Suchergebnisse

Issue of the University of Scranton student newspaper, The Aquinas. This edition includes a four-page arts feature, The Electric City Review.

We are immersed in a political struggle around "facts." Hannah Arendt (1967), in her classic piece on "Truth and Politics," quoted above, carefully examined the difference between "factual truth" and its interpretation in order to show the political danger of obliterating the distinction between truth and opinion. The interpretation of facts and how to deal with them in order to change the world were the stuff of political projects and action but need to stand on the solid ground of factual truth. According to Arendt, one of the modes of substituting facts with lies is through making factual truth equivalent to opinion, something that the Trump administration has done with the phrase "alternative facts."

Who are the 'people' supporting 'populist' leaders and what are their claims? The argument I seek to develop here is that 'populist' mobilisations (of all kinds) are a reassessment of the continued reality of illiberal capitalism and the withering away of the ideological force of the illusion of Enlightenment liberalism and democracy. Hence, rather than focusing on 'illiberal democracy' I will focus on the inherently 'illiberal' aspect of capitalism and on the irresolvable contradiction of the ideological articulation of democracy and capitalism that has repeatedly produced a 'populist' kind of conflict. Indeed, we find similar anti-liberal and anti-capitalist popular mobilisations scattered throughout European history in the nineteenth century, taking the form either of 'resistance' revolts seeking to preserve rights and duties embedded in obligations attached to privileges of status, and 'transformative' revolutions seeking to establish an egalitarian society.