Politics and Truth : Heidegger, Arendt and the Modern Political Lie

Fascism, Hannah Arendt claimed in 1945, has invented a way of “lying the truth”. She later came to call this invention the modern political lie, and saw it as a key element in the event of totalitarianism. The present study explores a paradoxical relation between politics and truth in totalitarian movements that can reinvent itself anew, in non-totalitarian forms and under non-totalitarian conditions. Although Martin Heidegger is not a proponent of the modern political lie, the problematical rel