"It is impossible to understand the crisis of truth today without exploring the dilemma that was essentially baked into democratic politics from the beginning. In the absence of any one source of authoritative answers, it was inevitable that extended and often vicious battles would erupt over what counted as truth and, even more, who got to say so, and on what grounds."  Sophia Rosenfeld in The Hedgehog Review (one of my favorite journals) on the crisis of truth in our world.    

I think this is really good.  A fair amount of sociology tries to engage this issue with the question of what happens to authority under conditions of modernity.  "Modernity" is a shibboleth for sociologists--a secret word that, when properly employed, shows your union card in the in-group.  Rosenfeld, being an historian, is not a member of the sociology club, and "modernity" is a dangerous thing for an historian to believe in.  They're all about showing how no such thing as modernity exists.

She critiques the belief, from Milton through Locke and Jefferson to Mill and Habermas, that free speech in an unregulated market setting will allow truth to emerge in an unproblematic way.  Here I might push back a bit.  Is she saying that they thought it would be easy?  Is that what they promised?  Decorum?  Maybe I missed that passage in Areopagitica.

But that's a relatively minor quibble.  She makes the good point about what has happened in the industrial and post-industrial age: "both the failure of compromise on the way to consensus and the threat of capture by one part of the population have only grown since the twentieth century, as economic inequality and, consequentially, inequality on the basis of educational attainment and every other measurable manifestation of disparity (all made possible in part by the rise of elite knowledge makers) have expanded unabated. The world looks extremely different to people whose lives are lived only very rarely in common."

Thus she suggests there is a deep tension between the rise of experts and the concomitant "technocracy," and a reactionary populism which prioritizes a fantasized "real people" with common sense against (unreal) "effete" intellectuals.  I wonder if she might have embedded this in a larger narrative about the difference between rival aristocracies--the old noble aristocracy of "blood" and what Tocqueville calls the "new industrial aristocracies".  In other words, the tension she notes may not be new, but perhaps with the non-elite populace having more direct power, they can contest the elite more directly.  (This would suggest that modern egalitarianism is in some ways functionally like the political crisis after the Black Death that led to the end of medieval serfdom; with fewer peasants, they had more power and could renegotiate the terms of their subservience, at least a bit.)  The war was always there, but now both sides have ways to engage in it.

The will-to-truth is finally about sharing a common world.  We all experience what we can call a "drive to egalitarianism" in modernity.  What Rosenfeld points out is that the contemporary "crisis of truth" has roots that go back at least to the eighteenth century.  Perhaps they go still further back.  Understanding these roots helps us put our situation in a better, deeper, richer perspective.