In a recent New York Times article on “James Frey’s admission that he invented many of the details of his life in his best selling book, A Million Little Pieces,” Michiko Kakutani suggests that the furor surrounding Frey’s exposure as a fraud is misplaced. The issue, says Kakutani, is not just a case of “truth-in-labeling”; many memoirs, after all, have been accused of being made up.¹ Rather, “It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth.”² The disturbing fact is, he writes, that we live in a culture in which people do not attach very much importance “to objectivity and veracity.

We live in a relativistic culture where television “reality shows” are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics, where academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history, where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the “reality-based community,” can assert that “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”. Phrases like “virtual reality” and “creative nonfiction” have become part of our language. Hype and hyperbole are an accepted part of marketing and public relations. And reinvention and repositioning are regarded as useful career moves in the worlds of entertainment and politics. The conspiracy-minded, fact-warping movies of Oliver Stone are regarded by those who don’t know better as genuine history, as are the most sensationalistic of television docudramas.³

If we recognize in Kakutani’s description fundamental characteristics of American late modernity, where does this leave us as political theorists? Just as James Frey was not the first author to misrepresent his past, George W. Bush, as Tracy Strong reminds us, is not the first president to lie to the American public. And just as Frey’s exposure led to an intense but nonetheless short-lived sense of outrage — Oprah, after endorsing the book, invited him back on the show to chastise him in public — so too did the Bush administration’s exposure on the matter of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction have its famous fifteen minutes in the mainstream news media. In both cases outrage was on the whole tempered by a certain cynicism: “he lied; so what’s new?” It is just this “so what?” response, even if it is preceded by an initial sense of outrage, that Kakutani would have us explain.

Kakutani blames “postmodernists,” “deconstructionists,” “radical feminists,” and “multiculturalists” for “our culture’s enshrinement of subjectivity — “moi” as a modus opernadi for processing the world.”⁴ But that is like killing the messenger. The radical subjectivism he decries hardly arose with identity politics, let alone with Derrida and Foucault. Indeed, pace Kakutani, the subjectivism that “replaces the old ideas of objective truth” is not what comes after modernity. No, the threat of subjectivism was always already there as the other face of modernity and its notion of objective truth. For the quest for truth, as modern science radically reconceived it, took leave of the world-giving and supposedly world-distorting properties of common sense and “mere opinion” and sought real knowledge through the controlled and supposedly neutral application of method.

Recognizing and bemoaning the subjectivist character of modernity, Hannah Arendt (following the insights of Nietzsche and Heidegger), did not rally behind the idea of objective truth. She recognized that such truth carries with it not only a coercive element that endangers politics but also that the vehicle of truth’s discernment, scientific method, sets itself against common sense and tends to deprive people of a worldly context in which things make sense for them, a context in which they could hold things to be true. As I argued in my essay, Arendt was not indifferent to the claim of truth, but that claim of truth was, in her view, always relative: from the perspective of democratic politics, she fiercely held, what matters is not care for truth but care for the world.

It is easy to lose sight of the world when your concern is truth. I...