The Western Crisis of Truth in the Early 21st Century

The Western Crisis of Truth in the Early 21st Century explores the symbolic, experiential, and associative side of contemporary political culture, arguing that phenomena such as ‘post-truth’, digitalization, mediatization, propaganda, illiberalism, or populism, far from being curiosities, have in fact come to represent a uniform aspect of political culture – a challenge to the ‘enlightened’, ‘developed’, and ‘progressive’ world that we believed ourselves to be inhabiting.

Through analyses of visual and textual material such as internet memes, academic discourse, news articles, videos, and other media, it considers truth-making in the epoch of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Donald Trump, the hyper-rationalist ritualism of managing the COVID-19 pandemic and the shifting realities on the Eastern border of the West, in order to shed light on the transfiguration of the western intellectual tradition by the global political, technological, and intellectual dynamics of a world that is far from approaching the end of history. Asking what is to be done in the face of this new reality, The Western Crisis of Truth in the Early 21st Century considers whether the dissident literature of Central and Eastern Europe, which has already lived through a period of disenlightenment under the Soviet Union, as well as other Eastern European movements of dignity and independence might offer answers.

A study of the dimming of the Enlightenment, this volume will appeal to scholars of social and political theory and political anthropology.