Among the astonishing variety of sources mentioned in Martin Jay's new book on lying in politics the reader will find ancient Greek philosophical dialogues, pamphlet controversies between eighteenth-century philosophers, post-structural literary theories and, resting easily among the likes of these, a familiar old joke. “How can you tell when a politician is lying?” Jay asks. “He moves his lips” is the answer my grandfather used to give, and that is the punch-line that Jay recounts here. But my grandfather told the joke as part of a syllogism whose unstated premise was “lying is bad” and whose common-sense conclusion was that politics is corrupt. Jay is not satisfied with that conclusion. His book, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics, puts forward a very different argument: He assumes that politics is worthwhile, suggests that it is unavoidably linked to lying, and concludes that lying must not be as bad as we think it is. There are a host of complications and caveats, so many that one could spend a whole review admiring the virtuosity involved in constructing such a rich pastiche of historical episodes and texts touching on mendacity. But the frisson that the book provokes comes almost entirely from its willingness to flirt with the endorsement of vice, so any serious engagement with it cannot avoid responding in some way to that flirtation.

The book begins with a playful trick—not a lie, but a temporary withholding of information with strategic intent. Jay quotes a stirring sentence condemning lying in politics and then reveals that the sentence comes from a program published by the Nazi Party, the same one that would eventually engage in massive propaganda campaigns. Of course, as he recognizes, the horrible ugliness of Nazism had almost nothing to do with that particular hypocrisy. Also, Jay admits, the Nazis were too extreme to be typical of anything in politics. Nevertheless he introduces them as the first and therefore defining case of the phenomenon he wants to discuss in his introduction, that of “railing against the ‘lies’ of one's opponents while privately granting to oneself the right to commit one's own in the name of a higher cause than truth-telling” (3). From this example he moves directly to the so-called “noble lie” from Plato's Republic, thus bringing the Nazis together with “their favorite philosopher” to demonstrate that professed lovers of truth can be liars themselves.

Only after tarnishing moralisms against lying in this way does he bring into view his real object of inquiry. It is the typically American “dream of transparent politics,” a dream that stems from “the powerful legacy of ruthless Puritan self-examination and insistence on interpersonal transparency” (7). We still teach the dream to our children whenever we retell the familiar fable about George Washington as a boy, heroically unable to lie to his father about having cut down a cherry tree. An illustration of boy Washington and his tree graces the cover of Jay's book, and captures the simple moralism that he means to undermine. When Jay finally turns to the story in the introduction he points out its source—the popular 1806 edition of Mason Locke Weems's Life of Washington—and quickly comes to his point: Weems “in fact made up the anecdote, or more accurately, plagiarized it from an earlier story by James Beattie” (8). As with the Nazis so it is much closer to home, we learn. Campaigns against lying are often waged by liars, and the professed love of truth is no guarantee of truthfulness. It is clear from the introduction that we will not be allowed to take comfort in the reassuring truths we learned in school, or from our grandparents.

Jay's book comes at a good moment for thinking about truth and politics. Older studies, such as Hannah Arendt's important 1967 New Yorker essay “Truth and Politics,” were still very much shaped by reflections on the totalitarian propaganda of the Nazis and the Soviets.Footnote ¹ Today the topic is no less important, but our political culture raises new obstacles to truth and new fears about its elusiveness. Many major news organizations have consciously discarded the aspiration to present a nonpartisan view of the news, and the Internet seems to provide no common version for everyone. Political campaigns and public-relations offices operate on principles virtually indistinguishable from those of advertising agencies. The anxieties that these facts provoke are evident in one of the most watched shows on television, Mad Men, which concerns itself almost entirely with the question whether a life composed of lies can be good.

Like today's most skillful pundits and politicos, and like the television show, Jay has a real appreciation for the virtuosity that can be found in lying. In this way his interest in lying is different from the familiar realist one with which it might at first be confused. The realist accepts, with a resigned sigh, the Machiavellian insight that lies, half-truths or secrets may be necessary sometimes, that lying may occasionally be the best of a bad set of options. The realist can make such admissions while still recognizing the corrosive effect that lies, even small ones, can have in public life. His freedom from conventional morality allows him to weigh the pros and cons of lying in a cold and calculating manner. Jay, in contrast, takes us beyond that world-weary wisdom and into quite another register; at his most provocative he introduces the thought that lying might actually be “part of what makes politics valuable” (18). Numerous times in the book he raises “the Straussians” so that he can distinguish his interest in mendacity from their tolerance of esotericism. But the Straussian line on lying, I believe, is that it may sometimes be prudent or necessary, which is actually a milder and less celebratory stance than this effort to speak of mendacity's “virtues.” Both positions fit the moment, however, in treating as naive the simple distaste for lying in politics that most people still feel.

Is that conventional feeling really so simple-minded? Part of the problem in defending it is that honesty's spokesmen have not always made their case persuasively. Jay devotes the culminating part of his chapter on lying to the well-known eighteenth-century debate between Immanuel Kant and Benjamin Constant over the question whether lies are ever justified (66–75). As even Kantians acknowledge, it is hard to side with Kant in that particular exchange. Constant, with the recent history of police informers in France in mind, had put to him this test case: a known murderer is knocking at your door asking where to find your friend, whom you are hiding and whom he openly intends to kill. Is it morally justified to lie to the murderer? Kant bit the bullet and denied that it was, offering the chillingly cold explanation that “truthfulness in statements that one cannot avoid is a human being's duty to everyone, however great the disadvantage to him or to another that may result from it.”Footnote ² But, as Jay points out, Kant allowed himself to craft careful loophole-filled statements that were quite deceptive when he deemed it necessary. When he was made to promise King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia that he would stop writing about the controversial subject of religion, he promised to do so “as your faithful subject,” knowing full well that the king would soon die and that Kant would then, as subject to a different king, be free to write about religion without formally violating his word. With this famous example of Kant's own craftiness in mind we could easily dismiss his uncompromising answer to Constant as yet another example of hypocritical moralism. Some commentators have tried, however, to read Kant more sympathetically. Michael Sandel, for instance, recently pointed out that there is a principled distinction between Kant's true but evasive promise and an outright lie; in feeling the need to tell an evasive truth rather than simply lie, Kant implicitly acknowledged the wrongness of lying.Footnote ³ Instead of seeing only hypocrisy, then, we might admire Kant's effort to find ways to avoid lying even when faced with political constraints as clear and dangerous as royal censors. But Jay does not entertain possible vindications of Kant's behavior; he seems to agree with the commentators he cites who regard Kant's stance against lying as an “absurdity.” Nor does he consider whether it is fair to let the case for honesty end with Kant's peculiar defense of it, or whether Constant's pragmatic argument for balancing multiple moral principles against one another really points the way towards seeing mendacity as having virtues of its own. He is content to follow Hans Saner in seeing in Kant's position a sign that a strict rule against lying is simply not “a comfortable bedfellow of the political” (74).

The concept of “the political” brings us to the real heart of the book. Jay devotes a full chapter to exploring various ways in which twentieth-century thinkers have defined that concept so that he can then investigate how each definition might relate to lying. He treats six alternative definitions of the political: the antagonism of Carl Schmitt; the agonism of Chantal Mouffe's more recent work; the contractualism of classical liberalism; the governance by the wise of Plato and, Jay says, Straussian thinkers; the republican virtue of Machiavelli, Harrington, Rousseau and Habermas; and the aesthetic politics of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, and Claude Lefort. The grouping of theorists into these categories obviously raises a host of questions, but Jay elaborates each perspective in confident prose and leaves one with the sense of having been led by an experienced guide through some of the main currents of twentieth-century political thought. And the question of how reliable the categorization of theorists is seems not to be of tremendous importance for the overall argument, because not much is made to hang on the differences between the categories. Jay shows that when Schmitt tried to define the essence of the political realm, he was trying to clarify the way in which liberalism threatened to colonize it with a purportedly antipolitical ideology. And he shows Arendt doing something analogous but distinct in her effort to save politics from the corruptions of “the social.” But he regards these particular battles from a distance. He does not have to choose among the conceptions of politics he identifies because his main point is that all of them point to an “affinity” between politics and mendacity, and therefore that lying must be “somehow inherent in that realm of human endeavor we have come to call politics” (84).

The links that Jay finds between the first four conceptions of politics and lying can be summarized briefly enough. Insofar as politics is a realm of warlike antagonism, there would seem to be no reason not to use lying as one weapon in the war. Insofar as politics is an agonistic contest that stops short of war, diplomatic deception would seem to be a part of it. If politics is about making and keeping contracts, and therefore depends on at least the appearance of trustworthiness, it would seem naturally to give rise to the bourgeois hypocrisies that Benjamin Franklin described and that Judith Shklar defended. If politics is about good governance by wise elites, it might often serve the public good to manage the unwise through “noble” lies. None of these arguments is especially surprising or controversial.

When Jay comes to the final two conceptions of politics, however, the links to lying need more explanation. His argument about republicanism leans heavily on Hannah Arendt's essays on truth and politics. Arendt argued that “truth carries with it an element of coercion” because it demands to be recognized as the end of an argument rather than just a part of one.Footnote ⁴ “Politics,” writes Jay in glossing her view, “always keeps open the possibility of future persuasion, whereas truth demands to be recognized once and for all” (160). Since republican politics prizes the activity of persuasion, it cannot help but view assertions of truth as threats. Even Thomas Jefferson's beloved statement in the Declaration of Independence about self-evident truths is only compatible with republicanism, Arendt argued, because he unwittingly acknowledged the true character of those truths—as opinions—when he wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .” Republican politics—all true politics, on the Arendtian view—is the realm of opinion rather than truth. When you assert an opinion you are acting in Arendt's sense of the word, trying to start something new. Jay points to a passage in which Arendt suggested that lying is a surer way of starting something new (the falsehood) than telling the truth, since the truth refers to something that already exists. Arendt distinguished this sort of lying from the government-controlled mass deception practiced by totalitarian regimes, and she insisted that there were areas in which lies were intolerable, such as science and the judiciary, but what Jay emphasizes is that she also supposed that creative lying could be an example of political action. As Jay sympathetically sums up her position, “while it would be disastrous to politicize everything, it would be no less a loss to human freedom to extirpate the uncertain realm of opinion, rhetoric, and, yes, mendacity that we call ‘the political’” (163, emphasis added).

But notice here the word “yes” that Jay inserts prior to the word “mendacity.” The single-syllable affirmative is a form of rhetorical amplification. It is crucial to the rhythm of the sentence; it heightens the tension by delaying a cadence; it calls attention to what follows and gives the impression that the next word—mendacity—is an unwelcome but necessary truth, one that requires an extra act of will and an extra dose of intellectual courage to affirm. Because Arendt's view of politics is one that Jay seems to find congenial, the force of the whole book rests, ultimately, on this affirmation that mendacity must be included next to opinion and rhetoric as part of a truly republican politics. And yet it is precisely here that an objection both commonsensical and of deep theoretical significance must be registered: the need to live in the uncertain realm of opinion and rhetoric does not necessarily imply the need to accept, much less endorse, lying. The sort of republican politics that Arendt admired among the American revolutionaries was highly rhetorical, but to speak of the revolutionary councils and town meetings primarily as sites of creative lying would mischaracterize them. Arendt may have allowed herself, in a few moments of exploratory thought provoked by Rahel Varnhagen, to play with the idea that lying could be a form of political action. But there was nothing in her republicanism itself that compels us to give the point much weight. She may have been right that “seen from the viewpoint of politics, the truth has a despotic character,” but she did not thereby prove that lies are less despotic. Indeed—and this is a crucial point—lies pose as truths and so do not avoid whatever despotism may be inherent in claims to truth. What a republican politics of the kind that Arendt admired requires are modes of speech that preserve the possibility of continued mutual persuasion—neither truths nor lies, but opinions.

It is odd that in a book otherwise so hostile to Plato, Jay does not press harder against the very Platonic impulse to tie the realm of opinion to that of falsehood. Opinion is not demonstrably true, so it must be false—here is an argument from the pages of Plato's dialogues, an argument against rhetoric. But even Plato did not really denigrate opinion so thoroughly; even he saw at least the seeds of truth in opinions, as in his image of the “divided line” in the Republic, or when he showed Socrates finding mathematical principles implicit in the uneducated mind of a slave boy in the Meno. His student Aristotle expanded upon the potential in opinion and opened a whole world of prudence and deliberation in which falling short of philosophic truth could not be taken as a sign of untruth; this accounts in part for his rehabilitation of rhetoric. Other rhetoricians followed Aristotle's lead. Cicero defended oratory as having links with “the probable.” When Giambattista Vico revived the rhetorical tradition after the Cartesians tried to leave it behind, he too insisted upon the dignity of mere opinion and of the rhetoric based upon it. No one in the long rhetorical tradition so closely wrapped up with republicanism reduced the political realm of probable beliefs and opinions into a world of lies; their intellectual task was to resist precisely this reduction. Indeed, one of the best recent works on rhetoric goes so far as to argue that rhetoric is actually best understood as the art of disclosing facts.Footnote ⁵ In the history of political thought, the close linkage of opinion with falsehood is a move made by the anti-rhetoricians, by Plato at his most impatient, by Descartes and by Hobbes. These were also the antirepublicans. When Jay participates in their intellectual move to link opinion and rhetoric with lying, he succeeds in being provocative, but he also risks undermining the integrity of the republican conception of politics that he seems to admire.

If opinions can be contrasted with lies, so too can symbols and myths. These fictions are central to the last way of understanding the political that Jay treats. Here, the myth of unity and harmony found in common talk about a “people” or a “nation” is the subject. If the everyday sociology of politics reveals little more than contests about who gets what, the more elusive meaning of politics can be found in the fictions that live in our imaginations and in our language. We speak as though political contests concern not individuals or groups trying to get their way but instead an effort to represent a single imagined entity known as the electorate. Similarly, when citizens speak to one another as if they are equals, they are joining together in a myth that ignores obvious social inequalities. Equality and democracy both seem to require a certain laxness with regard to the truth. Jay remarks that this conception of politics therefore draws attention to “the cumulative effect of the aesthetic moment in politics in creating an environment in which a premium is not placed on veracity” (173). Since Lefort, Ankersmit and others demonstrate that this aesthetic moment is virtually inevitable in modern politics, Jay concludes that “it [is] very hard to hope for a politics fully purged of looseness toward the truth” (173). He rightly admits, though, that this looseness, this element of fiction and symbolism, should not be conflated with “outright mendacity” (172). Poets and novelists, as well as inspiring orators, would insist upon this clarification. Politics often concerns the future, and we touch the future more through imagination than through knowledge. This is why political speech cannot be sorted simply into truths and lies. Dreams and hopes are neither; nor are fears. These political emotions are based on imagination and so they are expressed in a language of images. We certainly need to be able to distinguish more and less plausible images, but it seems misleading to link the activity of imagining itself so closely to mendacity.

Even if we were to accept the argument as a whole—that all of the major ways of thinking about the political seem to require lying in one form or another—we would find ourselves up against a worry that Jay himself raises with considerable sophistication at various points throughout the book. While he defends lying as inherent to politics, he would like to stop short of defending lying in other parts of life. In particular, he would like to be able to defend the importance of truthfulness in the press, the courts, and academic life (177–9). But to make such distinctions is to presume that politics is an insulated sphere of human activity. In fact, as Jay acknowledges, the boundaries of the political are “leaky” and not much hope should be placed on our ability to patrol its borders. “And as a result,” he remarks, “no unequivocal defense of political hypocrisy or mendacity will ever be fully convincing” (179). He therefore ends the book not by praising mendacity's virtues (as the title and introduction promise to do) but by warning against “the search for perfect truthfulness” (179).

Here on the last page he reveals how close he is to Arendt in his own view of politics. What he prizes above all is a pluralism of opinions and the give-and-take of political contests. The real threat he identifies in the conventionally American obsession with lying is the way that it leads us to delegitimize the partial truths voiced by our political opponents, and thus to subvert any chance of real political activity between us and them. When an opponent of the current president's health care proposal voiced his opposition as an accusation of mendacity—“you lie!”—he thereby eliminated the space for a republican politics between him and the other side. The same happened when opponents of the previous president's foreign policy voiced their opposition as an accusation of mendacity. Jay's argument against trading charges of mendacity is sharp and important, and deserves a hearing beyond the world of intellectual history. But his diagnosis of what lies behind that mode of politics is contestable. Is it really the simple American hope that politicians should try to avoid lying to us? Or is it, rather, the all too familiar assumption that truth in politics is a simple thing? Often we rush to accuse one another of lying because that is easier than thinking that differences of opinion might be due to the complexity of the issues and the existence of plausible perspectives on both sides. We are not so much naive as lazy. More patience with partial truths and partisan opinions, which arise in any serious debate, would make our politics healthier. More tolerance for lies, which make serious debate impossible, would not. That is one sort of tolerance that we already have too much of.