Abstract
Kari Palonen , Politics and conceptual histories: rhetorical and temporal perspectives. Nomos, Bloomsbury: Baden-Baden, 2014; 348 pp.
The term ‘politics’ is in serious reputational decline. It has been infected by ‘dirty hand’ associations – amplified both by frequent and well-documented cases of sleaze and corruption and by its association with cynical utilitarian and strategic methods. Indeed, democracies – surrounded as they are by an aura of ethical expectations, however modest – are particularly culpable in the momentum accrued by the revulsion from politics. Their election campaigns invariably become mired in insincere promises and crude generalities that all too often treat the electorate as malleable simpletons. ‘Anti-politics’ has become a fashionable descriptor indicating the reluctance of many to participate in formal political processes such as voting. Yet that phrase is a serious misnomer, coming as it does not only from eminently political groups dedicated to political and social reform or disruption, but also from academic groups. Thus, the Political Studies Association in the UK curiously hosts an anti-politics and (de)politicisation specialist group, ambiguously leaving unexplained whether that is an endorsement of the existence of anti-politics or merely a commitment to researching the beliefs and rhetoric of those who use the term.
Into this field Kari Palonen strides with a clear and well-worked out programme and methodology. This volume brings together a series of articles and chapters he wrote between the late 1990s and 2013. Renowned in conceptual history circles, Palonen’s intelligent and probing voice, and wonderfully erudite scholarship, have pre-empted much recent thinking in political theory and it is in that discipline, particularly in its Anglophone spheres, that he deserves keener appreciation. The topic – or in Palonen’s favoured term, topos – of politicisation constitutes one of his most illuminating discussions, though it is not without its own problems. Irrespective of the Anglophone usage of its antonym, the term ‘politicisation’ is curiously and mainly prevalent in German and French analyses of politics. Palonen traces the emergence and different senses of politicisation, and shows how it became a narrow term relating predominantly to party politics, or to the ‘spread’ of political matters to spheres not initially associated with the political, such as drama (as if those had not been there to begin with). But there are two underlying distinctions at stake, implied but not always teased out in Palonen’s explorations. The one refers to the crucial hiatus between a set of practices and the often ill-fitting vocabulary that is marshalled to denote it. The political as an actual phenomenon of human thought and action is far from coterminous with the language employed to indicate the range of political thinking. The other may shed some light on what conceptual historians of Reinhart Koselleck’s ilk (and a goodly number of political theorists, as it happens) do not always realise: the differentiation between thinking about politics and thinking politically. Thinking about politics alludes to the patterns of ideological thinking that come to light when human beings, located within collectivities, consider the salient and contested issues of socio-political life revolving around justice, liberty, equality, national identity and communal well-being. Thinking politically refers to the more elemental, specific and unique features of human thinking in evidence whenever – and at every level of social interaction – people tackle questions of order, stability and disorder, of ranking collective ends, of bestowing the aura of finality and entitlement on decision-making, of mustering or denying support for human communities and groups, of indulging in social visions and elaborating ways of attaining them. Not least, of course, it refers to the invariable engagement by people in the power practices incumbent in all speech and action: persuading, reasoning, cajoling, threatening. While there may be shifts and recalibrations in the way we think about politics – in what holds our attention and what we repudiate when associating with others – it is inconceivable to imagine a group of people that have expunged thinking politically from their practices.
Despite the justifiable emphasis of recent political theory on dissent and polysemy, politics is not merely the arena of contestation and struggle, nor it is a dispensable or absent activity and mode of thinking. Koselleck himself – the high priest of conceptual history – was prone to run politicisation and polemicisation together. If we do have to employ the term ‘politicisation’, it should be restricted to an increase in the intensity and salience of political matters, and not relate to the sudden conjuring of the political out of a hat, or to reducing politics to polemics. Those who imagine something termed the pre-political, or a world bereft of politics, might as well talk of the collapse of human interaction and of societies, with their rituals, conventions, dreams, preferences, bargaining, group cohesions, leadership practices or sacred guiding texts, all of which exist alongside upheaval, radicalisation, dispute and disruption. All human relationships have, and have had, a political dimension, though the centrality of that dimension will vary inasmuch as a ‘state of the nation’ speech has more concentrated political significance in its vision and authoritativeness than standing in a queue for theatre tickets, with its own rules of order and mode of distribution of a cultural good. More controversial, however, does not indicate more political, and it is a pity that occasionally Palonen seems to join conceptual historians, as well as post-structural and post-Marxist theorists, in an overemphasis on conflict. In particular, his frequent reference to rupture (e.g. 183, 189) – which puts one in mind of Ranciėre, though without the accompanying radical egalitarianism – employs too strong a term for discontinuities, which are often partial, or may be downgraded to interruptions. At any rate, they exist alongside acquiescence and silence, which are suggestive of a contrary political drive to dampen disagreement and to engage in the ideological naturalising of specific points of view and practices. As for consensus, while it inevitably tends to dissolve under the piercing scrutiny of a magnifying glass, it too is part of the rhetorical vocabulary of politicians, of nationalists, of socialist revolutionaries, as well as some ethicists, and it needs to be taken as a manifestation of a pretty widespread desire for unity both as vision and as strategy, and hence as a common political thought practice. Issues do not arise, contrary to Palonen’s view, ‘only in response to moves or processes of politicization, and only when they are thematized as contingent and controversial topics’ (p. 117). And when contested issues do not arise it may simply be because political controversy has been made invisible in an act that is blatantly – and quite normally – political. Silence may then be the ultimate triumph of the political. Moreover, Palonen is mistaken in claiming that questions about ‘what is politics?’ had hardly been posed prior to Second World War in the Anglophone world. From the late 19th century onwards attempts to understand and define politics were widespread in the UK and a variety of different interpretations of the concept jostled with one another.
Such reservations, however, pale in relation to the merits of this rich and challenging book. Behind the word politics lies a complex concept with great ideational and historical depth, and Kari Palonen has dedicated most of his academic career to unpacking, augmenting and finessing it. Such work is crucial if we wish to rescue politics from its vernacular detractors, but academic scholarship is not always best suited to counterbalance the stickiness of popularisation: ideology as a term has experienced a similar chasm between the vernacular and the professional. Professional languages are themselves split into many clusters, and as his subject matter Palonen has selected the language of parliaments and parliamentarians rather than, say, of bureaucrats, political correspondents or advocacy groups, not least because he is interested in the rhetoric of debates as well as in contrariness and the normality of built-in dissent. Thus, the core of Palonen’s actual research into political thinking revolves around British Parliamentary debates, in which he has set himself up as an expert of considerable insight. It is in this area in particular (p. 106) that Palonen has drawn together the interests of political theorists and conceptual historians, a pursuit that has risked his becoming alienated from both disciplines, with each side persuaded that he is serving the concerns of the other. That charge is unwarranted and unjustified. His thorough investigation of Parliamentary procedure in terms of rhetorical practices adds a new dimension to the way political thinking is experienced and handled. Notably, the British Houses of Parliament offer ample instances of the banality of debate and of the boisterousness (and puerility) of barbed wit, long before political decisions are made. But those decisions or, we should of course say, divisions, are merely the temporary conclusions of a set of political practices that include banality and boisterousness as fundamental features in their own right.
But the study of parliaments also directs conceptual historians to a particularly abundant reservoir of linguistic and ideational usage. Parliaments engage in regular and recurrent activities and they are amenable to comparison across space and over time. That major site of political decision-making and deliberation still remains under-explored, despite the extraordinarily fertile soil it offers to students of political discourse and ideas. Always cognisant of the methods of conceptual historians, Palonen has redescribed parliamentarians as political theorists ‘who judge political situations’ (p. 239), inasmuch as ‘one of the requirements of the politician may be to specify how political life can set the problems that are contemplated by political theorists’ (p. 238). Nonetheless, three small caveats are in order. First, politicians are more political thinkers than theorists, and one could take issue with Palonen’s somewhat idealised assessment that a politician ‘is a person who is more prepared than others to acknowledge the inherent paradoxes of a situation’ (p. 237). Second, many citizens take part in the practice of judging political situations at different levels of articulation – sometimes with more, sometimes with less, knowledge than politicians. Palonen himself acknowledges that societies host many (political) languages that demand to be listened to and accounted for. Third, the English, or British, Parliaments often disguise deep conformities under a screen of excitement, passion and theatrical acting out.
No less importantly, work such as Palonen’s is also crucial if we wish to liberate politics from its recent usurpation by leading ethical philosophers who, sloppily ignoring the generations of political theorists that have developed sophisticated ways of addressing the concept of politics as it has been and can be, do in fact confer on it a gratingly depoliticised and decontextualised meaning that runs the risk of rendering it unintelligible to students of politics or, at the very least, bizarrely idiosyncratic. The distinction between political liberalism and comprehensive liberalism is one such instance, as if the latter were not deeply political. Palonen repeatedly insists not only on the prevalence of the political as an everyday, disputable set of dispositions but on the unintelligibility of neutrality in social affairs, a neutrality always masking an ideological preference. Indeed, one could put that in starker form: the idea of neutrality as an ethical end is itself not neutral but a particular (if unattainable) preference for regarding human beings and their practices. Similarly, as Palonen judiciously notes, Weber’s notion of scholarship as Wertfrei nonetheless possesses a ‘Wertbeziehung in its high appraisal of the activity of politics as a way of life’ (p. 91).
All those deeply worrying tendencies in much current theorising about politics are all the more reason to celebrate a book written by one whose ‘scholarly interests are shaped by a political imagination’ as Palonen puts it himself (p. 343). Rather than operating at the interstices of the political and the philosophical, Palonen examines the interstices of the political and the historical, always from the viewpoint of a political theorist. That places him in a commanding position to take the study of politics to task from a different angle, one not involving a critique of the normative or the idealist, not even a critique of essentialism. Instead Palonen gently suggests that the discipline has turned a blind eye to crucial aspects of the political because it has failed to pose a series of questions muted through its ahistorical academic practices.
One of Palonen’s great strengths is the systematic way he mines, elucidates, criticises and attempts to improve the arguments of the three thinkers he most admires: Max Weber, Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner. His readings of those figures are powerful, in a largely Germanic tradition of intense exegesis, but always cleverly marshalling evidence to create an intricate building-up of his own case and insights. His command of German, English and French, as well as Finnish, has equipped him with access to different intellectual traditions, and concurrently enabled him to offer valuable comparative insights based on close textual reading. Famously, Kari Palonen does much of his reading on his favourite mode of transport – trains and he is undoubtedly the only person on the planet to have read the entire eight volume Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the bible of the conceptual historians co-edited by Koselleck, while travelling on that mode of transport.
Widening the perspective, Palonen is part of a significant development in the study of social and political thought and ideas since the late 20th century: the convergence of research fields and their attached methodologies in the contiguous spheres of politics and history. Conceptual history was a slightly outré and tribal concern among historians until the 1990s, particularly until its ‘internationalisation’ in the now famous gathering at the Finnish Cultural Centre in London in 1998. The serious consideration of concepts and their relationship to political thought was similarly marginal to the study of political theory, which was conventionally heavily focused on the artificial genealogy of great political philosophers to the exclusion of almost everyone else. W.B. Gallie’s seminal article on essentially contested concepts – despite its many infelicities – had been the pioneering foray into the field of ‘conceptology’, but it had been published in the mid-1950s and initially had limited impact on political theory as a whole. It was another 40 years before the debate over essential contestability came out of the shadows of a contained and often esoteric conversation among its philosophical critics and supporters and was assimilated into the broader study of ideologies. Even now, though, conceptual historians and political theorists do not engage with each other sufficiently: as an idea, the essential contestability of concepts is almost invisible in studies conducted by the former, while the latter pay limited attention to the temporal complexity of conceptual mutation.
By the turn of the 21st century, the rise of the concept as a significant unit of analysis had begun to open many doors, some of which fortunately led into the same intellectual vestibule. The growing attention to words and language as the depositories of shifting meanings, not the least through the ministrations of discourse analysis, ploughed parallel furrows. Added to this fermenting cauldron was Skinner’s emphasis on retrieving authorial intentionality side by side with Ricoeur’s complementary insistence on the ubiquity of a surplus of meaning in speech and writing acts. Given that the well-defended fortress of American analytical and ethical political theory was still very difficult to breach, it was no wonder that alternative coalitions started to form – a process that is ongoing and has by no means attained maturity. And the study of political rhetoric – a central interest of Palonen (and of Skinner) – slowly became part and parcel of the reinvigorated interpretation of political discourse as an activity. In Palonen’s words, it is part of ‘a “horizon shift” from the discipline of politics to the phenomenon of politics’ (p. 170).
One area of investigation is Palonen’s insistence on contingency as a key to appreciating conceptual change. Contingency, in his view, is largely imposed on concepts by a constantly changing set of practices involving naming and signifying, as language changes over time in actual argumentation and discourse, reflecting Austin’s locutions, illocutions and perlocutions as elaborated by Skinner (pp. 63–64). No wonder that Palonen distances himself from the predilection of conceptual historians to explore lexicons rather than real debates. Palonen endeavours to integrate Skinner’s emphasis on rhetorical redescription, which incessantly undermines the stability and singularity of concepts, with Koselleck’s temporalisation of concepts as they move through different layers of time, at variable speeds and with many of them themselves becoming time oriented. Palonen wants more emphasis on the rhythms of conceptual change, but also more emphasis on the details of temporalisation that Koselleck glosses over.
And yet there is also another issue at stake. Concepts change not only due to ‘external’ causes. Their contingency is endemic to their internal structure. Contingency applies not only to what concepts do and to what is done to them, but to what concepts are, what they consist of. Rhetoric is emphatically crucial to understanding the way social and political concepts are employed and interpreted, but that analysis operates on a different, parallel dimension to that of understanding what it is in the ideational make-up of a concept that can account for its propensity to change, whether or not change ensues. The notion of the essential contestability of concepts is missing here, not as an explanation of contestation over the values that concepts carry (that was Gallie’s main, though narrow, concern), but as an explanation of the unavoidable and contingent selection that has to be made when incompatible conceptions of each concept are confronted, included, excluded and allotted differential weight in any articulated version of the concept. For what changes when political concepts undergo modification are not only time, language and rhetoric, but the ordering and reweighting of social understandings and paradigms of human experience. That said, we should not conflate contingency with randomness: the act of selection may be logically arbitrary but it invariably possesses cultural significance. Time and space reduce and channel the pliable openness of conceptual morphology, but that openness remains the default position of political language.
Hence when Palonen advances what he calls the ‘activity-concept of politics … categorically constituted by the play with contingency’ (p. 206) this requires further elaboration. First, though this may be implicit in Palonen’s understanding of politics, it needs to be spelt out robustly that his central question ‘how do we act when we act politically?’ (p. 234) should be twinned with ‘how do we think when we think politically?’ The focus has to be on these two parallel yet distinct forms of performativity, even if thinking can only be ascertained through performativity, whether oral, written or by employing body language. Second, yes, politics does navigate through contingencies, absorbing, confronting or being defeated by them. But we should not blur the distinction between the scholar’s identification of contingency and the participant’s frequent obliviousness of it. Do political actors really necessarily experience everyday decisions concerning ‘food, clothes, habitation, sexuality, travel’ (p. 188) as contingent, rather than as pursuing certain ends or just getting on with it? And does their contingency equate with their politicisation? In the real world of political thinking, mechanisms have developed that screen actors from the frustrating paralysis that the over-awareness of contingency and of ceaseless contestation would generate. One of the features of the political and of the workings of the ideologies we all sport is the push to decontestation, to closing, and imposing determinacy on, the impossible fluidity of essential contestability, precisely because although contingency and contestability may work across debating parties, they cannot be permanently tolerated within the mental and cultural ambit of the users of political language as far as they are concerned. Decontestation, however illusory it may be, is indispensable for mapping the worlds we traverse and for making the decisions without which the political flounders.
Conceptual history is still caught between reconstruction and interpretation, between aiming at the resurrecting of past linguistic practices and the recognition that the filter of reception always produces a different spectrum of understanding. Palonen aligns himself firmly with the latter camp and quotes Koselleck to great effect that history has formed itself behind the sources, occasionally through them, but a source is never itself history (p. 166). Those who wish to acquire a more subtle appreciation of the political would do well to read Palonen closely. What he has to say should be extended beyond the confines of northern and central Europe, and the way he says it should be incorporated into the current vocabularies and arguments both of political theorists and conceptual historians even – or maybe particularly – if that means drawing them out of their disciplinary comfort zones. It is high time that those disciplines recognised that they can only flourish by becoming more undisciplined.
Erratum
DOI: 10.1177/1474885115622757
The name of Terry Macdonald, one of two guest editors of European Journal of Political Theory’s special issue entitled ‘Real-world justice and international migration,’ was erroneously missed off the editor listing in the October 2015 issue.
The guest editors of the special issue are given below:
Adrian Little and Terry Macdonald