Bird, Political Theory and Ordinary Language

Political Theory andOrdinary Language: A RoadNot Taken

Colin BirdUniversity of Virginia

This article argues that political theory could gain from a revival of the form of

ordinary language analysis advocated by J. L. Austin. It distinguishes three

objectionable forms of scholasticism widespread in contemporary political theory,

and shows how Austinian methods might help to combat them. To illustrate the

potential of Austinian analysis in political theory, the final third of the article

considers, in the light of pertinent ordinary language, the widely canvassed claim

that coercion can involve “disrespect for persons”; these considerations suggest that

this claim is more complicated, less obviously sound, and more interesting, than

political theorists often assume.

Polity (2011) 43, 106–127. doi:10.1057/pol.2010.20; published online 23 August 2010

Keywords: J. L. Austin; ordinary language; coercion; disrespect;

dignity; foundationalism

J. L. Austin played an important, although largely unintended, role in the

twentieth-century revival of normative political theory. Isaiah Berlin, H. L. A. Hart,

Jurgen Habermas, Quentin Skinner, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Stanley Cavell,

Bernard Williams, Hannah Pitkin, and those they have influenced were all heavily

indebted to Austin, and to ordinary language philosophy more generally. Yet

political theorists today rarely give ordinary language the sort of patient attention

that Austin recommended, and the continuing relevance of his ideas for the

practice of political theory remains widely unappreciated and misunderstood.

Among the present generation of political theorists, the received view of Austin

runs something like this: although his notion of performative utterance has

proven to be a lasting contribution, with seminal political relevance, Austin’s

wider philosophical concerns, and especially his distinctive plea for philosophi-

cal “field work” in the everyday use of language, have little to offer political

The author is grateful to Bill Gorton, Corey Brettschneider, George Klosko, Ryan Pevnick, AndrewPolsky, several anonymous referees for Polity, and audiences at the Midwest Political Science Associationmeetings, at the University of Virginia, and at the National Humanities Center for many constructivecomments. Large parts of this article were completed while I was on sabbatical leave supported by anNEH Fellowship at the National Humanities Center for 2008–2009; I thank both those institutions for theirgenerous support.

Polity . Volume 43, Number 1 . January 2011

r 2011 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/11www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

theorists. This article aims to combat this view by explaining how a renewed

attention to ordinary language might enrich the field. I certainly do not claim that

contemporary political theory should be wholly reconceived on an Austinian

basis; ordinary language, as Austin was the first to admit, has real limitations.1 My

thesis is rather that, in forgetting some of Austin’s strictures about the significance

of ordinary use, political theorists deprive themselves of a vital resource.

How Austin Was Forgotten

Many intellectuals are reluctant to acknowledge that everyday discourse

could be a source of philosophical insight in its own right, and this partly explains

why political theorists still resist Austin’s contention that the nuances of ordinary

use always repay our attention. However, various historical contingencies were

far more important to the demise of interest in Austin’s approach. Neither Austin

nor Wittgenstein (the other leading twentieth-century advocate for ordinary

language) showed much interest in philosophical ethics or political theory, and

both died well before the resurgence of these fields that began in the 1970s. Their

writings provide few models for political philosophers to follow, and are rarely

taught in graduate courses in the field. Austin’s early death in 1960 was

particularly unfortunate in this regard. After his passing, ordinary language

approaches fell out of favor in other areas of philosophy and slipped from the

foreground of academic attention. Also influential were nagging reservations

about “ordinary language” philosophy more generally. Even its admirers

sometimes view the analysis of ordinary language as suited only to the negative,

“therapeutic” task of dispelling conceptual confusion, while having little

constructive utility in political reflection.2 Critics complained that in their

deference to established usage, ordinary language analysts must be unsuspecting

of the ideological falsifications that infect everyday political consciousness. On

this view, ordinary language is necessarily conservative and ideological, and

making it central to theoretical discussion precludes a suitably critical stance

toward prevailing norms, practices, and conventions. These criticisms were

crystallized in polemical attacks on ordinary language philosophy published

by Herbert Marcuse and Ernest Gellner in the 1950s and 1960s.3 Although Alan

Wertheimer effectively rebutted the charges,4 the Austinian program has not been

1. Isaiah Berlin, “Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy,” in Essays on J. L. Austin, ed.G.J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 14.

2. For example, Phillip Pettit, “The Contribution of Analytic Political Philosophy,” in A Companion toContemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert Goodin and Phillip Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 9–10.

3. Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (London: Gollancz, 1959), 217; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (New York: Beacon, 1964), 172–73.

4. Alan Wertheimer, “Is Ordinary Language Analysis Conservative?,” Political Theory 4 (1976):405–22.

Colin Bird 107

taken up by political theorists in any systematic way, and the stock image of

ordinary language philosophy as hair-splitting, politically disengaged, and

conservative persists.5 As a result, the various intellectual paradigms (Kantian

ethics, natural law theory, Rawlsian political liberalism, virtue ethics, post-

structuralism, anti-foundationalism, rational choice theory, Straussianism) that

dominate the field of political theory today rarely tarry long with ordinary

language in the areas of ethical consciousness they theorize.

Why Austin Is Still Important: Anti-Scholasticism

In urging that we redress this imbalance, I stress that my interest is neither in

“ordinary language philosophy” as a particular episode in intellectual history nor as

a doctrinaire tradition to be revived. My aim is to rehabilitate ordinary language

itself as a philosophical resource, one that political theorists too often ignore.

Apart from the many insights it offers on specific matters, the close study of

ordinary use has a more general value in subjecting intellectual speculation to a

powerful and salutary anti-scholastic check. Scholasticism is a perennial

temptation in any academic field, and at the heart of Austin’s project was an

astute diagnosis of this phenomenon. As he saw it, scholasticism develops

when academics rip words and concepts clean from the circumstances in which

they would ordinarily be used and then redeploy them to populate highly

technical, specialized theoretical frameworks of their own devising. The result is

“over-simplification, schematization, and constant obsessive repetition of the

same small range of jejune ‘examples,’ ” scholastic faults that Austin described

as “far too common to be dismissed as an occasional weakness of philosophers.”6

As a counterweight to these tendencies, Austin urged philosophers to initiate

5. These longstanding misconceptions about ordinary language philosophy have been furtherreinforced in recent years by the influential contemporary campaign for “experimental” or “empirical”forms of philosophical inquiry. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 2004) and Jesse Prinz, “Empirical Philosophy and Experimental Philosophy,” inExperimental Philosophy, ed. Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),189–209. This campaign often trades on naıve oppositions between empirical and “armchair”conceptual analysis in a way that unfairly reads Austin out of the picture. We should remember thatwe owe to Austin one of the earliest uses of the pejorative metaphor of the “armchair philosopher” whoanalyzes concepts a priori. See J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in his Philosophical Papers, ed. G.J.Warnock and J.O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 182. Philosophical experimentation todetermine the tolerances of concepts used in ordinary language under the pressure of differentempirical circumstances was central to Austin’s approach. Experimental philosophers ought to besympathetic to, rather than dismissive of, this Austinian technique.

6. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 3. Compare politicaltheorists’ fascination with largely meaningless terms like “liberalism,” “contestability,” “alterity,”“intuition,” “foundationalism”; our tendency to trade in abstractions like “metaphysics,” “modernity,”“ontology,” “identity,” “subject,” or the “separateness of persons”; and our predilection for highly stylizedphilosophical examples (trolley problems, eye lotteries, babies drowning in ponds, etc.).

108 POLITICAL THEORY AND ORDINARY LANGUAGE

careful “field work” in the ordinary use of those expressions and words that are

adjacent to, or involved in, their area of interest: “How much it is to be wished

that similar field work will soon be undertaken in, say, aesthetics; if only we could

forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the

dumpy.”7

Although Austin regarded this fieldwork as a prerequisite for sophisticated

theoretical reflection about virtually any topic, it does not follow that his

approach is in any sense anti-theoretical. Our everyday metaphors and turns of

phrase are themselves often theory-laden, and therefore inquiry into ordinary use

need not be a journey into a theoretical void.8 Austin certainly insisted that

we achieve a firm grip on how ordinary language characteristically works in the

relevant contexts before investing heavily in large-scale academic theories. But

this insistence was less a protest against “theory” as such as against theories

that are simplistic (and, more pointedly, against the conceit that it is easy for

intellectuals to resist simplification: in this sense, Austin’s project was a plea for

intellectual humility). As Austin famously put it: “certainly, . . . [o]rdinary

language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented

and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.”9

Austin’s “first word” proviso underlines his insistence that, ideally, ordinary

language be consulted in the early stages of inquiry, so as to kill off scholastic

temptations at their root. One way to show the continued relevance of the

Austinian approach to political reflection, then, is to explain how it can offset

forms of scholasticism that are prevalent in academic political theory today.

Accordingly, I will identify three distinctively scholastic prejudices that often

infect the early, agenda-setting phases of recent discussion in the field, and in

each case show how Austinian techniques provide an appropriate remedy.

I stress that in arguing in this way, I do not mean to indiscriminately indict

all “contemporary political theory” as entirely insensitive to nuances of ordinary

use. I concede that many important and influential arguments made by political

theorists since Rawls are consistent with, already perfectly attentive to, or could

not be significantly improved by consultation of ordinary use. “Contemporary

political theory” is in any case too variegated a category to permit a sensible

evaluation as a whole. Indeed, to reify it in this way would be to indulge the

very sort of scholasticism I want to resist. My target is not the abstraction

“contemporary political theory,” but rather the forms of scholasticism that Austin

hoped to expose and dissolve. Informed readers will recognize these tendencies

7. Austin, “A Plea,” 182–83.8. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago University Press,

1980).9. Austin, “A Plea,” 185.

Colin Bird 109

in recent political theory, even as they acknowledge that the field is not defined

by them.

The Scholasticism of Texts

As with earlier forms of scholasticism, the prevalence of the highly technical

idioms that Austin warned against reflects a dominant presumption that texts

written by certain designated, qualified authors (trained churchmen, accredited

fellow academics, canonized historical figures, etc.) provide the main source of

insight into the phenomena to be investigated. Take a glance at the program of

any major academic conference in political theory and one will immediately be

struck by the high proportion of panels devoted to the discussion of canonical

authors. This presumption in favor of texts, and moreover texts of a special kind,

is by now deeply woven into our disciplinary norms and pedagogy. Such texts are

very often profoundly instructive and are worthy objects of study in their own

right. Nevertheless, giving these texts, and the terms of art they characteristically

propagate, undue prominence can prematurely limit our theoretical imagination.

We stand as much in the shadow as on the shoulders of these giants; the dazzling

light they cast in some directions may artificially darken other areas and lend

premature credence to assumptions that deserve closer scrutiny.

Ordinary language, as incited within everyday political interaction, is as

important a source of insight precisely because it can guard against these

tendencies. This is not to say that we can simply read sound conclusions off

individual specimens of ordinary use. Austin explicitly warned against treating

ordinary language as a “final arbiter” in philosophical argument; doing so would

anyway be no better than simply invoking the authority of our favorite historical

author (Arendt, Hobbes, Kant, Tocqueville, Hayek, Marx, Rawls, etc.) to defend

our claims (though this scholastic conceit is hardly unknown in the field today).

However, there is an important difference between the consultation of a text and

the interrogation of ordinary language: the former will usually be the product of

a single mind, with its own blind spots, prejudices, agendas, etc. Of course,

ordinary use has its own shortcomings, but it has an open-ended character: it is

not trying to say anything in particular, to be systematic, or to convince us of some-

thing. Rather, it embodies a rich assortment of latent communicative capacities that

develop and persist as ways of coping with the problems of life in a variety of

circumstances: “If a distinction works well for practical purposes in ordinary life

. . ., then there is sure to be something in it, it will not mark nothing.”10

If ordinary use as such is not trying to tell us anything in particular, and is

simply a rich reservoir of communicative capacity, how can we “persuade

10. Austin, “A Plea,” 195.


it to yield information” and mine it for philosophical insight? The “various

dodges” that Austin recommended for this purpose include the consideration

of etymology and of the variations in use to be found across history and

different natural languages. Austin shared Nietzsche’s appetite for the variegation of

human social practice and culture, and regarded it as something to be cherished

and not feared, as long as it is approached in a thorough and systematic way.

Thoroughness was important to him because it guards against any tendency to

fixate narrowly on certain words or idioms, and sees them as exhausting the

modalities of expression in a particular area. He would have agreed with the spirit

of Nietzsche’s remark in the Genealogy that “the more eyes, different eyes, we use

to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our

‘objectivity’ be.”11

But the most important device that Austin both advocated and practiced is

the construction of vignettes in which certain expressions or verbal uses either

seem very clearly appropriate or obviously aberrant. The identification of

aberration is crucial in the Austinian approach, for it helps us to “be brutal with,

to torture, to fake and to override, ordinary language.”12 By putting ordinary use

under pressure, brutality of this kind exposes the substructure of norms and

metaphors that permit, prevent, or (in some cases) require certain ways of using

language. Austin claimed, for example, that we would, and should, never

ordinarily say “A wounded B for the purpose of killing him.”13 As he showed,

reflecting on why this phrase is aberrant reveals much about our implicit

conceptions of responsible action. It is similarly illuminating to reflect on the

proper (and improper) use of the word “wound.” Why, as Norwood Hanson asked

many years ago, does it make sense to speak of someone “receiving a wound in

battle,” but not to say that a surgeon, slicing up a patient’s abdomen in order to

get at her appendix, is “wounding” her or that an Eskimo “wounds” the dead

whale whose blubber he is hacking off?14

Investigation along these lines, Austin held, yields much more than an

inventory of bare meanings or senses of words.

When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in

what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or “meanings”,

whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk

about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our

perception of . . . the phenomena. For this reason I think it might be better to

11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1962), 119.12. Austin, “A Plea,” 186.13. J. L. Austin, “Three Ways of Spilling Ink,” in Philosophical Papers, ed. Warnock and Urmson,

275–76.14. Norwood Hanson, “Causal Chains,” Mind 64 (1955): 194–96.

Colin Bird 111

use, for this way of doing philosophy, some less misleading name . . . for

instance, “linguistic phenomenology”, only that is rather a mouthful.15

Therefore, if “wounding for the purpose of killing,” “the surgeon’s incision

inflicted a grave wound,” or “the lumberjack wounded the timber when he sawed

up the log” are not things we should ever say, except perhaps in very rare and

peculiar cases, these are (in effect) events that hardly ever take place.

The fruits of this sort of analysis are best illustrated by example, and in the last

part of the article I will provide an example of my own. But, although Austin

rarely tackled political or ethical topics directly, his approach is surely well suited

to political reflection. Speech, as Aristotle noted, is what makes us political

animals, and political interaction exhibits a rich vernacular of complaint, protest,

intimidation, compromise, allegiance, mobilization, loyalty, complaisance,

division, dissent, inequity, and so forth. However, rather than devote much time

to fieldwork in ordinary use in these areas, political theorists today instead reach

instinctively for the crutch of a classic text, a technical distinction, a scholastic

paradigm.

But what if, instead of (say) reflecting on Rawls’s highly technical specification

of “Justice,” we thought, at least at the outset, about the ordinary use of “evenhan-

dedness,” “crookedness,” “innocence,” getting “one’s own” back (what is the

“owned” thing one gets back?), the “irregular,” “rough justice,” the “aboveboard,”

and so on? Suppose that, instead of consulting Kant to determine what we mean by

respect or love, we asked: why do we “make” love but not respect—or (to put the

same question differently) why is respect not poetic in the way love is? And why do

we “pay” respect but not love? Or what if, rather than parroting academic dis-

tinctions between “positive” and “negative” rights, or between “natural,” “human,”

and “positive” rights, we reflected instead on such expressions as “she has no

business here,” “what gives you the right?,” “you have every right to be angry,”

“bragging rights,” or “in its own right.” What about the various verbs that we use to

describe things that we do (violate, trample upon, wield, exercise, claim, waive,

honor, bestow, etc.) with rights? Might we not learn more about the terms of poli-

tical protest by forgetting for a while about such dry abstractions as “illegiti-

mate” or “unjustified” and reflecting instead on the difference between exclaiming

“how dare you!” and “what do you think you are doing”? A whole politics lies in

between them.

Austin’s own explorations in “A Plea for Excuses,” the only one of his papers that

addresses directly issues relevant to political theorists, provides ample examples of

the dividends such investigations might repay. Anyone interested in the nature of

personal responsibility must take seriously Austin’s deconstruction of the “myth of



the verb” and his careful analysis of the difference between doing something “by

mistake” and “by accident.” Similarly, his claim that, in ordinary language,

“voluntarily” and “involuntarily” are not simple antonyms (Austin: “involuntarily”

opposes “deliberately” or (not the same) “on purpose”; while “voluntarily” opposes

“under duress, constraint, or influence”) is a cardinal insight for all sophisticated

accounts of free and responsible action. These and related distinctions, derived not

from meditation on any academic text, but by patient study of ordinary use,

deserve our attention. Political theorists often insist, for example, that objectionable

infringements on individual liberty occur only if they result from “intentional”

action, or when done “on purpose” or for which someone can be held responsible,

as if these phrases are simply interchangeable and pick out a single category of

actions. Austin’s careful distinctions suggest otherwise, and likely complicate (but

also illuminate) our understanding of the forms that (problematic) infringements

on personal liberty might take.16

The Scholasticism of Disputation

The penchant for formalized disputation between doctrines defined as

mutual adversaries has been part of the academic mentality since the heyday

of medieval scholasticism. Austin insisted, however, that these “habits of

Gleichschaltung, the deeply ingrained worship of tidy-looking dichotomies” must

be overcome.17 Within contemporary political thought, these habits persist in

two overlapping forms, one more strictly academic, the other more political.

The purely academic form is exemplified by the popularity of organizing

dichotomies, including individualism versus collectivism, consequentialism

versus deontology, “realism” versus “antirealism,” “cosmopolitanism” versus

nationalism, and postmodernism versus modernism. The more political version

involves the willingness to identify particular theoretical stances, and the theorists

invested in them, with large-scale secular ideologies such as “liberalism,” “liberal

democracy,” “communitarianism,” “socialism,” “libertarianism,” “feminism,” or

“conservatism.” Hence, the contemporary popularity of research projects

16. Building on Hart and Honore’s famous work, Richard Tuck has recently shown how the ordinarylanguage of causation can help dissipate some of the paradoxes of collective action, especially in thecontext of claims about the rationality of voting. This suggests that the resource of ordinary languageneed not be useful only to political theorists, but across political science more broadly. Richard Tuck,Free Riding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 40–43. To some degree, this is increasinglyrecognized in the empirical subfields: see, for example, James Fearon and David Laitin, “OrdinaryLanguage and External Validity: Specifying Concepts in the Study of Ethnicity,” presented at LiCEPmeetings October 20–22, 2000, at the University of Pennsylvania; Lisa Wedeen, “Reflections onEthnographic Work in Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science 13 (January 2010, online):255–72; Frederic Schaffer, Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

17. Austin, Sense, 3.

Colin Bird 113

devoted to developing (say) a “feminist theory of freedom,” a “liberal approach

to minority rights,” a “libertarian theory of international justice,” or a defense of

“market socialism.”

No doubt these categories, and the dichotomies that go along with them,

often serve a useful purpose. They can have heuristic value and may help

anchor academic discussion in the political discourse of the day. But the danger

against which Austin warns in his talk of a “habit” of “worship” is the tendency

for these organizing categories to master our theoretical imagination rather

than accept subordination to it. When this happens, they form a privileged

technical vocabulary around which set-piece academic debates pivot. Reflection

is then increasingly controlled by the (often spurious) assumptions required

to hold these debates in place. Worse, these assumptions become difficult to

challenge because professional success is tied to establishing the “significance”

of one’s work in relation to such scholarly debates. As a result, our thinking

becomes stuck in ruts, colonized by patterns of thought at once questionable

yet hard to dislodge.

Consider, for example, the recent fixation with “foundationalism.” The

literature abounds with confident assertions about the “demise,” the “collapse,”

or the “discrediting” of this purportedly traditional view. But the questions of what

has supposedly suffered this catastrophic breakdown,18 and of why its downfall

has specifically political implications, are rarely answered with any clarity or

coherence. Yet despite this vagueness, even very sophisticated thinkers find

themselves continually tempted to draw sharp adversarial lines around these

categories. Here, for example, is Richard Rorty, trumpeting the anti-scholastic

credentials of his anti-foundationalist position:

Only when the sort of cultural change I optimistically envisage is complete

will we be able to . . .[enjoy] . . . such intricate intellectual displays as the

Summa Contra Gentiles or Naming and Necessity as aesthetic spectacles.

Someday realism may no longer be a “live, momentous and forced option”

for us. If that day comes, we shall think about questions about the

mind-independence of the real as having the quaint charm of questions about

the consubstantiality of the Persons of the Trinity.19

18. Is it moral realism? The “correspondence theory of truth”? “Strong ontology”? The possibility of“objectivity” (meaning what?)? The aspiration to technological mastery? The privileging of a certain sortof reason (“instrumental”? “enlightenment”?)? The methodological presuppositions of modern scientificresearch? Certain conceptions of the “knowing/controlling subject”? Trying to discuss these en bloc is asurefire recipe for groupthink, innuendo, and pointless disputation.

19. Richard Rorty, “A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy,” in Philosophy asCultural Politics: Collected Papers, Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 136–37.


This passage is entirely in tune with the Austinian program I am seeking to retrieve

in this article, as is Rorty’s repeated suggestion that the work of novelists and other

non-academic writings often provide more insightful resources for social criticism

than do the works of scholars. Yet in the same essay Rorty could also write, “As I

see contemporary philosophy, the great divide is between representationalists, the

people who believe that there is an intrinsic nature of non-human reality that

humans have a duty to grasp, and anti-representationalists.”20 This taste for dividing

us from them, prevalent throughout Rorty’s oeuvre, reintroduces scholasticism by

the back door. Is it useful to fixate in this way on the “great divides” that separate

intellectuals from each other? Why view philosophical positions under this tectonic

aspect, always asking which side of the fault line we are on? For all of the freshness

of Rorty’s writings, remarks such as these lead us back to the tired scholastic

presumption that theoretical engagement is best preconceived as a series of

existential decisions about which parties to join (e.g., should I declare myself as a

“utilitarian”? A “perfectionist”? A “rationalist”? A partisan of “recognition” rather

than “redistribution”?).

Of course, no one, not even Austin, would suggest that we need ordinary

language to recognize this. But it is one thing to sense these dangers and another

to find resources to actively resist them when they arise. Here Austinian

techniques can still find an important role; while turning to ordinary language is

not the only way to combat the seductions of intellectual partisanship, it is one

very good way. For a start, it diverts our attention. Setting sail on an open sea

of ordinary language can loosen prejudices (political or intellectual) required to

sustain ongoing disputation among partisans of entrenched positions. But it also

offers something more concrete: a genuine alternative to the debate-centered

paradigm around which so much academic reflection revolves. As Austin

stressed, in contrast to the model of competitive disputation, fieldwork in

ordinary use provides an occasion for uncommitted intellectual collaboration.

That is why he favored seminar-based teamwork as the best vehicle for inquiry

into ordinary language. Such collaboration is rare among political theorists

today, in part because they are encouraged to sink their intellectual capital into

deathless struggles among ever more nicely distinguished adversaries. Pooling

our talents to explore the functioning of our everyday political concepts might

provide more light. It would also encourage theorists to seek the assistance of

those outside the academy in developing ethnographies of everyday political

speech, and in this way combat the esoterism that often haunts the field.

Austin was often surprisingly enterprising in the sources he consulted—a

seminar on aesthetics he conducted examined a handbook of industrial design,

for example—and, in principle, public life is rich in comparable sources (e.g.

20. Rorty, “Pragmatist View,” 134.

Colin Bird 115

rulebooks of parliamentary or legal procedure), ones that are nonetheless largely

neglected in academic political theory.

The claims I have advanced in this section are likely to prompt two objections.

The first asserts that the prospects for agreement about ordinary use in political

contexts must be dim, because the concepts involved are “essentially contest-

able.” This ineradicable feature of political concepts means that ordinary

language fieldwork in this area can never make any definitive progress or

converge; adversarial debate will inevitably reemerge in due course, or so the

objection maintains.

However, the credibility of this contestability thesis may be an effect (rather

than the cause) of the partisan disputation that plagues large sectors of the field.

And is that thesis offered as an a priori truth about all (or some?) relevant

concepts or as an empirical prediction that reflection about ordinary language

in the context of political concepts will usually result in divergence rather than

convergence? If the former, the contestability thesis strikes me as little more than

a prejudice that needs to be defended (and has anyone since Gallie ever actually

offered an argument for it, as opposed to parroting a slogan?). The latter version

is more plausible, and one cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility that, rather

than reducing disagreement, inquiry into ordinary use will only give scholars new

things to disagree about. But since my main point here is that hitherto political

theorists have largely ignored ordinary language, still less collaborated in actually

exploring it, we are in no position at this stage to confirm or disconfirm the

prediction. We must at least try first, and then see where the matter stands.

Moreover, disagreements over language use may themselves be instructive,

not necessarily occasions for empty disputation to resurface. As Austin said,

If our usages disagree, then you use “X” where I use “Y”, or more probably

(and more intriguingly) your conceptual system is different from mine, though

very likely it is at least equally consistent and serviceable: in short, we can find

why we disagree . . . . A disagreement as to what we should say is not to

be shied off, but pounced upon: for the explanation can hardly fail to be

illuminating. . . . a genuinely loose or eccentric talker is a rare specimen to

be prized.21

In embracing ordinary language, then, we need not be choosing agreement

over disagreement. We may instead be choosing to exploit disagreements for

insight, rather than as excuses for pointless controversy.

A second objection concerns my suggestion that political theorists should

de-invest in large-scale ideological categories such as “liberalism,” “feminism,” or



“libertarianism.”22 If these ideological counters are part of the language games

of ordinary political discourse, one might think that an Austinian approach would

give them more credence, not less. This criticism recalls the Marcuse-Gellner

objection mentioned earlier, according to which ordinary language analyses

cannot be sufficiently critical of the ideologies and groupthink ubiquitous in

much public discourse.

This objection, however, neglects the vital distinction between the empirical

prevalence of certain modes of speech at particular times and places and

the range of possibly valid uses of ordinary language. Analysts of ordinary

use are, or should be, primarily concerned with the latter. That is, the point of

such analysis is to determine what could, or should, validly be said under

certain circumstances. But that is very different from slavishly documenting,

and giving some theoretical privilege to, what is actually or even typically said

in some actual society or situation. It is entirely possible, for example, that

empirically prevalent modes of speech represent clear abuses of ordinary

language.23 But to detect such abuses, we must first do the patient fieldwork

in the modalities of ordinary language that Austin recommended. The key word

here is modality: “ordinary use” is not exhausted by empirically observable

speech. It is, rather, constituted by the expressive potentialities latent within

our linguistic resources. What can and should be said is often very different

from what speakers actually do say (riddled with mindless cliche, unclarity,

and dishonest euphemism).24 Consider in this regard the following remark of

George Orwell:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the

indefensible. . . . Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism,

question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are

bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the

cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is

called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent

trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called

22. Of course I don’t mean to imply that “liberal” or “feminist,”etc. arguments are never valid; but ifwe find them powerful, important, revelatory, etc., it should be because they are good arguments, notbecause we have any independent allegiance to the ideological traditions that happened to have hitupon them.

23. As in the widespread tendency among journalists to use the word “refute” when they mean“deny,” for example, “President Bush refuted allegations that he lied about the war with Iraq . . . .”

24. This is why Austinian fieldwork cannot be pigeonholed as purely “empirical” or purely“normative” (a distinction that anyway exemplifies just the sort of scholasticism Austin abhorred). Whenthe analyst of ordinary language claims that speakers “would not say . . . X,” she is not making a simpleempirical prediction, but rather a judgment about what it would be appropriate/intelligible for a speakerin certain empirically specifiable circumstances to say/do in response. Here, empirical and normativeconsiderations are woven inextricably together.

Colin Bird 117

transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for

years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in

Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such

phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental

pictures of them.25

Here, Orwell reminds us that we do not need complex, esoteric, technical

language to expose the delusions, falsifications, and complacencies so common

in actual political discourse; natural language is usually quite sufficient. Indeed,

Orwell suggests that the proliferation of bureaucratic, pseudo-scientific, technical

jargon (“WMD,” “regime-change,” “de-baathification,” “islamo-fascism”) is far

more likely to be implicated in, rather than a corrective to, the mendacities

we want to expose. Orwell’s style of social criticism is thus quite compatible with,

and indeed likely to be furthered by, an Austinian approach.

The objections of Marcuse and Gellner that attending to ordinary language is

necessarily reactionary and ideological are therefore unfair. They and other

critics are misled by what they see as the unfortunate Burkean resonance of

Austin’s remark that

Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found

worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the

lifetimes of many generations: these are surely likely to be more numerous,

more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of survival of the fittest,

and more subtle . . . than any that you or I are likely to think up in our

armchairs of an afternoon.26

The parallel with Burke is at once tempting, yet deeply misleading. When

Burke talked this way, he was discussing traditions, and especially the various

unreflective habits and expectations that fix in place specific and putatively

valuable social practices. But language, at least as Austin and Orwell conceived it,

is no “tradition” or particular social practice. Rather, it is a power whose purposes

are as diverse as human activity itself. These may include social criticism and

the ruthless interrogation of established practices. The Austinian claim is simply

that our power to understand the world, to record and grasp features of our

ethical consciousness, and to articulate complaints, will be weakened to the

extent that we ignore the nuances of ordinary use. To associate this stance, as

Marcuse did, with an “abhorrence” of “transgression” is a complete distortion.27

The furor caused by the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover reminds us that our

25. George Orwell, A Collection of Essays (London: Mariner, 1970), 166–67.26. Austin, “A Plea,” 182.27. Marcuse, One-Dimensional, 173.


most ordinary words, not extraordinary ones, often have the most explosive

transgressive power. We rarely blaspheme in technical terms.

The Scholasticism of Constructivism

Especially since Rawls, arguments in political theory have frequently

presented themselves as operating on so-called moral “intuitions” or “considered

convictions.” A good political theory, on this account, will draw out the

determinate implications of these widely shared ethical intuitions, and at the

same time bring an overarching coherence to the whole field of common

intuitions from which they are drawn.28 The most distinctive feature of this

“constructivist” approach to political theorizing is the direction in which it

argues, moving (by a process of constructive articulation) from putatively

primitive and unsystematic everyday intuitions to (supposedly) more philo-

sophically self-aware and integrated theoretical structures. Rawls’s work exemp-

lifies this sort of constructivism in its most austere form, but a similar approach

can also be discerned in the work of Ronald Dworkin and even in the seemingly

different approach taken by Michael Walzer. As with Rawls and Dworkin, Walzer

sees himself as teasing out the implications of certain “shared understandings”

to which he assumes his readers are already committed. As he has it, the

political philosopher should accept those understandings as they stand and

then offer propitious constructive “interpretations” to disclose their specific

implications.

But as Rawls acknowledged, this approach makes sense only if the intuitions

fed into the resulting theories are first certified as “considered convictions” rather

than just any unreflective ethical judgments that agents might report, or that

happen to be widely shared in particular societies at particular historical

junctures. However, Rawls did not provide a systematic account of how to

distinguish intuitions that are appropriately “considered” from those that are “ill-

considered” or otherwise unacceptably unreflective. He hinted, correctly in my

view, that the sort of analysis required to accredit certain intuitions as

“considered judgments” would probably be Socratic in form.29 But he never

pursued such an analysis in a sustained way.

Walzer, in contrast, seems actively suspicious of the effort to inquire into the

credentials of these supposed “shared understandings.” This may be because he

assumes that doing so would indulge what he dubs in Interpretation and Social

Criticism the “path of discovery,” the idea that there is some independent order of

28. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 15–19,40–46; John Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 29–32, 41–42.

29. Rawls, Theory, 507; on the link between ordinary language philosophy and Socratic analysis, seeOswald Hanfling, Philosophy and Ordinary Language (London: Routledge, 2001), 15–25.

Colin Bird 119

moral data standing behind language and culture.30 But this trades on a false

ultimatum: either some coherently articulable local consensus or some proble-

matic form of realism about ethics.

The resource of ordinary language provides a way out of this paralyzing

dichotomy. The real choice is not between moral realism and approaches that

remain locked within, and credulously ratify, some local set of shared

understandings or moral intuitions. Rather, it is between relatively vague,

inchoate, and prematurely charitable characterizations of prevailing intuitions

and cultural norms and more precise articulations of the ordinary practical

consciousness from which they are cobbled together. Although it does not get us

to some realm of independent moral “truth,” attention to the ways we use certain

words and concepts in different normative situations allows us to gain critical

distance from the conventional self-presentation of familiar moral beliefs beyond

which Walzer, Rawls, and many others are reluctant to look. (Consider, “We all

believe in equality today.” Who is this “we” and when, in what concrete situations,

does the language of equality actually make sense?)31

The norms governing, and reflected in, language use need not have any

distinctively cultural locus. They may be common to many cultures, perhaps

reflecting psychological propensities that cut across cultural difference. Nor do

they necessarily fall naturally into integrated structures called “moralities” or

“shared understandings.” They may be fractured and internally contradictory in a

way that efforts to theorize them as wholes only conceal. If this is correct, ordinary

language analysis provides a way to pierce the veil of uncertainty that surrounds

appeals to “intuition” and “shared understandings,” and to map their inner geo-

graphy more sharply. It allows us to do so, moreover, from a point of view that is not

itself culturally partial or at any rate not obviously so. Instead of moving forward

from an initial characterization of certain germane “moral intuitions” (selected on

some usually unexplained basis), the analyst of ordinary use moves in the opposite

direction, to yield a more discriminating appreciation of what stands behind the

intuitions and “shared understandings” on which political theorists like to build.

Some will counter that we need to devise theories precisely because ordinary

use is too vague and unrefined. They will point to the incredible variation in

30. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).31. While I am sympathetic to G. A. Cohen’s critique of Rawlsian constructivism, I see no reason to

think that the resulting debate about whether normative principles should be “fact-dependent” or “fact-independent” is likely to be a helpful one. See G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2008); and David Miller, “Political Philosophy for Earthlings,” in Political Theory:Methods and Approaches, ed. Marc Stears and David Leopold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).The authentically Austinian response, I think, is to say that without clarification of how (and in whichcontexts) we would ordinarily speak of agents “acting on principle,” of “being men or women ofprinciple,” of “standing on principle,” of “having strong principles,” or of “adopting a principle,” on thebasis of certain personal experiences, this debate about “principles” is sterile.


the deployment of everyday concepts across historical contexts and natural

languages, and insist that without the conceptual refinement in which

professional philosophers specialize, lay use is simply too crude and unruly to

supply determinate guidance about how public institutions should be organized.

This argument implicitly compares analytical theorization to a process of

manufacture in which we begin with certain crude, impure, “raw” materials—

grapes, minerals, larval secretions, everyday concepts of justice—and work them

into something more refined (fine wine, multifaceted gems, silk scarves, elaborate

conceptions of justice). I see no reason to accept this analogy, however. Is variation

across epochs and tongues necessarily a sign of crudeness or disarray? We cannot

simply assume this in advance: uses vary under different historical conditions (or

in other languages) because they answer in a particular compelling way to the

unique needs of diverse situations. What at first looks like unruliness may turn out

on closer inspection to reflect sensitivity to easily overlooked but pertinent

differences in context. For all we know, the development of different linguistic

expressions for use under different circumstances is like speciation under natural

selection, representing subtle adaptive advantage rather than any sort of crudeness.

Austin’s writings remain fresh because they take that possibility seriously, and

as a result often reveal ordinary use to be far more nuanced than the plodding

abstractions of academicians. But until political theorists stop ignoring Austin’s

pleas for “fieldwork” of this kind, they are in no position to assert with any

confidence that ordinary use in relevant areas is chaotic or unsophisticated.

Variation in linguistic use is as likely a sign that ordinary language is a source of

theoretical subtlety in its own right, than as it is a symptom of some sort of

coarseness that needs to be boiled away.

Coercion and Disrespect

To illustrate how Austinian analysis might be fruitfully applied in political

theory, I conclude with a brief case study. Consider the claim that

Coercion . . . reduces the will of one person to the will of another; [it violates]

autonomy not simply in virtue of that fact, but because of the symbolic gesture

this fact represents. In subjecting the will of one otherwise autonomous

agent to the will of another, coercion demonstrates an attitude of disrespect,

of infantilization of a sort inconsistent with respect for human agents as

autonomous, self-creating creatures.32

32. Michael Blake, “Distributive Justice, State Coercion and Autonomy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs30 (2001): 257–96.

Colin Bird 121

On the strength of such claims, many accept a global presumption against

coercion and therefore assert that the question of “political legitimacy” always

arises in the same basic form: under what conditions might the presumptive

illegitimacy of state coercion be defeated? On this now very familiar “liberal”

view, which likes to claim a Kantian (and sometimes Lockean) inspiration, efforts

to coerce people must overcome this burden of proof and show themselves to be

consistent with an underlying principle of respect for persons. The elaborate

thought-experiments devised in the recent contractualist tradition from Rawls

onward seek to determine what forms of coercion might satisfy this desideratum.

The orthodoxy that “coercion demonstrates an attitude of disrespect” thus does

double duty in this approach. On the one hand, it characterizes a generically

objectionable feature of coercion. On the other, it allocates the burden of proof

that assertions of coercive control over the individual must meet: to be legitimate

they must avoid “disrespect for persons.”

Little of the philosophical disagreement that has developed in the wake of

Rawls’s book has cast doubt on this underlying assumption about the significance

of the Kantian principle of “respect for persons.” The main controversy has rather

concerned which kinds of coercive action that principle allows. Redistributive

taxation (for purposes other than maintaining basic guarantees against force,

fraud, and theft) has proven particularly contentious in this regard. Some follow

Rawls in seeing it as required by “respect for persons.” Others counter that it is

always profoundly disrespectful for the state to presume to decide for individuals

how their earned income should be spent.

Since Rawls, this disagreement has been played out in large-scale confronta-

tions between artificially constructed conceptions like “justice as fairness” and

“the libertarian entitlement theory.” But once underway, discussion conducted

at this level may lead us to overlook the real nub of the disagreements: in the end,

they hinge on the credibility of various metaphors, constructed from words in

ordinary use, inviting us to view redistributive taxation (and other controversial

public practices) in a favorable or unfavorable light. But consider again the

metaphors operative in Blake’s remark above: “disrespect,” “infantilization,”

personal independence, and subjection. These are not the property of any

academic tradition or theoretical construct, but are drawn from the everyday,

face-to-face discourse of complaint and resentment (the realm of Strawson’s

“reactive attitudes”). That discourse is ripe for Austinian fieldwork.

I cannot here conduct such fieldwork systematically. I confine myself to four

points that I hope illustrate where Austinian techniques might be constructively

pursued in this area and the directions in which they point.

(When) (and what) does coercion disrespect? While agents frequently

complain of disrespect in everyday life, the ways in which they do so do little

to substantiate the liberal contractualist postulate of a close link between


coercion, disrespect, and wrongdoing. Such complaints often arise in contexts

that have nothing to do either with coercion or autonomy. When my son

contemptuously ignores my request to tidy his room, my students check their

email during my lectures, or my religion is openly mocked by comedians or

cartoonists, I may intelligibly complain of disrespect. But these cases plainly

involve no coercion and do not imperil my autonomy in any other way. Nor need

disrespect be a form of wrongdoing. Ordinary use certainly suggests that

disrespect is at least always unwelcome to its target, but that does not show that it

necessarily involves wrongdoing. Punishment is unwelcome to its victim, and

may be intended (and rightly experienced) as disrespect, but it does not follow

that it is wrongly inflicted.

Still, even if much disrespect does not involve coercion, it might remain true

that all coercion involves disrespect. But surely not always in the same way.

Consider the case of redistributive taxation we mentioned earlier: in what ways

might this be “disrespectful” of taxpayers? Blake mentions several different

possible dimensions of “disrespect”: the subjection of one will to another;

treating adults like children; failing to take autonomous “self-creation” seriously.

To Blake’s list we might add several others also familiar from ordinary life—

humiliation, dishonor, insult and offense, and ridicule. I find it difficult to imagine

circumstances in which complaints about redistributive taxation couched in any

of these terms would ordinarily carry much conviction: should citizens who

believe their tax rate is too high or who disapprove of the uses to which their

taxes are put protest that they are thereby “treated like children,” “mocked,”

“humiliated,” “offended,” “dominated,” “not recognized” as “self-creators,” or

“dishonored”? The fact that these metaphors fail in (or at least stretch) ordinary

use swings the onus back onto those who follow Nozick in seeing an analogy

between taxation and “forced labor,” for those metaphors fare far better in

standard cases of forced labor. Here, Austinian techniques operate like a crowbar

prising Nozick’s famous analogy apart.

One might query the relevance of these points by denying that the force of

Nozick’s analogy derives in any important way from claims about disrespect for

persons. Perhaps, for example, Nozick’s objection to both forced labor and

redistributive taxation is grounded, not on any experiences of personal

disrespect, but on claims about the importance of certain inviolable rights. In

that case, notions of “respect for persons” do no important work in Nozick’s

analogy, and redistributive taxation (like forced labor) is objectionable because,

and only because, it violates a fundamental right.33 However, stripped of any

33. One natural reading of the libertarian objection to redistributive taxation is that it involves a formof “theft.” I agree that there is something to this charge; but notice that it does little to support Nozick’s“forced labor” analogy, for surely we shouldn’t say that the essential problem with forced labor is that itinvolves theft.

Colin Bird 123

connection with notions of personal respect and disrespect, a bare appeal to

fundamental rights along these lines is unsatisfying. Sensing that Nozick’s

notoriously incomplete defense of Lockean rights begs the question against

redistributive taxation, many readers persist with Nozick’s argument only because

they suspect it might capture our intuitions about respecting persons better than

do the alternatives. But I have suggested that ordinary use puts pressure on the

libertarian claim at just this critical point.

To be sure, in ordinary language “rights” are themselves objects of “respect,”

as are the “wishes” they protect. But we cannot slide automatically from the

useful shorthand that agents’ legitimate rights and wishes ought to be “respected”

to definitive judgments about which categories of wishes and entitlements must

be upheld if we are to avoid seriously disrespecting people, and that is the crucial

issue that needs attention. To pose the question in Kantian terms, when does

coercion treat agents only as means (and therefore disrespect persons), and

when does it at the same time treat them as ends-in-themselves (and hence

respect them)? I have contended that ordinary use casts doubt on the libertarian

claim that redistributive taxation belongs in the former category. If so, this in turn

defuses the criticism we mentioned at the start that consideration of ordinary use

has an exclusively therapeutic role and cannot be used to defend substantive

normative judgments.

Not all Kantians, of course, accept the libertarian view of redistributive taxation.

They may argue, following Rawls, that properly designed contractualist tests can

establish, with some specificity, when redistributive taxation is compatible with the

Kantian imperative never to treat others as means only (and when not). Arguments

along these lines by now have a very honorable pedigree, and may well justify

the specific conclusions Rawls and others have defended. Yet one can still ask:

when it comes to carefully discriminating between “respectful” and “disrespectful”

coercion, can contractualist thought-experiments beat ordinary language? I would

bet against this. Even when consideration of ordinary use supports the same

conclusions as those reached by more elaborate contractualist means, it may do so

with greater efficiency and sophistication. At the same time, it has the additional

advantage of accessing many more relevant intuitions about “respect” and

“disrespect” than the inevitably more limited set of uses on which any particular

contractualist framework must concentrate.

Contribution and disrespect. David Schmidtz—a philosopher whose writings

are more than usually attentive to the subtleties of natural language—has recently

linked redistributive taxation and disrespect in an interesting way, one that

corresponds to some widely held (though controversial) attitudes in capitalist

societies. In a liberal economy, he claims, people participate in the “system of

production” “because,” in protecting contributors’ title to the personal profits

they yield, that system recognizes their contributions as “their own.” Although he


acknowledges the possibility that “there is a form of respect that we can have for

people even while giving them no credit for the effort and talent they bring,” he

denies that this is the sort of “respect” that “brings producers to the table . . ., that

makes communities work.” This leads him to object to those who “talk as if justice

is about how to divide what people contribute, rather than how to respect what

people contribute.”34

Schmidtz seems to suggest the gratitude and respect that “brings producers to

the table” requires that we at least restrain the urge to redistribute (“divide”) the

rewards they reap. This line of argument raises many questions, and consideration

of pertinent ordinary language allows us to pose them in a particular sharp way.

Schmidtz assumes that income represents contribution such that redistributing

someone’s earnings through taxation can amount to “dividing” their “contribution,”

and hence signaling a kind of disrespect. But would (should) agents ordinarily

equate income and contribution in this way? Should you think of your salary as

a contribution? (Is a surgeon’s contribution to society in saving your life equivalent

to or represented by the market price of his services? Should we call income tax

a “tax on our economic contributions”?) Does it make sense to speak, with

Schmidtz, of agents “owning” their contributions (as opposed to the income they

may command)? If so, could it still count as a genuine “contribution”?

Austinian inquiry into these questions would point us in two worthwhile

directions. On the one hand, it forces us to consider how we actually (should)

think about contribution in the context of economic cooperation, an issue that

theorists of distributive justice have generally neglected. On the other hand,

suppose that Austinian techniques substantiate that Schmidtz’s way of thinking

about contribution, respect, and economic reward abuses the ordinary concepts

involved. This would at least put us on the road to establishing that the prevalent

attitudes about redistributive taxation as “disrespect” that Schmidtz’s argument

reflects represent a certain sort of ideological illusion. I am not here claiming to

have substantiated this charge. The point is simply that, in principle, Austinian

techniques might help substantiate it: as Orwell reminds us, abuse of words is a

common symptom of ideological illusion. But to accept that fieldwork in ordinary

use could play this role is to allow that it can accomplish much more than critics

like Marcuse and Gellner have supposed.

“Symbolic Gestures.” Implicit in Blake’s remark is a contrast between coercion

that directly accomplishes a “reduction” of someone’s will and coercion that

communicates subordination “symbolically” or by “gesture.”35 Even if both

are objectionable, they are so presumably in different ways and degrees.

34. David Schmidtz, Elements of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 151–52, 154.35. Note that “symbols” are distinct from “gestures”: “giving someone the finger” is not a “symbol”

(though the finger involved may be), and the Swastika is not a “gesture.”

Colin Bird 125

But since both of these possibilities rest in some sense on metaphors of

interpersonal status, it is unclear how one should distinguish symbolic from non-

symbolic treatment in this context, and to what effect for our judgments about

publicly accountable wrongdoing (if redistributive taxation is objectionable can

it be because we would call it an inappropriate “gesture” of some sort?). In one of

her last papers, Jean Hampton suggested that Paul Grice’s36 theory of meaning

can be used to explicate the symbolic significance of actions that are

“demeaning” or “diminishing.”37 Hampton’s appropriation of Grice opens a

possibility that is in some ways the converse of the one for which Austin is

most famous, yet surely congenial to an Austinian outlook: just as there are

“speech-acts,” there can be “act-speech,” and actions we interpret as demeaning,

diminishing, or degrading are clear examples. Such actions convey messages

about personal standing, worth, and inclusion, which is one reason why they

can bother us so deeply. The ordinary metaphors we mobilize to mark

treatment as debasing in these ways are virtually constitutive of the micropolitics

of abuse to which theoretical arguments about “disrespect for persons”

implicitly appeal. Our understanding of those arguments can only gain from

Austinian investigation into how these metaphors actually function in everyday

language.38

Dignity as a “Trouser Concept.” Under the influence of Kantian doctrine,

many political theorists attribute the alleged presumption against coercion in

general, and redistributive taxation in particular, to an underlying imperative

of “respect for dignity.” However, the concept of “dignity” has no simple

accepted meaning. While it has plenty of ordinary uses that deserve

scrutiny,39 it is implausible to suppose that agents’ complaints about others’

disrespect can be simply read off some settled schedule of dignitary entitlements.

Rather, the content of what we ordinarily demand by way of “respect for our

dignity” is given by what we independently interpret as disrespect, humiliation,

36. Grice was of course a student of Austin; despite his later doubts about ordinary languagephilosophy, Grice never repudiated Austinian techniques entirely.

37. Jean Hampton, “Righting Wrongs: The Goal of Restribution,” in The Intrinsic Worth of Persons,ed. Daniel Farnham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 124–34.

38. There is a large literature in sociology and adjacent disciplines, much of it inspired by Goffman(whose interest in everyday interaction was certainly Austinian in spirit, if not directly influenced byAustin), that could aid in this effort. Particularly suggestive are: Erving Goffman, Relations in Public:Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Transaction, 2010); Philippe Bourgeois, In Search of Respect:Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Randall Collins, Violence(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); James Gilligan, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and itsCauses (New York: G. P. Putnams & Sons, 1996).

39. Consider the way in which diplomats and other official representatives are “dignitaries”; or aman’s complaint about the “indignity” of a prostate examination; or the way in which a crime ormisdemeanor can be (as a speeding ticket I once received put it) “an offence against the peace anddignity” of a municipality.


insult, ridicule, contempt, patronization, dismissiveness, “giving the lie,” exclu-

sion, etc. On this hypothesis “dignity” turns out to be what Austin called (with

apologies for the sexist terminology) a “trouser concept,” a notion that he

elaborated most clearly in his discussion of the ordinary use of the word “real.”

Austin argued that philosophers are misled by syntax into believing that there

must be some set of positive attributes characteristic of all those entities that

possess “reality.” But he believed that this erroneous view, typical of scholastic

modes of reflection, can be dissipated by noticing that what does the really

important work in the different ordinary uses of the word “real” are the various

things that contrast with the “real” in varying contexts—“counterfeit,” “toy,”

“dummy,” “picture,” “artificial,” “illusory,” and others.40

It seems plausible to speculate that this is also true of dignity. “Dignity” covers

a large field of experience and evaluative commitment. To apprehend its

(possible) use, we have to see how contrasting concepts (diverse forms of

indignity—belittlement, ridicule, indecent exposure, humiliation, insult, offence,

etc.) cast light and shadow across that field and reveal its topography. Without

this detail illuminated, however, the bare concept of dignity is an extremely

unforthcoming one, as anyone who has tried to define it can attest. To really

understand how the landscape of human dignity is internally structured, why we

feel at home in it, and how it is vulnerable to abuse, one needs a closer scale

map. Doubtless the stylized categories of Kantian ethics are often a rough and

ready guide. But, ultimately, they are no substitute for a more systematic

exploration of (and may artificially simplify) the ordinary use of expressions

involving disrespect, humiliation, rejection, insult, mockery, belittlement,

personal defeat, and violation. As Austin said, “[T]oo evidently there is gold in

them thar hills”;41 I suggest that it is time for political theorists to devote more

energy to seeking it, in this and other areas.

Colin Bird is Associate Professor of Politics and Director of the Program in

Political Philosophy, Policy and Law at the University of Virginia. He is the author

of two books, The Myth of Liberal Individualism (Cambridge 1999), and An

Introduction to Political Philosophy (Cambridge 2006). He can be reached at

[email protected].

40. Austin, Sense, 70–72.41. Austin, “A Plea,” 181.

Colin Bird 127

Bird, Political Theory and Ordinary Language

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