By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

Linda Zerilli proposed a democratic theory of truth that requires citizens to engage in the public space to continually affirm factual truth. “Whatever is true is expressed by us arising from everyday life with language,” she said.

UCLA International Institute, February 17, 2026 — In a talk on January 30 about her latest book, “A Democratic Theory of Truth” (Chicago, 2025), political scientist Linda M.G. Zerilli argued that doubling down on fact checking will not solve the widespread power of lies in modern democratic political life.

“Epistocratic solutions — trusting experts over citizens — don’t resolve this crisis. They risk authoritarianism by reducing citizen opinion to mere subjectivity,” she insisted.

Zerilli, Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where she also teaches gender and sexuality studies, spoke at a political theory workshop cosponsored by UCLA’s department of political science and International Institute. UCLA political scientists Giulia Sissa and Tejas Parasher served as discussant and host of the workshop, respectively. The nuanced, detailed presentation and discussion that ensued is summarized here with a focus on the main themes of Zerilli’s presentation.

Drawing on the work of political philosophers Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt and their respective interpretations of Socrates, as well as the work of Wittgenstein and other modern philosophers, she argued that affirming factual truth in the political sphere requires sustained citizen engagement.

“We should recognize that the core issue is worldly disorientation and the erosion of citizen trust in the very existence of facts and objective truth… The question isn’t just whether something is true or false. The real question is: Under what conditions do democratic citizens commit themselves to certain truths?” she asked.

In Zerilli’s view, only through discussion and the exchange of citizens’ opinions in the public forum can we agree on which political truths will and will not compel our actions, based on lived experience and how we use language to describe that experience. “There is truth in opinion, and we have to pull it out precisely through talking to others,” she said, asserting that this this process is essential to democracy.

Foucault on truth and power

“What if the coercive force of truth doesn’t rely on truth alone but on us?” asked Zerilli as she began a discussion of Foucault’s later work.

“Foucault distinguishes between games of truth and regimes of truth. This distinction is vital for understanding our current situation,” she noted. “The game of truth refers to the epistemological standards we use to decide whether something is true or false. These include the rules of evidence, verification and rational argument. Foucault agrees that these standards are part of the game itself.

“But here’s the key point: Once we agree that something is true, we are not automatically bound by what Foucault calls the regime. The practical consequences are obligations that come with accepting that truth.

“As he explains,” she continued, “there is always a certain assertion that does not belong exactly to the realm of the true or the false. [It] is a sort of commitment, a sort of profession: ‘If it is true, therefore I will submit,’” she continued.

“The subject’s submission to truth does not belong to the game of truth itself. This distinction,” said Zerilli, “helps explain something puzzling about contemporary politics: Why citizens with vastly different political views can agree on facts.

“With Foucault, we can reformulate the post-truth question like this: Is the problem really that people don’t know the truth, or that truth alone can’t tell us what to do? It has no intrinsic coercive force.

“For Foucault, power has no intrinsic legitimacy. Any form of power is contingent. It could have been otherwise. Instead of assuming that we should bind ourselves to something simply because it is true, we should both contest the idea that there is no truth and problematize the intrinsic value of truth for democratic politics.

“This is not relativism,” insisted Zerilli. “Instead, it shifts our focus from ‘It is true’ to the influence we give to truth. We can critically examine how people have gradually connected themselves to different forms of power through the expression of truth, including those that oppose democracy.”

____________________________

“Arendt recognized that loneliness, isolation, silos and vastly attenuated
public spaces have generated growing cynicism regarding
factuality and liberal democratic capitalist societies.”
____________________________

Arendt on truth and lies in politics

“For Arendt,” said Zerilli, “the despotic character of truth lies in the idea that it has nothing to do with us, specifically with citizen opinion — the free public exchange — which is the hallmark of all political thinking. But in contrast with Foucault, Arendt seems to assume that truth does indeed have a coercive force.

“Now, Arendt’s position is much more nuanced than it first appears. She recognizes that without accepted factual truths, there would be no public realm and no opinions to exchange. Shared factual truths form the scaffolding of the public realm, but she insists that the compelling force of truth should be excluded from what she calls the wholly persuasive nature of political debate.

“Arendt admits factual truth is no more self-evident than opinion, and opinion holders find it relatively easy to discredit factual truth as just another opinion. [I]n other words, even though Arendt talks about truth as compulsory, truth as coercive, she also sees factual truth as deeply fragile, deeply vulnerable, precisely because it is contingent and also because it is dependent, ultimately, on people talking about it. In other words, people have to continually reaffirm factual truths for them to have any practical meaning.”

Zerilli then turned to one of the most significant contributions of Arendt to the post-truth debate: the distinction between the traditional political lie and the modern political lie.

“The traditional lie aims to mislead or distort reality, while the modern political lie, which emerged with 20th-century totalitarianism, seeks to recreate reality itself,” said the speaker.

“The modern lie is a complex phenomenon that both creates and destroys reality using truth claims not to conceal or distort, but to undermine the very foundation for distinguishing between true and false, and for believing that factual truth exists at all.

“Arendt,” she continued, “relates the modern lie to the power to shape reality through action. She states that the lie changes the record of history, not as a false statement that denies truth, but as a perlocationary speech act [an act that has an emotional effect on the listener] that, like political action, alters something in the world...

“If we focus solely on the liar, enthralled by the virtuosity of the liar, we lose sight of the lie,” said Zerilli. “It is the lie as boundless action that has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries… every action becomes a chain reaction, and every process is the cause of new processes.

“Arendt recognized that loneliness, isolation, silos and vastly attenuated public spaces have generated growing cynicism regarding factuality and liberal democratic capitalist societies.”

Re-imagining truth as a process of the free exchange of citizen opinion

An approach that counters traditional lies by exposing falsehoods, errors and deliberate dissimulation will “focus on fact checking and knowledge practices that generate unbiased information and the cognitive ability to process it objectively, but [will] not address the problem of the modern lie as a form of action,” said Zerilli.

She pointed out that Foucault clearly thought that the most dangerous political system was one that claimed to lay down the truth. “This is the genuine truth that the post-truth debate conceals,” she reflected.

“Democracy has always accommodated truth claims, including falsehoods. Citizens must discern who tells the truth without granting any regime absolute authority over it… [W]e we need to carefully consider what happens when we invoke truth in politics, whose interests benefit, which forms of power are validated and what opportunities for democratic freedom are lost.

“Instead of assuming that truth inherently wields coercive power, I propose what I call a realistic approach, drawing on ordinary language philosophers like [Ludwig] Wittgenstein, Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell. This realistic spirit acknowledges that reality is not separate from how we speak and act, but exists within them. Truth is not some higher force waiting to be found outside our practices. Whatever is true is expressed by us arising from everyday life with language,” she explained.

“We should problematize the ‘you have to’ of truth and become aware that no ‘therefore’ [as in, ‘It is true, therefore I submit’] is automatically decided for us by the truth itself, however decisively we may accept the criteria of any game,” she said in reference to Foucault.

“We can recognize with Arendt and Foucault that affirming truth is always a political act, one that can support different forms of power, including those opposed to democratic freedom. Everything we need for critical thinking and democratic truth telling is already available in our public acting and speaking. Democratic truths and their consequences depend, in this sense, on us.”

____________________________

“We we need to carefully consider what happens when we invoke truth in politics,
whose interests benefit, which forms of power are validated and what opportunities
for democratic freedom are lost.”
____________________________

Arendt, Socrates and Protagoras

UCLA Distinguished Professor of Political Science Giulia Sissa remarks on “A Democratic Theory of Truth” focused on correcting Arendt’s romanticization of the Socratic dialog, which informs the arguments Zerilli makes in the book.

The Socratic dialog, said Sissa, “is not a form of curious, friendly, charitable engagement [where] you are really interested in what the other person thinks because you think that there is an inherent truth to discover.

“It’s not a conversation, it’s not an exchange, it’s not curiosity about what the other person thinks… [Socratic] dialog is a bespoke refutation and not a discourse addressed to a crowd and not an engagement with the people at large.”

Nor, emphasized the political scientist, can Socratic dialog be understood as having taken place in the agora, or the public space. “The elegant drinking parties and gym clubs and other venues where Socrates mingles with this friends — friend who are poets, public intellectuals and leisurely individuals — these venues are not the location of popular assemblies. It’s a completely different world. Socrates is not a model of democratic doxa [public opinion].

“The dialog is the beginning, not the end, because definition is going to be dismantled, question after question after question after question. This is the theater of Platonic philosophy, of dialogical philosophy.” Along with refutation, Sissa used the metaphors of testing, torturing, purification or catharsis, catastrophe and tragic comedy to describe Socratic dialog.

“The culmination of this glamorization of Socrates [is that] Socrates did not want to educate the citizen with his truth so much as he wanted to improve their doxa with his own,” she said.

Rather than Socrates, “Protagoras is the person who really thinks in tune with this project, because Protagoras is the person who theorizes a form of truth that is relative, situational, relational — and which is precisely all we want for democracy,” asserted Sissa.

“And this is why Protagoras is, in Plato’s casting, precisely the most important theorist of the value of democratic speaking, of doxa as good for, good enough, good for the here and now.

“I think that a contemporary philosopher who would be a further good companion in this travel to Greece is Barbara Cassin, who has completely transformed our understanding of the Sophists exactly in this direction,” she concluded.

In her response, Zerilli was more than willing to concede that Arendt got Socrates wrong, but said she wanted to preserve the alternative model of truth that Arendt was trying to (incorrectly) draw out of Socrates.

“I want to hold onto this central insight about what does it mean to really think that there’s truth and opinion, and how that is a different starting point than the binary conception of truth,” she said.

All photos by Peggy McInerny/ UCLA.

Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2026