The Ionian fallacy and the authoritarianization of liberal discourse

Abstract

The article presents the issue of the so-called the Ionian fallacy, which Isaiah Berlin originally identified as a philosophical error shaping the content of liberal thought. This fallacy, in the broadest sense, consists in the assumption that there is a connection between truth, law and the good, which are understood as reflections of the same lógos. The authors examine the nature of the fallacy, identify, what its historical sources and manifestations, and consider how it may affect the authoritarianization of liberal discourse currently observed in the world of scholarship. The authors consider the issues of the genealogy of the Ionian fallacy, its impact on political practice (and, consequently, on mainstream legal and jurisprudential discourses) and the problem of the (im)politicity of law, which gives rise to many contradictions within the demoliberal ideological and discursive formation dominant in the broadly conceived West. The authors conclude that the Ionian fallacy fosters an epistemic closure of liberal discourse to unorthodox views, and that populism, by defining itself as a movement opposed to the liberal paradigm, in fact reproduces the same pattern of thinking that contains the Ionian fallacy.