Submitting “Alternative Facts” to Debate: A Weberian Perspective on Post-truth Politics

Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as the “Word of the Year 2016”, while the association of German linguists (Gesellschaft fur deutsche Sprache) did the same for “postfaktische Politik”. “Alternative facts”, launched by Kellyanne Conway concerning the attendance at Donald Trump’s inaugural, was a third variant in this cluster. In this article, I shall discuss Max Weber’s parliamentary perspective on the critique of given facts and of the powers of science in relation to the debates around post-truth politics. A critical assessment of Leo Strauss’s critique of Weber as a nihilist and relativist introduces the problematic. One aim of the article is to illustrate how even trivial slogans can be situated in the history of political concepts, political theory and rhetoric.