After Post‐Truth: Revisiting the Lippmann-Dewey Debate

Abstract

The debate on post‐truth has sought to restore what it held to be the proper relationship between knowledge, truth, and political judgment. This made for an intuitively plausible response to the experience of democracy itself being increasingly contested. However, with the re‐election of Donald Trump as US president and a broad array of instances of democratic backsliding in Europe and beyond, such a restorative framing may have exhausted itself. Therefore, we suggest revisiting the Lippmann-Dewey debate as a starting point for an alternative way of theorizing the contemporary crisis of democracy and knowledge production. The article outlines the potential of revisiting the Lippmann-Dewey debate to this end in three steps. First, we read the Lippmann-Dewey debate as a classical instance of the contestation of the concept of (liberal) democracy. Second, we discuss the relevance of two fundamentally different perspectives on the politics of knowledge: expertise and education. Third, we introduce two empirical sites to further illustrate such reflexive contestedness: the contestation of economic knowledge during European austerity politics and the role of Scientists for Future in environmental protests. A brief conclusion reflects on how one could think of the paradigmatic positions of Dewey and Lippmann not as mutually exclusive but complementary ways to problematize democracy in crisis.