Political-Historical Analysis of the Relationship between Knowledge, Truth, and Power from the Enlightenment to the Post-Truth Era

Abstract

This article examines the political-historical relationship among knowledge, truth, and power from the Enlightenment to the contemporary post-truth era. It argues that knowledge has never been a purely neutral or isolated intellectual phenomenon; rather, it has been continuously shaped by institutions, social authority, political interests, and historical conditions. The study adopts a historical-analytical approach to trace the changing political role of truth across major intellectual and institutional transformations. The Enlightenment is examined as a period that associated reason, scientific inquiry, criticism, and public debate with human emancipation and political legitimacy. Enlightenment thought challenged inherited authority and promoted the idea that governments should be accountable to rational principles, law, and public welfare. However, the article shows that modernity also transformed knowledge into an instrument of administrative power through bureaucracy, education, law, medicine, statistics, national history, and social classification. The study further analyzes critical approaches that challenged the assumption that truth is always universal, neutral, and independent of relations of power. These approaches demonstrated that institutions influence which forms of knowledge are recognized as valid and that dominant intellectual frameworks may exclude alternative experiences, identities, and interpretations. The article then considers the post-truth era as a crisis of public credibility rather than the complete disappearance of truth. In this condition, emotional appeal, political identity, ideological polarization, algorithmic communication, and strategic misinformation can outweigh evidence in shaping public opinion. The findings indicate that post-truth politics is strengthened not only by technological change but also by declining trust in political institutions, media organizations, scientific authorities, and democratic processes. The article concludes that democratic societies must defend evidence-based public reasoning without allowing scientific, political, or institutional authorities to monopolize truth. A sustainable democratic response requires critical education, media literacy, institutional transparency, ethical communication, protection of independent research, and inclusive public deliberation. Truth remains essential to freedom, justice, accountability, and the preservation of democratic life.