The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (147 page)

The essence of politics is argument between principles and theories of society. Thus language is to politics as oxygen is to air, its vital and distinct ingredient. Perception of the realities of politics is shaped by the structure and emotional power of language. Words do not merely describe politics, they are part of the politics they describe. It can be argued that almost every choice of word, in most of the discourse we engage in, is a political act. The academic study of politics has almost entirely failed to develop the kind of agreed, ‘neutral’ vocabulary which exists in the physical sciences and, to a degree, in economics. The study of politics, like politics itself, is thus in large part a contest over words, a language game. Even
Mao Zedong
, who said that ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’, saw the ‘little red book’ of his thoughts as more important than bullets in achieving his communist objective.
But intellectual difficulties arise because the power of the pen is much more complex than the power of the sword. For example, much feminist theory claims that existing language embodies forms of patriarchy or male power: we talk of our species as mankind and refer to God as a male. These forms of language arguably inculcate or maintain the acceptance of a dominant role for the male in social institutions. It is extremely difficult, though, to demonstrate the effects of such usages or to refute the allegation that they are trivialities. It is even more difficult to show them to be forms or tools of ‘power’ in any workable sense that allows us to attribute control over society. Orwell offers us, in 1984, a vision of a society in which the state does control people through its deliberate manipulation of language, by introducing a turgidly jargonistic form of English, ‘Newspeak’, which blurs almost all significant moral and philosophical distinctions. This largely drew on Orwell's knowledge of totalitarian dictatorship, but it can also be taken as a satire on almost any political propaganda and speechifying, since politicians invariably try to manipulate people through their use of language and engage in ‘doublespeak’. But actually those in power have rarely, if ever, been able to control language, which usually shows dynamics of change far beyond the control of international policy. One can legislate about language, as the Académie Française has always attempted to legislate to maintain the purity of the French language. But such legislation is impossible to implement. Language is a hugely important dimension of politics, but it is almost impossible to disentangle causes and effects, or to isolate the location of power in any clear sense of that word.
The German nationalist intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as J. G. Fichte , Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm , and J. G. Herder , argued that what made a person German was a threefold relationship between language, consciousness, and territory. To possess a language is to share a consciousness; add the perception of a shared territory and that shared consciousness becomes nationality. Much of their consideration predates the existence of large numbers of nations which speak Spanish or English and is clearly, therefore, an oversimplification. Nevertheless it is an approach followed by twentieth-century Welsh writers, like Saunders Lewis , Berresford Ellis , and Ned Thomas , whose nationalist project has consisted almost entirely of the preservation of the Welsh language.
An important implication of the idea of a shared consciousness unique to those who speak a particular language is that there is a problem of translation. It is proverbial that the peoples of the Arctic circle have dozens of subtly differentiated words for snow. The German translator of a reference in a Harold Pinter play to ‘the man who watered the wicket at Melbourne’ rendered it as ‘the man who peed on the city gate of Melbourne’. An apparently correct translation may contain very different connotations as compared with the original. The very word ‘correct’ furnishes a good example; in French and German it is routinely used to describe behaviour; in English, however, it has a sinister or ironic ‘ring’ to it (as in the phrase ‘ politically correct’) that is lacking from most languages. In the debate about European unity in the 1990s it became clear that ‘federalism’ meant quite different things in different languages, depending, partly, on national experience.
Most states have more than one linguistic group within their borders. This situation persists because, although there is a tendency for ‘big’ languages (of which English is the biggest on a global scale), to eradicate smaller ones, this tendency is offset by both migration and deliberate policy. To some degree there is always a ‘politics of language’ in a multilingual society, because questions of educational resources, the language of bureaucratic and legal procedures, and the control of the mass media are bound to arise. But only in certain countries is the politics of language ever at the top of the agenda and it can take very different forms. In Malta, a long struggle between English and Italian as potential ‘official’ languages ended with the elevation of the Maltese dialect into a full-blown language. In Israel, Hebrew has been successfully revived and is an important dimension of national unity, but in Ireland, the revival of Gaelic (sometimes known as Irish or Erse) has proved divisive and unsuccessful. Black children in South Africa successfully revolted in the 1970s against education in Afrikaans, itself an African dialect of Dutch elevated into a written language as a ‘Boer’ nationalist project. The Canadian federal government has struggled to establish bi-lingualism (English and French) throughout Canada. In Belgium the struggles between French- and Flemish-speaking populations have led to an extreme form of federalism, and the establishment of strictly defined boundaries within one state, that determine the appropriate official language. A similar system has been operated in Switzerland, where a German-speaking majority coexists with French-, Italian-, and Romansch-speaking minorities, though the issue has never been so bitterly contested as in Belgium.
The political dimension of language raises complex and, ultimately, mysterious questions. Questions of culture, identity, and manipulative power are inseparable from linguistic structures. Language sometimes seems definitive of identity, at other times almost irrelevant. One must beware of simplification or generalization about language and politics, yet always remain aware that language is not separate from political reality, but part of that reality.
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(1893–1950)
British political scientist. One of the most influential Marxist writers on British political institutions. When Laski pointed out in 1945 that the parliamentary Labour Party was, according to the Party constitution, subordinate to the extraparliamentary Party of which he was chairman, Winston Churchill claimed that to vote Labour was thus to hand over power to an unelected body. Clement Attlee , leader of the Labour Party, nevertheless won the 1945 General Election, having written to Laski , ‘A period of silence from you would be welcome’.

 
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(1825–64)
Socialist thinker, democrat, and agitator. Born in Breslau, the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant, Lassalle was very idle as a schoolboy, constantly cheating and playing truant. His somewhat authoritarian manner was quite capable of producing personal animosity and general antagonism. Lassalle is remembered now for his endeavours to make socialism and private property compatible, and also for his attention to the
iron law of wages
. He always believed that wages suffered from a downward pressure to mere subsistence. Unfortunately, as he reached his maturity, early hostility to Judaism broadened into something recognizable as anti-Semitism.
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Virtually all accounts of law acknowledge the existence of positive law, which can be loosely defined as the body of rules enforced by any sovereign state. Beyond that, theories of law diverge sharply in their answers to a range of questions about what the law is. For example: Do we have to accept that any rule enforced by any state is a law? Is positive law the only kind of law which exists? Must a rule, in order to be called a law, conform to certain universal principles or precepts? What is the relationship between laws in the legal sense and scientific laws? Answers divide generally into two camps, the
legal naturalists
and the
legal positivists
.
Legal positivism
asserts that only positive laws exist. Laws are, therefore, made, or chosen by, legislators; they do not exist, awaiting discovery, before a law-making act occurs. The distinction between laws and non-laws is a question of judging whether the source of a rule is or is not a sovereign state. Moralizing about what the law ought to be is thus a logically separate activity from discovering or deciding what the law is. Legal laws bear only an etymological relationship to scientific laws: they are quite different kinds of statement.
Positivism can be traced back to Jeremy
Bentham's
attending the lectures of William Blackstone (1723–80) in which the latter attempted to derive the content of English common law from the existence of a higher, natural law (
Commentaries on the Laws of England
). To Bentham it was clear that real laws were made by legislators, parliaments, and judges, and ought to be chosen because their consequences were better than those of alternatives and not because of their supposed conformance to some other body of law. He published his critique in the
Fragment on Government
in 1776.
John Austin (1790–1859), an associate of Bentham, developed a brutally clear form of positivism in
The Province of Jurisprudence Determined
(1832). In this version, laws are simply the commands of a sovereign, who is a person or institution whose general commands are habitually obeyed by the bulk of a reasonably numerous population. Austin has been criticized on the grounds that his theory is incapable of distinguishing between a legal system and the rule of a gangster, but an obvious Austinian response to this is to say that if the gangster has a capacity to enforce rules over an entire territory and to dominate or eradicate his rivals, then what he has is a state, and the rules that he enforces are laws.
Positivism has dominated twentieth-century thinking about law, at least in Western and communist states. American legal positivists have argued that ‘the law is what the judges say it is’ and their account is strikingly concordant with that of Lenin in
State and Revolution
(1916). To Lenin, law is the expression of the will of the dominant class, whether the bourgeoisie before the revolution or the proletariat afterwards.
A more complex version of positivism is offered by H. L. A. Hart in
The Concept of Law
(1961). Hart characterizes law as ‘a system of rules’. The most basic type of rules are primary rules which impose rights and obligations and which include the criminal law. Secondary rules stipulate how primary rules are ‘formed, recognized, modified or extinguished’. A system is identified by its ‘rule of recognition’ that defines its legal status. A rule of recognition is, in effect, a definition of what Austin called a sovereign: in the United States it is the whole constitution, while in Britain it consists, arguably, of the single principle of
parliamentary sovereignty
.
Turning now to
legal naturalism
, if positivistic theories of law have been predominant in the ‘developed’ world in the twentieth century, naturalistic theories, defined as those which posit the existence of some kind of higher and permanent law not dependent on the actions of particular legislators, have dominated most other societies at most other times. Typically, such laws are derived from religious revelation or from the requirements of reason; in the synthesis of
Aquinas
, our reason is the mechanism whereby religious truth is revealed. Reason may inform us, for instance, about the necessary structure of a legal system or about its core content. It may tell us that there must be laws against murder or that all laws, whatever their content, must treat equals equally. Thus, systems of laws are, in some respects, like scientific laws; both are necessary truths which our intellects can discover. In naturalistic theory some questions about the ethical quality of a ‘law’ are relevant to the question of whether or not it is a law at all. Of a racist law, say, which contradicts natural principles of law, the natural lawyer can say, ‘It is a rule the current state attempts to enforce, but it is incompatible with natural law and, therefore, not properly a law at all’.
In the West, the theory of natural law has had a significant revival in the last decades of the twentieth century, led by such writers as Ronald Dworkin and John Finnis . In Islamic cultures, it has always remained dominant. There is room in an Islamic society for rules which are merely contingent to a particular society, covering such matters as driving on the left or the right. But positive law which contradicts holy law would not be law and there is no room, in principle, for divine rules which are not enforced as positive laws.
From a positivist point of view naturalism carries excessive philosophical baggage: it must be based on either revealed religion or a concept of reason which is dangerously wide-ranging and which objectifies ethical judgements. Thus, naturalism is potentially illiberal and must conflict with the canons of utility and democracy. On the other hand, positivists have only feeble answers to certain practical ethical problems. What do we do with people who did wicked things which were not illegal under a wicked regime? How do we distinguish between, say, burglars and political protesters who are imprisoned under a morally unacceptable government when both their activities were clearly illegal at the time they were committed? Positivists, rightly or wrongly, can have no answer to Heinrich Himmler's claim that he could not possibly be tried since he had committed no crime.
In some, more subtle, accounts, positivism and naturalism are not so far apart: legislators make law and judges interpret it, but they do so according to criteria which may be common to all legal systems and, in some sense, are deduced to be necessarily preconditions of a legal system.
LA