On Lying and Politics

More urgent than ever, two landmark essays by the legendary political theorist on the greatest threat to democracy, gathered with a new introduction by David Bromwich

Few writers have understood the deep implications of "big lies" better than Hannah Arendt. This short volume brings together for the first time two of her most widely discussed and quoted essays-"Truth and Politics," first published in February 17, 1967 issue of The New Yorker, and "Lying in Politics," which appeared in the November 18, 1971 issue of The New York Review of Books. In these seminal works Arendt explored the natural affinity between lying and politics, and the danger that deceit represents to "the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world" and to our ability to differentiate between truth and falsehood, between the real and unreal.

In an introductory essay, David Bromwich (American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us) rereads Arendt's essays on lying as a clarion call for our fractious times. He examines Arendt's contention that we become cut off from our own life experience by the human tendency to normalize the aberrant and atrocious. And once we become cut off from our own experience, we lose the ability to question official representations of reality-and can adapt to anything.