Ricerc@Sapienza

What can we still learn from Hannah Arendt’s political categories and reflections on the public realm in an era that sees the growing spread of populisms? Among the large number of current debates, in the age of populist simplification and of the so-called “post-truth”, Arendt's relationship between truth, lying and politics seems to assume particular relevance. The most important consequence for the purpose of the reflections we are proposing here can be probably found in the impact that the strategies of simplification and polarization of the public – political and mediatic – discourse adopted by contemporary populisms can exert upon the publics who are less “equipped” for contextualizing those distorted or simplifying messages which are better known at nowadays as “fake news”. The weakening of the critical sense seems to find broad consonance not only with the foreseeable reduction of political and social pluralism, but also with such phenomena as the growth of perceived insecurity and individualism, stigmatization of “the different”, erosion of social capital and political participation.