Theory, Ideology, Rhetoric: Ideas in Politics and the Case of ‘Community’ in Recent Political Discourse
| Author | Steve Buckler |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-856x.2007.00248.x |
| Published date | 01 February 2007 |
| Date | 01 February 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Theory, Ideology, Rhetoric: Ideas in
Politics and the Case of ‘Community’
in Recent Political Discourse
Steve Buckler
The article develops and applies a framework for examining the way in which ideas figure and
re-figure in political discourse. The framework identifies three ‘levels’ of discourse: theory, ideology
and rhetoric. These are distinguished by reference to the differing performative conditions pertain-
ing at each level, which in turn explain differing styles and modalities. The framework allows a
multilayered examination of political ideas, employing an analysis at one level in order to illumi-
nate another. The framework is then applied to the case of the idea of community as it has figured
in recent British political discourse and allows an elucidation of the ideological adaptations and
rhetorical strategies in which the idea has featured. The analysis reveals the discursive complexities
attaching to the use of ideas in politics.
The purpose of this article is to develop and apply a framework for examining the
role of ideas in politics. The framework is designed to allow us to take that role more
seriously. It is quite commonly assumed that when ideas are deployed in politics, by
contrast with more scholarly discourse, they tend to lose all depth and stability and
are therefore robbed of their conceptual integrity. This view, part of a broader
suspicion of politics, tends to presuppose a distinction between how people think
and speak about politics in a scholarly setting, where the demands of rationality,
consistency and coherence are paramount, and how people think and speak politi-
cally, where discourse is corrupted by instrumentality, emotivism and rhetoric. The
suspicion of politics has long and deep roots: one need only think of the contrast
between the articulation of truth (in the language of philosophy) and the use of
worldly rhetoric (in the language of politics) as thematised by Plato (1971).
This view has generally been based on an implicit belief (explicit in Plato) in a
metaphysically guaranteed realm of truth that is always potentially undermined
when exposed to the dynamics of the worldly realm of appearances—a picture of
‘two worlds’ distinguished by their different cognitive status, grounded respectively
in truth and in opinion (with the latter, in turn, answering to interest). The
questioning of this belief and subsequent moves toward an understanding of
meaning as conventional, and so contextually generated, has not, on the whole,
done a great deal to allay suspicions about politics from a scholarly point of view, let
alone a popular one. However, greater emphasis upon linguistic context may allow
us to take political discourse more seriously by tracing ways in which more theo-
retical and more political ways of thinking and speaking may inform one another.
The framework is elucidatory rather than explanatory. In its conception and design,
it anticipates significant correspondences between levels of discourse (responding to
the same social world), some of which will be the result of more or less direct
reciprocal influences. The point here will not be to trace the processes by which
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856x.2007.00248.x BJPIR: 2007 VOL 9, 36–54
© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Political Studies Association
such influences occur but rather to exploit their effects by using analysis of one level
to illuminate analysis of another. The framework will be applied in the case of the
deployment of the concept of ‘community’ in recent political debate.
Framework
For analytical purposes we can identify three kinds of discursive context in which
political ideas may figure. These provide for three ‘levels’ of political discourse
which can be termed, respectively, ‘theory’, ‘ideology’ and ‘rhetoric’.1These terms
are not used here in any particularly technical sense. The context of theory refers
to more scholarly discourse as occurs, for example, in academic debate; the context
of ideology to the deployment of ideas as elements in an integrated and coherent
political platform with action-guiding potential, associated, for example, with the
work of party intellectuals; the context of rhetoric to the kind of debate that goes on
among actors who are seeking power in a competitive political arena.2
I do not want to suggest that the distinctions between these levels can be drawn in
a manner so categorical as to mark them out as different ‘universes of discourse’. In
this sense, the distinctions drawn are not to be framed in terms of cognitive standing
(a move which in any case would potentially reintroduce a cognitive hierarchy
redolent of the ‘two worlds’ conception mentioned above). Instead, different levels
of discourse may be distinguished by reference to the characteristic differences in
discursive style and modality as between the theoretical, the ideological and the
rhetorical.
Differences of this kind might be thought a somewhat frail or arbitrary basis on
which to draw analytical distinctions. However, we can give them further sense,
and a firmer basis, if we relate them to the different discursive contexts in which
contrasting styles and modalities arise. The reason that context matters in this
respect is that in different contexts of argument, embodying differently constituted
relations between speaker and audience with contrasting criteria for discursive
success, speakers may be trying to do rather different things. In this sense, the
typical styles and modalities at each level of discourse may be understood in relation
to the contrasting performative circumstances that pertain. More specifically, in
Austinian terms, differing perlocutionary conditions can be invoked: levels of dis-
course can be distinguished by reference to the contrasting requirements they place
upon speech undertaken to produce an effect in others, speech aimed at ‘getting
someone to ...’ (Austin 1976, 101).
In the light of this, with respect to the levels of discourse identified earlier, we can
draw some broad distinctions. At the level of theory, the priority is to produce
consensus through agreement in argument in circumstances of contestability; at the
level of ideology, the priority is to create solidarity around an action-guiding
programme in circumstances of choice over commitments; at the level of rhetoric,
the priority is to win hegemonic contests in the light of competition for popularity
(and so power). Boiled down to the perlocutionary formula of ‘getting someone to
...’ we might distinguish these levels in terms of getting people to ‘... agree with (an
argument)’; ‘... subscribe to (an agenda)’; and ‘... vote for (a party)’. We can expect,
as a result, that at these different levels, modes of speech are modified by reference
THEORY, IDEOLOGY, RHETORIC 37
© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Political Studies Association
BJPIR, 2007, 9(1)
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