James Martin

Situating Speech: A Rhetorical Approach to Political Strategy

Ideas are increasingly acknowledged as factors in explaining political behaviour. But often they are treated as inert resources rather than dynamic instances of action in themselves. The latter, I propose, requires reflection on the character of speech — as the medium of ideas — in responding to and refiguring a prevailing situation. I undertake such reflection by setting out a rhetorical approach to political strategy. Building upon ‘interpretive’ advances in political science I shift the focus from stable cognitive frames to the dynamics of argumentation where ideas work expressively. I then explore the rhetorical aspect of strategising with attention to the way speech serves to orient audiences by creatively re-appropriating a situation. That approach is shown to be consistent with a ‘dialectical’ political sociology that emphasises the interaction of structure and agency. Finally, I sketch a method for undertaking rhetorical analysis and indicate how it might be applied to a concrete example.

Rhetoric in British Politics and Society

The art of rhetoric is central to the practice of politics. It also, however, plays an important role in civic and private life, where it is employed to persuade, negotiate and resolve disputes on a daily basis. Using the Aristotelian categories of ethos (appeals based on the character of the speaker), pathos (appeals to the emotions of an audience) and logos (appeals to reason), the contributors to this collection explore topics ranging from Prime Ministers Questions and Welsh devolution to political satire and the rhetoric of cultural racism. This collection provides a highly accessible and engaging discussion of a variety of issues, while casting new light on the place and function of rhetoric in contemporary Britain. As such, it will appeal to a wide audience, including scholars and students of rhetoric, political communication, British politics, cultural studies and sociology.

The Political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevirs approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffes work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevirs more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.

Capturing Desire: Rhetorical Strategies and the Affectivity of Discourse

This article: Provides a theoretical exploration of rhetorical persuasion as a practice aimed at ‘capturing desire’. Elucidates the shared interest of rhetorical and psychoanalytical theory in the production of so-called ‘plausible stories’ that mobilise and shape affects. Surveys different psychoanalytical approaches to the rhetorical articulation of ‘symptomatic beliefs’ that support political reasoning. Demonstrates the applicability of psychoanalytical theories to the analysis of a specific example of political speech. In this article I argue that psychoanalytical theory can help us understand the emotional force of political rhetoric. I undertake a theoretical enquiry into the method of interpreting political speeches as strategies of affective persuasion. Both rhetorical and psychoanalytical studies converge in their concern with the production of ‘plausible stories’ that aim to fold psychic investments into political judgements. To capture desire, I claim, political rhetoric must articulate ‘symptomatic beliefs’ in relation to wider situational exigencies. I sketch three distinct psychoanalytical approaches, each of which emphasises a different scenario of unconscious organisation where rhetorical strategies are pertinent: namely Freudian, Kleinian, and Lacanian approaches. These are then applied to the example of a controversial rhetorical intervention—Enoch Powell’s infamous Birmingham speech of 1968—to demonstrate the various potential foci when undertaking analysis.

Piero Gobetti's Agonistic Liberalism

This article examines the ‘revolutionary liberal’ outlook expounded by the young Italian journalist and intellectual, Piero Gobetti, immediately following the First World War. It considers the historical evolution of his ‘agonistic’ liberalism according to which conflict rather than consensus serves as the basis of social and political renewal. The article traces the formation of Gobettis thought from his idealist response to the crisis of the liberal state through to his endorsement of the communist revolutionaries in Turin and his denunciation of fascism as the continuation of Italys failed tradition of compromise. Whilst Gobettis views presently resonate with a growing interest in the agonistic dimension of politics, it is argued that his elitism and his understanding of liberalism as a ‘civic religion’ reveal challenging tensions in his thought.

Introduction: Rhetoric and the British Way of Politics

In Ancient Greece, in the 5th century BCE, the people we now call Sophists began to reflect on the power of speech to rouse people to anger and move them to tears. They were the first (in Europe) to try to understand how language works, and to grasp the strangeness of its relationship to the reality it describes yet of which it is also a part. Such concerns had particular importance in the democratic city of Athens. It was a noisy place in which civic life revolved around arenas of public speaking and disputation — from the public political assembly to private (and drunken) philosophical symposia by way of a noisy agora. In these places the ability to speak well — to instruct, to move and to persuade — was a vital skill for citizens of all kinds. As teachers of that skill, the Sophists were offering to train others in something thought to be as important as soldiering or manufacturing, essential for personal self-defence and for the maintenance of the self-government of the polis.

Ontology and law in the early Poulantzas

This article reviews the little examined early work of the Greek Marxist and state theorist, Nicos Poulantzas (1936–1979). In his first book, Nature du choses et droit of 1965, the young scholar developed a sociology of law culled from the insights of philosophical ontology. The article sets out the central claims of that book and reflects on its place in Poulantzass intellectual development. Drawing on Heidegger, Sartre and Marx, Poulantzas proposed a species of Natural Law theory that unified ‘facts’ and ‘values’ by grounding legal concepts in a theory of social praxis centred on material labour. Legal categories were thus irreducible to ahistorical essences but were, rather, expressions of mankinds struggle to realize its intrinsic freedom. As we shall see, although flawed and in key respects radically at odds with his later anti-humanism, Poulantzass legal ontology nevertheless anticipated his mature theory of the state by setting out a philosophical sociology of the political order rooted in an anti-essentialist mode of inquiry.

Third Way Politics Today

The Third Way’ has come to symbolize the effort to revive European social democratic politics at the start of the twenty-first century. Having rejected old-style socialist statism and the free-market economics of the New Right, leading social democrats claim to have identified an alternative that cuts a path between state and market. Two of the major parties of the left in Europe — the British Labour Party under Tony Blair and the German Social Democrats under Gerhard Schroder — have heralded a Third Way or, in German, a ‘new middle’ (Neue Mitte), an ideology of the ‘radical centre’ (see Blair, 1998, 2001; Blair and Schroder, 1999). Instead of a confrontational leftism, doomed forever to protest and never govern, proponents of the Third Way have announced a politics that purports to move beyond the antagonism between left and right.

Poulantzas: From Law to the State

Poulantzas began his intellectual career as a scholar of law but eventually shifted his focus onto the theorization of the capitalist state. In his early publications, he explored legal concepts from the perspective of Phenomenology, inspired in particular by the Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Lucien Goldmann. This chapter explores the logic of Poulantzas’s early legal thinking and the shift in his work under the influence of Louis Althusser’s ‘structural’ Marxism, which accompanied his new focus on the state in the mid-to-late 1960s. This shift in his thought permitted Poulantzas a uniquely complex view of the state as a contingent, ‘material condensation’ of class forces. But his new insights were not fully extended to the exploration of legal subjectivities or the law as a site of socio-political contestation, which had been features of his earlier work.

Book Review: Charles Wells, The Subject of Liberation: Žižek, Politics, PsychoanalysisThe Subject of Liberation: Žižek, Politics, Psychoanalysis by WellsCharles. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 245pp., £65.00 (h/b), ISBN 9781623563684

In recent years, populism has gained great strength across the world. This book by Benjamin Moffitt focuses on the dynamic emergence of populist movements in the last two decades and examines the different manifestations of populism through the concept of political style. The central argument of the book is that populism has changed over the years due to the radical mutation of political and media landscapes in contemporary times, and therefore, we must take advantage of new concepts to analyse it effectively. Specifically, populism as a global phenomenon – which entails both democratic and antidemocratic tendencies (p. 149) – involves a classic divide between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ but also develops a close relationship with the new global media environment (p. 3). In order to understand populism in the current mediated and stylised political setting, we must rely on the concept of ‘political style’ (p. 28). The author thus criticises the approaches which dominate contemporary populism research (premised on ideology, strategy, discourse and political logic) (pp. 17–25) in order to put forward the concept of political style, defined as ‘a repertoire of embodied, symbolically mediated performance’ (pp. 28–29). In other words, Moffitt’s definition bridges the rhetorical and the aesthetic dimensions of populism (p. 38). This approach clarifies populism in a period of global crisis, in which the media pervade the political spectrum. In addition, the author examines 28 cases of populist leaders across the world, with a view to gaining a more thorough understanding of populism (pp. 5–6). Moffitt’s approach on populism is really interesting. However, there is no substantial distinction between political style and Ernesto Laclau’s concept of political logic/discourse. Laclau (as Moffitt now does) had highlighted the importance of performance in constructing social reality and argued that discourse is not identical with language or text but refers to a network of meaning connecting both linguistic (e.g. rhetoric) and non-linguistic elements (e.g. style). Moreover, contrary to the author’s opinion (p. 41), discourse analysis (with a formal/ structural conceptualisation of populism) is undoubtedly useful for comparative research and also highly flexible (cross-fertilisation with other approaches). This has been proven by the significant increase in the empirical applications of this theoretical framework. A great advantage of the book, however, is that it examines so many compelling cases of populist leaders around the world. Nevertheless, it fails to take account of left-wing populist movements in Europe, such as Syriza and Podemos. In sum, despite its controversial orientation, The Global Rise of Populism should be read by students and researchers interested in populism and anyone interested in anti-establishment politics broadly defined.