Political Discourse Analysis: The Dangers of Methodological Absolutism
Abstract
Isabela and Norman Fairclough have written a very important book whose full significance is perhaps in danger of being missed if we view it simply, in their own selfdepiction, as a text for advanced students. Indeed, in what follows I want to argue that their book is much better seen as the occasion for a debate that we desperately need to be having about how to conduct political discourse analysis rather than as the elucidation of an agreed, almost official, methodology for the conduct of such a form of discourse analysis. At times their book reads like the definitive statement of the only credible approach to the analysis of political discourse as both political and as discourse, derived logically and forensically from a consideration of the specificity of the political itself (...).