This essay investigates questions about the relationship between language, speech, and democratic institutions by bringing into conversation Hannah Arendt's and Pierre Bourdieu's distinctive views of the politics of language and speech. First, I explicate Arendt's account of the connection between speech, action, and identity disclosure, as well as its role in her broad conception of political institutions. Next, I complicate this outlook by examining Bourdieu's political sociology of language, focusing on the ways that linguistic competences valorized in particular institutional settings (...) operate as mechanisms of silencing, domination, and exclusion. Finally, I bring these approaches together by investigating political events—AIDS activism in the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s—that raise critical issues regarding the politics of language and speech within a specific institutional setting. By reading Arendt and Bourdieu together in the context of these events, one can develop a defensible account of the politics of speech in democratic theory and practice. (shrink)

Engaging the work of thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Pierre Bourdieu, Roy Bhaskar, and Hannah Arendt, as well as recent literature in political ...

In recent years a number of writers have defended and attacked various features of structural, or neo-realist theories of international politics. Few, however, have quarrelled with one of the most foundational features of neorealist theory: its assumptions about the nature of science and scientific theories. In this essay I assess the views of science underlying much neorealist theory, especially as they are articulated in the work of Kenneth Waltz. I argue not only that neorealist theories rest on assumptions about science (...) and theory that have been questioned by postpositivist philosophers and historians of science, but also that the failure to consider the work of these writers yields theories of international politics that are deficient in several respects: they are weak theories in the sense that they cannot illuminate crucial features of international politics, they presuppose and sustain a narrow view of power and power relations, they reify practices and relations in the international arena and they offer little promise of producing the sort of Copernican Revolution for which Waltz called (or, more modestly, even a minimally satisfactory theory of international politics). In light of these shortcomings, I sketch an alternative approach to the study of international affairs, one that has been termed prototype studies. I contend that such an approach provides scholars with a rigorous way of studying international politics, without being a theoretical science. (shrink)