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Political Science, Political Ideas and Rhetoric

Article  in  Economy and Society · November 2004

DOI: 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

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 con-
tingent 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 faux-
foundationalism 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
 Alan Finlayson: Political science, political ideas and rhetoric 529

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. Billig’s
(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.
530 Economy and Society

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 one’s 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-
 Alan Finlayson: Political science, political ideas and rhetoric 531

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
532 Economy and Society

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 presenta-
tion than other forms of human action’ (2000: 223
/4). In political science this
encourages a kind of ‘hyper-determinism’ in which political action is under-
stood 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, March’s and Olsen’s
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
 Alan Finlayson: Political science, political ideas and rhetoric 533

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 Weber’s 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 Keohane’s 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 acknowl-
edging 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. McNamara’s
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
534 Economy and Society

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, unpro-
blematically 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, Hall’s 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
 Alan Finlayson: Political science, political ideas and rhetoric 535

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 trans-
formed 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 Hay’s
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 Hay’s 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
536 Economy and Society

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
Hay’s 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 persuasive-
ness 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 general-
izable. It is this political moment that political science runs up against for it is
limited in its ability to perceive the politics of politics.
 Alan Finlayson: Political science, political ideas and rhetoric 537

Politics, words and ideas

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.
538 Economy and Society

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 institutiona-
list political science. For us, Fairclough’s (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
 Alan Finlayson: Political science, political ideas and rhetoric 539

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 enuncia-
tions that, for politicians, is unavoidable.21
The psychological variant of CDA (discursive or rhetorical psychology) is
also of interest. Billig’s 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 demon-
strate 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
540 Economy and Society

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 large-
scale, 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
 Alan Finlayson: Political science, political ideas and rhetoric 541

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.

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
542 Economy and Society

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 influence 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 influential Michael McGee (1980, 1982). (See
also the special issue of American Communication Journal (6(4), 2003) devoted to
McGee.)
2 Some in the field 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 flirtations with rhetoric to
 Alan Finlayson: Political science, political ideas and rhetoric 543

more explicit, more systematic, more thoroughly developed rhetorical conceptions of

what they are about’. The present article is an attempt to encourage the author’s field,
of British political studies, to begin the flirtation in the first 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 affinity is clearly apparent.
4 This, of course, is not the case with political theory, even though much of that field
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 influential
(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 Maclean’s 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 Hyvärinen 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 ‘reflectivist’ 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 Krasner’s 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 ‘God’s 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
544 Economy and Society

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 significance, 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 influence 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 fix
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 de-
emphasizing 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 specific 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 scientific claims and arguments,
while clearly significant, 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
Arendt’s 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 ‘‘reflectivists’’, neo-Marxists, and other marginal figures 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 prefigured 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
 Alan Finlayson: Political science, political ideas and rhetoric 545

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 difficulties 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 conflicts but metaphor can also help resolve such conflict 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).

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