"Truth and Politics: The Loss of Authoritativeness in Contemporary Politics."

Abstract: This article deals with an aspect of the contemporary political crisis in Western countries, namely, the sharpening conflict between politics and truth, a problem interwoven with the progressive loss of authoritativeness in contemporary politics. The risk of reducing truth to opinion is to be expected in a merely procedural interpretation of democracy, obscuring the element of shared truth that lies at the origin of every political community. The expansion of power to the detriment of authority contributes ultimately to forgetting the original truth, that should instead be refocused and brought up-to-date in order to give a sense of direction once again to communal life. A notable aid for proceeding in that direction is the dialectic method, with which the search for truth in Western civilization began, on the basis of which the truth is always a communitarian quest. Such a communitarian vision assumes particular importance in light of the renewed insights brought by Christian revelation to the categories used for analyzing human and political relationships.