Philosophical Lying

Abstract

I have argued that John Arbuthnot, even if not acting the preacher and venting himself upon the public, did have a serious doctrine to communicate in The Art of Political Lying. It was not simply that we should be honest and sincere in all things. Part of it was a direct extension of Neville’s reading of Machiavelli’s Prince as satire. If the ‘Pseudologia’ is there to instruct the politicians, the account we are given of it arms us against their activities. Yet, as public opinion is itself part of the political system for Arbuthnot, both teaching and fore-arming apply to us all. This is to introduce more than a tincture of paradox and through paradox it raises the issue of just how far forms of dishonesty provide the constitutive rules of politics. At what point between an insight and a reduction to an extreme do we have something like the truth? It is Niklas Luhmann who in recent years has become celebrated for claiming a necessary interdependence of forms of self-reference and the notion of a system.¹

‘Philo, with twelve yeares study, hath been griev’d To be understood; when will hee be beleev’d?

John Donne, epigraph, Satyres 1633.