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This chapter explores the political discourse on extremism in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when Egyptians began to explore the causes of extremism in more critical and nuanced ways. It argues that by participating in the new anti-extremist politics and the debate over the meaning of Kharijism that accompanied it, Islamists were trying to win over the public and make a stronger case against the existing regime. But, in the process, they conceded the importance of the very middle-class demands that informed the new politics; and those demands were not for a religious transformation of Egypt — the creation of an Islamic government or the implementation of Islamic law — but rather for workable social institutions, a more open political process, and a healthy economy. In the political discourse of late-20th-century Egypt, the end of violence, the end of the problem of Kharijism, entailed a new political beginning shorn of absolutist politics of any kind.

This introductory chapter criticizes the amateurish way in which history is used to corroborate International Relations theory, in particular Realism. Conversely, it criticizes conventional historiography for its neglect of political theory. A case in point is the constructivist insight that political structures are created through political discourse. The political discourse underlying present-day political structures is so ubiquitous as to render those structures largely immune to manipulation. But since to most people the everyday political discourse of past eras is now unfamiliar, historians feel free, indeed obliged, to describe past political structures using the political concepts and assumptions of our own day. What they fail to realize is that unlike present-day political structures the political structures of past ages do change when anachronistic terminology is used to describe them: they come to look more like our own than they were.

This chapter covers the political discourse on Islamist extremism during the Sadat years. Sadat established his reputation as president by steering a course away from the policies of his predecessor. His distinctive legacy was his economic and political opening to the West, which was preceded by an opening up of Egyptian society. Discourse on extremism during this period bears the distinct markings of the political negotiations underway between Islamists and the state; and the Kharijites were a tool for the claims of both the authorities and Islamists.

Evaluates and compares movement strategy and success in influencing public policy within the state when environmentalists act in conventional interest group or in political party fashion. But movements can also influence public policy when they confront the state from civil society. In addition, movements in civil society can take effect more directly by changing the terms of political discourse and political culture, and engaging paragovernmental activity that bypasses the state. In light of these possibilities, guidelines are developed for movements contemplating whether to act within the state, in oppositional civil society, or in both. We show when and how the popular ‘dual strategy’ for movement action can work—and when it cannot.

Establishes the conceptual and methodological framework for the study of government efforts to implement sustainable development in the industrialized countries. It examines the emergence of sustainable development in international political discourse, the engagement of the social science research community with sustainable development, and the implementation problems associated with sustainable development. It anchors the understanding of sustainable development in the 1987 Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development and the subsequent international process that led on to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. It suggests that while sustainable development will remain a politically contested concept, it also possesses a core meaning that can orient policy development.

This chapter presents an overview of the ecology of ideas in American politics. It discusses the various means by which political participants engage with a multiple constituency of core values in the competitive struggle for advantage and legitimacy. It also reviews how analysts have sought to come to terms with the dual existence of a fixed set of central principles within society, and the fluid and innovative style by which these core values are articulated and aggregated for political effect.

This chapter begins by reviewing arguments evaluating whether television is unique as a medium of political communication. It analyzes whether any of these same effects occur in response to incivility in political discourse that reaches audiences through other media. Although in-your-face politics has been framed as a theory about the effects of television, incivility in political discourse can also occur on the radio, and at times even within newspapers. Furthermore, the Internet has become a particular locus of concern with respect to the civility of political discourse in recent years. Questioning whether in-your-face politics is tied to the emergence of television is important for purposes of understanding the potential historical importance of in-your-face politics.

This chapter discusses the means for circulating political discourse. The discussion centres on the physical design of books, the practice and material spaces of reading, the potential impact of the spoken word, and the circulation of print and manuscript. The interpenetration of these forms of discourse is considered to be important in understanding the Popish Plot and the ensuing political crisis.

This chapter examines the consequences of perceived distance and incivility on levels of political trust. It suggests that people may also react to incivility for entirely different, more straightforward reasons. People are all too aware of the banality of shout shows they see on television, and they have made their disgust for this practice well known. If there is consensus that politicians and political advocates are not behaving admirably, then perhaps incivility in political discourse also affects public regard for politics and politicians more generally, despite its lack of any apparent effects on attitudes toward individual favored politicians. Televised portrayals of political conflict have received a particularly severe beating, with some pointing to media reports highlighting conflict as a source of greater political cynicism.

This chapter discusses the concept of “in-your-face” politics. When it comes to expressing political views in face-to-face settings, most people are usually polite. With political television, in contrast, there is considerable political disagreement, and the opinion holders that people see are often chosen specifically as exemplars of extremely divergent, highly polarized positions. It is well established that violating norms for interpersonal distance or norms for polite conversation can have important consequences in real life. The chapter addresses whether these same norm violations have consequences when they occur via television. It also provides background on incivility in political discourse and what is known about the importance of spatial distance in how people react to one another.

In this chapter, the antagonistic discourses of marriage and freedom are highlighted in two modern novels by black people. Comparing the axioms of twentieth-century “black aesthetics” to the nineteenth-century critical imperatives of race literature, the author postulates a reading model that will recover the politicization of the desire of the heroine as an unequivocal discourse in the domestic fictions of the post-reconstruction era. Three studies were instructive on the formulation of such a model. These were works by the female authors Hazel V. Carby, Nancy Armstrong, and Jane Tompkins. This chapter includes a wide discussion on the antagonistic discourses of marriage and freedom as a modern paradigm, twentieth-century imperatives, the aesthetic of race literature, and domestic desire as a political discourse.

This chapter uses additional experiments to investigate viewers' perceptions of the legitimacy of the candidates and issue positions they like least. Conflict is central to the democratic process, and it is altogether appropriate that media highlight differences of political opinion. The legitimacy of democratic outcomes requires that political options be contested, and the in-your-face style could be just another way to present conflicting ideas to the public. Televised political discourse plays an important role in familiarizing viewers with issue arguments related to matters of public controversy. If television did so for rationales for oppositional political perspectives in particular, then it could be extremely valuable in discouraging polarization and encouraging perceptions of a legitimate opposition.

This chapter examines language ideologies and political discourse of the bilingual, indigenous Polynesian community of Easter Island, Chile, where the local Rapa Nui language has in the past been considerably marginalized by Spanish. It details how Rapa Nui speakers came to challenge this situation, first by pushing syncretic Rapa Nui–Spanish speech styles into public and political domains, and more recently, by constructing purist Rapa Nui speech styles. The chapter argues that the Rapa Nui deploy syncretic and purist speech styles as linguistic registers in political discourse to perform stances, and are voicing different but complimentary sets of values—those of democratic participation, and those of primordialism and ethnic boundary construction. The case study illustrates the ways in which the users of an endangered ethnolinguistic minority language have contributed to revalorizing and maintaining their language by establishing new linguistic registers, increasing the linguistic heterogeneity of their language.

This concluding chapter discusses the realizations and attempts that were made in the previous chapters. It focuses on Roger L'Estrange, who was preoccupied with authority and used metaphors to describe disguise and opacity. He was a prolific writer of pamphlets and periodicals, and was also fully alive to the manipulations and distortions of political discourse. Roger L'Estrange is also shown to have professed moderation, but he was found to be frequently guilty of zeal and running to extremes. The representation of Catholics is revealed to have been crucial for the credit of the plot.

This chapter explores the relationship between media practices in the United States and normative conceptualizations of a healthy democracy. While a media system that discourages participation meets the normative standards of representative democracy, democratic theorizations that call for an active and engaged citizenry require a media that can develop and articulate a sense of collective identity. From this normative perspective, the chapter explores the personalization of news and the media's use of adversarial frames. Each of these media trajectories presents a double-edged sword for advocates of participation-oriented democratic theory. Personalization tends to discourage the development of a collective identity, yet it also provides the opportunity for grassroots constituencies to mobilize around particular issues. Likewise, adversarial framing encourages individuals to actively participate on behalf of one side of a conflict. At the same time, adversarial frames can create unnecessary and misleading oppositions, and impede the development of cooperation and coalition formation.

This chapter discusses David Hume's background and contributions to macroeconomics. Hume's book, Political Discourses, consists mainly of essays—seven out of the twelve—on economic issues. Hume had strong views on the neutrality of money, particularly in the long term. He challenged the view that increases in the money supply could influence output in the long term. He rejected the mercantilist view that the accumulation of bullion was an appropriate policy for the nation. Instead, he outlined the self-adjusting price specie flow mechanism to show how a nation could not accumulate excessive stocks of gold and silver. He disagreed with the view that the rate of interest was determined by the demand and supply of money. In his final writing on economics, “Of the Jealousy of Trade”, Hume argued strongly in favor of free international trade. The core of theory that he constructed in some of the central essays of the Political Discourses is now regarded by many writers as the core of pre-monetarist theorizing.