The Conversation
I. A Fruitful Approach
Investigating âthe politicalâ
HB: Iâd like to discuss aspects of intellectual history and your other academic interests, and we will hopefully move in that direction during the course of this conversation. But for the moment letâs begin with your book, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics, and discuss the motivations and inclinations that you had in writing it.
You start off the book by talking about Christopher Hitchens and his book on Bill Clinton, No One Left to Lie To. In that book, Hitchens alludes to lying and perjuring as the sine qua non of disreputability, along with why it is that no one should take the Clintons seriously. This piqued your interest not simply with respect to general attitudes towards lying, but to the entire issue of lying in the public realm.
Years later, when Hitchens became an advocate for the war in Iraq, the matter of whether the authorities had publicly lied concerning the existence of certain weapons of mass destruction, and other matters did not seem to matter to him so much anymore, as the justification for the war focused much more narrowly on the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. He tacked quite wildly himself.
But Iâm guessing that you had been thinking about these sorts of ideas well before then. How much did Hitchens and his discussion of lying in the public sphere trigger things that were already there, and how much of that caused you to think afresh about these ideas?
MJ: Well, I doubt I would have written the book if I hadnât been asked by the London Review of Books to write a review of Hitchensâ book. That was the immediate cause. But youâre absolutely right, there must have been something prior to that; and it was probably my reading of Hannah Arendt, specifically her essays on truth and politics and lying in politics.
These essays were in a way typically Arendtianâwhich is to say, against the conventional wisdom, provocative, and not fully clear on the implications. She was always subtle enough to understand the ambiguities of positions. The notion that there is something special about the political realmâsomething that sets it apartâwas something that she was a great advocate of.
Reading her essays started me thinking about whether or not one of the things that did set the political realm apart is precisely the âpassâ given, under many circumstances, to the fudging, or twisting, or shading, of the truthâand perhaps even outright lying. At the very same time, the very accusation of lyingâthe accusation hurled at oneâs enemiesâis itself such a staple of politics.
That paradoxâthat people often accept the fact that politics is a realm in which certain moral conventions about lying are, if not suspended, at least qualified, while at the same time accepting that within politics the accusation of lying could be used as a tool against enemiesâwas probably lurking in the background when I was asked to review the books by Hitchens and George Stephanopoulos by the London Review.
HB: It seems to me that, as an intellectual historian, this is a perfect sort of subject to wrap your head around, because you can look at not only lying but at the conjunction of lying and politics. You can explore that combination from Platoâs time up to the present day, which of course you do in the book.
Am I wrong in saying that this is a paradigmatically meaty topic, one that as an intellectual historian you say to yourself, âThis is a good one. I can really sink my teeth into thisâ?
MJ: Intellectual history gives you certain tools to relativize absolute contemporary positions. It gives you a sense of the sedimented and often contradictory legacy of other peopleâs thoughts on these issues. So instead of thinking that you can ever get it right in the kind of transcendental way in which history is suspended, it makes you sensitive to the fact that other people, over many centuries and in many different contexts, have also thought about the same issues.
Lying itself, and the issue of what constitutes politics, are not questions that have self-evident answers. One has to do the spadework to figure out what other people have said.
Iâve always been interested in what I call âcultural semanticsââways in which words mean different things over long periods of time, etymologies, and how different discursive contexts shade them in ways that we sometimes forget, but which, nonetheless, may still be palpable beneath the surface, still have an efficacy.
Thereâs an enormous tradition of people pondering the implications of lying, the justificationsâor lack thereofâfor lying. And then, when I really got into this subject, questions about âthe politicalââwhat we mean by âpoliticsâ, how we are to understand its boundaries, whether or not we can talk about it having an essence, whether or not we can make a distinction between âthe politicalâ as an ontological phenomenon on the one hand versus banal, mundane politics on the otherâall of that became available for intellectual historical exploration.
HB: From my perspective, it looks like you used lying as a toolâas a scalpel, sayâto look at what the political realm really is and how it differs from other areas. You talk about âleakageâ from one realm to the other, while other political philosophers have sometimes spoken about âsealing offâ a political realm. The question of lying seemed to me like a probe that you could use to explore these issues. Is that right?
MJ: I think that one could get into the political in many different ways. You can examine specific institutions, asking whether or not there are particularly political institutions as opposed to economic, social, or religious institutions, trying to determine when these political institutions became relatively autonomous (theyâre never fully autonomous).
One can ask about activities: what constitutes being political? Is the personal political, as we thought in the 1970s? If so, is there no distinction between a man deciding to wash the dishes or going on strike and starting a revolution, since everything is political?
You could also ask about the political in terms of its, as it is sometimes referred to, âoppositions in a semantic fieldâ: the public versus the private, the political versus the economic, or the political versus the moral.
Politicsâand this is true of all termsâneeds to be situated in a dynamic force field of competitive and sometimes synonymous terms. And the crucial thing to note is that this is historically variable: the political in our society at this moment is not the same as the political in the European Middle Ages, or in, say, a society that existed prior to Columbusâ discovery of America.
These terms have their histories and they have their shifting terrains. As you say, one way to deal with that is to look at a particular theme. And for me, lying proved to be particularly fruitful in that respect.
- Do you think that the political realm is a fundamentally different one than other areas of human activity? Are some people ânaturally cut out for politicsâ?
- What do you think Martin means, exactly, when he refers to âgetting it right in the kind of transcendental way in which history is suspendedâ? Does this imply that there is no such thing as âobjective truthâ?
II. The Liarâs Stage
From Machiavelli to political play-acting
HB: Another notion that you discuss is not only how different socie...