To be true to oneself, strictly speaking, is to think and act in accordance with one’s condition as a free yet limited conscious being. Authenticity, therefore, entails a commitment to both freedom of thought and genuine doubt. For the former, the authentic individual remains free to constitute their own political reality through the capacity for negation, which, in turn, implies the capacity to doubt any claim or proposition presented to us. In cultivating a receptiveness to genuine doubt, the authentic individual fully acknowledges the limitations inherent in conscious subjectivity. That absolute certainty in objective matters is unavailable to us indicates the possibility of genuine doubt at any turn. In order to be authentic, we ought to avoid the hubris of overestimating our capacity for certainty in political judgement. We, therefore, find in authenticity an ethos to justify deliberative norms, in which authenticity mandates that we remain sceptical of our own presuppositions, consider the views of others as our epistemic equals, and resign our personal biases in favour of a collective pursuit of truth. The authentic individual embraces their capacity for freedom of thought yet equally embraces the limitations of this capacity, expresses a view of truth in the subjective sense while avoiding conflating subjectivity with objective truth, and recognises their propensity for error, and so encounters the opposing views of others with wonder and curiosity rather than dismissive apprehension. As such, they are able to see the value in moral frameworks, which involves a degree of deference to the established worldviews of others, yet they avoid succumbing to ideological thinking and refrain from assuming that any such framework contains a comprehensive and all encompassing theory of reality. The ethical ideal of authenticity, therefore, justifies the set of deliberative norms that underpin the theory of deliberative democracy, in mandating an attitude of epistemic humility and limitations while enabling the freedom to conceive and present an individual and singular perspective on truth to the public realm. This deliberative process, notably, runs contrary to the liberal understanding of politics as a competition of predetermined individual interests for control over the public realm; an authentic approach to politics, by contrast, views individual interests and preferences as fluid, dynamic, and adaptively responsive to challenges presented by one’s peers. As such, an authentic approach to politics must remain receptive to genuine doubt, as the contrary views of another represent a critical possibility of error, and we must be willing to revise our commitments on such terms. This is to say, an authentic acknowledgement of the limitations of our understanding is an opportunity to facilitate a collective pursuit of truth within a political realm modelled on a community of inquiry.