Austerity lives in Southern Europe: Experience, knowledge, evidence and social facts

We are immersed in a political struggle around "facts." Hannah Arendt (1967), in her classic piece on "Truth and Politics," quoted above, carefully examined the difference between "factual truth" and its interpretation in order to show the political danger of obliterating the distinction between truth and opinion. The interpretation of facts and how to deal with them in order to change the world were the stuff of political projects and action but need to stand on the solid ground of factual truth. According to Arendt, one of the modes of substituting facts with lies is through making factual truth equivalent to opinion, something that the Trump administration has done with the phrase "alternative facts."