The Politics of Language

In The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley present a radical new approach to the theory of meaning, offering an account of communication in which political and social identity, affect, and shared practices play as important a role as information. This new view of language, they argue, has dramatic consequences for free speech, democracy, and a range of other areas in which speech plays a central role.

Drawing on a wealth of disciplines, The Politics of Language argues that the function of speech — whether in dialogue, larger group interactions, or mass communication — is to attune people to something, be it a shared reality, emotion, or identity. Reconceptualising the central ideas of pragmatics and semantics, Beaver and Stanley apply their account to a range of phenomena that defy standard frameworks in linguistics and philosophy of language — from dog whistles and covert persuasion to echo chambers and genocidal speech. The authors use their framework to show that speech is inevitably political because all communication is imbued with the resonances of particular ideologies and their normative perspectives on reality.

At a time when democracy is under attack, authoritarianism is on the rise, and diversity and equality are being demanded, The Politics of Language offers a powerful new vision of the language of politics, ideology, and protest.

'[An] important book by two prominent scholars.' – Choice

'The Politics of Language is a massive accomplishment — novel, nuanced, and timely. It is especially impressive for its rich synthesis of disparate literatures from outside of analytic philosophy, ranging from information theory to social identity and critical race theories…It thereby offers a fertile resource for explaining a wide range of phenomena that are typically ignored by philosophers and linguists, such as gestures, music, and monuments. It also offers a powerful tool for illuminating the politics of language, understood not just as speech produced by politicians or about politics, but all speech – indeed all action – that involves communal coordination and contestation.' – Elisabeth Camp, Mind

'[Stanley and Beaver] have taken it upon themselves to forge a connection between semantic theory and the intellectual outside world. Where many have speculated, they have done the work and come away with a concrete theory of the thing. What is more, they have made a sustained interdisciplinary case for the importance of properly linguistic notions in the analysis of meaning and politics...The book is sure to be a key reference for scholars working on lexical semantics, philosophy of language, linguistic ideology, and meaning writ large for years to come.” Nicholas Fleisher, Language' – Nicholas Fleisher, Language