the british journal of politics _ international relations volume 11 issue 3 2009 [doi...

8/10/2019 The British Journal of Politics _ International Relations Volume 11 Issue 3 2009 [Doi 10.1111_j.1467-856x.2009.003

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the techniques of the theorist in analysing that body of discourse; principally,

through the reconstruction and appraisal of a relevant set of arguments and

terminology.

The intention of this article, therefore, is to address itself exactly to that task. It

proceeds, however, by limiting the field of interest to a more manageable size, bydemarcating the kinds of arguments and terminology it is concerned with. In this

sense, it takes its bearings from a predicament mapped out suggestively by Mark

Lilla in an influential essay originally published in the New York Review of Books in

2002. In that essay Lilla himself began from President Bushs axis of evil formu-

lation, which he deemed hollow.2 But Lilla agreed that what the 2001 terrorist

attacks had decisively made clear was the poverty of the political language that was

available to make sense of the international environmentin particular, the

absence of a settled and plausible set of categories through which to calibrate

degrees of difference in various illiberal and/or non-democratic states and threats.

This was an environment constituted, in Lillas turn of phrase, by the geography ofa new age of tyrannya hotchpotch of political forms that harm[ed] their own

people and threaten[ed] their neighbours in very different ways. Yet for this

geography, Lilla opined, we simply lacked geographers (Lilla 2005 [2002], 244,

249).

On this logic, the need to engineer a particular type of political vocabulary was in

one sense a strategic need. But Lillas more interesting point, was that a geopolitical,

strategic task is closely related to a conceptual task and, moreover, a rhetorical one:

How can we find a kind of public rhetoric that connects well with an informed

exercise in political thinking? How might we identify and construct a language in

which to discuss and evaluate changing political realities and which is at the same

time capable of resonating with a broad audience? Lillas own proposal was that this

might be found by revisiting the classical treatment of the problem of tyranny, a

proposal that might be deemed problematic for a number of reasons.3 Yet, in

retrospect, it is in light of his broader pleathat the problem of nomenclature be

taken seriously (Lilla 2005 [2002], 244)that, so this article argues, the kind of

phraseology of concern here is helpfully seen; in particular, it would seem to offer

a basis upon which the relevant set of arguments and terminology might begin to

be revisited.

The Failure of Political Argument

In hindsight, the challenge laid down by Lilla was taken up with vigour: it was met

by a whole succession of suggested idioms and terms. But this challenge was not

met with success. Indeed, on the kind of verdict since offered by Stephen Holmes,

the response to September 11th was a reckless one. In the face of a provocation

that, on Holmes pregnant metaphor, resembled the proverbial bull in front of the

matadors cape, the reaction was a muddled one (Holmes 2007, 2). More to the

point, it was muddled for the reason that it was a response comprising a diversity

of prisms and paradigmsall of which together translated the event of September11th and determined the nature of the response (Holmes 2007, 13). Accordingly,if

there was a failure of strategy it was informed at least partly by a failure of

480 RI C H A RD S H O RT EN

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prominentlyalbeit sometimes haphazardly, and frequently interchangeably

upon the response to terror: the languages of anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism.

Both were articulated in the public realmin various forms, in the guise of

particular conceptual innovations and adaptive patterns of argument; both vied for

public attention and accreditation; and both sought to gain political gravity in virtueof being made to speak to changing political circumstances. Yet the attempt, in each

of these ways, to reconfigure these languages successfully is something that has

fallen flat. As I will seek both to argue and to generalise from, below, this has to do

with the failure to meet certain, minimal conditions that would support the

successful consumption of political language. But before these conditions can begin

to be specified, it is prudent to tease out the various properties of the kind of

political language under consideration. Partly, a set of comments would seem in

order by way of anticipating objections that might be made to staking out this level

of analysis as a legitimate area of inquiry, particularly from the viewpoint of political

theory. But they are also intended to set out some guiding posts for the analysis

which is to follow.

The salient properties of such political language are four-fold. The first property

relates to the valid claim that it might be thought to have to being treated as sincere

expression. A second property connects with the idea of memory. Its third and forth

properties refer to its designated audience and to the particular kinds of conceptual

vocabularies it is embedded in, respectively. A brief note follows thereafter, to

clarify exactly the kind of approach to the study of political discourse being argued

for here.

Some Properties of Post-September 11thPolitical Language

First, a familiar concern expressed in regard to the study of political language, in the

form that it is articulated in the public realm, is that it can be only an unreliable

support to explanation. This is expressed as a concern for two reasons. One is that

it can be obtuse and clumsy. Another queries its sincerity; on that view, it is treated

as a retrospective rationalisation of interest or, in stronger form, as a mask screening

hidden agendas (e.g. Fairclough 2000). Yet, in fact, accepting both of these claims

might be said to detract far less from the potential explanatory value of political

language than is often imagined. In one sense, the deployment of unwieldy termi-

nology does not preclude the possibility that it arises out of a genuine conviction or

state of mind. To that extent, it is still an indicator of intention (even if a rather

opaque one) inasmuch as it offers a window on to broader or deeper patterns of

political thinking. By the same token, to reject professed motives while accepting

ascribed motivesin the particular form of imputed hidden agendaswould seem

counter-intuitive: there is little reason, prima facie at least, why they should not

share in an equal distance from actualmotives.6 In another regard, even conceding

that the deployment of particular terminology might follow from careful, if not

mischievous, selection, this possibility is revealing in itself and merits close atten-

tion. In that sense, sincerity can be treated as an issue of only second-orderimportance from the point of view of an external assessment of its attempt to make

a discursive impact (Freeden 2006); when, that is, the interest in a statement is



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located in its uptake (Austin 1975 [1962], 121).7 Moreover, that statements are

deliberately tailored to evoke certain responses in particular audiences is a rather

probable feature of political language when, as here, it is vying for public validation.

Second, there is a curious sense, relevant in the present context, in which political

language, both in its production and consumption, might be at once both sincere

and rather unintentional. In the case of the language called forth by September

11th, this process of competing for attention is in one important respect a contes-

tation over memory. There is a general sense in which contemporary issues are

refracted through the lenses of the 1930s and the Second World War (Lebow et al.

2006, 3).8 But the recourse to a kind of stockpile of memories imparted by those

earlier experiences is a particular feature of post-September 11th discourse, with

particularly emotive registers of meaning. Once more, there is every possibility that

the appeal to this set of reference points is prompted by instrumental calculations

that they are invoked to sell or justify policy options reached on some other

rationale. Yet this ought not to preclude the prospect that sincere understandings ofthe past provide an important frame of reference for judging the meaning of present

eventsor, more pertinently, that their presentation is treatedas sincereby a public

to whom such language is directed.

This suggests a third property of the relevant kind of political language, which

relates to its audience and arises in view of the fact that it can only, after all, gain

political gravity when its finds a broader resonance. This is the demand that it

become articulatedin a more general set of public discourses that support decision-

making in foreign affairs. These public discourses might be pictured as bringing

together different discursive settings: the arenas of policy formation, certain kindsof academic scholarship and more day-to-day forms of conversation expressing

ideas, attitudes and feelings. Hence in studying them the theorist is not dealing with

idiosyncratic, singular kinds of expression but rather accessing the product of a

shared resource, one that might be investigated across diverse locations (Finlayson

and Martin 2008, 449):9 general ideas, policy prescriptions, newspaper editorials

and the general effusions of the commentariat, as well as other forms of political

grandstanding.10

A final property concerns the more particular form and structure of political

language when, specifically, it is being appropriated in the shape of a normative

resource. The problematic that Lilla and Holmes set out calls for the development of

a conceptual vocabulary capable of making sense of a new constellation of political

phenomena. A vocabulary, in that sense, might be taken to be roughly synonymous

with what is ordinarily meant by an ideology, a cluster of ideas organised with

action-informing potential. It likewise implies a systematic arrangement of ideas

thatwhile compact and coherent enough to support specific political commit-

ments and preferencesis sufficiently flexible to accommodate shifting meanings

and applications. But a vocabulary nevertheless denotes a thinner cluster of ideas

than does an ideology. (It is quite conceivable in principle, for instance, that either

liberalism or Marxism play host to anti-fascism or anti-totalitarianism as political

languages subsumed within them.) On closer inspection, what is even more rec-ognisably a feature of the kinds of vocabularies under consideration here is that

they are organised around a single concept. More accurately still, they are

T H E F A I L U RE O F P O L I T I C A L A RG U M EN T 483


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structured around a single kind of concept: namely, the regime-type.11 Generic

terms of this sort (from democracy right the way through to dictatorship) form a

core of rather basic political concepts when considered alongside a set of more

abstract political terms (Richter 1986, 613614; Koselleck 1996, 64)terms which

are abstract because they feature far less ubiquitously in ordinary speech andcommunication; which include, among others, power, representation and

equality; and which are notoriously subject to essential contestability (see Gallie

1956). However, this is not to say that regime-type concepts are any less contest-

able. Indeed, this turns out to be an important point, one comprising aspects that

are logical, historical and political in turn. In principle, regime-type concepts have

a range of associations and applications that are logically plausible. This (potential)

range of denotations is trimmed down somewhat by the fact that they have

historically cumulative stores of meaning that are the product of successive contexts

of usage.12 But it is only in view of these two aspects together that languages like

anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism are not fixed but rather available for appro-

priation in changing political circumstances: it is in light of their characteristic trait

that regime-type concepts are only implausibly pictured in abstraction from both

historically prior and logically plausible contexts that the scope for political action

is opened up, and constrained, at one and the same time.

In sum, languages that comprise regime-type concepts are capable of serving as

rich, normative resources because regime-type concepts are always more than

descriptive of political phenomena: they are constructions that carry both moral

content and normative force. Indeed, they regularly are deployed in those public

arenas in which political argument is conductedand rarely purely in pursuit of

disinterested analysis. More typically, when they are embedded in oppositionallanguages, as is acutely the case of political language after September 11th, bad

regime-types are put to work with a set of more practical purposes in view (Richter

2005, 226)the mobilisation of opposition to undesirable political institutions,

practices and actions, in which they serve simultaneously to identify and delegiti-

mate those institutions, practices and actions. In order to do so successfully,

however, the constraints are such that the meeting of minimal conditions is the

requirement. For now it can be expected that these conditions have something to

do with bridging the gap between the received meanings of terms and their

projected designations.

It is worth relating this account of what is specific to post-September 11th language

to a more general standpoint for the study of discourse. In fields of the study of

politics outside political theory there has been much debate about the relation

between political belief and effect, and about the methods befitting its investigation

(see Bevir et al. 2004). Viewed in this light, the approach being argued for here

bears similarities to interpretivist, social constructivist and rhetorical forms of

political analysis (see, respectively, Bevir and Rhodes 2003; Hay 2002; Finlayson

2004 and 2007); indeed, an affinity is likely when, as here, analytical attention is

being paid both to the form and content of political speech and communication, and

to the potentially causal role of ideas in mobilising support. Such forms of analysis,

usually sharing also in the notion that political realities can have noneutraldescrip-tion, have rightly brought into view that causal role; and they have often sought to

negotiate careful positions between unsatisfactory realist and idealist polarities,



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trying to clarify in which ways that role is circumscribed, even while independent

and causal.

Necessarily, clarification here is an exercise fraught with uncertainty, because

relationships between beliefs and wider actions are, though appropriately acknowl-

edged, difficult to measure. Nonetheless, a criticism is to be made of this latestrenewal of the linguistic turn in the social sciences. By and large, such approaches

have been resistant to looking at ideas close up; they have disregarded the internal

detail of ideas, construing them instead as monolithic. That they typically work with

the ideational as a unit of analysis belies an unclear sense of what ideas-in-politics

are (Finlayson 2004, 530). It is in this connection that, from within the method-

ologies of political thought, the form of analysis associated with conceptual history

is a more promising mode of inquiry, particularly so in the case of post-September

11th language (see Richter 1986; Koselleck 2002; Palonen 2006). In giving ideas

their own histories, conceptual history is committed to something akin to the

separation of ideas from material conditions enacted within interpretivism andsocial constructivism; it treats ideas on their own terms, locating them as interacting

with wider processes and events but as irreducible to them. But it is also capable of

providing a clearer procedure through which the potential, causal role of particular

ideas-in-politics might be analysed, something often unspecified when the ide-

ational is the unit of analysis. For in the form of conceptual change it identifies a

mechanism for the inheritance and transmission of ideas. Moreover, conceptual

change thereby provides a basis for their analysis at two crucial levels: the strategic

and the contextual. In this sense, from the viewpoint of political theory at large, its

study necessarily works at a second-order level, taking actual (rather than idealised)

political thought as its subject-matter (see Freeden 2005). Yet it is in doing so thatit forms a useful vantage point both for understanding the strategic moves of

political actors and, because it takes seriously the thought that concepts do not have

fixed essences, for specifying the contextual possibilities attaching to political

action. Its exercise is certainly distinct, therefore, from Habermasian discourse

ethics. Here, to treat ideas as normative resources is not to work cleanly through

the normative validity of political argumentation but instead to investigate the

availability of ideas to arrive at positionstreated asnormatively valid in politics itself.

Usually, the practitioners of conceptual history are concerned with illuminating

conceptual change over a long-term historical perspective. But they can also be

tracked over a shorter space of time, as a feature of the response to a particular,

perceived dilemma (see Bevir and Rhodes 2002, 149). Within the new linguistic

turn, one influential body of scholarship on the discourses of September 11th has

rightly located the importance in the matter of the depiction of that reality.

However, guided by the techniques of critical discourse analysis (see Beard 2000;

Fairclough 2001; Chilton 2004), such studies have unfortunately made the burden

of explanation of those discourses fall on hidden agendassupposing ideological

distortion to be at work in the relevant ideas that either enable or constrain

political action (usually, on such accounts, consisting in the manufacture of fear),

and taking the close, linguistic analysis of speech to be the means of unmasking

that distortion (see, e.g. Jackson 2005 and 2007; Burke 2008; Guelke 2008). Thatburden is particularly unhelpful when, for example, the claims made by memory

play a part in structuring the possibilities of political languages as normative



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resources, claims that are less satisfactorily accommodated by a notion of the

manipulation of interests. But it is with the constraints in mind that we might turn

directly to the reappraisal of the response to September 11th, proceeding by iden-

tifying those particular guises in which anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism have

been brought to bear upon the contestation of contemporary affairs.

Anti-Fascism and Anti-Totalitarianism:From September 11th to the War in Iraq

While a rather open-ended war on terror(ism) became the official response to

September 11th (Singh 2003, 172), either this came to house the languages of

anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism, or these same languages served as normative

resources for those sometimes resisting the phraseology of the official response but

otherwise endorsing its broad thrust.13 A rough chronology of the relevant respects

in which events were accordingly framed can be traced as follows, moving from the

general to the particular. Very early on, administration rhetoric invoked the SecondWorld War as a decisive reference point. The September 11th assault was immediately

equatedwiththeJapaneseattackonPearlHarbourin1941,andninedayslaterGeorge

W. Bush stated: I have seen their kind before ... heirs of the murderous ideologies of

the 20th century. They follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. 14

These early utterances aside, and particularly in retrospect, the axis of evilinitially

invoked in the presidential State of the Union address in January 2002was itself a

clear step on the path towards a more forthright appropriation of earlier political

languages. At one level it echoed Reagans Evil Empire and thereby mobilised the

memory of the struggle against communism. By the same token, it also introduced a

distinctive pattern of argument: a model of conflict that coded a new confrontationbetween good (democracy, freedom) and its demonised other (Judt 2006). A kind of

bridging exercise was thereafter required in order to bring Saddam, Iraq and weapons

of mass destruction (WMD) into the same field of associations as the ostensibly new

threat of militant Islamic fundamentalism. Notably, this took the appropriation of the

twolanguages inspecificdirections that were bothalready evident andnew. Following

recent precedent, the Second World War analogy was amplified. Sometimes Saddam

was cast in the role of Hitler, and there were various rhetorical allusions, in connection

with the broader struggle now envisaged, to World War IIIand World War IVeach

of which projected the global cold war model on to the long war against terrorism

(e.g. Gordon 2007; Podhoretz 2007). Less familiarly, what was new was the intrusionof a humanitarian-interventionist paradigm into the interpretation of events, a

paradigm which itself had an anti-totalitarian connection. Several shifts therefore, in

usage and in terminology, frame general developments here. But for the purposes of

analysis we can abstract three particular features of the discourse. While one singular

adaptationofthelanguageofanti-fascismhasbeensoprominentastowarrantfocused

consideration, it can be seen that anti-totalitarianism has been subject to two sorts of

appropriation.

Islamo-Fascism

The conceptual innovation Islamo-fascism was initially brought into use, it seems,in the immediate wake of September 11th, by Christopher Hitchens, a public figure

with a provenance on the left (Hitchens 2004 [2001b]; see also Schwartz 2001;



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Steyn 2002; Stille 2003). But it was on the back of repeated usage in neo-

conservative commentary that the term, some time later, gained currency in the

Bush administration rhetoric in such a way that the war on Islamic fascism for a

brief period became synonymous with the war on terror (Pollitt 2006). While

domestic support for continued troop commitment in Iraq waned, President Bushused the occasion of a thwarted Britain-based aerial suicide attack in August 2006

to issue a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists.15 In a press

conference on the Israel/Lebanon conflict on 7 August 2006, he repeated the

identification: those to whom America is opposed, he said, try to spread their

jihadist message of Islamic fascism, a message that is also totalitarian in nature.16

Furthermore, speaking at the national convention of the American Legion in the

lead up to the fifth anniversary of September 11th that same year, Defence Secre-

tary Donald Rumsfeld urged resolve in the face of extremists waging a new type of

fascism, while depicting the Iraq war as the epicenter of the struggle against

terrorism.17 Islamo-fascism surfaced, therefore, principally as a marker for militant

Islamic fundamentalism (see also Daley 2006), but in practice it sought to serve to

bring Iraq into the same conceptual universe.

Islamism as a New Totalitarianism

Drawing instead on the language of anti-totalitarianism, a related claim in both

governmental rhetoric and the kind of discourse emanating from key policy advis-

ers was that radical forms of Islam constitute a new totalitarianism. In some cases

the use of this term was direct (e.g. Gove 2006; Hirsi Ali et al. 2006). In other cases

similar designations tapped into the same conception. The 2006 National Security

Strategy paper of the United States, for instance, anticipated a long struggle against

a new totalitarian ideology, an ideology grounded notlike communismin

secular philosophy but in the perversion of religion, in view of which ending

tyranny became a decisive foreign policy goal.18 Once again, this thinking was

reinforced by other sources of public opinion formation. In Britain and America,

alongside neo-conservative commentaryalthough often treated as if it should be

subsumed within it (e.g. Judt 2006)a body of quite prominent left-liberal opinion

tried to resuscitate a tradition of left or liberal anti-totalitarianism, in the service of

what was often diagnosed as a more muscular liberalism. On this view, September

11th provided an argumentative basis not only to oppose new political realities; it

was also an opportunity to reconfigure a progressive consensus by (re)centring

democracy, opposition to tyranny, and human rights as its foundational commit-

ments (see Geras et al. 2006; Cohen 2007). In this milieu, the reception of Paul

Bermans (2004) Terror and Liberalism generated a common point of focus (e.g. Amis

2008), with its rather elegantly trim thesis that (mid-20th century) European

totalitarianism gave rise to two branches of Muslim totalitarianism: a religious

and fundamentalist (Islamist) variant and a secular nationalist (Baathist) expres-

sion. Partly in light of this, some of these liberal hawks found an anchor in cold

war liberal anti-communism (e.g. Beinart 2006) or the anti-fascist commitments

particularly of the non-communist leftof the 1930s (e.g. Kamm 2005). Others

drew attention to the same dehumanising picture of the west that could be shownto figure in all anti-democratic movements, from communism and Nazism to

Islamism (Buruma and Margalit 2004). Lastly, certain Central and Eastern



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European public intellectuals, like Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel and George

Konrad, whose political identity was forged in the struggle against Soviet rule and

the revolutions of 1989, also found sufficient malleability in totalitarianism to

articulate meaningful political positions, especially in the run-up to the Iraq war

(Cushman 2005b). And in view of that, the idea of both an affinity and amutationa historical derivationof old into new totalitarian political designs also

gave the impression, at least, of echoing back into administration rhetoric.

The Anti-Totalitarian Case for Intervention in Iraq

At the same time, another appropriation of anti-totalitarianism took the form of a

specific, adaptive pattern of argumentthe anti-totalitarian case for (Anglo-

American) intervention in Iraq. This was the human rights case for the war that

was evident alongside the WMD case and the regime change case; it became, in

other words, one of the braid of reasons and justifications leading to the Iraq war(Danner 2006, 82). It was a strand given prominence not so much by neo-

conservative criticsthough they frequently did appeal to Saddams genocidal

behaviour (e.g. Kaplan and Kristol 2003)but rather, once again, by various

representative figures of the neo-left (see Buruma 2007, 14). Accordingly, what

was in some cases a rather particular defence of the Iraq war on liberal-

humanitarian grounds became, in the wider public arena, the claim that it was an

act of liberation from totalitarianism in the service of human rights and democracy

(Cushman 2005a, 1). Indeed, this was the claim to the fore in Tony Blairs speech

before the House of Commons in March 2003 that graphically depicted a tyrannical

regime and evoked a people groaning under years of dictatorship and brutalrepression (Blair 2005, 334, 338, 339). Yet again, there is a specific text that found

a particular currency in this discourse (e.g. Berman 2005; Clwyd 2005, 311; Cohen

2007). Typically, such views took their bearings from the Iraqi migr and dissident

Kanan Makiyas (1998 [1989]) influentialRepublic of Feara text that reads Sadd-

ams state through a classical model of totalitarianism; that traces the reception of

European fascist ideas in the Middle East; and that maps the importation of the

organisational practices of dictatorship from Soviet communism.19

Accordingly, an overview of the uses of anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism in the

wake of September 11th suggests that there are three significant conceptual adap-

tations through which they have been subject to attempted, internal reconfigura-

tion as political languages. What I wish to draw attention to, however, and to

reiterate, is one common feature of each usagetheir failure at the level of political

argument. Simply put, none of the three adaptations caught on. Notwithstanding

theirpotentialappropriation, in the case of the attempt to mobilise support for both

the war on terror and (Anglo-American) intervention in Iraq, the users of this

language could not get their intended meanings to stick. Briefly, this claim might be

substantiated as follows. At one level, there was a failure on the part of each to take

root deeply. It is symptomatic, for instance, that the war in Iraq failed to gain

international support (see Hendrickson and Tucker 2005, 14) and that, even takingthe United States alone, the analysis of poll data suggests that September 11th did

little to dislodge a general rule that public opinion holds up much better to the



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response to threats than to intervention in internal conflicts (Eichenberg 2005,

176). At another level, each term failed to maintain currency over any significant

duration of time. Again it is symptomatic that the subsequent occupation evidenced

a steady erosion of public support for the war in the US as well as globally (albeit

from markedly different peaks), and this well before prison abuse stories came tolight (Goot 2004, 265; Eichenberg 2005, 177).

One possibility here is that failure to gain depth might be explained with reference

to a particular function of political language: namely, a requirement thatin the

context of a response to traumapolitical language answer, at a non-cognitive

level, to the demands of grieving and mourning (Edkins 2003; Jackson 2005,

3138). Another possibility is that failure to sustain duration is connected with its

intended functions only in the short termeither a need, at a particular moment

in time,20 to sacrifice complexity for moral clarity in the articulation of policy

dilemmas (envisaged here through the juxtaposition of ostensibly different realities

under a single conceptual auspices), or a desire to renegotiate political identities andallegiances, again at a particular moment in time, in the light of altered political

circumstances. But the failure of political argument when understood in a rather

more specific sense can, it is proposed here, be more adequately explained with

reference to a particular vantage point on the legitimation of conceptual change. In

turn, it is hoped, the illumination of failure through reasons pertaining to this

vantage point also carries a potentially richer set of implications.

Conceptual Change and Rhetorical Redescription

As we have seen already, the conditions that regulate the failure of political

argument, in the sense meant here, relate to an attempt to bridge the gap between

the available understandings of terms and their projected meanings and applica-

tions. In this context, regime-type terms have historical and logical stores of

meaning that can be selectively drawn upon with the end in mind, in principle, of

soliciting either approval or antipathy towards the political phenomena to which

they can be made to refer. A more specific vantage point on this problem can be

discerned by drawing attention to a particular, representative scenario, one which

is identified by Quentin Skinner (1974 and 2002, 145157) in a set of remarks he

makes on the nature of conceptual change.21

This is a scenario in which, as newproblems are deemed to emerge in political and social life, conceptual vocabularies

are manipulated in order to make sense of those same problems. In this setting,

moreover, there is a representative figure, one whose task closely approximates that

faced by the relevant actors in our case. In Skinners discussion he hones in on the

case of the innovating ideologist, a figure who wishes to extract from an available

moral language while seeking at the same time to challenge conventional moral

beliefs. His project, in Skinners rather quaint turn of phrase, is that of legitimising

untoward social actions (1974, 293 and 2002, 178179).

Now, there are good reasons for imagining that this is precisely the situation of

those who seek to draw upon the languages of anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianismin trying to legitimise the three conceptual adaptations identified above. More

particularly, they seek to sharpen up, as it were, hostility to the institutions, practices



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and actions in view, partly by feeding on a ready store of moral condemnation, and

partly by acting on the thought that conventional opinion is too neutral in the face

of them. Equally, imagining this to be the case entails little more than teasing out some

further implications of one of the four properties of the relevant kind of political

language. One salient feature of regime-type concepts that emerges in light of theearlier discussion is that they are both basic and contestable. Treated accordingly,

moreover, a further feature sooner or later comes into the picture: that they resemble

what have been called evaluative-descriptive terms. That is, they belong to a class

of wordsidentified by Skinner and others through reference to speech act theory

(e.g. Searle 1969; Hare 1970; Austin 1975 [1962])that both describe an action or

stateof affairs and, in a normative sense, evaluatethose same things. It is by using such

terms in the latter sense, furthermore, that the success of any agent becomes a matter

of exercising perlocutionary effects through the meaningful reception of particular

statements. Characteristically, this will entail inciting or persuading [ones] hearers

or readers to adopt a particular point of view and, in the process, getting an audience

to revise its ideas, attitudes and feelings (Skinner 1974, 294).

We noted before that it is specifically in virtue of the fact that regime-type terms

perform an evaluative as well as descriptive function that they create the space for

a particular form of political action. But the vantage point suggested by Skinners

scenario now brings these possibilities more clearly into focus. Skinners own

discussion principally concerns terms relating to individual moral conduct and the

redescription of actions and states of affairs in a favourablenot unfavourable

light. He shows, for instance, how in 17th-century England shrewdness went from

denoting the disparaging quality of being self-serving to indicating the commend-

able quality of sound commercial judgement.22

Yet something very similar applies tothe innovating ideologists in the post-September 11th case. Theirs is the case of

trying to do things with regime-type conceptsboth of legitimating a change in

the feasible meanings, applications and associations of concepts, and of shifting the

terms of moral appraisal of the kinds of political practices and agendas brought into

view on the basis of those concepts. Moreover, Skinners treatment of the repre-

sentative scenario here potentially illuminates the failure of political argument by

signalling some more particular conditions that might be taken to determine success

or failure, respectively; he notes that there are two semantic strategies that may be

called into use, in the act of which the legitimation of conceptual change might be

effected. The failure to implement those strategies authoritatively betokens thefailure of the broader task and, as such, stipulates two standard requirements that

conceptual innovations and adaptive patterns of argument must meet. Accordingly,

the suggestion is that this can be used helpfully to elucidate the reasons for the

failure of the appropriation of the languages of anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism

in post-September 11th discourse, by drawing attention to two separate levels for its

analysis.

The first strategy is to effect a change in the moral complexion of a term. The second

strategy is to effect a change in the definitional criteria according to which cases are

admitted to a term with a given moral complexion. But both are instances of

rhetorical redescription that are capable of redescribing a given object in an unsym-pathetic and adverse light.23 The intention that underlies the first strategy especially

is to elicit a particular mode of response in ones audience; in our case, the projected



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outcome is to ask an audience to reconsider any feelings of (perhaps unwitting)

neutrality that it has towards something. That, the first strategy suggests, can be

effected in a process of renaming that, in principle, can take the form either of

altering the normative colour of an existing term, or of coining a new expression

one perhaps with an amplified degree of moral resonance (Skinner 1974, 296).Strictly speaking, of course, regime-type concepts are always already evaluative

termsall such terms are. But clearly some concepts in the family of undesirable

regime-type words carry more emotional intensity than do others when describing

a similar range of actions (see Freeden 2006, 17). This is the point that Thomas

Hobbes had in mind when observing that they that are discontented underMon-

archy, call it Tyrannythat tyranny is no more than monarchy disliked (Hobbes

1985, 240). Where euphemism is conventionally understood to point to some-

thing that runs in the opposite directionthe substitution of a mild expression in

the place of one thought to be too harsh or directthe characteristic idiom in this

case is liable instead to overstatement and hyperbole (see Orwell 1968 [1946];

Bromwich 2008).

The second strategy is to extend (or simply change) the range of cases covered by

a term, with the projected outcome of getting this instead to stick. Either the view

is taken that the criteria that regulate admission need to be revised (or at least

clarified), or it is that the criteria upon which we might admit a given phenomenon

to this category are previously presentthough it escapes our notice. In any case,

the charge then becomes that an audience is making an empirical mistakein the

first case because we discover, in a proposed redefinition, that a term has previously

been mistakenly (or ambiguously) defined; in the second case because we find it

has been misapplied (Skinner 1974, 298). Typically, this tactic will proceed bydropping some criteria and adding others, or else by reallocating the relative

weighting of the existing criteria.24 If successful, the effect is to reproach an audi-

ence that it ought really to be sharply condemning something which it is presently

(and mistakenly) withholding that condemnation from. Put differently, the second

strategy is to create deviant usages (on the basis of standard usages) which render

what are otherwise implausible comparisons into rather compelling ones.

When mapped on to post-September 11th discourse, and to the extent that this

discourse can be seen as the attempt to achieve moral clarity in the articulation of

contemporary realities, these two strategies throw up the following questions

which more amply illuminate its failure than have attempts to illuminate that

failure to date: What understandings of fascism and totalitarianism are culturally

resonant and in that sense available? Which, if any, of those understandings did the

projected meanings and applications seek to tap into? What was going on with the

relevant terms at the emotive level? How exactly were definitional criteria being

tweaked, and just how malleable did they prove?

The Legitimation of Conceptual Change and its Failure

The Diminishing Returns of FascismLet us begin with Islamo-fascism. Linguistically speaking, that word is a compound

construction, one which seeks to complement a set of kindred hybrid terms like



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neo- and crypto- fascism, in which each element grafts particular associations on

to the other. But when compared at the level of the emotive meanings of terms

what comes into view is its rhetorical pitch (Pollitt 2006)a dimension which some

critical treatments of Islamo-fascism have largely ignored (e.g. Judt 2008b). Within

that purview it is a construction that, when applied to the range of movements andregimes pictured, seeks to manipulate a particular emotional reaction and a par-

ticular degree of intensity: in the rather laconic sound of that term itself, the fascist

element connotes coarseness and bellicosity, associations that are also called up in

more passionate register than are those implied by more rhetorically neutral alter-

natives like extremist or theocratic. In fact, analysis of its moral complexion

suggests that Islamo-fascism seeks to elicit the particular emotion of contempt.

However, the failure of that term to gain uptake, and thereby to impart that

contempt effectively, can be understood to derive from a miscalculation regarding

its deployment; not a mistaken assumption about the appropriateness of the rhe-

torical pitch in itself, but rather a short-sightedness about the tendency of the

meanings triggered by the stem parts of compound words to reflect back on to the

originary terms themselves, a tendency confirmed to such a degree in the reception

of Islamo-fascism that it was, by broad public consensus, deemed to be off-limits. (It

would certainly seem to have failed as a move to bolster the association of the

struggle against terrorism with the war in Iraq, for world opinion surveys note a

reverse over time in confidence that the latter was helping the former (Goot 2004,

256257).)25 Yet if the rhetorical pitch was unsuited for general consumption, this

is in part because there was a more specific audience intended for whom the terms

of those same calculations were different. The coining of that expression is also to

take a term with an established left-wing pedigree and, in view of those credentials,

to ask a particular constituency to think carefully about the location of its natural

allegiances and sympathies (see Walzer 2002; Burleigh 2006b). Accordingly, called

into work were not only short-term, emotive triggers, but also more long-term

investments of political commitment. But the trade-off thereby entailed meant, at

best, securing only modest returns on those investments in virtue of the relative size

of that constituencya body of opinion, as practice proved, below the level suffi-

cient meaningfully to reconfigure a political language.

The effort to manipulate fascisms definitional criteria, in order to accommodate a

meaningful extension to radical Islam, has once more to do both with the ordinary

understandings attached to that concept as well as those understandings particular

to certain milieus.26 Together, and potentially at least, they furnish the contempo-

rary political imagination with fertileif quite clearly demarcatedgrounds for

teasing out new meanings. Since the post-Second World War era, when the term

initially came to entertain uncertain boundaries (Gemie and Schrafstetter 2002,

413),27 fascism has, at an everyday level, yielded a continuity only in the core set of

political values incorporated within those boundaries: most prominently, milita-

rism, racism and authoritarian nationalism. At the more reified level of general

theory, scholars have for several decades now contested the finer detail of a

definitive fascist minimum, in that a broad consensus has gravitated towards the

idea that it refers to the cultural and social rebirth of a national or ethiccommunity deemed to be in crisis (Griffin 2004, 228; see also Payne 1995; Eatwell

1996; Mann 2004; Paxton 2004; Griffin 2007a, 179180). But between those



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currents it is quite conceivable to locate a rhetorical rendering of fascism that, in the

first strand of meaning, proceeds upon a growing detachment from the events of

Nazism especially (see Maier 2003, 45)28 and that, in the second sense, foregrounds

its temporal dimension. The viability of Islamo-fascism, in that connection, is

contingent upon the credibility of two implicit moves here that expand fascismsterms of reference as a rather more free-floating metaphor. The litmus test of that

credibility, however, is to do so without jettisoning the utility of that concept in the

process. Seen in those terms, the first move is to downgrade fascisms secular

criteria in a way that approximates an older conception of clerical fascism (Hitch-

ens 2004 [2001a]; Kamm 2005, 23, 72); the by-product is to give definitional

primacy either to the collusion of clerical interests in radical nationalist projects or

the articulation of fascist motifs within a theological framework (see Laqueur 2006;

Griffin 2007b, 215). The intended effect, either way, is to create a broad affinity of

reactionary ideas and to bring into focus the idealisation of a primordial past to be

imposed in conformity to a particularist tradition. A second move instead locates

fascisms vision in the future. Potentially validated by a conception of fascist politics

as reactionary modernism (Herf 1984; Osborne 1995), its aim is to project a

continuity in fascisms both past and present in the idea of the (re)creation of

a purely imagined past to be brought aboutin the face of perceived cultural

decadencethrough the purifying force of highly organised political violence

(Herf 2005; Burleigh 2006a, 471; Daley 2006). Yet the attempt, premised on one or

other of these moves, to legislate for the reallocation of fascisms definitional criteria

fails the relevant test by short-circuiting its rationale to begin with: when fascism,

on its most accessible meanings, implies the elevation of the state, race or nation

into a supreme objection of devotion (see Gentile 2000), to emend its organising

terms of reference to privilege more literal forms of veneration only renders redun-

dant the work being done by the fascist component (Nunberg 2006; Stohlberg

2006). Both moves, moreover, are complicit in a kind of banalization of the term

(Judt 2008a, 35)a progressive depletion of its moral capital through repetition

such that the verdict of one historian, that by the time that category comes to

include Muslim fundamentalists it has become largely a meaningless term of

abuse, rings particularly true (Gregor 2004, 5). That judgement, I think, in the light

of the analysis here, might even be best understood to indicate the gradual exhaus-

tion of fascism as a normative resource on the law of diminishing returns.

The Limits of Totalitarianism as a Normative Resource

The attempted uses of totalitarianism in the rhetorical redescription of both Islam-

ism and humanitarian intervention can, in the same sense, be conceived as efforts

to achieve public validation in culturally resonant understandings. Whether or not,

once identified more particularly, these resources were even in principle flexible

enough to accommodate those new applications pertains again to the definitional

revisions implied. But it is worth considering, in each case, the rhetorical work first

of all being performed at the level of the political emotions.29

In that regard, the idea of a new totalitarianism runs in a contrary direction tofascism, seeking to evoke not contempt but instead fear and, in a more particular

sense, awe. It constructs a rather grandiose, even intellectually coherent target,



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which serves to locate terror(ism)whether practised by states or non-state

actorsin the immanent logic of all such systematising philosophies (Berman 2004,

2251). The notion of a new totalitarianism, in those terms, makes implicit

reference to the contemporary rejection of reductive, dogmatic and utopian

systems of thought. But seen in the present light the mismatch of that rhetoricalpitch to political reality explains its incapacity to exercise any significant emotional

appeal. In its conception there are more than traces of an attempt to revive the

ethos of a cold war liberalism (see Mller 2005), a confrontation in which the

stakes of political commitment were markedly different in virtue of the holistic

character of liberal democracys ideological opponent there. Applied to the percep-

tion of a disparate collection of groups acting under the rubric of radical Islam it is,

as its failure to take root attests, rhetorically excessivea point which empirical

studies of the Bush administrations reading of domestic public opinion have

indirectly noted by flagging up the policy oversell (e.g. Foyle 2004, 290). That

failure is bound up too with the corresponding shifts implied in totalitarianisms

definitional properties. Unpacked in detail, the discourse surrounding the new

totalitarianism suggests that a quasi-Marxist, ideological structure is typically being

given definitional priority in order to expose a broader set of commonalitiesa

mythical narrative organising the past, present and future of a collectivity according

to a pattern of victimhood, struggle and salvation (Berman 2004, 4851; Amis

2008, 7882, 200204).30 The emphasis, however, on ideological form over content

disconnects with the primary associations of totalitarianism in the contemporary

mind: political projects animated exclusively by secularist, utopian ideas.31

A second set of associations in contemporary discourse formed the relevant back-

ground to the anti-totalitarian case for intervention in Iraq, that case which made

the most emotionally direct demands of its audience. The adaptive pattern of

argument here sought to anchor itself in a distinctive post-cold war context, a setting

where human rights have displaced conventional allegiances as a basis for political

action (Meister 2002, 91; Rieff 2005, 3537; Judt 2006; Rabinbach 2006, 95100)

even to the point of acquiring the trappings of a secular religion (Wiesel 1998, 3;

Ignatieff 2001, 53). In that dimension, it was a justificatory strategy which looked

to engage empathy as the relevant emotional faculty: it made relief to Iraqi suffer-

ing its principal tenet (Cohen 2005, 80). As such, its potential success was to trump

hypothetical, dry risk assessments of worst-case scenarios that invoked the neutral

language of the precautionary principle (e.g. Ignatieff 2005, 162167)arguments

which, constructed in costbenefit terms, characteristically leave politicians, in

particular, open to the charge of appearing cynical and without conviction (Run-

ciman 2004, 14; Sunstein 2005, 129148). But while that tone was fitting to the

case presented, to frame it in the language of anti-totalitarianism actually proved

counterproductive: it raised the bar too high in setting out the threshold beyond

which humanitarian intervention was justified and, indeed, required. The totali-

tarian portrait of the terminal stage of Saddams Iraq (see Stansfield 2007, 7598)

was treated with scepticism by a broad audience because it failed to resonate with

a rather intuitive assessment of that states location on a continuum somewhere in

excess of the authoritarian but short of the totalitarian; by eclipsing thatdistinctiona distinction given weight in the comparative politics literature but

which, in a related idiom, sets the terms of reference in the more general



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imaginationit lent hubris to the project in hand.32 Certainly, public opinion poll

data indicate the pronounced failure of the humanitarian case relative to the other

justifications (Eichenberg 2005, 176; Gershkoff and Kushner 2005, 531). Even if a

projected audiencewere tobuy into the totalitarian label, it could only be by fixing

that continuum as denoting degrees of social control rather than those increasingdegrees of ideological conviction on which, in the inherited model, atrocities in

prospect were premised.33 That the picture sketched of Saddams Iraq better

approximated the model instead of a Stasi-style surveillance society is rather

belied by the account of Iraq upon which this part of the pro-war camp rested its

case: its overarching theme was a state whose fragile legitimacy derived from

impossibly intertwined circles of complicity and victimhood in which large parts of

the population were implicated in its modes of operation (Makiya 1998 [1989],

xxxii). The consequence, in short, was a serious disjuncture between the range of

the rhetorical pitch and the actual content of the message being conveyed.

Conclusion: Political Rhetoric and the Failure ofPolitical Argument

The failure of anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism in post-September 11th discourse

is, then, explicable in two parts. An anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian consensus neither

coalesced around the war on terror, nor around the war in Iraq, because the guises

in which it was expressed were first of all complicit in a kind of rhetorical overreach

and, secondly, were liableagainst the background of a shared set of understandings

of the relevant termsto be perceived only as false analogies. As we have seen, while

an emergent set of political realities called for the construction of a new politicallanguage, the inheritance of older, regime-type vocabularies came to serve as

prominent templates for translating diagnosis into a frame for political action. In that

fashion, a failure of political strategy was preceded, on a view now widely endorsed,

by a failure of interpretation (e.g. Holmes 2007). But, in terms of public credibility at

least, the potential in those diagnoses to garner political support was greater than has

sometimes been imagined such that they might have inhibited those actions far less

than transpired to be the case.Thatfailure was foreshadowed instead by a failure of

political argument.It was a failure of politicalnot philosophicalargument notonly

because it was staged in a public arena, but also because while a fluid set of conceptual

understandings were in principle available it was at a political level that these optionswere closed off. In that sense, one important facet of the failure of political argument

would appear to be that it is contingent, not predetermined: the feasibility of effecting

conceptual change to accommodate new associations and applications turns upon the

selection of viable strategies for doing so, strategies that are capable of speaking

meaningfully both to the emotional demands and the existing understandings of a

broad public audience. Rhetorical overreach can be a case either of misjudging the

emotionaltonedemanded(ademandthatsignalslimitstotheplausibilityofanevents

interpretation), or of correctly conceiving that tone while misjudging the strategy for

getting a particular language to match it.

Successful anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian rhetoric rests on the capacity to redescribeits terms of reference with the effect that it carries over that moral denunciation

intuitively bound up with it in a liberal-democratic context. Those terms of reference,



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at the level of political discourse, entail a movable boundary between fascist/

totalitarian and non-fascist/totalitarian political forms; as we have argued, such

boundaries are flexible because languages of this kind are active both as repositories

of public memory and as sites of political contestationand more so than as providers

of viable tools for continuing, analytical inquiry. In view of that, the claim thatanti-fascist and anti-totalitarian rhetoric must fail per sesimply because it has

outlived its era (Moyn 2006, 3)makes little sense. Or, at least, it is incomplete as a

statement, for it assumes the existence of a fixed set of (external) reference points

attaching to those normative vocabularies. Yet the constraints that pertain to such an

exercise in redescription must be carefully negotiated. The arguments must compe-

tently handle the surfeit of moral condemnation harboured in those languages,

attentively separating their intended uses from those unintended by channelling that

condemnation both in the right direction and the tone appropriate to it. Therein,

moreover, conceptual adaptations confront a moving target: those associations of

fascism and totalitarianism that hold contemporary, cultural resonance are fluid

subject to changeand to varying importance. One achievement of the work of Skinner

and others on conceptual history is to illustrate the extent to which the fixing of

conceptual meanings is not static and ahistorical (as supposed by forms of conceptual

analysis that privilege the vantage points of philosophy and etymology) but is rather

a dynamic enterprise (see Ball 1997, 3536). That claim is usually advanced with an

eye upon those resources that are available to the producers of ideas in order to effect

changes in political language. But as much would seem to turn also on the horizons

of the consumers of those ideas.

Lastly, there are broader implications contained in the discussion here also, for how

the relation between political theory and political rhetoric ought to be conceived.Too often, in the past and to date, it has been assumed that there is a rigid

distinction between substance and (mere) rhetoric. On that view, rhetoric takes the

character of passions that are strategically affected in order to conceal baser political

motives; or else the two are treated as entirely discrete moments of the same

phenomena, thereby requiring wholly separate modes of analysis. That view has

been challenged in a recent body of literature (see Freeden 2005; Buckler 2007;

Finlayson 2007). But on the reading of post-September 11th discourse offered here

there is even more reason to suppose that there is no cast-iron, hierarchical relation

between shallower and deeper levels of understanding in relation to forms of

linguistic meaning under investigation. For not only is contingent (rather thanpredetermined) failure a revealing feature of the connection between theory and

rhetoric, but so too is the process through which changes in the core components

of political vocabularies are legitimated and deployed thereafter, inclusive of the

philosophical level that those changes reflect back upon. In that, such strategies of

persuasion transpire to be rather more important than philosophical efforts to shut

down disagreement by logical reduction, with the corollary that the particular

conditions of the failure of political argument emerge in the conduct of argument

itself.

About the Author

Richard Shorten, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of

Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK, email: [email protected]



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20/25

political innovations deemed to stretch the existing terms to an unworkable extreme. Despotism, forinstance, was invested with new meaning by Montesquieu in the 18th century, in connection withthe absolutist tendencies of the French monarchy. Bonapartism, in the following century, added theconnotation of militarism to despotic rule (see Boesche 1996; Baehr and Richter 2004).

13. It should be registered that both languages, in a directly inverted usage, have figured equally in theattempt to delegitimate that same broad thrust of the response to September 11thusually with

reference to the purported imperial designs of American foreign policy and its secondary effectsupon the internal arrangements of the American political system. See especially Wolin (2003 and2008) and Falk (2004, ch. 12, Will the empire be fascist?).

14. George Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, 20 September 2001,http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html (accessed 1 May 2008).

15. President Bush discusses terror plot upon arrival in Wisconsin, 10 August 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060810-3.html (accessed 19 March 2008).

16. President Bush and Secretary of State Rice discuss the Middle East Crisis, 7 August 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060807.html (accessed 1 May 2008).

17. Reported in Washington Post, 30 August 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/29/AR2006082900585.html (accessed 10 March 2008).

18. National Security Strategy of the United States of America, March 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/nss2006.pdf (accessed 10 March 2008).

19. See also Cohens (2007, ch. 1) depiction of Makiya as the Iraqi Solzhenitsyn. On Makiyas (1998[1989], 115, 284 and 2006/7) (classical) model of totalitarianism, it is notable that he acknowledgesan explicit debt to Hannah Arendts conception.

20. On the idea of a moment of totalitarianism as performing a well-established political function thatsharpen[s] oppositions at the expense of obscuring moral and political ambiguities, see Rabinbach(2006, 8788); see also Brooks (2006).

21. For related perspectives on conceptual change see Connolly (1983); Ball et al. (1989); Ball (1997).

22. Skinners (1974, 296297) argument is that, at one historical moment in time, shrewdnessalongwith related terms like ambition and frugalitychanged their meanings as Puritan ideologiststeased out different conceptions from an existing normative vocabulary. In a related discussionSkinner does, at one time, consider one regime-type (democracy) in the same contexttracing its

metaphorical extension into a term of nigh-on universal commendation. Yet it is notable that hejudges the need to re-describe something, conversely, in condemnatory terms to be a conceptualpossibility that is empirically less usual (Skinner 1973, 298). Accordingly, our analysis here takes upa possibility conceded by Skinner but dismissed as being without much consequence in political andsocial reality.

23. Note that this is to draw on a distinction explicit in Skinners original discussion, but that the specificrendering of it here may depart from Skinners own account. There is no claim, in short, to getSkinner exactly right here; some features of the distinction are rather teased out with a view to howthey might inform the analysis that is to follow.

24. The concept of democracy, for instance, might be imagined to be made up of various componentpartsparticipation, equality, self-determination and libertyeach in differing proportions, theoverall allocation of which is open to redistributive contestation (see Freeden 2004, 4).

25. Goot (2004, 256257), in an overview of world opinion surveys, notes a patternthe United Statesexcepted, but common to Britain, France, and Germanywhereby majority support, in May 2003,for American policy on terrorism in the broadest sense had, by early 2004, given way to majoritiesagreeing that the war in Iraq had hurt that policy.

26. As a political language, anti-fascism can well be imagined to vary from place to place, in depth as wellas content. Certainly, throughout the post-war period, it has borne a different valence in the politicaland cultural life of different western nations, where variation turns upon historical issues likeguilt/victimhood, complicity/opposition and its relative allocation of space in respective politicalcultures (Eley 1996, 73).

27. That uncertainty began from the inability of the two regimes which fascism was originally intro-duced in connection with to develop a recognisably specific doctrine between them. In GeorgeOrwells (1968 [1946]) perhaps too austere verdict, the word emerged as a prime candidate for theabuse of political words in virtue of signifying simply something not desirable.

28. The detachment, in the public imagination, of fascism from the Nazi period is also something which,it must be said, has been facilitated by both historiographical and public debates about the appropri-ateness of assimilating that experience within any broader category.

29. On the political emotions see, for instance, Hall (2002); Marcus (2002); Clarke et al. (2006).



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30. Where the Marxian narrative plots the massesexploited by the bourgeoisieengaged in revolu-tionary struggle to achieve the communist future, the Islamist narrative (on this view) plots acommunity of Muslim believersoppressed by the infidels and the weststruggling in jihad for arestored caliphate.

31. To a lesser extent, the same discourse suggests the extended meaning is also being made to turn ona model of (totalitarian) organisational design: a vanguardist conception of a select elite acting in thename of a broader community and on the authority of privileged access to knowledge (see Hitchens2001b; Berman 2004, 93; Amis 2008, 191; see also Burleigh 2006b, 2; Gray 2007, 69). Yet that toowas an idea that was without adequate weight, on the ordinary denotations of the term, to gaintraction.

32. Typically, in both forms of usage, authoritarianism is that category of the two which is used to coverthe greater number of cases, to the point of often being used as a straightforward synonym fornon-democratic government (see Brooker 2000; Linz 2000). From a polemical direction see alsoKirkpatrick (1982).

33. See Sigrid Meuschels (2000) apt distinction between two often conflated approaches, one denotingtotalitarianism as extermination and the other totalitarianism as total control. As critics of the casefor intervention in Iraq were quick to point out, the Baathist regimes acts of mass killing, even whileincluding genocide against parts of its own population, were in the past rather than immediateprospect.

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