Virtuous Hypocrisy

Virtuous Hypocrisy

Speak your mind, always. Hypocrisy challenges this rule of authenticity, and for this very reason hypocrisy is judged negatively, as intentional inconsistency between thoughts and words, between belief and behaviour. Does this make the hypocrite a silent saboteur of the moral order? A person who hides in the shadows and erodes the foundations of trust? Without trust there is no society, no friendship, no love. But is hypocrisy always reprehensible? Nadia Urbinati argues that society, friendship and love all require a measure of hypocrisy – what she calls ‘virtuous hypocrisy’. If we were always uncompromisingly honest in public, it would be a disaster for everyone. Sometimes it is better to refrain from speaking your mind: hypocrisy can be a form of civility and a sign of maturity and autonomy. And in politics too, a degree of hypocrisy and inconsistency is essential. The important thing is to understand when and within what limits hypocrisy can be justified, and to avoid it becoming systematic and leading to outright lying and deception. Urbinati does not praise hypocrisy unconditionally but argues that a degree of hypocrisy is essential to the smooth functioning of our social and political life. This perceptive reappraisal of a much-maligned concept will be of interest to students and academics in politics and political theory and to a wide general readership.

Rethinking Sincerity and Authenticity

"This above all: To thine own self be true," is an ideal—or pretense—belonging as much to Hamlet as to the carefully choreographed realms of today’s politics and social media. But what if our "true" selves aren’t our "best" selves? Instagram’s curated portraits of authenticity often betray the paradox of our performative selves: sincerity obliges us to be who we actually are, yet ethics would have us be better. Drawing on the writings of Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and Emmanuel Levinas, Howard Pickett presents a vivid defense of "virtuous hypocrisy." Our fetish for transparency tends to allow us to forget that the self may not be worthy of expression, and may become unethically narcissistic in the act of expression. Alert to this ambivalence, these great thinkers advocate incongruent ways of being. Rethinking Sincerity and Authenticity offers an engaging new appraisal not only of the ethics of theatricality but of the theatricality of ethics, contending that pursuit of one’s ideal self entails a relational and ironic performance of identity that lies beyond the pure notion of expressive individualism.

The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray