ABSTRACT
This chapter explores something of the way truth figures in Arendts thinking, particularly as it arises in relation to the political, and to a certain form of democratic politics. It argues is that a properly democratic politics, one that prioritizes the public realm and the engagement within it that so preoccupied Arendt, can be understood precisely in terms of the attitude it takes towards truth. One of the oddities in Platos philosophy, at least on a certain reading of it, consists in an apparent tension between two ways of thinking of truth, and the search for it, that correspond to two different aspects of Platos thought. A philosophy that conceives of truth and communication as one and the same has left the proverbial ivory tower of mere contemplation. Arendts analysis of totalitarianism, like the analyses advanced by Camus and Orwell, has often been criticized as failing to do justice to the socio-political complexity of actual totalitarian states.
