Contemporary Political Concepts: A Critical Introduction

235 Pages·2002·1.37 MB·English

by  Georgina Blakeley

Contemporary Political
Concepts
A Critical Introduction
Edited by
Georgina Blakeley and Valerie Bryson
P
Pluto Press
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First published 2002 by Pluto Press
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Copyright © Georgina Blakeley and Valerie Bryson 2002
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this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1797 9 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 1796 0 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Contemporary political concepts : a critical introduction / edited by
Georgina Blakeley and Valerie Bryson.
p. cm.
“The product of a conference hosted by the Politics Department of the
University of Huddersfield in November 1999”––Introd.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0–7453–1797–9 –– ISBN 0–7453–1796–0 (pbk.)
1. Political science. I. Blakeley, Georgina. II. Bryson, Valerie,
1948–
JA71 .C5774 2002
320––dc21
2002000090
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
Georgina Blakeley and Valerie Bryson
1. Globalisation 14
Graham Harrison
2. Governance 35
Andrew Taylor
3. Postmodernism 54
Stephen Brown
4. Citizenship 73
Keith Faulks
5. Civil Society 90
Georgina Blakeley
6. Gender 108
Valerie Bryson
7. ‘Ethnicity’, ‘Race’ and Racism 126
Amrit Wilson and Kalpana Wilson
8. The Third Way 145
Brendan Evans
9. Empowerment 162
Hannah Cooke
10. Stakeholding 179
Adrian Budd
11. Social Capital 198
Georgina Blakeley
Conclusions 215
Georgina Blakeley and Valerie Bryson
Notes on Contributors 220
Index 222
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank staff and students in the Politics
Department at Huddersfield University for the enthusiasm and
supportthathelpedmakethe‘ApologiesforCapitalism’conference,
whichgaverisetothisbook,suchasuccessfulandenjoyableoccasion.
vi
Introduction
Georgina Blakeley and Valerie Bryson
Political concepts
Concepts are to the student of Politics what maps and compasses are
to navigators: they are the tools of the trade which, if well designed,
understood and applied, can guide us through the political world
around us. Good concepts facilitate description, comprehension and
explanation; without them we cannot even describe political
phenomena, let alone progress towards their comprehension or
explanation. If they are used constructively and analytically, political
concepts can help us not only to interpret the world, but also, as
Marx would have advocated, to change it. However, concepts can
also at times mislead us: they can disguise more than they reveal,
and lead us in directions we would not have chosen had we thought
more clearly. This means that a key task for political theorists and
scientists is to critically examine concepts and explore their logic
and implications rather than accepting them at face value; it may
also be relevant to ask who has designed them, and why.
Political concepts can be understood as particularly succinct ways
of expressing general ideas. As such, they frequently encapsulate a
range of complex and contested theories and approaches. For
example, the concepts of ‘democracy’ and ‘separation of powers’ are
both often used to discuss empirical evidence about the ways in
which political power is organised in any given country; at the same
time, however, they encapsulate more abstract theories about the
ways in which political power can be organised and they contain
normative arguments about how this should be arranged.
Themoreconceptsareclearlydefinedandwellunderstood,the
moregenerallytheycanbeappliedinavarietyofcontextsandina
1
2 Contemporary Political Concepts
varietyofways,orinSartori’stermsthemoretheycan‘travel’,whilst
avoidingthedistortionintheirmeaningwhichSartorigraphically
describedas‘conceptualstretching’(1970).Someconcepts,however,
appeartoescapecleardefinitionandcomprehension.Conceptslike
‘democracy’,‘power’,even‘politics’itself,willalwaysappeartobe
morecoherentandunderstandableintheabstractthanwhenapplied
totherathermessyrealityaroundus.Suchconceptsarewhathave
been termed ‘essentially contested’ concepts, that is to say, multi-
facetedconceptswhosedefinitionisneitherneutralnorsettled,but
rathershiftsaccordingtoeachtheorist’sideologicalandnormative
views (Gallie 1955/56). Many theorists would place the concepts
dealtwithinthisvolumeintothiscategoryofessentiallycontested
concepts,giventhemanyinterpretationstowhichtheyhavebeen
subjectedandthecontroversieswhichtheyhaveproduced.
Nevertheless, to accept that concepts can be ‘essentially contested’
should not imply that we simply abandon any attempt to define and
understand them, nor should we accept that all definitions are
equally valid; whilst there may be no right or wrong definition, some
definitions will still be better than others. Moreover, we should not
ignore what may sometimes lie behind this idea of ‘essentially
contested’ concepts, namely, that what we regard as definitional
disputes may in fact be a smokescreen for normative and ideologic-
al disagreements.
This point is pertinent to the concepts in this volume, all of which
have widespread currency in both academic and more general
political debate. Whilst there are disagreements concerning their
meaning, it is also often the case that these disagreements serve to
obfuscate what are deeper ideological and normative disagreements
about the extent to which we think that the phenomena described
and explained by the concepts are either desirable or practical.
Political concepts today
Some of the political concepts we use today, such as democracy, are
as old as political thought itself. However, some are much more
recent, whilst others have only recently regained currency after years
of neglect. The concepts examined in this volume have been selected
because they seem to represent a distinct moment or mood amongst
political theorists and commentators in the west, who are
responding to a particular set of political and ideological circum-
stances. In this sense, the concepts can be seen as linked responses
Introduction 3
to the dramatic changes that characterised the closing decades of the
twentieth century. The collapse of so-called communist states in the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, concurrent pressures on the
‘overloaded’ states in the west, and a trend in western philosophy
which questions ‘modern’ belief systems in general and Marxism in
particular have combined to undermine many of the key assump-
tions and certainties that underpinned ‘progressive’ western thought
for most of the twentieth century. The collapse of faith in Marxism
as either an explanatory tool or a strategic course of action and a
general ‘retreat from class’ in political thought (for an early critical
discussion of this, see Wood 1986) left a conceptual vacuum for
those who still hoped to understand society with a view to changing
it for the better. The concepts discussed in this volume have seemed
to some to provide a way forward. As such, they form part of a
common endeavour by many who wish to deepen and extend liberal
democracy to provide a more genuinely inclusive society, whilst
trying to learn the lessons from the collapse of Soviet communism
and the contradictions of the bureaucratic welfare state in advanced
capitalist societies in the west.
In this endeavour, many of those traditionally on the left of the
political spectrum have both abandoned the Marxist discourse of
class, capitalism, exploitation and oppression and taken on board
many classical liberal preoccupations, in order to correct past
inattention to the diversity and plurality of interests within civil
society on the one hand, and the need to check and hold account-
able state power on the other. In doing so, many have looked to new
ideas and concepts, or sometimes the revival of old concepts, to
provide a ‘Third Way’ between the rather sterile conclusion that
nothing short of a revolutionary transformation will suffice, and the
belief that contemporary western societies are ‘as good as it gets’. For
such theorists and political commentators, the dusting down of
long-forgotten concepts such as civil society or citizenship, the
development of new concepts like globalisation, stakeholder,
empowerment or governance, or the recognition of social interests
based on gender and ethnicity can both enhance our understanding
of contemporary processes and offer the ability to ‘reconcile the
irreconcilable’1by revealing the potential for progressive and eman-
cipatory change withinexisting societies and structures.
1. According to Marx, this was what the liberal theory of his contemporary
John Stuart Mill tried and failed to do (1970:16).
4 Contemporary Political Concepts
Although the concepts and approaches discussed in this volume
can be seen as the interlinked products of underlying trends, they
certainly do not constitute a neat package of ideas and they have
not been uniformly welcomed. In addition to their popular currency
amongst politicians and policy makers, each has generated its own
body of specialist literature, some of which is critical of recent devel-
opments. In particular, there is concern amongst commentators on
the left that, partly because many of the newly popular concepts are
rooted in liberal rather than democratic or socialist thought, they
may act as a smokescreen for continued exploitation and oppression.
This may mean that, rather than contributing to our understanding
and the development of progressive change, they provide a distorted
picture of the world that legitimises the inequalities of the free
market capitalist economy. Another way of putting this is to say that
the concepts may be ideological in a Marxist sense: that is, they
provide a picture of the world which, although it has a basis in
reality, at the same time represents a distortion of this reality, a
partial view which serves the interests of powerful groups and makes
it difficult to imagine alternatives. If so, rather than contributing to
our understanding and helping us to develop effective strategies for
improving society, the concepts would provide only a skewed and
limited perspective that allows no space for the discussion of radical
change.
Although all the concepts have generated similar concerns, each
has generally been discussed separately from the others, and there
has been little attempt or opportunity to assess the new develop-
ments in political thinking as a whole. This volume, which is the
product of a conference hosted by the Politics Department of the
University of Huddersfield in November 1999, seeks to change this.
It brings together the findings of academics and practitioners with
specialist knowledge of key concepts and approaches who have a
common interest in contributing to a wider debate and developing
a shared critical response to current trends.
The chapters
Despite their common background, the concepts and approaches
discussed in this volume also have very different histories, and draw
on a wide range of methodologies, epistemological foundations and
disciplines. Contributors were therefore asked to identify these and
to make their analysis accessible to generalists as well as to fellow
Introduction 5
specialists. At the same time, they were asked to consider the extent
to which their chosen concept helps us to understand contemporary
society and set realistic emancipatory goals, and whether it
supersedes, complements or duplicates approaches based on the
analysis of capitalism and class.
The result is a book which is significantly more than the sum of
its parts. Although each chapter was written separately and contribu-
tors certainly do not adhere to any ‘party line’, a number of key
themes have clearly emerged. At the most general level, there is a
sense that most of the concepts can be helpful, but that they must
be handled with extreme care if they are not to be used by conser-
vative interests to legitimise policies and outcomes that are
inherently oppressive. This danger arises if the concepts are
abstracted from the analysis of the political economy of capitalism
and we lose sight of capitalism’s central imperative: that is, to pursue
profit and maximise the extraction of surplus value from workers.
As Wood has argued, in the long run this imperative means that ‘Not
only welfare provision but decent pay and working conditions and
even environmental protection are, it seems, obstacles to competi-
tiveness, profitablity and growth’ (1995:285).
Globalisation, governance and postmodernism
The first three chapters, on globalisation, governance and post-
modernism, introduce overarching concepts which are referred to
in many later chapters. As Graham Harrison shows, the orthodox
notion of globalisation provides an ideological justification of that
which it purports to describe, and the concept both argues for certain
political viewpoints and limits our ability to conceptualise alterna-
tives. As such, it asserts not only the existence and inevitability, but
also the desirability, of an increasingly integrated and deregulated
global economy in which national boundaries are becoming
insignificant and nation states can have little power to control the
forces of global capital. Harrison argues that this view both exagger-
ates what is happening, particularly the alleged loss of power of
nation states, and glosses over the inevitably damaging effects of
intensified international competition both on the environment and
on the majority of the world’s population, for whom globalisation is
a story not of success, but of ‘unemployment, malnutrition, poverty
or extreme uncertainty about the future’ (see page 23).
However, Harrison does not argue that the concept of globalisa-
tion should be abandoned. Instead, he shows that if we engage