BOOK REVIEW - Jonathan Rauch "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth"

By Luke Hallam

This book by the journalist Jonathan Rauch seeks to make sense of the threats facing liberal societies today – threats including the destructive convulsions of Donald Trump  and  his  Make  American  Great  Again  movement,  a  global  army  of social media trolls, and the emboldened attacks against liberal cornerstones such as expertise, free speech, and diversity of opinion. Rauch is no pessimist, but he is clear-eyed about the crises we face, and The Constitution of Knowledge provides an authoritative and crisp account of those challenges. Over  the  past  five  years,  plenty  of  writers  have  sent  up  flares  about  our  so-called  post-truth age. Yet the term ‘post-truth’ is refreshingly absent from The Constitution of Knowledge. This is because Rauch’s book, which is subtitled ‘A Defense of Truth’, is not an epigraph to something we have supposedly ‘lost’. Rather, it is a call to arms. Ultimately, he argues, truth isn’t lost; we have simply forgotten what it looks like, and we have permitted its  enemies  to  exploit  our  confusion.  The  result  is  authoritarian  politics,  the  erosion  of  democratic norms, ‘cancel culture’, and the depressing sense that ‘truth’ itself might be an illusion. But none of these problems is insurmountable.