Political correctness has become a fighting word used to dismiss and discredit political opponents. The article traces the conceptual history of this fighting word. In anthropological terms, it ...describes the social life of the concept of political correctness and its negation, political incorrectness. It does so by adopting a concept-in-motion methodology, which involves tracking the concept through various cultural and political regimes. It represents an attempt to synthesize well-established historiographic and anthropological approaches. A Swedish case is introduced that reveals the kind of large-scale historical movements and deep-seated political conflicts that provide the contemporary context for political correctness and its negation. Thereupon follows an account of the conceptual history of political correctness from the eighteenth century up to the present. Instead of a conventional conclusion, the article ends with a political analysis of the current rise of fascism around the world and how the denunciation of political correctness is both indicative of and instrumental in this process.
Introduction Stade, Ronald S
Conflict and society,
2017, Volume:
3, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Concepts have cultural biographies and social lives. Some concepts become social and political keywords that can be both indicative of and instrumental in social and political conflicts. (It might ...even be possible to speak of conceptual violence.) But they are not just contentious; they also tend to be contested. Contentious and contested concepts have been studied by historians and social scientists from varying temporal and spatial horizons. It is a research area that lends itself to cross-disciplinary approaches, as is demonstrated in the three contributions to this section, the first of which investigates the Russian obsession with the concept of “Europe.” The second contribution to the section explores the military roots of the concept of “creative thinking,” and the final contribution examines the social life of “political correctness” as a fighting word.
In liberal political philosophy, from Michel de Montaigne to Judith Shklar, cruelty – the wilful inflicting of pain on another in order to cause anguish and fear – has been singled out as ‘the most ...evil of all evils’ and as unjustifiable: the ultimate vice. An unconditional rejection and negation of cruelty is taken to be programmatic within a liberal paradigm. In this contribution, two anthropologists triangulate cruelty as a concept with torture (Stade) and with love (Rapport). Treating the capability to practise cruelty and the liability to suffer from cruelty as universal aspects of a human condition, Stade and Rapport aim to instantiate the precise enactment of cruelty, firstly, and secondly, to propose a process of its social negation. CIA training manuals and quotidian practice within the British National Health Service are employed as illustrative materials.
Cruelty Stade, Ronald
Conflict and society,
2016, Volume:
2, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
She had to carry a bag of heads. Blood was dripping from the bag. The armed men made her laugh about this. When they arrived, the bag was emptied and she saw the heads of her children. This happened ...in Sierra Leone toward the end of the twentieth century. An account of the event was given by the woman who had been forced to carry the bag. Hers is a story of cruelty and suffering, reminiscent of similar stories told and sometimes recorded over the millennia. It is a story about the twin constellation of cruelty and suffering, perpetration and victimhood. Cruelty is the intentional inflicting of suffering. It is suffering plus agency. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it can also be to delight in or be indifferent to the pain or misery of others and to act in a merciless, hard-hearted fashion. There is, of course, also suffering without cruelty and perpetration: there can be no cruelty without suffering, but there can be suffering without cruelty. Human beings can and do suffer without anyone in particular being responsible for the suffering (although magical and conspiratorial thinking, with their belief in excessive agency, will attempt to identify a perpetrator, someone to hold accountable). Contemporary politics of life, with its focus on the maximization of vitality, is likely to define suffering as an absence of intervention, as an act of omission.
What follows is a set of paired articles, followed by a statement by both authors where they debate their distinct positions. Both articles treat irony, but while Rapport looks to it as a possible ...liberal virtue, a means of dealing with radical difference in a modern democracy, including the illiberal, Stade approaches irony from an ontological position that considers social relationships and cultural contingencies to be but one facet of human existence and irony and alienation to have an existential depth, the study of which can facilitate a rapprochement between sociocultural and philosophical anthropology. The paired articles are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, perhaps: irony as world-mocking as well as world-tolerant. Adapted from the source document.
Contemporary cosmopolitanism is difficult to conceive of without recent history. To a considerable extent it consists of a transvaluation of anti-cosmopolitan values. In particular, modern ...cosmopolitanism rejects various forms of social and political exclusion. this, one may say, is its cosmology: that citizenship rights should follow human rights, so that the institution of citizenship becomes truly universal. The polis can no longer be the private domain of propertied men, excluding women, immigrants, slaves, poor men, and so on. This does not necessarily contradict the principle that citizenship should be organized at a national level. As long as citizenship rights are not universally shared across the globe, however, national citizenship will inevitably create exclusion. Far from being an unbroken tradition, cosmopolitanism has always been an historically contingent concept.
PDF
