Research project
Quiet Rebels? A Social History of Political Rhetoric
Speeches and speech acts have been crucial in settling the question at the centre of every political debate: who gets what, when and where?
- Contact
- Anne Heyer
- Funding
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NWO Starting Grant
People who proposed radical religious, social and political transformation threatened the existing order, safety, and peace. But emerging external threats also bore the opportunity for stability. For engaging with these risks to the existing order could, in fact, legitimize power relations. In this project we study how elite engagement with radical ideas - perceived as threats - shaped society and politics in the Netherlands and beyond. We closely analyze the political conversations ensuing whenever elites felt threatened. What the political establishment discussed as radical, in practice often occasioned - quiet - adoption of the rebellious agenda to stay in power. Our aim is to show how, as a result, political language changed over time.
We focus on the political communication of and dialogue between incumbents and advocates of change. Challenging the existing order and developing the proper response to threats were no easy tasks. Rulers had to identify challenges, assess their potential and convince others to support their line of response. Exaggerations and understatements of potential dangers were connected to emotional radicalism and populism on the one hand and a pragmatic and technocratic style of communication on the other. A combination that still bears importance for democracy today. [1]
Thus we offer a new understanding of political change. Political change is often described as sudden and unexpected, for instance in the case of revolutions. [2] We argue that there is another type of change less apparent to observers, taking place internally and gradually mitigated through speech acts. This invisible transformation is the slow adjustment of political rulers to perceived and real threats.
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[1] Margaret Canovan, ‘Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy’, Political Studies 47, no. 1 (March 1999): 2–16.
[2] Laurent Curelly and Nigel Smith ed., Radical voices, radical ways: articulating and disseminating radicalism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2016); Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
