aim at being well informed’ is a different matter today than
in Schutz’s 1946, as the internet increasingly replaces the newspaper. Digital technology
even facilitates the production and dissemination of post-truth (Pörksen, 2018). However,
if the motivation to do so is linked to a mistaken idea of truth, efforts to stimulate
‘well-informed’ citizenship, e.g. through education, political communication, or science
Strassheim 13

outreach, might help change the use of digital media and even put their ease of access to
a wide range of information sources to use in the task of open contextualization that a
more adequate idea of truth requires.

Conclusions
Lippmann and Hayek helped develop a political rhetoric of expert truth which has
become dominant across party lines since the 1990s. This rhetoric combines faith in
expert truth with skepticism of experts through the claim that the market mechanism
serves the common good. The 2008 financial crisis reinforced doubts about this claim
and, consequently, about the role of experts. Politicians like Trump harness dissatisfac-
tion with experts by couching it in the language of expert ‘truth’ itself. The resulting
‘post’-truth rhetoric attacks established expert communities and instead appeals to what
it claims are ‘real’ experts. On a formal level, the post-truth politician and many of their
critics who defend established expert communities share the same language. This bipar-
tisan language, however, stifles meaningful debate, as both sides disqualify each other as
unable or unwilling to follow ‘the truth’.
A possible way out of the impasse was proposed. Dewey argued that the paradox of
faith in expert truth and skepticism of experts stems from a metaphysical misconception
of science. Dewey and Schutz understand both scientific and everyday truth in terms of
‘presumptive knowledge’ which can be robust but forever remains in need of scrutiny
from fresh perspectives. Scientific ‘facts’ are produced through practices of decontextu-
alization but remain connected to human contexts. Schutz therefore advocates a pluralis-
tic and open-ended process of (re-)contextualization. His ideal of the ‘citizen who aims
at being well-informed’ transcends Lippmann’s dichotomy between experts and ordinary
citizens and should be encouraged in the public sphere.
I have singled out only one factor which may nevertheless be central. If post-truth
audiences are inherently conflicted in their assessment of experts, their stance is unsta-
ble, likely to merge with external motivations, and readily co-opted by vested interests
and corporate lies. A sweeping rejection of established experts in favor of renegade
‘facts’ and fringe experts easily spills over from economics to fields such as climate sci-
ence or medical research. Vague suspicions that experts are part of a wider ‘elite’ (whether
based on social criticism, on the higher ‘truth’ of conspiracy theorists, or on the Hayekian
idea that ‘real’ experts listen to ‘the people’) may find meaning and direction in existing
anti-democratic ideologies and propaganda, such as fascism, racism, or sexism.
‘Economic anger’ readily translates into ‘reactionary anger’ (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018), as
a ‘representation crisis’ mutates into a ‘power-devaluation crisis’ (Hahl et al., 2018).
The bipartisan dominance of a rhetoric of truth inspired by neoliberal epistemology
may be part of a wider ‘truth regime’ that binds truth and power even more closely to
the market form than in Foucault’s day. Harsin (2015) has even argued that a ‘regime
of post-truth’ produces multiple ‘truth markets’. This disintegration might be driven by
an overarching notion of ‘truth’, itself wedded to a market model of expertise. The
argument presented here would suggest that theoretical and practical approaches to the
post-truth phenomenon should further interrogate the role of economic thought, mar-
ket optimism, and inequality.19
14 Theory, Culture & Society 

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank six anonymous TCS reviewers for their constructive criticisms and sugges-
tions. Some of the arguments in this paper were presented in May 2018 at the conference of the
International Alfred Schutz Circle for Phenomenology and Interpretive Sociology, ‘Knowledge,
Nescience and the (New) Media’, at the University of Konstanz (Germany). For valuable com-
ments and suggestions, I would like to thank Holger Strassheim, as well as Yuko Katayama,
Hisashi Nasu and Benjamin Stuck. I am very grateful to Mariko Otsubo, Teppei Sekimizu and
Daniela Voss for their helpful comments on a first draft.

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German
Research Foundation) – 431058086.

ORCID iD
Jan Strassheim https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3324-8980

Notes
  1. See: https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/
  2. In 2017, this claim was voiced by philosophers as diverse as Daniel Dennett (www.theguard-
ian.com/science/2017/feb/12/daniel-dennett-politics-bacteria-bach-back-dawkins-trump-
interview), Roger Scruton (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/post-truth-pure-nonsense),
and A. C. Grayling (www.bbc.com/news/education-38557838). For a nuanced critique, see
Salmon (2018).
  3. In Hayekian terms, economists mathematically express the ‘general conditions’ under which
a market works optimally, but only the market itself can determine the prices in a way that
fulfills these conditions (Hayek, 1989 [1974]).
  4. This is not simply a paraphrase but effectively a reduction, as the Oxford Dictionary defines
‘post-fact’ by the same phrase, referring once again to ‘objective facts’.
 5. See: www.udel.edu/content/dam/udelImages/udaily/2017/April/pdf/march-for-science-
study-2017.pdf
  6. See: https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/
 7. See: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president
-donald-j-trump-earth-day/
  8. See: www.vox.com/2017/2/18/14659952/trump-transcript-rally-melbourne-florida
 9. See: https://time.com/5406000/donald-trump-united-nations-speech-criticism/. Similarly,
Gove did not simply attack ‘experts’ but experts whom he claimed were ‘getting it
consistently wrong’(https://news.sky.com/video/michael-gove-argues-for-the-uk-to-leave-the
-eu-in-a-live-sky-q-a-10303640).
10. The Brexit campaign also revolved around a contentious figure: ‘We send the EU £350 million
a week’.
11. It may be, for example, that ‘post-truthers feel threatened by truth, therefore they want to
undermine or emasculate truth’ (Bufacchi, 2021: 349), but such statements are hard to verify.
12. This type of relationship (for similar interpretations of ‘post’ see Lyotard, 1992; Harsin,
2015), aptly captured by the phrase ‘alternative fact’, holds across various formats of post-
truth rhetoric. Fake news is fake in content but nonetheless has the typical format of news,
rather than that of a joke or a fairytale. A doctored or wrongly captioned photograph is an
Strassheim 15

example of post-truth only when it purports to be photographic evidence of a real event, rather
than an internet meme or a work of art.
13. See: www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-fact-checker-tracked-trump-claims/2021/01/23/
ad04b69a-5c1d-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html
14. In a 2016 poll, 53% of the US public (71% of Trump voters) agreed with the statement:
‘Everyday Americans understand what the government should do better than the so-called
“experts”’ (www.huffpost.com/entry/poll-civil-service-experts_n_5849d515e4b04c8e2bae
ede9). The statement refers to ‘experts’ in scare quotes and with the qualification ‘the
so-called’. This works as a device for elicitation because it ties in with the post-truth logic.
15. This comes close to Habermasian ‘rightness’, although Misak (2000: 35ff.) rightly criticizes
Habermas’s ideal of rational consensus as too strong. Indeed, Habermas (1998) sees ‘right-
ness’ as an ‘analogue’ to a ‘Platonist’ metaphysics of absolute truth.
16. Schutz stands between Brennan (2016: 4ff.), who introduces another dichotomy (‘vulcans’
versus ‘hobbits’/‘hooligans’), and Fuller, who tends to level all such distinctions and conse-
quently conflates Schutz with Lippmann (Fuller, 2018: 21).
17. On theories of ‘relevance’ and ‘irrelevance’ more generally, see Strassheim (2018).
18. This holds on the meta-level too. Even a modern Platonist can claim no more than ‘presump-
tive grounds to favor epistocracy over democracy’ (Brennan, 2016: 21). Dewey and Schutz
would add that we will never have ‘sufficient evidence to definitely favor’ expert government
(Brennan, 2016: 16) because truth is never more than ‘presumptive’.
19. Given the elastic but fragile nature of Hayek’s model, post-truth may also be linked to ‘post-
neoliberalism’ in ways that are being accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis (Davies and Gane,
2021).

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Jan Strassheim is a post-doctoral researcher in Philosophy at the University of Hildesheim

(Germany) and PI of the DFG-funded project ‘Towards an Anthropology of Relevance’. Among
his research areas are social theory, phenomenology, and philosophy of language. Publications
include a book on Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology (Sinn und Relevanz, 2015, in German)
and the multidisciplinary volume Relevance and Irrelevance (2018, co-edited with Hisashi Nasu).