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Recent political developments have made the notion of 'post-truth' ubiquitous. Along with associated terms such as 'fake news' and 'alternative facts', it appears with regularity in coverage of and commentary on Donald Trump, the Brexit vote, and the role – relative to these phenomena – of a half-despised, half-feared creature known as 'the public'. It has become commonplace to assert that we now inhabit, or are entering, a post-truth world.
In this paper, I issue a sceptical challenge against the distinctiveness and utility of the notion of post-truth. I argue, first, that the term fails to capture anything that is both real and novel. Moreover, post-truth discourse often has a not-fully-explicit political force and function: to 'irrationalise' political disaffection and to signal loyalty to a 'pre-post-truth' political status quo. The central insight of the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and others – that saying is always also doing – is as indispensable for understanding the significance of much of what is labelled 'post-truth', I'll argue, as it is for understanding the significance of that very act of labelling.
Keywords: post-truth, speech acts, Trump, brexit, Austin

This paper attempts to get some critical distance on the increasingly fashionable issue of realism in political theory. Realism has an ambiguous status: it is sometimes presented as a radical challenge to the status quo; but it also often appears as a conservative force, aimed at clipping the wings of more 'idealistic' political theorists. I suggest that what we might call 'actually existing realism' is indeed a conservative presence in political philosophy, and that its ambiguous status plays a part in making it so. But I also argue that there is no necessary connection between realism and conservatism. This paper describes the three contingent and suspiciously quick steps which lead from an initial commitment to being attentive to the real world, via a particular kind of pessimism about political possibilities, to an unnecessarily conservative destination. In the process, I try to show how the ubiquitous trinity of realism, pessimism and conservatism might be pulled apart, thus removing the artificial tension between 'being realistic' and the demand for far-reaching social change.

If the theory of ideology is the answer, what is the question? In its slick over-simplification and pseudo-profundity, this question-about-a-question brings to mind the well-rehearsed patter of the doorstep evangelist. As I'll argue later, we might do better not to ask it at all. However, much contemporary writing on the topic seems not only to assume that there is some determinate question that the theory of ideology is designed to address, but also to agree on one answer as to what that question might be: why do the victims of oppression not rise up against their oppressors (and sometimes not even seem to show any inclination to do so)? The particular explanation associated with the theory of ideology invokes ideological false consciousness, which may for present purposes be understood as follows: distorted or false ways of representing or relating to the world, where the distortion or falsity admits of a 'functional explanation' in terms of its tendency to serve certain social interests -- such as the interest an oppressor has in continuing to oppress rather than being overthrown. In what follows, I use the position taken by Michael Rosen (1996) as a convenient case study. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that I believe his position represents a fairly common way of treating the theory of ideology. The other reason is that, besides identifying the 'under-mobilization' of the oppressed as the problem to which the theory of ideology is a response, Rosen's approach also instantiates a further tendency that strikes me as being in need of critique: he goes on to make use of rational choice theory in order to arrive at an alternative solution to the problem -- and here, again, he has company. Thus, Rosen's position represents two regrettable trends in the literature on ideology. These trends are connected. Only by assuming that the point of the theory of ideology is to explain why the oppressed do not rise up is Rosen able then to offer a competing rational choice solution to this problem. Both stages of his argument seem to me to have their roots in a (mistaken) reaction to a concern for a (misconstrued) human rationality. This may all sound rather negative, but from the point of view of someone interested in the theory of ideology, mistakes -- especially, widespread or dominant mistakes -- are entirely appropriate objects of study. It is characteristic of this theory, though by no means peculiar to it, to think that we can learn something by looking at the cases where our thought goes wrong and by asking how this might best be explained. A further reason to be negative is best expressed by a line from Novalis which Rosen takes as his opening citation: 'The truthful presentation of error is the indirect presentation of truth.' If that is right, and if I am right to think that a common approach to the topic of ideology embodies a fundamental error, then perhaps getting clearer on what the error is (and why it occurs) may double as a pointer in the direction of something better. Adapted from the source document.

Since its influential rendering by Rae Langton in her 1993 paper, "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts," the "silencing argument" against pornography has become the subject of a lively debate that continues to this day. My intention in this paper is not to join in the existing debate, but to give a critical overview of it. In its current form, I suggest, it is going nowhere (and has been en route for too long already). Yet the silencing argument, I believe, nevertheless contains an indispensable insight—and more radical potential than is usually acknowledged either by its defenders or its opponents. I argue that in order to preserve this insight and unleash its potential, we should begin by adopting the following motto: MacKinnon, not Austin!