articles
Amid increasing anxiety about the fate of truth in politics, Hannah Arendt is often invoked to gain purchase on the ways in which lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories are overwhelming the public realm and paralyzing political discourse. This article reconstructs Arendt’s often misunderstood account of factual truth via a new interpretation of her seminal 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics.” While many theorists have charged Arendt with hostility to truth tout court, others defend her account of factual truth by way of her unfinished theory of judgment. I locate Arendt’s notion of “publicly known” facts within a different context: first, her understanding of knowledge as produced by work and anchored in the human artifice and, second, her account of authority and its modern crisis. By reinscribing “Truth and Politics” within this broader framework, my reading both clarifies its unique place in Arendt’s oeuvre and shows that the focus on judgment must be paired with a (re)turn to the neglected concept of authority. To that end, I propose an account of “public epistemic authority” as housed within inherited knowledge infrastructures and outline the new perspective this offers on the so-called “post-truth” crisis.
“Arendt on Earth,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Online First, October 28, 2025 (pdf)
This article rethinks the semantic constellation circulating around nature and artifice, earth and world, “the given” and “the made” in Hannah Arendt’s thought. The conventional reading conflates nature and earth, associating both with the given in opposition to the made. I offer an alternative account, one that surfaces an overlooked aspect of The Human Condition: a capsule genealogy of the natural world as the historically variable counterpart of the human artifice. Rather than eliding earth into nature, I suggest we think in terms of a twofold concept: earth as given ground and the Earth as revealed planet. This move offers three advantages. First, it extricates us from an untenable binary distinction between nature and artifice. Second, it denaturalizes the concept of the given and shows that its ambit is considerably wider than is generally appreciated. Third, it loosens the grip of the morality tale that structures the narrative arc of The Human Condition. Contemporary Arendtian environmental theory remains constrained by what I call Holocene thinking. By examining how Arendt's conception of earth as both ground and planet might help us face our new planetary dispensation, I suggest resources for thinking beyond the limits of both Holocene nostalgia and cosmic abstraction.
“Exemplary Ambiguity, or the True Story of a Fact and its Afterlives” forthcoming 2026, in z.B. Zeitschrift zum Beispiel.
“In August of 1914, Germany invaded Belgium.” This was Hannah Arendt’s paradigmatic example of factual truth. It was, she said, “brutally elementary data.” But it was not raw data: it came packaged in a story—a bon mot attributed to Georges Clemenceau, made famous by Arendt herself. She sets the scene in 1929, a “friendly talk” with a representative of the Weimar Republic. When asked what future historians would say about the controversial question of war guilt, Clemenceau replied: “This I don’t know. But I know for certain they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.” But the facts of the story may be quite different. As best I can tell, the date was May 7, 1919, in Versailles. The German Foreign Minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, reads a speech acknowledging the grievous wrong done to Belgium and the need for reparations. He embeds the admission in layers of contextualization, dissolving Germany’s specific guilt into a general European tragedy where all parties share responsibility. He remains seated, which Clemenceau took as the final affront, although the Germans later claimed his legs were too weak to support him. As they file out, a German delegate asks Clemenceau, “what will history say of this?”—presumably meaning how will history judge this Carthaginian peace—and the Tiger delivers his devastating rhetorical strike. What are we to make of this story? Perhaps Clemenceau is smuggling an entire political framework under the cover of ‘saying what is’—the fact as delivery system for a whole architecture of blame and punishment. Or perhaps he’s deftly cutting through German obfuscation, undoing an hour of self-serving contextualization with a single quip. Following this bon mot from its origins through its philosophical afterlives reveals factual truth as a bludgeon, a scalpel, and a crystal refracting the complexities of the truth-politics relationship.
book manuscript
Common Knowledge: Public Epistemic Authority and Democratic Faith (Full description, pdf)
Why do people fall for fake news? A more revealing question might be: why wouldn't they? When institutions that validate public knowledge are under assault and facts are shadowed by counter-facts, the real puzzle is not skepticism but what makes authoritative knowledge possible in the first place.
Common Knowledge investigates how specialized knowledge becomes publicly compelling—not just available but authoritative. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, and science and technology studies, I develop the concept of "public epistemic authority" to explain how facts acquire the pre-reflective trust that makes them “stick” in public discourse. This authority is housed within "knowledge infrastructures"—the universities, agencies, and institutions that produce and circulate knowledge—and sustained through a covenantal relationship between knowledge-makers and democratic publics.
Three case studies examine how public epistemic authority adapts, renews, or fails: the evolving civic epistemologies of climate modeling; controversies over curriculum and political position-taking in universities; and electoral denialism as “epistemic secession.” Together, they reveal both how democratic societies maintain common factual ground and the thresholds beyond which they fail.
At a moment when knowledge institutions face unprecedented challenges, Common Knowledge offers both analytical tools for understanding our predicament and a path toward rebuilding the epistemic foundations of democratic life.
Work in Progress
Computer Modeling, Climate Prophecy, and Democratic Faith
When Worlds Divide: Electoral Denialism and Epistemic Secession
The New Politics of Ventriloquism
Invited Talks
2021. “Climate Prophecy, Computer Modeling and Public Faith in Science,” Colby College.
2021. “Model Affordances,” New Media and Culture Program, University of Oregon.
2020. “Arendt’s Genealogy of Nature,” Refashioning Worlds: Nature, Science, and the Human in the Thought of Hannah Arendt, University of Florida at Gainesville.
Conference Papers
2021. “Climate Prophecy, Computer Modeling and Public Faith in Science,” Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Seattle, October 1-3).
2020. “Votes, Polls, and Bots: Enumeration, Amplification and Democratic Equality,” Association for Political Theory (November 12-14).
2020. “Authority without Authenticity?” Beyond Disinformation: Authenticity and Trust in the Online World, Social Science Research Council & Digital Democracies Group (October 23-24).
2020. “Public Authority and Knowledge Infrastructures,” Themed Panel: Algorithmic Governance and the Politics of Data, American Political Science Association 2020 (September 10-13).
2019. “The Strangest of All Modern Societies: Hannah Arendt on Science and Scientists,” Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Washington DC, August 29-September 1).
2019. “Where do we begin? Between the Given and the Technosphere,” Arendt on Earth: Beginnings (Evanston, IL, May 3).
2018. “The Quintessence of the Human Condition: Earth in the thought of Hannah Arendt,” at Hannah Arendt: The Challenges of Plurality (Paderborn University, Germany, Dec 13-15).
2018. “Making Public Knowledge: Arendt and Herodotus’ historiēs apodexis,” Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association (Chicago, April 5-8).
2018. “The Politics of Scholarly Identity in the Hypatia Controversy,” Organized Panel: Experience and Expertise in the Making of Identity, Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association (San Francisco, March 29-31).
2017. “The Worldliness of Truth in Politics,” Themed Panel: Democracy, Distrust, and Digital Publics, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (San Francisco, August 31-September 3).
2017. “Life on Earth: From the Archimedean Point to the Anthropocene,” Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association (Vancouver, 13-15 April).
2017. “Worldly Facts: Truth in Public and Authority in Politics,” Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association (Chicago, April 6-9). Finalist, Review of Politics Prize 2018, for best paper in normative political theory presented in 2017.
2017. “Hannah Arendt on Science and Scientists,” University of Chicago Political Theory Workshop (March 6).
2014. “Contested Facts and Contentious Politics: Conspiracist Discourse in Revolutionary Egypt,” The Arab Spring, Human Rights & Democratic Transition: Between Hopes & Risks (Tunis, August 18-23).