Democracy and Truth, by the historian Sophia Rosenfeld, is a relatively short, breezy overview of modern democracy’s relationship to practices of truth-making, written for a broad audience in response to contemporary challenges. Political Self-Deception, by the philosopher Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, is a dense, analytical treatment of a very specific phenomenon, illustrated through detailed examination of three historical cases. Although both examine the politics of truth through serious engagement with political history, these are two very different books. Nevertheless, both make distinctively valuable contributions to our understanding of political life.
I begin with the more synoptic work. Like most of her guild who venture into the public arena, Rosenfeld aims to illuminate the deeper historical roots of our apparently unique circumstances—and does so on two distinct time scales. Focusing on the US case, with auxiliary examples from Europe, the first three chapters highlight the tension between technocratic overreach and populist reaction that has troubled representative government since its eighteenth-century beginnings. In the final chapter, she addresses the more proximate cultural and technological origins of the present crisis.
Rosenfeld’s first task is to establish that modern democracy is intimately related to the “particular truth culture of the transatlantic Enlightenment from which it emerged” (p. 22). From the Puritans’ “zeal for truthfulness” (p. 25) to the philosophes’ drive to eliminate superstition, the modern era saw sincerity, publicity, and verified knowledge become central political values. At the same time, critics of absolutism feared centralizing the power to declare official truths, and thus recognized the necessity of pluralism, free speech, and a “marketplace of ideas.” Together, these commitments constitute an ideal of “truth without dogmatism,” which in turn enables republican self-government. On Rosenfeld’s telling, that is, advocates of representative government recognized from the beginning that it required a division of labor between educated experts and ordinary people: the former to make technical judgments, the latter to keep them honest.
As she emphasizes, however, this ideal was never fully realized. Instead, these two sides have often been at war, with truth and democracy as the unwitting casualties. Worse, their excesses do not necessarily cancel each other out and in fact can degenerate simultaneously. Although expertise is necessary to run modern democratic states, for instance, Rosenfeld offers countless examples of experts becoming narrow-minded or corrupt, and thus yielding biased results. Meanwhile, popular resentment of experts and their biases—often real, sometimes imagined—can generate rejection of all expertise in favor of a totemic “common sense.” Given its gendered, racialized, and nativist heritage, we have ample reason to distrust this rhetoric. Even more worrisome for Rosenfeld, however—whose 2011 history of common sense is the source of many of this book’s most compelling insights—is its denial of the need for any truth-making practices whatsoever. Journalists, judges, scholars, and other traditional sources of epistemic authority may be prone to bias and corruption, but at least their flawed procedures can be identified, criticized, and reformed. The rhetoric of common sense eliminates this possibility, enabling demagogues to project their own will on it.
Having framed our post-truth moment in terms of the founding dilemma of representative democracy, Rosenfeld then analyzes its peculiar features in light of more recent technological and cultural changes. She first rejects a common story blaming “postmodernism” that both misunderstands postmodernism and overstates the impact of academic trends on broader political culture. Instead, she concludes, the causes are far more banal, pointing to the rise of cable news, “infotainment,” social media, and partisan polarization (driven especially by the Right). The solutions she prescribes are also rather conventional: aside from a few remarks suggesting a revision of free speech doctrine to account for concentrated economic power, her primary counsel is to reinforce Enlightenment norms of objectivity through means like an independent judiciary, educational reforms, and (surprise!) reviving the humanities. Indeed, she ultimately upholds the eighteenth-century ideal of truth without dogmatism as democracy’s best hope in the twenty-first century as well.
Rosenfeld cannot really be faulted for these anticlimactic prescriptions. For one, proposing policies is not her primary purpose, which is instead to illuminate the present crisis. Meanwhile, the right answers are not always sexy. It is hard to deny, as she puts it, that “truth is a necessary horizon for political life” (p. 174), even if that is more or less the conventional wisdom. Finally, her narrative of the centuries of democratic experience through which that wisdom has been learned (and forgotten and relearned) is lucid and compelling. It is an exemplar of public history, which will enrich our understanding of democracy as political scientists and as citizens concerned for its health. Still, readers already immersed in its subject matter may find themselves wanting more.
Galeotti’s Political Self-Deception, by contrast, is a far narrower and deeper dive. In fact, the first two chapters consist entirely of a ground-clearing analytical exercise, specifying precisely what self-deception is and, more importantly, what it is not. I was initially somewhat skeptical of this approach: Why must self-deception be so clearly distinguished from everything else it may resemble? Why assume that everyday terms like “self-deception,” “willful ignorance,” and “rationalization” refer to distinct phenomena, rather than ill-defined and partially overlapping features of our inescapably motivated “rational” faculty? Yet Galeotti’s systematic exposition gradually answered my concerns. By chapter 3’s discussion of political self-deception—and the historical case studies in chapters 4 through 6—I was fully persuaded that the phenomenon she describes is both empirically distinctive and deserving of extended normative analysis.
Self-deception, on Galeotti’s account, is defined by three key factors. First, the agent must be motivated to believe something. Second, she must encounter evidence contradicting that belief, triggering responses of anxiety and identity protection. Third, she must enter a biased reasoning process, by which she concludes (against the balance of evidence as judged by impartial observers) that the belief is true after all. (For simplicity, I set aside “twisted” cases, whereby an agent comes to believe what she fears rather than what she desires). Self-deception is thus distinct from mere wishful thinking, which is not triggered by contrary evidence and “cold” or unmotivated biases. Perhaps the most important feature of Galeotti’s account, however, is the role it gives to intentions. It does not require agents to believe something by an act of will, which seems subjectively impossible. Nevertheless, it does let some intentionality into the process, as when an agent begins a biased search for confirming evidence. This enables us both to hold self-deceiving agents morally responsible and to take prophylactic action against self-deception in politics.
Precise as Galeotti’s definition is, we may wonder whether the phenomenon she identifies is really that widespread or significant. However, the second half of her book allays these worries as well. Drawing on established historical accounts, she demonstrates that self-deception likely played a crucial role in three paradigmatic foreign policy disasters: Kennedy in Cuba, Johnson in Vietnam, and Bush in Iraq. Moreover, revisiting these episodes in light of her conception substantially alters our appraisal of them. Critics of these administrations typically claim that straightforward deception explains everything—that McNamara fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Rumsfeld invented Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction—while defenders insist that these were honest mistakes. On Galeotti’s view, neither model is complete. Though all three administrations certainly lied at times, the conspiracy model fails to explain the self-sabotage inflicted by some of their untruths. Meanwhile, the honest mistake model neglects the motivated nature of their failures, not to mention their responsibility for the resulting catastrophes. Galeotti’s conception, by contrast, makes better sense of their self-sabotage while still enabling us to hold them responsible.
Her analysis does have its limitations. The first two chapters position her view within a relatively self-contained debate on self-deception within philosophy. The psychological research she cites is often dated, and she ignores much recent work on motivated reasoning, the psychology of power, and political psychology more generally. Indeed, the relevance of her arguments would be clearer if they were contextualized within a broader range of discussions, rather than framed exclusively in the cramped terminology of a specific debate in analytic moral philosophy. Finally, although her narrow conception of self-deception persuasively explains her three chosen cases, it is unclear how far it applies beyond these extraordinary cases. (Her suggestions in this regard—about mass self-deception, for instance—are underwhelming.) Nevertheless, these issues are relatively minor, and Galeotti’s book makes major contributions not only to moral philosophy but also to democratic theory, political psychology, and international relations. In particular, her case studies teach important lessons for anyone interested in designing better foreign policy institutions.
One final issue that bears mentioning is the existence of a remarkable number of grammatical and typographical errors in the final (hardcover) version of the text. Galeotti’s arguments were otherwise exceptionally clear, but every author needs a good copyeditor, and the press should have provided one.
In sum, Rosenfeld’s Democracy and Truth and Galeotti’s Political Self-Deception occupy opposite poles of generality. Where Galeotti drills into a highly specific (albeit clearly important) epistemic pathology, Rosenfeld offers a wide-ranging narrative of democracy’s historical and contemporary challenges. Yet both deserve a wide audience for their useful—and complementary—insights into the vexed relationship between truth and political power.
