‘What’s the Problem?’: Political Theory, Rhetoric and Problem‐Setting

Abstract

This essay argues that political theorists interested in analysing, understanding or evaluating political problems in the ‘real world’ should consider the ways in which such problems are specified through a rhetorical process of definition. It discusses, in general terms, the relationship of rhetoric to political theory and examines in some detail the way in which different writers, developing applications of political theory to Northern Ireland, employ literary and figurative techniques in specifying the problem they propose to ‘resolve’. I argue that much of the dispute between such writers turns on different claims about the ‘facts’ and thus on different ways of conceiving the ‘problem’. In conclusion the essay calls for closer attention to the rhetoric of problem‐setting.

Key Words:

• Northern Ireland
• rhetoric
• political theory
• facts

Notes

1. A lot could be said about the general rhetoric of political theory which is often heavily dependent on imaginative constructions: fictions of various kinds such as states of nature or original positions; invented characters like lawgivers or the ever‐more ubiquitous ‘any reasonable person’ (the post‐Rawls version of what British law calls ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’). There is not space here to investigate these or other tropes of political thought, nor for investigation of the ‘routine’ rhetoric of academic writing which leans heavily on generic conventions in order to establish authority and ‘ethos’. That might include, for example, the way introductions (such as this one) demarcate an area of analysis, protect themselves by loudly pointing to what they will not address, and, after a more or less flat descriptive introduction, rapidly ‘review’ the relevant literature in order to establish scholarly credibility and enable justification through citations from ‘Authorities’. All this has been examined under the rubric ‘rhetoric of inquiry’ (see Nelson et al. 1991; for an indication of my misgivings see Finlayson 2004).

2. This was not the first appearance of Schmitt in political philosophical work on NI. Readers are eagerly referred to Aughey (1997) and, somewhat less eagerly, to the response found at Finlayson (1998).

3. On the logical difficulty of really regarding these aspirations as both, simultaneously, legitimate see the argument of English (1994).

4. For a worthwhile consideration of the extent to which a political theory can deal with feelings of exclusion as opposed to actual exclusion see Kymlicka (1990: 275–282).