Table Of ContentRHETORIC, POLITICS AND SOCIETY
GENERAL EDITORS: A. Finlayson; J. Martin; K. Phillips
DEBATES, RHETORIC AND
POLITICAL ACTION
Practices of Textual Interpretation
and Analysis
Claudia Wiesner,
Taru Haapala,
Kari Palonen
Rhetoric, Politics and Society
Series Editors
Alan Finlayson
University of East Anglia
Norfolk, United Kingdom
James Martin
Goldsmiths, University of London
London, United Kingdom
Kendall Phillips
University of Syracuse
Syracuse, New York, USA
Rhetoric lies at the intersection of a variety of disciplinary approaches
and methods, drawing upon the study of language, history, culture and
philosophy to understand the persuasive aspects of communication in all
its modes: spoken, written, argued, depicted and performed. This series
presents the best international research in rhetoric that develops and
exemplifies the multifaceted and cross-disciplinary exploration of practices
of persuasion and communication. It seeks to publish texts that openly
explore and expand rhetorical knowledge and enquiry, be it in the form
of historical scholarship, theoretical analysis or contemporary cultural and
political critique. The editors welcome proposals for monographs that
explore contemporary rhetorical forms, rhetorical theories and thinkers,
and rhetorical themes inside and across disciplinary boundaries. For infor-
mal enquiries, questions, as well as submitting proposals, please contact
the editors: Alan Finlayson: [email protected] James Martin: j.martin@
gold.ac.uk Kendall Phillips: [email protected]
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14497
Claudia Wiesner • Taru Haapala • Kari Palonen
Debates, Rhetoric
and Political Action
Practices of Textual Interpretation and Analysis
Claudia Wiesner Kari Palonen
University of Jyväskylä and Technical University of Jyväskylä
University Darmstadt Jyväskylä, Finland
Darmstadt, Germany
Taru Haapala
University of Jyväskylä
Jyväskylä, Finland
Rhetoric, Politics and Society
ISBN 978-1-137-57056-7 ISBN 978-1-137-57057-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57057-4
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P
reface
‘Nothing is more interesting than politics’. This does not seem to be a
popular claim today, as ‘politics’ rather has a bad reputation and ‘popu-
lism’ is on the rise. In the present volume we defend this claim, and we
hope that our readers will be intrigued to learn the reasons for taking such
an interest in politics, to analyse and study it and be consciously engaged
in it, at least as ‘occasional politicians’, to quote Max Weber (1919, 41).
To say that politics is interesting already presupposes that we do not
know in advance what is meant by politics. If there were a well-known and
commonly shared definition for ‘politics’, debates on what is meant by
politics or ‘the political’ could reach a definite conclusion simply by check-
ing the lexicographical authorities. This is not the case. During the past
150–200 years when parliamentary and democratic forms of politics have
been high on the agenda of a number of debates, among scholars as well
as the more or less professional political agents themselves, the concept of
politics has been continuously contested. Politics, therefore, is something
that cannot be understood simply by looking at what is said about it in a
dictionary. On the contrary, the writing of dictionaries and giving defini-
tions to concepts are themselves a political activity, a rhetorical move in a
debate in history and in the contemporary context of using concepts.
We also cannot distinguish certain views of politics on the basis of the
positions of political actors. There is not one typical governmental or oppo-
sitional view, or a right or left view of politics, that has historically strug-
gled for supremacy. How politics or the political should be understood
is a matter for debate. Politics is a controversial concept, and politicians,
scholars, journalists as well as citizens at large may make contributions to
v
vi PREFACE
the controversy. They may contest certain uses of the concept or invent
new ones, even without necessarily intending to do something new. The
debate is ongoing in the sense that there is no final authority to decide
when the debate is over nor is there any a priori limit to the possibilities
for inventing new perspectives on the concept of politics.
The conceptual history of politics underlines its contestedness.
Expressions using ‘politics’ or ‘political’ can be traced back to the ancient
Greek polis, to the city-republic as a political form, as opposed to ‘despotic’
monarchies and imperia (on the opposition between politikós and despo-
tikós see e.g. Aristotle’s Politics [Ta politikà], on the commentaries see e.g.
Meier 1980; Finley 1983). But the history of the concept in the different
European languages has not been just a translation from the Greek: the
different languages have developed their own vocabularies with different
conceptual resources. Above all, the ancient and early modern thinkers
could not have understood politics as a contingent activity, as this concep-
tual horizon was new, introduced in the course of the nineteenth century
in particular (see esp. Palonen 2006). This horizon of seeing politics as a
contingent and controversial activity is the one within which we move in
this volume.
Seeing politics as an activity, what we do in this volume is to analyse
the practice of debating as a distinct form of politics. We understand the
concept of ‘debate’ broadly, referring to a wide range of activities that can
be explicit and implicit, living and frozen, regulated and irregular, and so
on. Debate can as well as be debate between many or few agents, or debate
as in a debate event in the sense of a single actor’s action to intervene in
an ongoing debate.
The book offers typical as well as untypical examples of debate viewed
as a political activity. The examples are related in part to our own previous
or ongoing research, the convergence of which also prompted us to write
this book together. We realised that nobody had written a book on how
to analyse debates politically, and our publisher Palgrave Macmillan also
understood that this was the case.
While we aim at indicating possible paths, approaches and practices
for studying politics and debates, this is no ordinary textbook. We share
Robin George Collingwood’s well-known view, in his posthumously
(1946) published The Idea of History, that textbooks often treat the read-
ers as children who are expected to learn what is taught to them, keeping
them, as he puts it, in a condition of statu pupillari. As opposed to such
a view, we hope to encourage the independent and critical thinking of
PREFACE vii
our readers, which might lead far away from what we have presented or
anticipated in this book.
This book is based on our common engagement in such projects as: The
Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change;
The Politics of Dissensus: Parliamentarism, Rhetoric and Conceptual
History (the Academy of Finland research project); the Marie Curie proj-
ect Conceptualizing representative democracy in the EU polity by re-thinking
classical key conceptual clusters for the EU multi-level polity (EUPOLCON);
the Standing Group Political Concepts of the European Consortium for
Political Research (ECPR); and most recently, the Finnish Distinguished
Professorship project Transformations of Concepts and Institutions in the
European Polity (TRACE), directed by Professor Niilo Kauppi. The book
is also extraordinary in so far as we have tried to turn our different career
lengths, academic tracks, generational experiences of politics and practices
in analysing debates to our advantage in our combined efforts to write
this volume.
We are scholars in the Continental academic tradition. Although the
opposition between Anglophone and Continental political thought and
philosophy has become very relative in recent debates, our teaching and
research are still shaped strongly by the German (CW) and German-
indebted Finnish (TH, KP) academic cultures. We consider however that,
for the purposes of this book, it is more convenient to use examples that
are based on sources written or spoken in English. This is seen in most
of the examples presented in the book, especially the ‘exercises’ con-
ducted in Chapter 4. The Hansard documentation of the British House of
Commons debates from 1803 to 2003 has provided the main source for
two sections, the Oxford and Cambridge Unions the source for another
section (see also Haapala, forthcoming 2017), and the English version of
the European Parliament’s Rules of Procedure for another (cf. Palonen
and Wiesner 2016).
Our work is also inspired by a number of continental classics, Hannah
Arendt and Max Weber in particular, or contemporary political thinkers,
such as Reinhart Koselleck and Pierre Rosanvallon. Our principle has been
to quote from the sources in their original language, although we have
paraphrased the passages in English and referred also to the existing trans-
lations, in so far as they are available, both in the references and in the
bibliography.
This book is not a volume with three editors but a joint volume of three
scholars. We think, however, that the metaphor of ‘division of labour’ is
viii PREFACE
misleading to describe the art of cooperation practised in this volume.
Even if only one of us wrote the first drafts of the first three chapters, the
others have commented extensively on each of them and revised them so
thoroughly that none of them can be attributed to one of us as the main
author. To some extent the situation is different in Chapter 4, in which we
have used our different scholarly background and profiles. However, the
first example in that chapter also illustrates how each of us, when looking
at one and the same debate in the British House of Commons, has found
and focused on different aspects of it. Altogether, we hope to have grasped
some of what makes politics so interesting, and to be able to transmit this
to the interested reader.
Darmstadt, Germany Claudia Wiesner
Jyväskylä, Finland Taru Haapala
Jyväskylä, Finland Kari Palonen
c
ontents
1 Understanding Debate as Politics 1
1.1 The Conceptual Aspect of Politics 3
1.2 Politics as an Activity 5
1.3 Four Aspects of Politics: Politicisation—Polity;
Politicking—Policy 9
1.4 Types of Politics—Types of Debate 12
1.4.1 D ebate, Discourse, Dispute, Discussion
and Dissensus 14
1.4.2 D ebate as pro et contra and as a Peaceful
Form of Struggle 16
1.4.3 ‘ Live’ and ‘Virtual’ Debates 18
1.4.4 D ocuments as Contributions to Debates 19
1.4.5 P olitical and Academic Debates: Similarities
and Differences 21
1.5 The Presence of Politics in Texts and Debates 23
2 Reading Debates Politically 25
2.1 Political Literacy 26
2.2 P arliamentary Debate as an Ideal Type 29
2.2.1 On the History of Parliamentary Debates 31
2.2.2 Extensions of Parliamentary Debates 34
2.2.3 Limits of Debate 36
2.2.4 Restrictions of Debate Inside Parliaments 37
2.3 Forms, Dimensions and Characteristics of Debates 41
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