Elizabeth Frazer

Ethics, advocacy and empowerment: Issues of method in researching language

Researching Language, the book-length study on which the following discussion is based, deals with questions about power and method in a range of social science disciplines (anthropology, sociology and sociolinguistics). To put ‘power’ and ‘method’ together in such an explicit way, and to foreground them as major concerns, is perhaps an unconventional move. Yet any social researcher who has undertaken fieldwork must at some level be aware that power relations exist in this context as in others; and those power relations are strongly affected by the methods we are constrained to adopt in ‘doing research’. That is, they are not entirely determined by pre-existing differences of status imported from other contexts. Something happens within the process of research itself.

Sex Differences in Political Knowledge in Britain

This paper analyses, and examines the interpretation of, sex differences in political knowledge as measured in the context of nationally representative British surveys. The paper discusses the construction and operationalisation of ‘knowledge’ measures in survey research. British survey research finds striking sex differences in scores on political knowledge items. The inclusion of contextual variables, and of interactions between sex and other relevant variables, attenuates but does not eliminate consistent sex differences.

Feminist Talk and Talking about Feminism: Teenage Girls' Discourses of Gender.

In this paper I compare talk about class and gender by public‐school girls (who classified themselves as upper class and whose parents are in socio‐economic class I and/or are landowners) and comprehensive‐school girls whose parents are in socio‐economic class III. The comprehensive‐school girls had no clear concepts or categorisation of their own class position. Girls in both schools shared a diagnosis and set of grievances about the injustices and dilemmas of girlhood. However, the extent to which they used feminist categories and their contentment with these categories varied markedly — the public‐school girls being notably more uncomfortable. I analyse and theorise these differences as discursive, rather than psychological or purely sociological. This analysis highlights the importance of self‐conscious and critical discursive practice by educators and pupils in the educational setting.

Ethics, Advocacy and Empowerment in Researching Language

Researching Language, the book-length study on which the following discussion is based, deals with questions about power and method in a range of social science disciplines (anthropology, sociology and sociolinguistics). To put ‘power’ and ‘method’ together in such an explicit way, and to foreground them as major concerns, is perhaps an unconventional move. Yet any social researcher who has undertaken fieldwork must at some level be aware that power relations exist in this context as in others; and those power relations are strongly affected by the methods we are constrained to adopt in ‘doing research’. That is, they are not entirely determined by preexisting differences of status imported from other contexts. Something happens within the process of research itself.

Virtuous Violence and the Politics of Statecraft in Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Weber

This article seeks to problematise the dominant understandings of the relationship between politics and violence in political theory. Liberal political theory identifies politics with the pacified arena of the modern state; although violence may sometimes be an instrument for the pursuit of political goals, politics is conceptualised as the ongoing non-violent negotiation of competing rights and interests, and the overall aim of liberalism is to remove violence from the political process. Radical critics deny liberalisms promise to deliver a divorce between politics and violence, but they often share liberalisms premise that politics and violence are distinct in principle, and ought to be so in practice, developing a vision of politics beyond violence. In contrast, the theory of politics and violence that can be read in the work of Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Weber understands politics as immanently connected to violence. Neither politics nor violence is reducible to a singular logic. A distinctively political violence constitutes and polices political distinctions. In doing this political violence is bound up with its own limitations – it is one medium for the construction of a world which, according to these three thinkers, it does not and cannot fully control. Liberal and radical thinkers tend to treat Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Weber in their theory of political power as outdated or, worse, as celebrating the role of violence in politics. In our interpretation, however, their work has the virtue of demonstrating the paradoxes of political action, in particular the complex relationship between politics and violence which is neither one of naturalistic necessity nor pure strategy or instrumentality, but is embedded in politics as statecraft.

Argument and Rhetoric in the Justification of Political Violence

In contrast to liberal, Christian and other pacifist ethics and to just war theory, a range of 20th-century thinkers sought to normalize the role of violence in politics. This article examines the justificatory strategies of Weber, Sorel, Schmitt, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Fanon. They each engage in justificatory argument, deploying arguments for violence from instrumentality, from necessity and from virtue. All of these arguments raise problems of validity. However, we find that they are reinforced by the representation of violence in terms of a specific aesthetic, either tragedy or sublimity, and by certain rhetorical textual strategies. We conclude that the persuasive force of these arguments for violence rests as much, if not more, on aesthetics and rhetoric, as it does on argument.

The Value of Locality

Since the early 1980s political theory has been dominated by the debate about ‘communitarianism’ (Avineri and de-Shalit 1992). In the academic context, communitarianism engages critically with recent Anglo-US liberalism, especially its emphasis on individualism. More recently, communitarian ideas and values have taken a central place in mainstream UK politics.2 References to communitarianism and invocations of the value of community reflect a widespread fear, to the left, right and centre of the political spectrum, that market individualism threatens to atomise society.

Avowing violence: Foucault and Derrida on politics, discourse and meaning

This article enquires into the understanding of violence, and the place of violence in the understanding of politics, in the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. These two engaged in a dispute about the place of violence in their respective philosophical projects. The trajectories of their respective subsequent bodies of thought about power, politics and justice, and the degrees of affirmation or condemnation of the violent nature of reality, language, society and authority, can be analysed in relation to political traditions of realism, radicalism and liberalism. We trace the starting points, and points of convergence and divergence between them, and consider the implications of their work for our capacity to critically judge episodes and uses of violence in political contexts.

Mary Wollstonecraft on Politics and Friendship

How, exactly, might friendship be relevant to politics? Friendship between political actors can be hypothesised to have specific effects; friendship between individuals in society can be hypothesised to have specific political outcomes; or friendship and politics can be understood to be conceptually connected. Mary Wollstonecraft makes friendship a central concept in her political theory of social justice and good government. This article analyses how politics and friendship are related in her texts, exploring her arguments that friendship in society is a condition of just government, but also suggesting that for Wollstonecraft friendship and citizenship are congruent with one another, and hence that the connection between politics and friendship is conceptual as well as causal.

Revisiting Ruddick: Feminism, pacifism and non-violence

This article explores feminist contentions over pacifism and non-violence in the context of the Greenham Common Peace Camp in the 1980s and later developments of feminist Just War Theory. We argue that Sara Ruddick’s work puts feminist pacifism, its radical feminist critics and feminist just war theory equally into question. Although Ruddick does not resolve the contestations within feminism over peace, violence and the questions of war, she offers a productive way of holding the tension between them. In our judgment, her work is helpful not only for developing a feminist political response to the threats and temptations of violent strategies but also for thinking through the question of the relation between violence and politics as such.