Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables and figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Contemporary Theories of Australian Politics
- Introduction to Part I
- 1 Democratic theories
- 2 Institutionalism
- 3 Behaviouralism
- 4 Critical theories
- 5 Discourse theories and post-structuralism
- 6 International political theories
- Part II Politics in Everyday Australian Life
- Part III Elections
- Part IV Participation and Representation
- Part V Inside the Australian State
- Part VI Contemporary Public Controversies
- Glossary
- References
- Index
5 - Discourse theories and post-structuralism
from I - Contemporary Theories of Australian Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables and figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Contemporary Theories of Australian Politics
- Introduction to Part I
- 1 Democratic theories
- 2 Institutionalism
- 3 Behaviouralism
- 4 Critical theories
- 5 Discourse theories and post-structuralism
- 6 International political theories
- Part II Politics in Everyday Australian Life
- Part III Elections
- Part IV Participation and Representation
- Part V Inside the Australian State
- Part VI Contemporary Public Controversies
- Glossary
- References
- Index
Summary
Politics is full of words. Although all the theories in Part I of this book take some account of the role of words in politics, discourse theories focus directly on the words – the discourses – that constitute the textual basis of politics. The use of a particular discourse reinforces one set of political possibilities while unconsciously excluding others. As this chapter shows, one role of political scientists is to recover the possibility of political debate about terms such as ‘human rights’ by pointing to the other possibilities that a particular discourse about rights is obscuring. Discourse theorists and post-structuralists thus share a starting point of radical questioning of Australia’s political status quo with the critical theorists discussed in Chapter 4. They differ from critical theorists in the way that they view the relationship of discourses to socio-economic interests. They also refuse to give a particular structure (of class or gender) primacy in the analysis of power, seeing politics as more open and fluid than critical theorists do.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Contemporary Politics in AustraliaTheories, Practices and Issues, pp. 46 - 55Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012