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Economy and Society

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Political science, political ideas and rhetoric

Alan Finlayson
a

Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, Wales E-mail: Version of record first published: 21 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Alan Finlayson (2004): Political science, political ideas and rhetoric, Economy and Society, 33:4, 528-549 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0308514042000285279

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Economy and Society Volume 33 Number 4 November 2004: 528 /549

Political science, political ideas and rhetoric

Alan Finlayson
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Abstract
The article reviews ideational analysis and theory in political science. It argues that this is an important area of research limited by lack of a clear sense of what ideas in politics are and of how to analyse them as directly as possible. It is argued that political science should learn from the rhetorical turn in various areas of the social sciences, developing ways, appropriate to political science, of analysing the language, rhetoric and argumentation of political and policy discourse in its governmental contexts. Such an approach rests on a strong sense of the dynamic, contested and creative nature of political activity. Keywords: rhetoric; ideational; political science; political discourse; argumentation.

Introduction When, in the 1980s, rhetoric returned to the social sciences, it came, in large part though not exclusively, as a continuation, combination or extension of a variety of intellectual and methodological currents: the renewal of the linguistic turn in social science; the reassertion of interpretative and hermeneutic methodologies; the spread of poststructuralism; and varied forms of postmodernism that emphasized the discursive, narratalogical and contingent nature of knowledge production and its inevitable involvement with power relations.1 This new rhetoric formed part of an ongoing critique of positivisms and modernisms, providing yet another way to expose the fauxfoundationalism of a scientism blind to the use of language and figure in its most sure pronouncements. The rhetoric of inquiry, for example, focused on

Alan Finlayson, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales. E-mail: a.finlayson@swan.ac.uk Copyright # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online DOI: 10.1080/0308514042000285279

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the figurative and exhortatory techniques of particular disciplines and ranged widely, taking in economics, science, anthropology and mathematics (see Nelson et al. 1991). Others sought to sensitize practitioners to the importance of their own rhetorical address, understanding it as part of the public nature of their work and a way in which knowledge is generated and circulated (see Edmondson 1984; also Brown 1977), or saw rhetoric as way of interpreting psychological processes (e.g. Billig 1987). This rhetorical turn, though it may not have transformed all epistemology or established a new queen for the social sciences, has certainly provided for rhetoric a secure place in the field.2 But, for its leading advocates, the rhetoric of inquiry was literary critical in nature. McCloskey, while rejecting the positivist pretence of economics, makes a point of presenting his work as a reading not a grading or demolishing (1994: xii). For such reasons Michael Billig (1989), in a special issue of Economy and Society touching on this rhetorical turn, was probably right to worry that the revival of rhetoric might turn out to be the revival of a conservative aesthetic, the yearning for a lost heroic age of eloquence before politics became mired in the details of scientific public policy, or merely a tool to advance, even gentrify, the persuasion business. Billigs (1987) own project, conducted in the guise of a self-consciously antiquarian gadfly, stressed the welcome inevitability of Protagorean contradiction and the virtues of endless, aporetic, argumentation. His concern was to help social psychology appreciate the dynamic, interactive processes of argumentation but he also offered a vision of the free society: agonistic, liberal, dialogical rather than monological consisting of free and equal disputants arguing without constraint. Similarly, Shotter (1989), in the same issue, hoped the revival of rhetoric would help the reinvention of citizenship.3 The rhetorical turn, wherever it was made, certainly took political directions. One might expect the discipline of politics to have taken an interest: to realize it could learn from and contribute to this. But the rhetorical turn had, and continues to have, almost no effect whatsoever on political science4 and, of the many works that analyse government from a rhetorical perspective, few are written by those working within, or knowledgeable about, political science.5 Rhetorical and linguistic approaches, indeed, interpretivism in general, are not widely adopted approaches to the study of contemporary government (particularly in Britain where there are no large departments of rhetoric or speech communication).6 The argument of this article can in part be understood as a call for political science finally to forge productive conversations with such work on rhetoric and with the civic political tradition of rhetoric in particular. This was once essential to all political thinking, acting and analysing and it can be drawn upon without lapsing into either conservative romanticism or the merely literary analysis of political texts. Intended primarily as a ground-clearing exercise, making space for the rhetorical approach within political analysis, this article attempts to provoke political analysts and scientists into conceiving of politics through, rather than in spite of, its rhetorical nature.

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The need for this has become clear as political scientists have come to realize that, in order to explain some aspects of political and policy change within and around government, one needs to understand the role of ideas. But political science has failed properly to analyse such ideas in politics because it tends to conceive of politics as a social output and to abstract from the specific, strategic contexts of political action within which, alone, the ideas can be understood. The article then examines the effects of these tendencies in work associated with the ideational turn, showing that even those approaches most attuned to the importance of ideas tend to hypostasize them in the form of culture, habit and tradition. It is argued that ideas can be made amenable to focused and rigorous analysis once we realize that, as Rodney Barker has put it, Political ideas, even ones own, are apprehended only as statements (2000: 227). Such statements form part of wider processes of deliberation, argumentation and persuasion and it is these that must be the object of analysis. The article quickly considers some of the linguistic methodologies and schools of political theory that could assist here (some of them associated with the rhetorical turn). It concludes that these have much to offer political science as long as we retain an appreciation of politics as a dynamic creative activity in which actors have no choice other than, through the artful use of political terms and concepts, to convince themselves and others of the utility, truth or virtue of their perspective: a classical, agonistic, conception. A rhetorical political analysis can open up and explain some parts of this process and help us to appreciate and contribute to it.

Ideas and political science In the business of producing parsimonious and testable hypotheses and models of political behaviour, many political scientists have tended to ignore the complex and hard-to-measure relationship of political ideas with wider political actions. Often working within the confines of the assumption that actors act rationally to maximize utility, they are led to regard ideas as mere background assumptions or noisy rhetorical interference that can and must be bracketed off. But over the last ten to fifteen years there has been a localized intensification in study of the relationship between ideas and political or policy decisions. A field that has generally not been overly interested in them has, in some quarters, come to regard ideas as a potentially important variable.7 But this is dominated by the vague theoretical category of the ideational and a range of terms are often used interchangeably and seemingly imagined to substitute for, or to be synonymous with, idea: norm, belief, paradigm, value, habit, tradition, narrative and even culture. Too often these displace ideas onto background conditions and deflect interest away from their direct analysis. In general, ideas are still examined by political scientists only to be reduced to an effect of something already accounted for: instrumental action by self-interested politicians; the superior structural location of the actor who promotes an idea; the requirement for action co-

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ordination in complex organizations and so on. Few regard the formation and expression of ideas as a kind or aspect of political action in its own right. As such, not only does political science continue to paint a picture of politics that is curiously, even suspiciously, shorn of ideology, argument and persuasion; it has failed to resolve problems of explanation and description because it is unable to comprehend the relationships between ideas and political and policy decisions. This marginalization and reduction of the status of ideas in politics is no mere oversight. Ideas are a problem for political science analysis, a limit to what it can meaningfully address without fundamentally reassessing itself. This is because of two broad tendencies that underlie and drive contemporary political science. The first of these is the tendency to treat politics as an output; a result of social phenomena rather than an influence upon them; a passive realm rather than a dynamic force that can transform social organizations and relations (see also March and Olsen 1984; Mair 1998). For example, if political phenomena are understood as an aggregate outcome of atomized individual actions which can in turn be understood in the terms of behavioural or rational choice, then the ideas held by those individuals can be regarded as irrelevant since what matters is the action undertaken and its political result. The beliefs or desires that may have motivated it can be inferred from such action but this adds little if anything to the analysis. Ideas are merely mental states that reflect or assist acting on the basis of optimization, posing no problems and holding little interest for political science. The new institutionalist challenge to such rational choice analysis appears to redress the balance and to return to politics an input role. But this often takes the form of emphasizing the restrictive (even determining) effects of organizational cultures and habits. Preferences, as it were, are displaced from individuals to bureaucratic collectivities and their transformation attributed to externally imposed crises or dilemmas, and longer-term processes of social learning. The actual ideas in question are left largely ignored; their power simply derivative of the power of institutions. The second tendency that makes it constitutively difficult for political science to examine ideas is a particular kind of abstraction. Political science often proceeds via abstract models made up of classes of things understood to be theoretically homogenous. Ideas are often treated as just such a class. But ideas are not a uniform class of things. An idea of God, an idea of good, an idea of right and an idea of what to have for lunch may all be connected in some chain of reasoning, but, if we regard them as things of essentially the same sort, just examples or instances of the category idea, then what makes them important, their specificity as ideas of particular things, formulated in and for particular contexts and uses, is dissolved. This matters for the analysis of ideas in the political process because here one is rarely talking about chains of thought that unfold in individual minds but about clashes of different ideas (sometimes of the same thing) and their formulation; about ideas that their proponents want to be accepted by others. The question of how ideas have influence or effects on government and politics cannot be abstract but must be

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understood as practical in nature: it can be asked and answered only in relation to specific ideas as it concerns how such come to have effectivity through being persuasive to particular people at particular times. Both of these problems are related to the tendency of political science routinely to separate ideas from material factors in a way that is rarely defended let alone explained. Presumably it derives from a general prejudice which, as Rodney Barker points out, sees ideas as mere rhetoric, a cover or justification for other things and a positivist prejudice for which [w]hat can be counted and measured is more amenable to precise formulation and presentation than other forms of human action (2000: 223 /4). In political science this encourages a kind of hyper-determinism in which political action is understood as an expression of the dynamic of interests narrowly conceived and predefined (a point also made in Hindess 1988; Hay 2002: 103 /4) with no significant intervening process of intellectual or communicative deliberation; interests just manifest themselves as unmediated action-in-the-world. By contrast, Barker wants to understand ideas and their expression as themselves a form of political action.8 This is starkly at odds with a political science for which political phenomena are only outputs of social interactions, rather than inputs, and institutions primarily bargaining arenas for individuals or collectives concerned with optimization and whose moral, philosophical, ideological or other, normative, motivations are of minimal importance to analysis. When, in the late 1980s and progressively through the 1990s, there was, in political science, a revival of interest in ideas, it came as part of a counterbalance, even a riposte, to the more rigid forms of rational choice behaviourism.9 The trend emerged most strongly as part of the new institutionalist school which, in returning to the importance of political structures, sought to re-emphasize a certain autonomy for politics.10 In what became a manifesto for the new institutionalism, March and Olsen advocated that political scientists renew their interest in institutions understood as political actors in their own right (1984: 738). Criticizing a general inclination to see the causal links between society and polity as running from the former to the latter rather than the other way around (1984: 735) they were able to realize that the preferences which form the object of study of rational choice analysis develop in politics, as in the rest of life, through a combination of education, indoctrination and experience and that political leadership aims to transform them (1984: 739). This was a major challenge to a theoretical expressivism in which politics is understood as the unmediated expression of something located elsewhere. With its emphasis on politics as an input and a sensitivity to symbolic phenomena, Marchs and Olsens arguments should have led to a flowering of analyses of political ideas. Yet one can detect in institutionalist literature a hesitancy about going all the way. March and Olsen gave back to political analysis a more rounded sociology, but one that could easily be reconciled with some core claims of rational choice individualism, sustaining a vision of politics as the outcome of various forces and factors rather than the civic vision implied by their claim that ideas and

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symbolic forms are political tools in a process involving discovering, elaborating, and expressing meanings, establishing shared (or opposing) conceptions of experience, values, and the nature of existence (1984: 741 /2).

Political science and ideational analysis Goldstein and Keohane (1993) wedded the ideational turn to rational choice approaches by arguing that dominant ideas formalized in government organizations are there to resolve problems of collective co-ordination. They recommended we conceive of ideas as road-maps or focal points around which action is organized while carefully endorsing Webers well-worn switchmen metaphor to give interest the controlling share of power. Analysis of the content and form of any particular idea was eclipsed by this emphasis on institutionalization and structural function. For example, Stephen Krasner (1993), in Goldstein and Keohanes collection, acknowledges the role of ideas in contributing to the Treaty of Westphalia only to limit it. Ideas he says have been used to codify existing practices rather than to initiate new forms of order. . .they legitimated political practices that were already facts on the ground. Ideas have been one among several instruments that actors have invoked to promote their own, usually mundane, interests (1993: 238).11 Krasner departs from an instrumentalist and individualist paradigm only in acknowledging a measure of institutionalized longevity, saying little about the generation or propagation of the idea itself. Since no reason for the formation of a particular idea of sovereignty is offered, we are left to wonder if it has any particular importance. Would any idea have done, if it served the purpose of legitimation? One can see why Mark Blyth argues that the political science interest in ideas has been little more than an ad hoc attempt to account for theoretical problems in the two main schools of institutionalist theory, reducing ideas to filler, to shore up. . .already existing research programs rather than treat them as objects of investigation in their own right (1997: 229). For example McNamara (1999) quite explicitly imports ideas into an explanation of the formation of a consensus around economic policy in the EU and discovers that ideational consensus occurred because people told each other about their ideas. The forces behind this convergence of opinion included: the promotion of ideas by OECD experts and national policy elites, the advocacy of the French prime minister and the congeniality of meetings of central bank governors (1999: 467). Again, the form and content of the ideas are unexplored and as a consequence we do not move on from the banal point that in order to come to a shared view on something people need to share their views. McNamaras targets are analyses that place explanatory weight only on the structural requirements of international monetary flows but her challenge does not substantively alter this paradigm. Because the form and content of the ideas in question are not made a focus of investigation we are left to presume that either any idea would have done as long as it brought about consensus, or that

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it had to be this particular idea, in which case it was part of a determined outcome and observations about it are superfluous colouring.12 Ideas also touched the shores of political science, only to recede leaving little behind, in Peter Haas (1992) work on the influence of epistemic communities on policy formation. Concerned to correct over-reliance on claims about structural determination in a predefined system, Haas suggested that in conditions of uncertainty or excessive complexity (such as pertain to natural and scientific phenomena, including economics) politicians may turn to an expert epistemic community for information. Such groupings can introduce new patterns of reasoning to decision makers. . .new paths of policymaking (1992: 21) as well as circumscribe actions [and] define the alternatives. But Haas was interested in these experts rather than their ideas, in the diffusion of new ideas and information that can lead to new patterns of behaviour and. . .be an important determinant of international policy coordination (1992: 2). The proposed research programme was concerned to identify the persons involved in epistemic communities and to study their movements, unproblematically gleaning their ideas from early publications and testimonies before legislative bodies, speeches, biographical accounts, and interviews as if these were all the same kind of thing, the ideas they transmit immediately obvious and no sort of interpretative or analytical work required. In order to see if these ideas mask social conditioning we merely need to make a judicious use of the secondary literature (1992: 35). In contrast, the widely admired and influential work of Peter Hall shows how the greater the focus on specific instances of transformative political decision, the sharper the observations about ideas. Focused on the shift from Keynesianism to monetarism in British economic policy, and employing a number of slightly different approaches over his career, Halls analyses of policy paradigms have generated some promising hints about how to attend to actual political ideas but, ultimately, failed to deliver on them. For Hall, a paradigm specifies policy goals, instruments and objects, and is embedded in the terminology through which policy makers communicate (1993: 279). He realizes that at moments of crisis, when a paradigm collapses, the subsequent shift cannot depend on the application of norms contained within the collapsing paradigm. The movement from one to the other must involve a political judgement by actors casting around for an alternative framework within which to think, one that can explain the crisis and shape alternatives. For this reason not just any idea will do. In his case study Hall argues that monetarism appealed because it provided a new rationale for many measures which [Conservatives] had long supported and contained a new set of arguments for the long-standing Conservative position that public spending and the role of the state in the economy should be reduced as well as fitting with their hostility to unions (1993: 286). In short, part of its persuasive appeal was that it was useful in the promotion of a broader set of Conservative norms to which it could be added, having a supplementary effect on the rest of those ideas.13 Monetarism also appealed because it could be presented in terms that

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had broader public appeal. . .[and] offered a simple but appealing prescription for all these dilemmas (1993: 286). Hall thus acknowledges the need for policy to be sold, as it were, to be persuasive in a determinate political context, but he confines himself to speculative and suggestive comments14 and the general claim that sets of ideas can structure the policy-making process and are somewhat independent of institutions (1993: 290). He goes no further, in the belief that like subatomic particles, ideas do not leave much of a trail when they shift (1993: 290). These varied examples are indicative of the limited way in which political ideas are understood and (under)analysed even by those setting out to take them seriously. Many political scientists want to deal with ideas, they know there are limits to institutionalist as well as rational choice theories, but the tendency is still to oppose them to the hard things that really count. Thus ideas are interpreted as narrowly instrumental, covers for the real work of real interests, which are not significantly shaped by ideas; focal points for community formation or products of elite interactions whose occurrence is the beginning and end of ideational analysis. This neo-Durkheimian interest in collective binding and the creation of social order through ceremony. . .the ways in which symbolic behaviour transforms more instrumental behaviour and is transformed by it (March and Olsen 1984: 744) is sophisticated but risks hypostasizing ideas in the form of conventions, blinding itself to their dynamics. As a final example let us turn to a recent argument that can lead us on to a new position for it makes the case for the potentially independent causal role of ideas and recognizes the strategic context in which political actors operate, yet still holds back from addressing the nature of ideas themselves. Colin Hays concern is to show that the ideational can have an independent influence upon political and policy processes. In his theory the driving force of the ideational is inadequacy. The world is too complex, the variables too many and the outcomes too uncertain for actors to know with certainty what they should do. Thus they seek cognitive shortcuts, deriving choices from within paradigms. The ideational is dialectically related to the material in that the broader environment may circumscribe the range of possible actions to form a strategically selective context while actors act strategically in their choices, seeking to alter that context. Some elements of these choices are intuitive, or derived from habit, and some the product of conscious calculation (see Hay 2002: 126 /34). While Ideas provide the point of mediation between actors and their environment (ibid.: 209 /10) that environment is not everything for it is the ideas actors hold about the context in which they find themselves, rather than the context itself, which ultimately informs the way in which they behave (ibid.: 258). The underlying intent of Hays theorization is clearly critical. For example, he argues that a concept such as globalization can have effects on political and economic dynamics independently of the empirics of globalisation itself (2002: 202). If governmental actors believe that they must cut taxes in order to maintain competitiveness then they may act in a manner consistent with this

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prediction (ibid.: 202). Political science therefore needs to be able to distinguish between the effects of phenomena and the effects of conceptions of them (ibid: 204). This advances political analysis but it also preserves the possibility of a better understanding and thus an empirical critique of, for example, globalization: one can expose the mismatch between idea and reality.15 Hay is thus careful not to embrace fully constructivist positions and is very critical of particular kinds of postmodernism precisely because he believes them (incorrectly in my view) necessarily to nullify such critique. But we are misled if we believe that ideas in politics take the form of relatively coherent (if sometimes false) propositions or beliefs and that we, as political or social scientists, can simply evaluate these ideas, propositions or beliefs in terms of their accuracy. In politics, ideas and concepts are not social scientific in nature: they are political. Their function is not necessarily to be accurate or even adequate descriptions of the world. A concept such as globalization, when employed by political actors, is a political tool of use in persuading others of the virtue or necessity of a particular political course of action. It helps make certain things thinkable in certain ways and can contribute to the construction of broad coalitions of support (a rather different way of describing collective co-ordination).16 Hays achievement is to recognize from within political science that the particular ideas employed in politics have particular effects and are thus a necessary subject of investigation. But he loses sight of the way in which the political aspect of ideas lies not in their scientific veracity but in their persuasiveness (and in politics scientific veracity, however secure, is only an aspect of persuasiveness). In politics this is necessarily so for just the sorts of reason that Hay points to: the outcomes of actions are uncertain. Even if we know with scientific precision what the effect of a policy will be there is still the possibility of dissenting from the desirability of that effect: it may be evaluated, ethically or morally, in different ways. Political ideas concern what might happen in the future and the virtues of whatever it is so happening. As such they are inherently contestable. For an idea to be widely adopted in politics it must be (though it cannot only be) persuasive and this persuasiveness is neither coincidental nor covert. Such attempts at persuasiveness are definitive of politics, the intrinsically agonistic nature of which must be acknowledged if we are to enable analysis of the ideas that animate it.17 Introducing ideas into political analysis entails accepting a mediating moment in which preferences are transformed into, and transformed by, statements or propositions that are parts of complex chains of communication that have a powerful form as well as content. This, we might go so far as to say, is essential to the politicality of politics. Because it is a kind of wild element, a contingency that may transform or bypass the limits of prior calculability, it is not amenable to the usual sorts of predictive political science and it can be grasped only as strategic and contextual rather than as abstract and generalizable. It is this political moment that political science runs up against for it is limited in its ability to perceive the politics of politics.

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In his Philosophy of Rhetoric , some eighty years ago, I. A. Richards pointed out that an idea or a notion, like the physicists ultimate particles and rays, is only known by what it does. Apart from its dress or other signs it is not identifiable (1936: 5). Political science, when it has shown an interest, has been primarily concerned with these other signs, with the secondary effects of ideas understood as their impact on behaviour. The ideas themselves, it is imagined, cannot be explained since, like Popperian hypotheses prior to their verification, they are mysterious inspirations, and not amenable to scientific analysis (Popper 1959: 31), and, since they cannot be touched or observed, they cannot be investigated directly: only what they do, and how successfully they do it, their role in determining outcomes, can be considered. We need to focus on the dress in which ideas are made manifest to us. It is in as much as they can be formulated in communicable terms (even if they are communicated only to ourselves) that they can possibly have effects. Whether spoken or written, these words are, in principle at least, concrete, observable, analysable and intelligible, as are the effects they may and do in fact have.18 Let us consider an exemplary question. Why and how did Marxism capture the socialist parties in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century? A standard answer might begin by pointing out that the German SPD was the most successful socialist party in Europe and was also Marxist. Other parties allowed it to lead them or took it as a model. We then have to ask why the SPD embraced Marxism. This can be answered in social-historical terms through reference to the balance of class forces in the Bismarck era and a precise assessment of the conjuncture. But this sort of answer rapidly dissolves into something that is both deterministic and solipsistic. We explain the success of Marxism in nineteenth-century Europe by saying that the class structure and political conjuncture produced a constituency prepared to receive the message of Marx: Marxism was successful because there were lots of people ready to be Marxists. In his history of socialism in Europe, Donald Sassoon (1996: 6) suggests that an important factor in the spread of Marxism was the work of Kautsky and Bebel. They wrote the pamphlets that spread the doctrine to socialists and potential socialists capturing the ideology for Marxism. In doing so they produced an exposition of the doctrine that reduced it to three simple propositions (a pleasing number) and a narrative in which progress, disrupted by the intransigence and greed of the capitalist, is restored by the heroic proletariat that, in a dramatic gesture, establishes a new equilibrium in which people will live happily ever after. One may feel that this debases a subtle philosophy but, as Otto Bauer frankly put it, the simplification and vulgarisation of a new doctrine is nothing but a stage of its victorious advance, of its rise to general acceptance (quoted in Sassoon 1996: 5), which is to say the presentation was a strategic and not a philosophical concern.

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This argument-from-example is not intended to prove the irrelevance of various sociological factors for explanations of the rise to prominence of a particular political movement or philosophy. It is intended only to illustrate the fact that in politics ideas are always aspects of strategy in a way that is not secondary to or derivative of the real idea. The question of ideas in politics is always a question about the efficacy of particular political communications the strategic deployment of which is fundamental to political activity (Skinner 2002: 177). The methods we use to analyse them must be premised upon this. Habermasian assessments of political speech and argument, used in, for example, the analysis of global governance (Risse 2000, 2004) or public administration (Fox and Miller 1995) are unable fully to recognize the legitimacy of rhetorical force in political argument and, unwilling to accept their necessarily strategic nature, tend to subsume rhetoric into the category of illegitimate coercion. Fundamentally shaped by such normative concerns, discourse ethics, whatever its advantages, cannot provide a method for the analysis of ideas in politics. But, for the same sorts of reason, one cannot simply adopt the approach of the rhetoric of inquiry valuable though it is. We are not concerned to expose the hidden moment of contestability that lies behind an apparently scientific claim but to examine how the contest takes place: a contest in need of legitimization and, indeed, continuation (see, again, Billig 1989). There are a number of methods for this sort of analysis of political language and communication. Ethnomethodology offers conversation analysis to examine strategies or word forms in, for example, political interviews (e.g. Bull 1994) or the tricks by which a speaker can win applause (e.g. Atkinson 1984). This can produce valuable data on the ways in which politicians address themselves, each other and wider audiences but is limited to micro-level interactions and can be too abstracted from social context (see also the critique of conversation analysis in Billig (1991: 14 /18) and the exchange of Billig and Schegloff (1999)). Furthermore, conversation analyses of political talk tend to be fixated on critically exposing evasions and occlusions rather than attending to the content of such communication (which might well explain the evasion better than the assumption of venality). Atkinson, for example, all but completely reduces political speech to a tricksy game of call and response. By contrast, critical linguistics has been explicitly interested in the relations between language, ideology and politics (see Fowler 1996; Hodge and Kress 1979) and in the development of techniques for its analysis. Studies of the role of language and communication in organizations (see Iedema and Wodak 1999; Gunnarson 2000) should be of particular interest to institutionalist political science. For us, Faircloughs (1995, 1999, 2001) use of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to expose the hidden ideological presuppositions of political speech and argument is of most immediate interest and his research produces findings of great value to a political science analysis of ideas. However, his analyses seem to imply that political speech is merely instrumental, its meaning hidden and in need of revelation by the critical analyst. As with some institutionalist political science, the burden of

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explanation thus falls on hidden interests.19 Despite much theorizing about it Fairclough fails to recognize the implications of a rhetorical conception of politics.20 In demonstrating the way in which particular utterances are expressions of an underlying ideological structure (that seems relatively fixed) Fairclough neglects the strategic, argumentative context of political enunciations that, for politicians, is unavoidable.21 The psychological variant of CDA (discursive or rhetorical psychology) is also of interest. Billigs analyses of fascist discourse (1989), nationalism (1995) and of the everyday relations between talk and ideology are certainly instructive and discursive psychology has successfully challenged theories that too readily assume human activities to be merely expressions of some underlying mechanism or cognitive structure. Understanding discourse as a social practice, complicating notions of behavioural causality, it can demonstrate how forms of talk constitute as well as express thoughts (Potter and Wetherell 1987). Discursive psychology helps identify repertoires, or shared patterns of interpretation, active processes of reasoning that draw attention to the form as well as content of argumentation and can be linked to broader social and political structures and processes. For political science this should be of great interest. One thing we are interested in is decision-making processes and discursive psychology can help us see how these are related to, for example, rhetorical commonplaces and a common sense that can be transmitted as well as contested in the very language of argument. But our interest is also slightly different from that of discursive psychology. We are not, for example, interested in the construction of self or social identity. Furthermore, political talk in political and governmental contexts is not partly but wholly, and by definition, concerned with strategic, directed, persuasive motivation. As such, in politics the construction of the object in discourse can be taken for granted. That is what ideas are for in politics; in defining objects or phenomena in ways that make them amenable to governmental action they constitute an intellectual technology for trying to work out what on earth one should do next (Rose 1999: 27 /8). Discursive psychology, like critical linguistics in general, presents tools and case studies on which political science can and should draw. But this must be supplemented by an understanding of political institutions and contexts within which a political actor must act, even if they do not want to, and must do so in ways that constantly sustain the support of others, particularly those who must carry out the action. This strategic sense is central to a number of theoretical perspectives that have developed discourse approaches to political analysis (see the excellent survey in Norval 2000). Discourse analysis (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 1990) has had some success in explicating ideological formations (Smith 1994; Norval 1996; Howarth et al . 2000) and also produced concepts of relevance to the analysis of ideas in politics: the construction of relations of equivalence and, concomitantly, antagonistic frontiers of difference; the establishment of nodal points that temporarily fix down a discourse and empty signifiers that

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assist a range of potentially contradictory positions to coexist within a broader alliance. But its primary preoccupation has been the contingent formation of identities through processes of signification and the fixing of meaning in ideological discourse. This is one reason why it tends to be focused on largescale, often populist, political formations rather than the less dramatic ones that take place within governmental administrations. Discourse analysis, even when applied to concrete cases, is concerned to construct a general social and political theory and to specify logics of the political that can be found across various instances.22 As one proponent avers, it is not amenable to being turned into a methodology and is pitched at such a high level of abstraction that it is difficult to apply in an unmediated way in concrete empirical studies (Torfing 1999: 291). Political science analyses of ideas require an analytical framework located at a meso-level between the micro-readings of conversation analysis and critical linguistics and the macro-levels occupied by Habermasian normativity and post-Marxist critique, a level that combines explication of ideas in politics with a recognition that these are inseparable from a form that is, inevitably, intended to be persuasive. Recognizing that this form is not necessarily illegitimate but intrinsic to political action (the fundamental form of ungrounded or non-foundational public action) such an analysis can be properly attentive to the to-and-fro of multiple modes of argumentation. This is the promise of classical rhetoric, famously defined by Aristotle as the power to observe the persuasiveness of which any particular matter admits (Rhetoric 2, 1.2). As a contemporary rhetorical critic puts it: the study of rhetoric is the study of first premises in use (Hart 1997: 61) in as much as it is about the ways in which fundamental principles and ideas are formulated, expressed and then developed in argumentative action (see also Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969). Political science should learn from the insights of varied forms of linguistic and discourse analysis outlined here and it should do so as part of reacquainting itself with its own classical rhetorical tradition. In so doing it can generate and examine data on the selection, formation and communication of ideas and arguments in politics (something that is surprisingly thin on the ground at present). It can help establish what particular ideas are ideas of, where they may have came from and the changes they may have undergone in their movement through and between various fields. It can explore the arrangement and articulation of ideas and arguments, identifying how this produces redefinitions and redescriptions, pointing up the major tropes, keywords and names that sustain arguments (Billig 1991) and facilitate meaning capture (Fox and Miller 1995). As communicative relationships in, through and between political organizations are beginning to be understood as central elements of contemporary network governance (networks animated, defined even, by complex processes of debate and persuasion) theory and analysis of the ways in which such argument takes place and is managed within them will become of increasingly immediate importance (see Bang 2003). Rhetoric can illuminate as well as obscure.23 Clusters of ideas in particular contexts can open up new ways of thinking or

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limit the field of what is thinkable and arguable. We should not criticize politics for being merely rhetorical but affirm it precisely for being so (see also Brown 1997), trying, however, to ensure that it remains so; that concepts and ideas remain available for contestation and the argument continues. The immediate purpose of a rhetorical political analysis, drawing on but not confined to the insights of varied discursive analyses, and rooted in the tradition of Aristotle and Cicero, is to observe in action the processes by which political concepts are rhetorically formulated and deployed as ways of grasping a political situation and winning the consent of others for some course of action or another. In so doing we fill out the ideational with the political.

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Conclusion There is not a great deal of interest in political ideas to be found in political science. Perhaps because of a desire to separate itself from the despised parent of political philosophy and to form its own theoretical paradigms that guarantee worldly status and scientificity, political science seeks objects of analysis and modes of explanation that emphasize entrenched interests, hidden instrumental agendas and conventional pressures over and above the influence of ideas (conscious or otherwise) and their employment by political actors. Analysis of conceptual action has to include study of the institutions in which the potential makers and distributors of ideas operate. And it certainly requires a focus on the institutions that enable or hinder dissemination, or generate ideas and release them through determinate means (PR agencies, think tanks, media outlets, etc.). It must help us appreciate the ways in which ideas move from one domain (the academy, social science, management schools) into politics and perhaps back again, adapting as they do so. But this must be supplemented by analysis of the ideas themselves, manifested as forms of communication, shaped in forms that make them intelligible, amenable to further use, persuasive and attractive. A rhetorical political analysis emerges from a rhetorical turn eager to expose the shifting sands on which authoritative claims actually stand. Taking that, and reminding ourselves of a venerable tradition of political analysis, we might return to political science a sense of the creativity of politics, bringing back into the light the rhetorical arts through which phenomena can be redescribed (Skinner 2002), named (Billig 1987), naturalized (Norval 2000) or problematized (Rose and Miller 1992; Schon 1979) in ongoing processes of argumentation. One of the functions of rhetoric is to, as it were, transform preferences, engendering change through giving us new perceptions of old phenomena. Such rhetoric is not confined to the formal political and policy arenas. We can also appreciate the rhetorical and argumentative nature of other forms of political action and protest (see Edmondson 1997) and need not be confined only to spoken and written modes of expression (Delicath and DeLuca 2003). This can contribute to our

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understanding of present modes of political thought and action and the decisions that both form them and are informed by them. It may show us when we are not in control of what we think, when we are too dependent on the tools to hand (as George Eliot remarks in Middlemarch , all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them). But rhetorical political analysis is interested in expansion as well as limits; affirmation as well as critique; in the possibility of constructing something new. And this focus on creativity may turn out to have normative and critical effects achieved not through the daring revelation of falsehoods or the dramatic exposure of a hidden interest but by helping us see how things can be done differently: through the encouragement of a proper appreciation of political rhetoric that not only helps us think and argue better but gives us a better idea of political action against which we might judge our politics.

Acknowledgements I discussed some of the issues raised in this paper with staff and students of the Department of Speech Communication, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in October of 2003. I should like to acknowledge their hospitality and helpfulness as I learnt a great deal from them in a very short time. I should also like to acknowledge the responses made at the conference on The Dynamics of Ideas at Bristol University in November of 2003 and the advice of two anonymous referees.

Notes
1 The scale of work that could have been included is far too great, and probably too familiar, to warrant full discussion here. It includes, of course, Stanley Fish in literary and legal studies (e.g. 1980, 1989) and in history Hayden White (e.g. 1987), while, in a rather different fashion, a rhetorical analysis of texts, including political ones, was advocated by Eagleton (1981, 1983). A major inuence on the US version has clearly been pragmatism and especially Rorty (1982). The idea that exposing the rhetorical nature of texts has an intrinsically critical aspect owes a lot to de Man (e.g. 1984). Interest in the everyday use of metaphor was enhanced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980); see also Ortony (1979) and Sacks (1979). Over the same period, in the US at least, some of the actual rhetoricians, those in disciplines such as speech communication were actively broadening their remit and dealing with broader social, cultural and ideological matters, as in the work of the inuential Michael McGee (1980, 1982). (See also the special issue of American Communication Journal (6(4), 2003) devoted to McGee.) 2 Some in the eld of rhetoric and speech communication worry about the dissolution of their discipline as a result (see the discussions in Simons (2003) and Fuller (2003)). In his take on the advantages of the spread of rhetoric, Simons writes of an educational mission: moving the [human sciences] beyond their initial irtations with rhetoric to

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more explicit, more systematic, more thoroughly developed rhetorical conceptions of what they are about. The present article is an attempt to encourage the authors eld, of British political studies, to begin the irtation in the rst place. 3 Though neither Billig nor Shotter made a direct connection between their arguments and the sort of agonistic vision of radical democracy under development within political theory at the time, the afnity is clearly apparent. 4 This, of course, is not the case with political theory, even though much of that eld remains concerned with constructing elaborate moral philosophies. The Cambridge School of the history of political thought pioneered work on politics, language and rhetoric and some linguistic-oriented work in political theory has been very inuential (e.g. Connolly 1974; Shapiro 1981, 1984). But the impact of such work on political science and on the formal analysis of government continues to be negligible. When Herbert Simons remarks that the globalization of rhetoric has earned it a place at several academic tables, including science studies, culture studies, legal studies, media criticism, literary criticism, ideology critique, news journalism, photo journalism, organizational communication, religion and psychotherapy (2003: 7) the absence of political science is glaring. 5 See, for example, Chilton (1996), Medhurst et al . (1997) and Campbell and Jamieson (1990). The important work of Norman Fairclough is discussed below. A strange exception is Iain Macleans Rational Choice and British Politics in which a rational choice historian examines heresthetic: the sheer uniqueness and idiosyncrasy of this book (which does not engage with the literature discussed here) rather proves the point. 6 A good sense of the state of play can be derived from a recent symposium in The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (see Bevir et al . 2004; also Carver and Hyva rinen 1997; ECPR 2002). Other aspects of the discursive turn in political studies are discussed below. 7 Goldstein and Keohane (1993) and Hall (1989) are standard works. For overviews, see Blyth (1997, 2002), Jacobsen (1995) and Hay (2002: ch. 6). For further applications, see McNamara (1999a, 1999b) and Sikkink (1991). In IR the relevant schools are known as constructivist or reectivist and representative attempts include Wendt (1992) and (from the perspective of security studies), Buzan et al . (1998). 8 Barker writes: What appears to be required is. . .a way of describing politics which takes account of the use of ideas and the role of thinking in all political action, and which makes distinctions accordingly. If interests are then to be singled out in a particular piece of analysis, it will not be because they have a given materiality but because they constitute people thinking in a particular way, and in a way which constructs, cultivates or sustains a particular aspect of their public identity. (Barker 2000: 230) 9 Interestingly this mirrors the almost simultaneous developments in Marxist and neo-Marxist theory in which a challenge was made to structural determinism in the name of the autonomy of ideas, culture and discourse. It also mirrors the spread of the rhetorical turn as discussed above. 10 On the new institutionalism in political science see, in particular, Hall and Taylor (1996), Hay and Wincott (1998) and Lowndes (1996). 11 Krasners writing is full of ideational terms that thoroughly condition his arguments. He refers to a sense of national identity (1993: 254) in England in a way that suggests this had something to do with that country developing what we now recognize as sovereignty. He refers to Gods law, custom and natural law as sources of legal precepts, to society understood as a great chain of duties, to distinctions (such as that between domestic and international politics) as having little or no conceptual

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meaning and to ambassadors who regarded themselves as representatives of Christendom. These observations are not conceptualized and not followed up: they have no purchase on real power and real interests. 12 McNamara observes that a process of deliberation took place, even noting the importance of magazines such as The Economist , but does not study these utterances in any detail, as if this deliberation has no great signicance, the important factor being the achievement of consensus. Similarly, Peter Hall (1992: 102) notes the importance of media of communication in creating a community exerting inuence on British economic ideas but, sadly, does not dwell on what these said and how they said it (see below). 13 This is important since in many respects neo-liberalism appears to be at odds with a certain spirit of English conservatism. Monetarist ideas were evidently able to x themselves to more traditional conservatism in a way that emphasized the conservative commitment to a non-interventionist state and the liberty of the individual while deemphasizing opposition to doctrine and attachment to traditional values and practices. For a discussion, see Finlayson (2003b). 14 The terms of discourse in which. . .policies. . .are discussed constrain and enable often in highly specic ways. Even where the leitmotiv of policy is simply an overarching metaphor such as the war on drugs or the problem of welfare mothers the metaphor and its attendant elaborations can structure may aspects of what is to be done (1993: 291 /2). 15 This is something Hay is rather good at. See, for example, Hay and Watson (1999, 2003); Hay and Rosamond (2002); Hay and Marsh (2000). 16 It may be that these are also purposes or functions of the concept of globalization in arenas other than politics; or perhaps we should say that, when so used, they are being used politically. The political nature of social scientic claims and arguments, while clearly signicant, is not part of the current argument and, I believe, it need not be. There is further discussion of this point, below. 17 On agonistic conceptions of politics see, among others, Connolly (1991), Mouffe (1993) and Tully (1999). One of the best considerations of the problematic relationship between public political action and straightforward propositions of the truth is still Arendts essay Truth in politics (1993). 18 Reviewing the literature on the ideational in political science one can easily be forgiven for imagining that there has never been such a thing as a theory of ideology or a general literature precisely concerned, in various ways, with the analysis of political concepts in action, as they change and transform through history and are deployed in varying political contexts. In political science, interest in ideas has been sidelined into the bailiwicks of reectivists, neo-Marxists, and other marginal gures in the discipline (Jacobsen 1995: 283 /310) and over thirty years of social research shaped by various cultural and linguistic turns seem not to have had much effect (Chadwick 2000). But all the main themes in ideational analysis are also found in (and in some cases were pregured by) such analyses: the relation of ideas to lived experience; their institutionalization; the instrumental relation of ideas to interests and so on. Out of the various internal critiques of the ideology tradition, particularly Gramsci-inspired reformulations, there came a greater awareness of the political importance of the dynamic and contested nature of cultural values and ideas (see Hall et al . 1978; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; and, for an overview, Martin 1998). Similarly, the work of intellectual historians such as Quentin Skinner (1988) and J. G. Pocock (1972) has drawn attention directly to the linguistic and rhetorical history of political conceptual innovation. More recently Michael Freeden (1996) has sought to renew the study of political ideologies as thought-actions. 19 For example, analysing a speech given by Tony Blair during the Kosovo war, Fairclough (2000) explicitly sets out to measure the distance between rhetoric and

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reality, to show how the speech hides the undeclared economic or strategic interests underlying the NATO intervention. He complains of a simplistic division between us and the dictators, goodies and baddies and writes of a potentially dangerous distortion of reality (2000: 154). The speech, points to a reality but obfuscates it, and constructs it in misleading ways. Thus Fairclough opposes a false reality invented by the devious politician with one that is otherwise quite apparent and for guidance on which we are helpfully referred to the pages of New Left Review (2000: 154). 20 Fairclough employs an under-theorized normative notion of a politics (quite at odds with various aspects of his theoretical apparatus) consisting of real dialogue, where people decide to come together and access is open for whoever wants to join in, where differences are recognized, there is space for consensus and talk makes a difference (2000: 159 /60). 21 That context includes Fairclough of course. His critical analysis and evaluation of political rhetoric is undertaken precisely in order to advance the cause of his own. This is not necessarily an illegitimate activity. Nor is comparing political rhetoric to the facts but this is not the same as a scholarly analysis and explanation of political speech and political ideas. 22 On the implications of this for the applicability of discourse theory and analysis to problems of political analysis, see the discussion in Nash (2002). 23 Metaphors, for example, assist in developing new conceptualizations through bringing into a new relationship otherwise radically different concepts (see Black 1962; Richards 1936). Schon (1979), with regard to social policy, speaks of generative metaphor that helps set problems of public administration in helpful ways. He suggests that the essential difculties in social policy have more to do with ways in which we frame the purposes to be achieved than with the selection of optimal means for achieving them (1979: 255). The incompatible framing of problems may lead to irresolvable conicts but metaphor can also help resolve such conict by resituating problems in soluble form.

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Alan Finlayson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Wales Swansea. He is the author of Making Sense of New Labour (Lawrence & Wishart, 2003), editor of Contemporary Political Theory: A Reader and Guide (Edinburgh University Press) and co-editor (with Jeremy Valentine) of Politics and Poststructuralism: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2002).