Introduction by David Bromwich

“No one,” Hannah Arendt observed, “has ever counted truthfulness as a political virtue.” But why do politicians lie? What is the relationship between political lies and self-delusion? And how much organized deceit can a democracy endure before it ceases to function? Fifty years ago, the century’s greatest political theorist turned her focus to these essential questions in two seminal essays, brought together here for the first time. Her conclusions, delivered in searching prose that crackles with insight and intelligence, are as urgently needed today as when they were written, perhaps more so.

In “Truth and Politics,” Arendt explores the affinity between lying and politics, and reminds us that the survival of factual truth depends on the testimony of credible witnesses and on an informed citizenry. She shows how our shared sense of reality—the texture of facts in which we wrap our daily lives—can be torn apart by organized lying, replaced with a fantasy world of airbrushed evidence and doctored documents. Facts are degraded into opinions, and, in an ironic twist, liars may come to believe their own fabrications.

In “Lying in Politics,” written in response to the release of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt applies these insights to an analysis of American policy in Southeast Asia. She argues that the Vietnam War—and the official lies used to justify it by successive administrations—was at root an exercise in image-making, more concerned with displaying American power than with achieving strategic objectives.

In his introduction, David Bromwich engages with Arendt’s essays in the context of her other writings and underscores their clarion call to take seriously the ever-present threat to democracy posed by lying.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the foremost political philosophers of the twentieth century. Among her major works are The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution, and the posthumously published The Life of the Mind. Her commentaries on modern American and European politics and on the history of political thought are collected in Essays in Understanding, Thinking Without a Banister, and Responsibility and Judgment.

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. His books include The Intellectual Career of Edmund Burke and American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us. His articles on contemporary politics, the war on terror, and the fate of civil liberties in the United States have appeared in Dissent, The Nation, Huff-Post, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books.