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Depoliticisation refers to the narrowing of the boundaries of democratic politics. It is therefore intertwined with concerns about ‘the end of politics’ and the emergence of technocratic postdemocratic forms of governance. This article provides a broad theoretical and conceptual canvas upon which the various contributions to this special edition can be located and their interrelationships exposed. It achieves this by exploring the relevance of Carl Schmitt’s concept of ‘the political’, and particularly his analysis of ‘the age of neutralisations and depoliticisations’, to contemporary debates concerning depoliticisation, (re)politicisation and even hyper-depoliticisation.
Stagnating political participation, the growth of delegated agencies and the prevalence of rationalistic-technocratic discourse all represent interlinking aspects of what can been termed ‘the depoliticised polity’. Existing research has overwhelmingly focused on institutional or governmental depoliticisation strategies and fails to acknowledge repoliticisation as a critical counter-trend. This article argues that these weaknesses can be addressed through ‘a three faces’ approach that embraces societal and discursive depoliticisation strategies as complementary statecraft dynamics that often underpin more tangible governmental strategies. By revealing the existence of multiple forms of depoliticisation this approach also offers new insights in terms of politicisation and sociopolitical change.
Depoliticisation refers to the narrowing of the boundaries of democratic politics. It is therefore intertwined with concerns about ‘the end of politics’ and the emergence of technocratic post-democratic forms of governance. This chapter provides a broad theoretical and conceptual canvas upon which the various contributions to this special edition can be located and their interrelationships exposed. It achieves this by exploring the relevance of Carl Schmitt’s concept of ‘the political’, and particularly his analysis of ‘the age of neutralisations and depoliticisations’, to contemporary debates concerning depoliticisation, (re)politicisation and even hyper-depoliticisation.
Stagnating political participation, the growth of delegated agencies and the prevalence of rationalistic-technocratic discourse all represent interlinking aspects of what can been termed ‘the depoliticised polity’. Existing research has overwhelmingly focused on institutional or governmental depoliticisation strategies and fails to acknowledge repoliticisation as a critical counter-trend. This chapter argues that these weaknesses can be addressed through ‘a three faces’ approach that embraces societal and discursive depoliticisation strategies as complementary statecraft dynamics that often underpin more tangible governmental strategies. By revealing the existence of multiple forms of depoliticisation this approach also offers new insights in terms of politicisation and socio-political change.
The aim of this collection was to be provocative and open up debate, and the book appears to have succeeded. In doing so, it seems to have achieved the not insubstantial feat of provoking Colin Hay, who makes several abject criticisms of the collection. He is uninspired by Bob Jessop’s ‘neologistic’ approach to the topic, exhausted by the myriad attempts at conceptual re-formulation, and somewhat aghast at the potential implications of our own discussion of Carl Schmitt’s work. This very short concluding chapter responds to Hay’s critique of Flinders and Wood’s chapters, and of the broader purpose of this collection, in three senses. It argues that Carl Schmitt’s work is used to contextualise the collection, rather than set a theoretical agenda. Secondly, it argues that conceptual reflection and problem-based research need not be antagonistic, but can in fact be complimentary. Lastly, taking the lead from C Wright Mills’ work on ‘the sociological imagination’, it argues for a little more ‘big thinking’ in the social sciences, and the development of a ‘political imagination’.
Co-production is a risky method of social inquiry. It is time-consuming, ethically complex, emotionally demanding, inherently unstable, vulnerable to external shocks, subject to competing demands and it challenges many disciplinary norms. This is what makes it so fresh and innovative. And yet these research-related risks are rarely discussed and, as a result, risk-reduction strategies remain under-developed within training and research processes. It is for exactly this reason that this article draws upon Mary Douglas’s notion of ‘social pollution’ in order to understand the tensions and challenges of co-production. It seeks to expose the generally hidden politics of co-production.
In the documentary film Brexit, Health and Me,1 the drill rapper Drillminister reflects on accountability for political decisions affecting the health of the UK population and the NHS in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Drillminister interview is replete with references to legal forms of accountability: criminal processes, including imprisonment, for stealing, fraud and ‘joint enterprise’, as well as investigatory processes designed to promote transparency, such as Royal Commissions. Interviewer: Your song ‘NI Backstop’ for me was a song about educating, but also that encapsulated the arguments so well. What made you want to do that? Drillminister: Because my main ops is government, my main ops is the people that’s putting us down. What I’m saying, in certain lines like, um, ‘Before the referendum, did the average Joe know what Brexit was?’ – before the referendum, not after, where everybody’s saying, ‘Brexit, Brexit, Brexit’, saying the buzzword – did they know what Brexit was? No, they didn’t. They had no clue, otherwise they wouldn’t have been driving around with big buses saying, ‘Yeah, 150 million … [corrects self] 350 million … is going back to the NHS’, which is a lie. Which, right now, why is no one in jail for that? Because if I’m a fraud man, and if some Uncle is coming and saying, ‘Yo, I’m putting blah, blah, blah into your account’ … you’d be like, ‘Yo, Uncle, you’re putting that money in my account, yeah’.
