Return of the Sophists? Democracy, Post-Truth and Rhetoric in the Populist Moment

Research Questions

The project was grounded in two research questions, with the overarching aim of examining the antagonistic debate surrounding “the sophist” in political thought from the 1960s to the present day. The goal was to understand the threats this figure is perceived to embody, the solutions proposed, and what the figure reveals about the contemporary state of democracy.

The first question concerned the issues that sparked a renewed discussion about the sophist. In contemporary political philosophy, the discourse on post-truth—and the potential threat it poses to democracy—often takes center stage. By shifting focus away from the modern sophist—the populist politician—who has hitherto been studied primarily through an empirical lens, the project was able to redirect the analysis toward the more fundamental questions the sophist has raised in philosophy since antiquity.

The second question focused on what the philosophical resurgence of the sophist—an interest that emerged in the 1960s and has since intensified—can teach us about our understanding of the present era, often characterized by populism, post-truth, and instability. Here, the emphasis was placed on three key concepts: democracy, politics, and truth. Given the sophist’s long-standing historical connection to these fundamental political concepts, the project was able to provide a more complex picture of the challenges defining their interrelationships, as well as how the understanding of these relationships has evolved over time.

Results

The project’s main publications have focused on six political concepts that are—in various ways—threatened or problematized by the figure of the sophist: political imagination, political fear (Gk. phobos), political negation (Gk. den), political value (“the general equivalent”), political types (“the representative”), and political exemplars (Gk. paradeigma). By examining these concepts through the lens of key thinkers in the French post-1968 tradition (including Badiou, Cassin, Castoriadis, Ricœur, and Lacan)—who have themselves engaged with the figure of the sophist—the project has deepened the understanding of the sophist’s function within political ontology, epistemology, and rhetoric. The results demonstrate that the sophist, as a figure in political thought, should not be understood solely through the accusation that they threaten society by fracturing what was previously unified; rather, the figure’s very appearance reveals the fundamental inequality upon which politics is always already grounded.

Outputs

[Publications, conference papers and media contributions as they appear.]