ABSTRACT
The specter of lying haunts Europeans at the turn of the twenty-first century. From Greece to Bulgaria, elected officials are going to prison for prevarication. In response to the egregious mendacity of its budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac, who denied having a Swiss bank account, the French government has required ministers and parliamentarians to make their assets public, and it is considering a program to teach “secular morality” in public schools (Zarka 2013; Tavoillot 2013). Yet philosophers and legal experts have long debated the wisdom of avoiding lies in politics (Machiavelli 1988; Arendt 1993; Varden 2010; Wood 2011). In the wake of the French Terror Immanuel Kant asserted against Benjamin Constant the unconditional duty to tell the truth even to a murderer looking for his victim at one’s door (Kant 1949: 346–50), because lying voids “all rights based on contracts, and this is a wrong done to mankind generally”; it “vitiates the source of law itself” (Kant 1949: 347). Max Weber offered perhaps the most compelling challenge to Kant’s injunction when he critiqued the ethics of conviction, which sticks to pre-established moral principles with no regard for consequences. He recommended the ethics of responsibility in politics, which weighs an action’s impact before choosing to undertake it. Yet Weber wished for political actors who could hold both ethics: these “in unison constitute a genuine man – a man who can have the ‘calling for politics’ ” (Gerth and Mills 1973: 127).
