Language and Power: A Resource Book for Students

Language and Power offers a comprehensive survey of the ways in which language intersects and connects with the social, cultural and political aspects of power; provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of the field, and covers all the major approaches, theoretical concepts and methods of analysis in this important and developing area of academic study; covers all the 'traditional' topics, such as race, gender and institutional power, but also incorporates newer material from forensic discourse analysis, the discourse of new capitalism and the study of humour as power; includes readings from works by seminal figures in the field, such as Roger Fowler, Deborah Cameron and Teun van Dijk; uses real texts and examples throughout, including advertisements from cosmetics companies; newspaper articles and headlines; websites and internet media; and spoken dialogues such as a transcription from the Obama and McCain presidential debate; and is accompanied by a supporting website that aims to challenge students at a more advanced level and features a complete four-unit chapter which includes activities, a reading and suggestions for further work.

Covenanter Politics: Evangelicalism, Political Liberalism and Ulster Presbyterians, 1798-1914

Historians of Ireland have devoted considerable attention to the Presbyterian origins of modern Irish republicanism in the 1790s and their overwhelming support for the Union with Great Britain in the 1880s. On the one hand, it has been argued that conservative politics came to dominate nineteenth-century Presbyterianism in the form of Henry Cooke who combined conservative evangelical religion with support for the established order. On the other hand, historians have long acknowledged the continued importance of liberal and radical impulses amongst Presbyterians. Few historians of the nineteenth century have attempted to bring these two stories together and to describe the relationship between the religion and politics of Presbyterians along the lines suggested by scholars of Presbyterian radicalism in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. This article argues that a distinctive form of Presbyterian evangelicalism developed in the nineteenth century that sought to bring the denomination back to the theological and spiritual priorities of seventeenth-century Scottish and Irish Presbyterianism. By doing so, it encouraged many Presbyterians to get involved in movements for reform and liberal politics. Supporters of ‘Covenanter Politics’ utilised their denominational principles and traditions as the basis for political involvement and as a rhetoric of opposition to Anglican privilege and Catholic tyranny. These could be the prime cause of Presbyterian opposition to the infringement of their rights, such as the marriage controversy and the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in the early 1840s, and they could also be employed as a language of opposition in response to broader social and political developments, such as the demands for land reform stimulated by the agricultural depression that accompanied the Famine. Despite their opposition to ascendancy, however, the Covenanter Politics of Presbyterian Liberals predisposed them towards pan-protestant unionism against the threat of ‘Rome Rule’.

Religious Political Parties and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship.

Political Liberalism, Free Speech and Public Reason

In this paper, I critically assess John Rawls' repeated claim that the duty of civility is only a moral duty and should not be enforced by law. In the first part of the paper, I examine and reject the view that Rawls' position may be due to the practical difficulties that the legal enforcement of the duty of civility might entail. I thus claim that Rawls' position must be driven by deeper normative reasons grounded in a conception of free speech. In the second part of the paper, I therefore examine various arguments for free speech and critically assess whether they are consistent with Rawls' political liberalism. I first focus on the arguments from truth and self-fulfilment. Both arguments, I argue, rely on comprehensive doctrines and therefore cannot provide a freestanding political justification for free speech. Freedom of speech, I claim, can be justified instead on the basis of Rawls' political conception of the person and of the two moral powers. However, Rawls' wide view of public reason already allows scope for the kind of free speech necessary for the exercise of the two moral powers and therefore cannot explain Rawls' opposition to the legal enforcement of the duty of civility. Such opposition, I claim, can only be explained on the basis of a defence of unconstrained freedom of speech grounded in the ideas of democracy and political legitimacy. Yet, I conclude, while public reason and the duty of civility are essential to political liberalism, unconstrained freedom of speech is not. Rawls and political liberals could therefore renounce unconstrained freedom of speech, and endorse the legal enforcement of the duty of civility, while remaining faithful to political liberalism.

The African National Congress and its Critics: 'Predatory Liberalism', Black Empowerment and Intra-Alliance Tensions in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Post-apartheid South Africa is characterized by centralized, neo-liberal policymaking that perpetuates, and in some cases exaggerates, socio-economic inequalities inherited from the apartheid era. The African National Congress (ANC) leadership’s alignment with powerful international and domestic market actors produces tensions within the Tripartite Alliance and between government and civil society. Consequently, several characteristics of ‘predatory liberalism’ are evident in contemporary South Africa: neo-liberal restructuring of the economy is combined with an increasing willingness by government to assert its authority, to marginalize and delegitimize those critical of its abandonment of inclusive governance. A new form of oligarch power, combining entrenched economic interests with those of a new ‘black bourgeoisie’ promoted by narrowly implemented Black Economic Empowerment policies, diminishes prospects for broad-based socio-economic transformation. Because the new policy environment is failing to resolve tensions between global market demands for increasing market liberalization and domestic popular demands for poverty-alleviation and socio-economic transformation, the ANC leadership is forced increasingly to confront ‘ultra-leftists’ who are challenging its credentials as defender of the National Democratic Revolution which was the cornerstone in the anti-apartheid struggle.

New Ways of Looking at the State Apparatus and the State Archive in Nineteenth Century Ireland: Curiosities from that Phonetic Museum - Royal Irish Constabulary Reports and their Political Uses, 1879-91

This essay seeks to contextualise the intelligence work of the Royal Irish Constabulary, particularly in the 1880s, in terms of the wider British and imperial practice and, as a corollary, to reflect upon aspects of the structure of the state apparatus and the state archive in Ireland since the Union. The author contrasts Irish and British police and bureaucratic work and suggests parallels between Ireland and other imperial locations, especially India. This paper also defines the narrowly political, indeed partisan, uses to which this intelligence was put, particularly during the Special Commission of 1888 on 'Parnellism and crime', when governmentheld police records were made available to counsel for The Times. By reflecting on the structure of the state apparatus and its use in this instance, the author aims to further the debate on the governance of nineteenth-century Ireland and to explore issues of colonial identity and practice. The line of argument proposed in this essay is prefigured in Margaret O'Callaghan, British high politics and a nationalist Ireland: criminality, land and the law under Forster and Balfour (Cork, 199

The State, Compartmentalization and the Turn to Local Community: A Critique of the Political Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre condemns modern politics, specifically liberalism and the institutions of the liberal state, as irredeemably fallen. His core argument is that the liberal state encourages a disempowering ‘compartmentalization’ of people’s everyday roles and activities that undermines the intersubjective conditions of human flourishing. MacIntyre’s alternative is an Aristotelian politics centred on the notion of “practice.” Defined by justice and solidarity, this politics can only be realized, he claims, within local communities which oppose and resist the dictates of the administrative state and capitalist market. Here it is argued that MacIntyre’s notion of “practice” represents a compelling ethical-political ideal. However, the belief that this ideal is best realized within local communities is rejected. In privileging local community, MacIntyre relies on a reductive view of modern states and overlooks the institutional conditions of a just polity. Against this, it is argued that a politics of human flourishing cannot succeed without an emancipatory transformation of large-scale, trans-communal institutions, in particular the state.

Consociationalism and the evolution of political cleavages in Northern Ireland, 1989-2004

Political cleavages are often understood as deriving from either deep-rooted social divisions or institutional incentives. Contemporary Northern Ireland provides a test of the mutability of apparently entrenched cleavages to institutional change. Research undertaken before the ceasefire in the 1990s found noticeable asymmetries in the patterns of cleavage within the unionist and nationalist blocs. Within the unionist bloc, economic 'left-right' issues formed the main ideological division between the two major unionist parties. This contrasted with an ethno-national source of ideological division between the two nationalist parties. The emergence of a consociational form of government structure since then has demonstrated the ability of institutional incentives to swiftly reform some aspects of party competition however. As evidence of this, we show that between 1989 and 2004 there was little change in the sources of support for Sinn F�©in relative to the SDLP, but the influence of left-right ideology within the unionist bloc was negated as the influence of ethno-nationalism dramatically increased.

Placing political economy: organising opposition to free trade before the abolition of the Corn Laws

The unfurling of global capitalism – and its attendant effects – has long been fertile intellectual terrain for geographers. But whilst studies of the processes and mechanisms of globalisation undoubtedly assume a talismanic importance in the discipline, geographers, with few exceptions, have left examinations of early economic liberalism to historians. One such critically important episode in the evolution of the liberal economic project was the repeal of the so-called 'Corn Laws' in 1846. Whilst the precise impact of the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL) continues to be a matter of conjecture, Eric Sheppard has asserted that their particular take on political economy managed to assume a 'truth-like status' and worldwide universality. But the ACLL's campaign represents only one, albeit decisive, stage in the long intellectual and practical struggle between 'protectionists' and the disciples of free trade. Studies of the non-'Manchester' components have tended to focus squarely upon national politics. This paper examines a pivotal attempt in 1838 by Lord Melbourne's Government to experiment with the effective elimination of import duties on fresh fruit. Unlike most agricultural commodities, table fruit was produced in a tightly defined area, thus allowing the Government's experiment to play out, in theory, without national political fallout. Whilst the Government's clandestine actions left little time for a concerted opposition to develop, Kentish fruit growers soon organised. A formidable lobby was forged that drew wide local support yet also evolved beyond the original 'epistemic community'. Whilst the coalition failed in their efforts to reintroduce protective duties, their actions allow us to see how protectionist ideologies and policies were vivified through practices at many different spatial scales and to better understand the complex spatiality of protectionist takes on political economy. Their campaign also changed – at least in the short term – the course of British mercantile policy.

Nationalist Multiculturalism in Late Imperial Austria as a Critique of Contemporary Liberalism: The Case of Bauer and Renner,

This article evaluates Bauer's theory of the nation and the debateon national-cultural autonomy in late imperial Austria. It finds important similarities with contemporary liberal debates on multiculturalism and the rights of ethnic and national minorities. It argues that the debate on national-cultural autonomy went in some respects beyond the contemporary debate on multiculturalism. National-cultural autonomy rejects the idea of the nation-state and proposes instead a multi-nation-state that recognises differential rights for ethnic and national minorities. It seeks to break the limitations of liberal democracy and the territorial principle of the nation-state by organising national communities as deterritorialised national corporations, and multination-states as territorialised non-national identities.