Language and the State in Western Political Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Ives
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Language Use ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Language Policy And Planning ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Policy And Planning ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Nation State

This chapter examines the relationship between language policy and planning (LPP) and political theory, specifically the major figures of modern European political philosophy: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Johann Gottfried Herder. This chapter illustrates how these four figures’ diverse philosophical conceptions of language have differing implications for government policy aimed at language usage, and how these implications are evident in current LPP theory and practice. Although Locke and Herder are widely seen as mainstays of modern Eurocentric language ideologies central to the armature to the modern nation-state, it is also fruitful to pay greater attention to the tensions and contradictions within what has been depicted as a single ideology. Thus, the purpose here is to analyze connections between specific conceptions of language and various implied or explicit understandings of the relationship(s) between language use and government activity.

The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wokler ◽  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Modern Nation State

This chapter's overriding objective is to explain how both the invention of our modern understanding of the social sciences, on the one hand, and the post-Enlightenment establishment of the modern nation-state, on the other, encapsulated doctrines which severed modernity from the Enlightenment philosophy which is presumed to have inspired it. It offers illustrations not so much of the unity of political theory and practice in the modern world as of their disengagement. In providing here some brief remarks on how post-Enlightenment justifications of modernity came to part company from their Enlightenment prefigurations, it hopes to sketch an account of certain links between principles and institutions which bears some relation to both Enlightenment and Hegelian conceptual history.

‘BUT EVER SINCE SO TO SAY I HAVE TAKEN OVER THE PROPER WORDS … SO TO SAY I HAVE NO PROBLEMS’: LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES OF VOJVODINA HUNGARIAN MIGRANTS AND COMMUTERS FROM SERBIA TO HUNGARY

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Eszter Gábrity
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Joint Research ◽  
Swiss National Science Foundation ◽  
Minority Community ◽  
Joint Research Project ◽  
The Status ◽  
University Of Bern ◽  
The Relationship

In this paper, I examine and compare views, beliefs and ideas about two varieties of Hungarian in the framework of language ideologies. The purpose of the present paper is to illuminate the linguistic situation of the Hungarian migrants and commuters from Vojvodina through the examination of their language ideologies. The study focuses on the language ideologies of migrants and commuters who belong to the Hungarian minority community in Vojvodina and moved to Hungary or commute between Hungary and Serbia on a regular basis, thus they have frequent linguistic contacts and interactions on both sides of the border.  The research analyzes ordinary people’s views upon the relationship between their vernacular  and the standard variety, their views related to the status of their vernacular as well as their bidialectal language use. I intend to reveal how members of the Hungarian minority community locate, interpret and rationalize (if so) sociolinguistic complexities of their everyday lives. [1] The present paper presents a segment of a research project: Integrating (trans)national migrants in transition states (TRANSMIG) – joint research project in the framework of the co-operation program SCOPES (2009-2012), submitted to the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), coordinated by Prof. Dr. Doris Wastl-Walter (Department of Geography, University of Bern).

scholarly journals Ethnography of language planning and policy

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy H. Hornberger ◽  
Aldo Anzures Tapia ◽  
David H. Hanks ◽  
Frances Kvietok Dueñas ◽  
Siwon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Language Planning ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
Language Policy And Planning ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Language Planning And Policy ◽  
Research Paradigms ◽  
Policy And Planning ◽  
Multiple Languages

A decade ago, Hornberger & Johnson proposed that the ethnography of language planning and policy (ELPP) offers a useful way to understand how people create, interpret, and at times resist language policy and planning (LPP). They envisioned ethnographic investigation of layered LPP ideological and implementational spaces, taking up Hornberger's plea five years earlier for language users, educators, and researchers to fill up and wedge open ideological and implementational spaces for multiple languages, literacies, identities, and practices to flourish and grow rather than dwindle and disappear. With roots going back to the 1980s and 1990s, ethnographic research in LPP had been gathering momentum since the turn of the millennium. This review encompasses selected ethnographic LPP research since 2000, exploring affordances and constraints of this research in yielding comparative and cumulative findings on how people interpret and engage with LPP initiatives. We highlight how common-sense wisdom about the perennial gap between policy and practice is given nuance through ethnographic research that identifies and explores intertwining dynamics of top-down and bottom-up LPP activities and processes, monoglossic and heteroglossic language ideologies and practices, potential equality and actual inequality of languages, and critical and transformative LPP research paradigms.

Ignes fatui or apt similitudes ?- the apparent denunciation of metaphor by Thomas Hobbes1

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Musolff
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Cognitive Metaphor ◽  
Scholarly Publications ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
George Lakoff ◽  
History Of ◽  
Metaphor Use

AbstractThomas Hobbes's condemnation of metaphor as one of the chief "abuses of speech" in Leviathan occupies a famous (to some critics, infamous) place in the history of thinking about metaphor. From the viewpoint of cognitive metaphor theory, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980,1981) have depicted Hobbes and John Locke as the founding fathers of a tradition in which "metaphor and other figurative devices [became] objects of scorn". Similar verdicts on Hobbes and on Locke as arch-detractors of metaphor can be found in many other accounts of the history of semantics. However, these indictments stand in marked contrast to a considerable number of scholarly publications that have shown that Hobbes's assessment of rhetoric and metaphor is far from a 'straightforward' denunciation of anything non-'literal'. In this paper I shall use results of this research in an analysis of key-passages from Leviathan to re-assess Hobbes's views on metaphor. I shall demonstrate that some critics of Hobbes have overlooked crucial differentiations (in particular, of different kinds of metaphor and similitude) in his concept of metaphor as a key-issue of public communication. Furthermore, I shall argue that Hobbes's foregrounding of the 'dangers' of metaphor use in political theory and practice should be interpreted as an acknowledgement rather than as a denial of its conceptual and cognitive force.

scholarly journals Ist Standarddeutsch für Deutschschweizer eine Fremdsprache? Untersuchungen zu einem Topos des sprachreflexiven Diskurses

2005 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Hägi ◽  
Joachim Scharloth
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Language Awareness ◽  
Swiss German ◽  
The Status ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
The Relationship

This paper is concerned with the question, whether the status of Standard German in German-speaking Switzerland is adequately described as that of a foreign language. It discusses typological aspects, language awareness and language ideologies among German-speaking Swiss people, the practice of language acquisition, the language use in private life and media and the linguistic discourse about the relationship between the use of Swiss German and Standard German. It argues that from a linguistic point of view in none of these fields a clear decision can be made whether Standard German is a foreign language or not. Thus, the authors suggest that the conceptual framework ought to be widened to adequately describe the status of Standard German in German-speaking Switzerland. Finally, they take occasion to develop the concept of "Sekundärsprache"/"secondary language" for language situations similar to that in German-speaking Switzerland.

Auf der Suche nach einer komplexen Friedenslogik –Versuch einer metatheoretischen Verortung undNeuorientierung

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 158-163
Author(s):  
Wilfried Graf
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Dialogical Logic ◽  
Logic Of Action ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theoretical Paradigms ◽  
Different Levels

The dualistic juxtaposition of the logic of peace and the logic of security is necessary for the political debate but not sufficient to overcome the dominance of the security approach in political theory and practice. This article seeks to broaden and deepen the understanding of the relationship between the logic of peace and the logic of security on different levels of meaning. Firstly, this relationship is explored on the level of meaning of a logic of action and intervention. Secondly, this relationship is discussed on the level of meaning of a logic of research and the meta-theoretical paradigms on which the logic of action is constructed. Thirdly, this relationship is further reflected on the level of meaning of a logic of thought and rationality. Founded in a philosophy of complexity a dialogical “logic of complexity” is proposed as a metaparadigm for a complex logic of peace that is both critical and integrative of the logic of security.

Language Policies and Sign Languages

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronice Müller de Quadros
Keyword(s):  
Language Policy ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Language Policy And Planning ◽  
Language Policies ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
The Third ◽  
Policy And Planning ◽  
Future Work ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter argues for specific actions needed for language planning and language policies involving sign languages and Deaf communities, based on the understanding of what sign languages are, who the signers are, where they sign, and the sign language transmission and maintenance mechanisms of the Deaf community. The first section presents an overview of sign languages and their users, highlighting that sign languages are often used in contexts where most people use spoken languages. The second section addresses the functions, roles, and status of sign languages in relation to spoken languages, as well as the relationship between Deaf communities and hearing society. The medical view of deafness, which has a significant impact on language policies for Deaf people, is critically considered. The third section offers examples of language policies, especially related to the use of sign languages in education, and an agenda for future work on sign language policy and planning.

scholarly journals The philosopher as engaged citizen: Habermas on the role of the public intellectual in the modern democratic public sphere

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102110031
Author(s):  
Peter J. Verovšek
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Relationship

Realists and supporters of ‘democratic underlabouring’ have recently challenged the traditional separation between political theory and practice. Although both attack Jürgen Habermas for being an idealist whose philosophy is too removed from politics, I argue that this interpretation is inaccurate. While Habermas’s social and political theory is indeed oriented to truth and understanding, he has sought realize his communicative conception of democracy by increasing the quality of political debate as a public intellectual. Building on his approach, I argue that giving the theorist a direct role in public policy undermines theory as an enterprise oriented towards truth while overlooking the contingency, participatory nature and complicated internal logics of social and political practice. My basic thesis is that Habermas’s understanding of the relationship between theory and practice overcomes these difficulties by providing an account of theory that is independent but simultaneously also allows philosophers to participate in politics as public intellectuals.

scholarly journals Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 95-98
Author(s):  
Tauseef Ahmad Parray
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Religion And Democracy

Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy analyzes the theoretical relationshipbetween religion and democracy, specifically Islam’s relationshipwith liberal democracy. It discusses the relationship between Islam,Muslim-majority societies (viz., Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia), and liberaldemocracy in a way that advances theory and practice regarding their relationsand this relationship is the immediate focus of this study, and the conclusionshave a much broader applicability in illuminating the theoreticalrelationship between religion, secularism, and democracy in general, and incontributing to the development of a liberal-democratic theory for Muslimsocieties in particular. The author’s primary methodological approach is historical and comparative.Drawing on insights and lessons from western political theory andhistory, he examines the relationship between liberal-democratic developmentand religion both theoretically and in the context of the Muslim world.The three countries mentioned above are presented as case studies as ameans to reinforce the theoretical claims. The book consists of four chaptersfollowed by a conclusion, endnotes, a bibliography, and an index ...

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