Polity

. Volume 43, Number 1 . January 2011

r 2011 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/11 www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

Political Theory and Ordinary Language: A Road Not Taken

Colin Bird University of Virginia
This article argues that political theory could gain from a revival of the form of ordinary language analysis advocated by J. L. Austin. It distinguishes three objectionable forms of scholasticism widespread in contemporary political theory, and shows how Austinian methods might help to combat them. To illustrate the potential of Austinian analysis in political theory, the final third of the article considers, in the light of pertinent ordinary language, the widely canvassed claim that coercion can involve disrespect for persons; these considerations suggest that this claim is more complicated, less obviously sound, and more interesting, than political theorists often assume. Polity (2011) 43, 106127. doi:10.1057/pol.2010.20; published online 23 August 2010

Keywords: J. L. Austin; ordinary language; coercion; disrespect; dignity; foundationalism

J. L. Austin played an important, although largely unintended, role in the twentieth-century revival of normative political theory. Isaiah Berlin, H. L. A. Hart, Ju rgen Habermas, Quentin Skinner, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Stanley Cavell, Bernard Williams, Hannah Pitkin, and those they have influenced were all heavily indebted to Austin, and to ordinary language philosophy more generally. Yet political theorists today rarely give ordinary language the sort of patient attention that Austin recommended, and the continuing relevance of his ideas for the practice of political theory remains widely unappreciated and misunderstood. Among the present generation of political theorists, the received view of Austin runs something like this: although his notion of performative utterance has proven to be a lasting contribution, with seminal political relevance, Austins wider philosophical concerns, and especially his distinctive plea for philosophical field work in the everyday use of language, have little to offer political
The author is grateful to Bill Gorton, Corey Brettschneider, George Klosko, Ryan Pevnick, Andrew Polsky, several anonymous referees for Polity, and audiences at the Midwest Political Science Association meetings, at the University of Virginia, and at the National Humanities Center for many constructive comments. Large parts of this article were completed while I was on sabbatical leave supported by an NEH Fellowship at the National Humanities Center for 20082009; I thank both those institutions for their generous support.

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theorists. This article aims to combat this view by explaining how a renewed attention to ordinary language might enrich the field. I certainly do not claim that contemporary political theory should be wholly reconceived on an Austinian basis; ordinary language, as Austin was the first to admit, has real limitations.1 My thesis is rather that, in forgetting some of Austins strictures about the significance of ordinary use, political theorists deprive themselves of a vital resource.

How Austin Was Forgotten

Many intellectuals are reluctant to acknowledge that everyday discourse could be a source of philosophical insight in its own right, and this partly explains why political theorists still resist Austins contention that the nuances of ordinary use always repay our attention. However, various historical contingencies were far more important to the demise of interest in Austins approach. Neither Austin nor Wittgenstein (the other leading twentieth-century advocate for ordinary language) showed much interest in philosophical ethics or political theory, and both died well before the resurgence of these fields that began in the 1970s. Their writings provide few models for political philosophers to follow, and are rarely taught in graduate courses in the field. Austins early death in 1960 was particularly unfortunate in this regard. After his passing, ordinary language approaches fell out of favor in other areas of philosophy and slipped from the foreground of academic attention. Also influential were nagging reservations about ordinary language philosophy more generally. Even its admirers sometimes view the analysis of ordinary language as suited only to the negative, therapeutic task of dispelling conceptual confusion, while having little constructive utility in political reflection.2 Critics complained that in their deference to established usage, ordinary language analysts must be unsuspecting of the ideological falsifications that infect everyday political consciousness. On this view, ordinary language is necessarily conservative and ideological, and making it central to theoretical discussion precludes a suitably critical stance toward prevailing norms, practices, and conventions. These criticisms were crystallized in polemical attacks on ordinary language philosophy published by Herbert Marcuse and Ernest Gellner in the 1950s and 1960s.3 Although Alan Wertheimer effectively rebutted the charges,4 the Austinian program has not been
1. Isaiah Berlin, Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy, in Essays on J. L. Austin, ed. G.J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 14. 2. For example, Phillip Pettit, The Contribution of Analytic Political Philosophy, in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert Goodin and Phillip Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 910. 3. Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (London: Gollancz, 1959), 217; Herbert Marcuse, OneDimensional Man (New York: Beacon, 1964), 17273. 4. Alan Wertheimer, Is Ordinary Language Analysis Conservative?, Political Theory 4 (1976): 40522.

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taken up by political theorists in any systematic way, and the stock image of ordinary language philosophy as hair-splitting, politically disengaged, and conservative persists.5 As a result, the various intellectual paradigms (Kantian ethics, natural law theory, Rawlsian political liberalism, virtue ethics, poststructuralism, anti-foundationalism, rational choice theory, Straussianism) that dominate the field of political theory today rarely tarry long with ordinary language in the areas of ethical consciousness they theorize.

Why Austin Is Still Important: Anti-Scholasticism

In urging that we redress this imbalance, I stress that my interest is neither in ordinary language philosophy as a particular episode in intellectual history nor as a doctrinaire tradition to be revived. My aim is to rehabilitate ordinary language itself as a philosophical resource, one that political theorists too often ignore. Apart from the many insights it offers on specific matters, the close study of ordinary use has a more general value in subjecting intellectual speculation to a powerful and salutary anti-scholastic check. Scholasticism is a perennial temptation in any academic field, and at the heart of Austins project was an astute diagnosis of this phenomenon. As he saw it, scholasticism develops when academics rip words and concepts clean from the circumstances in which they would ordinarily be used and then redeploy them to populate highly technical, specialized theoretical frameworks of their own devising. The result is over-simplification, schematization, and constant obsessive repetition of the same small range of jejune examples, scholastic faults that Austin described as far too common to be dismissed as an occasional weakness of philosophers.6 As a counterweight to these tendencies, Austin urged philosophers to initiate
5. These longstanding misconceptions about ordinary language philosophy have been further reinforced in recent years by the influential contemporary campaign for experimental or empirical forms of philosophical inquiry. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Jesse Prinz, Empirical Philosophy and Experimental Philosophy, in Experimental Philosophy, ed. Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 189209. This campaign often trades on na ve oppositions between empirical and armchair conceptual analysis in a way that unfairly reads Austin out of the picture. We should remember that we owe to Austin one of the earliest uses of the pejorative metaphor of the armchair philosopher who analyzes concepts a priori. See J. L. Austin, A Plea for Excuses, in his Philosophical Papers, ed. G.J. Warnock and J.O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 182. Philosophical experimentation to determine the tolerances of concepts used in ordinary language under the pressure of different empirical circumstances was central to Austins approach. Experimental philosophers ought to be sympathetic to, rather than dismissive of, this Austinian technique. 6. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 3. Compare political theorists fascination with largely meaningless terms like liberalism, contestability, alterity, intuition, foundationalism; our tendency to trade in abstractions like metaphysics, modernity, ontology, identity, subject, or the separateness of persons; and our predilection for highly stylized philosophical examples (trolley problems, eye lotteries, babies drowning in ponds, etc.).

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careful field work in the ordinary use of those expressions and words that are adjacent to, or involved in, their area of interest: How much it is to be wished that similar field work will soon be undertaken in, say, aesthetics; if only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy.7 Although Austin regarded this fieldwork as a prerequisite for sophisticated theoretical reflection about virtually any topic, it does not follow that his approach is in any sense anti-theoretical. Our everyday metaphors and turns of phrase are themselves often theory-laden, and therefore inquiry into ordinary use need not be a journey into a theoretical void.8 Austin certainly insisted that we achieve a firm grip on how ordinary language characteristically works in the relevant contexts before investing heavily in large-scale academic theories. But this insistence was less a protest against theory as such as against theories that are simplistic (and, more pointedly, against the conceit that it is easy for intellectuals to resist simplification: in this sense, Austins project was a plea for intellectual humility). As Austin famously put it: certainly, . . . [o]rdinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.9 Austins first word proviso underlines his insistence that, ideally, ordinary language be consulted in the early stages of inquiry, so as to kill off scholastic temptations at their root. One way to show the continued relevance of the Austinian approach to political reflection, then, is to explain how it can offset forms of scholasticism that are prevalent in academic political theory today. Accordingly, I will identify three distinctively scholastic prejudices that often infect the early, agenda-setting phases of recent discussion in the field, and in each case show how Austinian techniques provide an appropriate remedy. I stress that in arguing in this way, I do not mean to indiscriminately indict all contemporary political theory as entirely insensitive to nuances of ordinary use. I concede that many important and influential arguments made by political theorists since Rawls are consistent with, already perfectly attentive to, or could not be significantly improved by consultation of ordinary use. Contemporary political theory is in any case too variegated a category to permit a sensible evaluation as a whole. Indeed, to reify it in this way would be to indulge the very sort of scholasticism I want to resist. My target is not the abstraction contemporary political theory, but rather the forms of scholasticism that Austin hoped to expose and dissolve. Informed readers will recognize these tendencies

7. Austin, A Plea, 18283. 8. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980). 9. Austin, A Plea, 185.

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in recent political theory, even as they acknowledge that the field is not defined by them. The Scholasticism of Texts As with earlier forms of scholasticism, the prevalence of the highly technical idioms that Austin warned against reflects a dominant presumption that texts written by certain designated, qualified authors (trained churchmen, accredited fellow academics, canonized historical figures, etc.) provide the main source of insight into the phenomena to be investigated. Take a glance at the program of any major academic conference in political theory and one will immediately be struck by the high proportion of panels devoted to the discussion of canonical authors. This presumption in favor of texts, and moreover texts of a special kind, is by now deeply woven into our disciplinary norms and pedagogy. Such texts are very often profoundly instructive and are worthy objects of study in their own right. Nevertheless, giving these texts, and the terms of art they characteristically propagate, undue prominence can prematurely limit our theoretical imagination. We stand as much in the shadow as on the shoulders of these giants; the dazzling light they cast in some directions may artificially darken other areas and lend premature credence to assumptions that deserve closer scrutiny. Ordinary language, as incited within everyday political interaction, is as important a source of insight precisely because it can guard against these tendencies. This is not to say that we can simply read sound conclusions off individual specimens of ordinary use. Austin explicitly warned against treating ordinary language as a final arbiter in philosophical argument; doing so would anyway be no better than simply invoking the authority of our favorite historical author (Arendt, Hobbes, Kant, Tocqueville, Hayek, Marx, Rawls, etc.) to defend our claims (though this scholastic conceit is hardly unknown in the field today). However, there is an important difference between the consultation of a text and the interrogation of ordinary language: the former will usually be the product of a single mind, with its own blind spots, prejudices, agendas, etc. Of course, ordinary use has its own shortcomings, but it has an open-ended character: it is not trying to say anything in particular, to be systematic, or to convince us of something. Rather, it embodies a rich assortment of latent communicative capacities that develop and persist as ways of coping with the problems of life in a variety of circumstances: If a distinction works well for practical purposes in ordinary life . . ., then there is sure to be something in it, it will not mark nothing.10 If ordinary use as such is not trying to tell us anything in particular, and is simply a rich reservoir of communicative capacity, how can we persuade
10. Austin, A Plea, 195.

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it to yield information and mine it for philosophical insight? The various dodges that Austin recommended for this purpose include the consideration of etymology and of the variations in use to be found across history and different natural languages. Austin shared Nietzsches appetite for the variegation of human social practice and culture, and regarded it as something to be cherished and not feared, as long as it is approached in a thorough and systematic way. Thoroughness was important to him because it guards against any tendency to fixate narrowly on certain words or idioms, and sees them as exhausting the modalities of expression in a particular area. He would have agreed with the spirit of Nietzsches remark in the Genealogy that the more eyes, different eyes, we use to observe one thing, the more complete will our concept of this thing, our objectivity be.11 But the most important device that Austin both advocated and practiced is the construction of vignettes in which certain expressions or verbal uses either seem very clearly appropriate or obviously aberrant. The identification of aberration is crucial in the Austinian approach, for it helps us to be brutal with, to torture, to fake and to override, ordinary language.12 By putting ordinary use under pressure, brutality of this kind exposes the substructure of norms and metaphors that permit, prevent, or (in some cases) require certain ways of using language. Austin claimed, for example, that we would, and should, never ordinarily say A wounded B for the purpose of killing him.13 As he showed, reflecting on why this phrase is aberrant reveals much about our implicit conceptions of responsible action. It is similarly illuminating to reflect on the proper (and improper) use of the word wound. Why, as Norwood Hanson asked many years ago, does it make sense to speak of someone receiving a wound in battle, but not to say that a surgeon, slicing up a patients abdomen in order to get at her appendix, is wounding her or that an Eskimo wounds the dead whale whose blubber he is hacking off?14 Investigation along these lines, Austin held, yields much more than an inventory of bare meanings or senses of words. When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or meanings, whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of . . . the phenomena. For this reason I think it might be better to
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1962), 119. 12. Austin, A Plea, 186. 13. J. L. Austin, Three Ways of Spilling Ink, in Philosophical Papers, ed. Warnock and Urmson, 27576. 14. Norwood Hanson, Causal Chains, Mind 64 (1955): 19496.

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use, for this way of doing philosophy, some less misleading name . . . for instance, linguistic phenomenology, only that is rather a mouthful.15 Therefore, if wounding for the purpose of killing, the surgeons incision inflicted a grave wound, or the lumberjack wounded the timber when he sawed up the log are not things we should ever say, except perhaps in very rare and peculiar cases, these are (in effect) events that hardly ever take place. The fruits of this sort of analysis are best illustrated by example, and in the last part of the article I will provide an example of my own. But, although Austin rarely tackled political or ethical topics directly, his approach is surely well suited to political reflection. Speech, as Aristotle noted, is what makes us political animals, and political interaction exhibits a rich vernacular of complaint, protest, intimidation, compromise, allegiance, mobilization, loyalty, complaisance, division, dissent, inequity, and so forth. However, rather than devote much time to fieldwork in ordinary use in these areas, political theorists today instead reach instinctively for the crutch of a classic text, a technical distinction, a scholastic paradigm. But what if, instead of (say) reflecting on Rawlss highly technical specification of Justice, we thought, at least at the outset, about the ordinary use of evenhandedness, crookedness, innocence, getting ones own back (what is the owned thing one gets back?), the irregular, rough justice, the aboveboard, and so on? Suppose that, instead of consulting Kant to determine what we mean by respect or love, we asked: why do we make love but not respector (to put the same question differently) why is respect not poetic in the way love is? And why do we pay respect but not love? Or what if, rather than parroting academic distinctions between positive and negative rights, or between natural, human, and positive rights, we reflected instead on such expressions as she has no business here, what gives you the right?, you have every right to be angry, bragging rights, or in its own right. What about the various verbs that we use to describe things that we do (violate, trample upon, wield, exercise, claim, waive, honor, bestow, etc.) with rights? Might we not learn more about the terms of political protest by forgetting for a while about such dry abstractions as illegitimate or unjustified and reflecting instead on the difference between exclaiming how dare you! and what do you think you are doing? A whole politics lies in between them. Austins own explorations in A Plea for Excuses, the only one of his papers that addresses directly issues relevant to political theorists, provides ample examples of the dividends such investigations might repay. Anyone interested in the nature of personal responsibility must take seriously Austins deconstruction of the myth of
15. Austin, A Plea, 182.

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the verb and his careful analysis of the difference between doing something by mistake and by accident. Similarly, his claim that, in ordinary language, voluntarily and involuntarily are not simple antonyms (Austin: involuntarily opposes deliberately or (not the same) on purpose; while voluntarily opposes under duress, constraint, or influence) is a cardinal insight for all sophisticated accounts of free and responsible action. These and related distinctions, derived not from meditation on any academic text, but by patient study of ordinary use, deserve our attention. Political theorists often insist, for example, that objectionable infringements on individual liberty occur only if they result from intentional action, or when done on purpose or for which someone can be held responsible, as if these phrases are simply interchangeable and pick out a single category of actions. Austins careful distinctions suggest otherwise, and likely complicate (but also illuminate) our understanding of the forms that (problematic) infringements on personal liberty might take.16 The Scholasticism of Disputation The penchant for formalized disputation between doctrines defined as mutual adversaries has been part of the academic mentality since the heyday of medieval scholasticism. Austin insisted, however, that these habits of Gleichschaltung, the deeply ingrained worship of tidy-looking dichotomies must be overcome.17 Within contemporary political thought, these habits persist in two overlapping forms, one more strictly academic, the other more political. The purely academic form is exemplified by the popularity of organizing dichotomies, including individualism versus collectivism, consequentialism versus deontology, realism versus antirealism, cosmopolitanism versus nationalism, and postmodernism versus modernism. The more political version involves the willingness to identify particular theoretical stances, and the theorists invested in them, with large-scale secular ideologies such as liberalism, liberal democracy, communitarianism, socialism, libertarianism, feminism, or conservatism. Hence, the contemporary popularity of research projects
16. Building on Hart and Honores famous work, Richard Tuck has recently shown how the ordinary language of causation can help dissipate some of the paradoxes of collective action, especially in the context of claims about the rationality of voting. This suggests that the resource of ordinary language need not be useful only to political theorists, but across political science more broadly. Richard Tuck, Free Riding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4043. To some degree, this is increasingly recognized in the empirical subfields: see, for example, James Fearon and David Laitin, Ordinary Language and External Validity: Specifying Concepts in the Study of Ethnicity, presented at LiCEP meetings October 2022, 2000, at the University of Pennsylvania; Lisa Wedeen, Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science 13 (January 2010, online): 25572; Frederic Schaffer, Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 17. Austin, Sense, 3.

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devoted to developing (say) a feminist theory of freedom, a liberal approach to minority rights, a libertarian theory of international justice, or a defense of market socialism. No doubt these categories, and the dichotomies that go along with them, often serve a useful purpose. They can have heuristic value and may help anchor academic discussion in the political discourse of the day. But the danger against which Austin warns in his talk of a habit of worship is the tendency for these organizing categories to master our theoretical imagination rather than accept subordination to it. When this happens, they form a privileged technical vocabulary around which set-piece academic debates pivot. Reflection is then increasingly controlled by the (often spurious) assumptions required to hold these debates in place. Worse, these assumptions become difficult to challenge because professional success is tied to establishing the significance of ones work in relation to such scholarly debates. As a result, our thinking becomes stuck in ruts, colonized by patterns of thought at once questionable yet hard to dislodge. Consider, for example, the recent fixation with foundationalism. The literature abounds with confident assertions about the demise, the collapse, or the discrediting of this purportedly traditional view. But the questions of what has supposedly suffered this catastrophic breakdown,18 and of why its downfall has specifically political implications, are rarely answered with any clarity or coherence. Yet despite this vagueness, even very sophisticated thinkers find themselves continually tempted to draw sharp adversarial lines around these categories. Here, for example, is Richard Rorty, trumpeting the anti-scholastic credentials of his anti-foundationalist position: Only when the sort of cultural change I optimistically envisage is complete will we be able to . . .[enjoy] . . . such intricate intellectual displays as the Summa Contra Gentiles or Naming and Necessity as aesthetic spectacles. Someday realism may no longer be a live, momentous and forced option for us. If that day comes, we shall think about questions about the mind-independence of the real as having the quaint charm of questions about the consubstantiality of the Persons of the Trinity.19

18. Is it moral realism? The correspondence theory of truth? Strong ontology? The possibility of objectivity (meaning what?)? The aspiration to technological mastery? The privileging of a certain sort of reason (instrumental? enlightenment?)? The methodological presuppositions of modern scientific research? Certain conceptions of the knowing/controlling subject? Trying to discuss these en bloc is a surefire recipe for groupthink, innuendo, and pointless disputation. 19. Richard Rorty, A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, in Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Collected Papers, Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 13637.

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This passage is entirely in tune with the Austinian program I am seeking to retrieve in this article, as is Rortys repeated suggestion that the work of novelists and other non-academic writings often provide more insightful resources for social criticism than do the works of scholars. Yet in the same essay Rorty could also write, As I see contemporary philosophy, the great divide is between representationalists, the people who believe that there is an intrinsic nature of non-human reality that humans have a duty to grasp, and anti-representationalists.20 This taste for dividing us from them, prevalent throughout Rortys oeuvre, reintroduces scholasticism by the back door. Is it useful to fixate in this way on the great divides that separate intellectuals from each other? Why view philosophical positions under this tectonic aspect, always asking which side of the fault line we are on? For all of the freshness of Rortys writings, remarks such as these lead us back to the tired scholastic presumption that theoretical engagement is best preconceived as a series of existential decisions about which parties to join (e.g., should I declare myself as a utilitarian? A perfectionist? A rationalist? A partisan of recognition rather than redistribution?). Of course, no one, not even Austin, would suggest that we need ordinary language to recognize this. But it is one thing to sense these dangers and another to find resources to actively resist them when they arise. Here Austinian techniques can still find an important role; while turning to ordinary language is not the only way to combat the seductions of intellectual partisanship, it is one very good way. For a start, it diverts our attention. Setting sail on an open sea of ordinary language can loosen prejudices (political or intellectual) required to sustain ongoing disputation among partisans of entrenched positions. But it also offers something more concrete: a genuine alternative to the debate-centered paradigm around which so much academic reflection revolves. As Austin stressed, in contrast to the model of competitive disputation, fieldwork in ordinary use provides an occasion for uncommitted intellectual collaboration. That is why he favored seminar-based teamwork as the best vehicle for inquiry into ordinary language. Such collaboration is rare among political theorists today, in part because they are encouraged to sink their intellectual capital into deathless struggles among ever more nicely distinguished adversaries. Pooling our talents to explore the functioning of our everyday political concepts might provide more light. It would also encourage theorists to seek the assistance of those outside the academy in developing ethnographies of everyday political speech, and in this way combat the esoterism that often haunts the field. Austin was often surprisingly enterprising in the sources he consulteda seminar on aesthetics he conducted examined a handbook of industrial design, for exampleand, in principle, public life is rich in comparable sources (e.g.
20. Rorty, Pragmatist View, 134.

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rulebooks of parliamentary or legal procedure), ones that are nonetheless largely neglected in academic political theory. The claims I have advanced in this section are likely to prompt two objections. The first asserts that the prospects for agreement about ordinary use in political contexts must be dim, because the concepts involved are essentially contestable. This ineradicable feature of political concepts means that ordinary language fieldwork in this area can never make any definitive progress or converge; adversarial debate will inevitably reemerge in due course, or so the objection maintains. However, the credibility of this contestability thesis may be an effect (rather than the cause) of the partisan disputation that plagues large sectors of the field. And is that thesis offered as an a priori truth about all (or some?) relevant concepts or as an empirical prediction that reflection about ordinary language in the context of political concepts will usually result in divergence rather than convergence? If the former, the contestability thesis strikes me as little more than a prejudice that needs to be defended (and has anyone since Gallie ever actually offered an argument for it, as opposed to parroting a slogan?). The latter version is more plausible, and one cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility that, rather than reducing disagreement, inquiry into ordinary use will only give scholars new things to disagree about. But since my main point here is that hitherto political theorists have largely ignored ordinary language, still less collaborated in actually exploring it, we are in no position at this stage to confirm or disconfirm the prediction. We must at least try first, and then see where the matter stands. Moreover, disagreements over language use may themselves be instructive, not necessarily occasions for empty disputation to resurface. As Austin said, If our usages disagree, then you use X where I use Y, or more probably (and more intriguingly) your conceptual system is different from mine, though very likely it is at least equally consistent and serviceable: in short, we can find why we disagree . . . . A disagreement as to what we should say is not to be shied off, but pounced upon: for the explanation can hardly fail to be illuminating. . . . a genuinely loose or eccentric talker is a rare specimen to be prized.21 In embracing ordinary language, then, we need not be choosing agreement over disagreement. We may instead be choosing to exploit disagreements for insight, rather than as excuses for pointless controversy. A second objection concerns my suggestion that political theorists should de-invest in large-scale ideological categories such as liberalism, feminism, or
21. Austin, A Plea, 184.

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libertarianism.22 If these ideological counters are part of the language games of ordinary political discourse, one might think that an Austinian approach would give them more credence, not less. This criticism recalls the Marcuse-Gellner objection mentioned earlier, according to which ordinary language analyses cannot be sufficiently critical of the ideologies and groupthink ubiquitous in much public discourse. This objection, however, neglects the vital distinction between the empirical prevalence of certain modes of speech at particular times and places and the range of possibly valid uses of ordinary language. Analysts of ordinary use are, or should be, primarily concerned with the latter. That is, the point of such analysis is to determine what could, or should, validly be said under certain circumstances. But that is very different from slavishly documenting, and giving some theoretical privilege to, what is actually or even typically said in some actual society or situation. It is entirely possible, for example, that empirically prevalent modes of speech represent clear abuses of ordinary language.23 But to detect such abuses, we must first do the patient fieldwork in the modalities of ordinary language that Austin recommended. The key word here is modality: ordinary use is not exhausted by empirically observable speech. It is, rather, constituted by the expressive potentialities latent within our linguistic resources. What can and should be said is often very different , unclarity, from what speakers actually do say (riddled with mindless cliche and dishonest euphemism).24 Consider in this regard the following remark of George Orwell: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. . . . Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called
22. Of course I dont mean to imply that liberal or feminist,etc. arguments are never valid; but if we find them powerful, important, revelatory, etc., it should be because they are good arguments, not because we have any independent allegiance to the ideological traditions that happened to have hit upon them. 23. As in the widespread tendency among journalists to use the word refute when they mean deny, for example, President Bush refuted allegations that he lied about the war with Iraq . . . . 24. This is why Austinian fieldwork cannot be pigeonholed as purely empirical or purely normative (a distinction that anyway exemplifies just the sort of scholasticism Austin abhorred). When the analyst of ordinary language claims that speakers would not say . . . X, she is not making a simple empirical prediction, but rather a judgment about what it would be appropriate/intelligible for a speaker in certain empirically specifiable circumstances to say/do in response. Here, empirical and normative considerations are woven inextricably together.

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transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.25 Here, Orwell reminds us that we do not need complex, esoteric, technical language to expose the delusions, falsifications, and complacencies so common in actual political discourse; natural language is usually quite sufficient. Indeed, Orwell suggests that the proliferation of bureaucratic, pseudo-scientific, technical jargon (WMD, regime-change, de-baathification, islamo-fascism) is far more likely to be implicated in, rather than a corrective to, the mendacities we want to expose. Orwells style of social criticism is thus quite compatible with, and indeed likely to be furthered by, an Austinian approach. The objections of Marcuse and Gellner that attending to ordinary language is necessarily reactionary and ideological are therefore unfair. They and other critics are misled by what they see as the unfortunate Burkean resonance of Austins remark that Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations: these are surely likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of survival of the fittest, and more subtle . . . than any that you or I are likely to think up in our armchairs of an afternoon.26 The parallel with Burke is at once tempting, yet deeply misleading. When Burke talked this way, he was discussing traditions, and especially the various unreflective habits and expectations that fix in place specific and putatively valuable social practices. But language, at least as Austin and Orwell conceived it, is no tradition or particular social practice. Rather, it is a power whose purposes are as diverse as human activity itself. These may include social criticism and the ruthless interrogation of established practices. The Austinian claim is simply that our power to understand the world, to record and grasp features of our ethical consciousness, and to articulate complaints, will be weakened to the extent that we ignore the nuances of ordinary use. To associate this stance, as Marcuse did, with an abhorrence of transgression is a complete distortion.27 The furor caused by the publication of Lady Chatterleys Lover reminds us that our
25. George Orwell, A Collection of Essays (London: Mariner, 1970), 16667. 26. Austin, A Plea, 182. 27. Marcuse, One-Dimensional, 173.

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most ordinary words, not extraordinary ones, often have the most explosive transgressive power. We rarely blaspheme in technical terms. The Scholasticism of Constructivism Especially since Rawls, arguments in political theory have frequently presented themselves as operating on so-called moral intuitions or considered convictions. A good political theory, on this account, will draw out the determinate implications of these widely shared ethical intuitions, and at the same time bring an overarching coherence to the whole field of common intuitions from which they are drawn.28 The most distinctive feature of this constructivist approach to political theorizing is the direction in which it argues, moving (by a process of constructive articulation) from putatively primitive and unsystematic everyday intuitions to (supposedly) more philosophically self-aware and integrated theoretical structures. Rawlss work exemplifies this sort of constructivism in its most austere form, but a similar approach can also be discerned in the work of Ronald Dworkin and even in the seemingly different approach taken by Michael Walzer. As with Rawls and Dworkin, Walzer sees himself as teasing out the implications of certain shared understandings to which he assumes his readers are already committed. As he has it, the political philosopher should accept those understandings as they stand and then offer propitious constructive interpretations to disclose their specific implications. But as Rawls acknowledged, this approach makes sense only if the intuitions fed into the resulting theories are first certified as considered convictions rather than just any unreflective ethical judgments that agents might report, or that happen to be widely shared in particular societies at particular historical junctures. However, Rawls did not provide a systematic account of how to distinguish intuitions that are appropriately considered from those that are illconsidered or otherwise unacceptably unreflective. He hinted, correctly in my view, that the sort of analysis required to accredit certain intuitions as considered judgments would probably be Socratic in form.29 But he never pursued such an analysis in a sustained way. Walzer, in contrast, seems actively suspicious of the effort to inquire into the credentials of these supposed shared understandings. This may be because he assumes that doing so would indulge what he dubs in Interpretation and Social Criticism the path of discovery, the idea that there is some independent order of
28. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1519, 4046; John Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2932, 4142. 29. Rawls, Theory, 507; on the link between ordinary language philosophy and Socratic analysis, see Oswald Hanfling, Philosophy and Ordinary Language (London: Routledge, 2001), 1525.

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moral data standing behind language and culture.30 But this trades on a false ultimatum: either some coherently articulable local consensus or some problematic form of realism about ethics. The resource of ordinary language provides a way out of this paralyzing dichotomy. The real choice is not between moral realism and approaches that remain locked within, and credulously ratify, some local set of shared understandings or moral intuitions. Rather, it is between relatively vague, inchoate, and prematurely charitable characterizations of prevailing intuitions and cultural norms and more precise articulations of the ordinary practical consciousness from which they are cobbled together. Although it does not get us to some realm of independent moral truth, attention to the ways we use certain words and concepts in different normative situations allows us to gain critical distance from the conventional self-presentation of familiar moral beliefs beyond which Walzer, Rawls, and many others are reluctant to look. (Consider, We all believe in equality today. Who is this we and when, in what concrete situations, does the language of equality actually make sense?)31 The norms governing, and reflected in, language use need not have any distinctively cultural locus. They may be common to many cultures, perhaps reflecting psychological propensities that cut across cultural difference. Nor do they necessarily fall naturally into integrated structures called moralities or shared understandings. They may be fractured and internally contradictory in a way that efforts to theorize them as wholes only conceal. If this is correct, ordinary language analysis provides a way to pierce the veil of uncertainty that surrounds appeals to intuition and shared understandings, and to map their inner geography more sharply. It allows us to do so, moreover, from a point of view that is not itself culturally partial or at any rate not obviously so. Instead of moving forward from an initial characterization of certain germane moral intuitions (selected on some usually unexplained basis), the analyst of ordinary use moves in the opposite direction, to yield a more discriminating appreciation of what stands behind the intuitions and shared understandings on which political theorists like to build. Some will counter that we need to devise theories precisely because ordinary use is too vague and unrefined. They will point to the incredible variation in
30. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 31. While I am sympathetic to G. A. Cohens critique of Rawlsian constructivism, I see no reason to think that the resulting debate about whether normative principles should be fact-dependent or factindependent is likely to be a helpful one. See G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); and David Miller, Political Philosophy for Earthlings, in Political Theory: Methods and Approaches, ed. Marc Stears and David Leopold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). The authentically Austinian response, I think, is to say that without clarification of how (and in which contexts) we would ordinarily speak of agents acting on principle, of being men or women of principle, of standing on principle, of having strong principles, or of adopting a principle, on the basis of certain personal experiences, this debate about principles is sterile.

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the deployment of everyday concepts across historical contexts and natural languages, and insist that without the conceptual refinement in which professional philosophers specialize, lay use is simply too crude and unruly to supply determinate guidance about how public institutions should be organized. This argument implicitly compares analytical theorization to a process of manufacture in which we begin with certain crude, impure, raw materials grapes, minerals, larval secretions, everyday concepts of justiceand work them into something more refined (fine wine, multifaceted gems, silk scarves, elaborate conceptions of justice). I see no reason to accept this analogy, however. Is variation across epochs and tongues necessarily a sign of crudeness or disarray? We cannot simply assume this in advance: uses vary under different historical conditions (or in other languages) because they answer in a particular compelling way to the unique needs of diverse situations. What at first looks like unruliness may turn out on closer inspection to reflect sensitivity to easily overlooked but pertinent differences in context. For all we know, the development of different linguistic expressions for use under different circumstances is like speciation under natural selection, representing subtle adaptive advantage rather than any sort of crudeness. Austins writings remain fresh because they take that possibility seriously, and as a result often reveal ordinary use to be far more nuanced than the plodding abstractions of academicians. But until political theorists stop ignoring Austins pleas for fieldwork of this kind, they are in no position to assert with any confidence that ordinary use in relevant areas is chaotic or unsophisticated. Variation in linguistic use is as likely a sign that ordinary language is a source of theoretical subtlety in its own right, than as it is a symptom of some sort of coarseness that needs to be boiled away.

Coercion and Disrespect

To illustrate how Austinian analysis might be fruitfully applied in political theory, I conclude with a brief case study. Consider the claim that Coercion . . . reduces the will of one person to the will of another; [it violates] autonomy not simply in virtue of that fact, but because of the symbolic gesture this fact represents. In subjecting the will of one otherwise autonomous agent to the will of another, coercion demonstrates an attitude of disrespect, of infantilization of a sort inconsistent with respect for human agents as autonomous, self-creating creatures.32
32. Michael Blake, Distributive Justice, State Coercion and Autonomy, Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2001): 25796.

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On the strength of such claims, many accept a global presumption against coercion and therefore assert that the question of political legitimacy always arises in the same basic form: under what conditions might the presumptive illegitimacy of state coercion be defeated? On this now very familiar liberal view, which likes to claim a Kantian (and sometimes Lockean) inspiration, efforts to coerce people must overcome this burden of proof and show themselves to be consistent with an underlying principle of respect for persons. The elaborate thought-experiments devised in the recent contractualist tradition from Rawls onward seek to determine what forms of coercion might satisfy this desideratum. The orthodoxy that coercion demonstrates an attitude of disrespect thus does double duty in this approach. On the one hand, it characterizes a generically objectionable feature of coercion. On the other, it allocates the burden of proof that assertions of coercive control over the individual must meet: to be legitimate they must avoid disrespect for persons. Little of the philosophical disagreement that has developed in the wake of Rawlss book has cast doubt on this underlying assumption about the significance of the Kantian principle of respect for persons. The main controversy has rather concerned which kinds of coercive action that principle allows. Redistributive taxation (for purposes other than maintaining basic guarantees against force, fraud, and theft) has proven particularly contentious in this regard. Some follow Rawls in seeing it as required by respect for persons. Others counter that it is always profoundly disrespectful for the state to presume to decide for individuals how their earned income should be spent. Since Rawls, this disagreement has been played out in large-scale confrontations between artificially constructed conceptions like justice as fairness and the libertarian entitlement theory. But once underway, discussion conducted at this level may lead us to overlook the real nub of the disagreements: in the end, they hinge on the credibility of various metaphors, constructed from words in ordinary use, inviting us to view redistributive taxation (and other controversial public practices) in a favorable or unfavorable light. But consider again the metaphors operative in Blakes remark above: disrespect, infantilization, personal independence, and subjection. These are not the property of any academic tradition or theoretical construct, but are drawn from the everyday, face-to-face discourse of complaint and resentment (the realm of Strawsons reactive attitudes). That discourse is ripe for Austinian fieldwork. I cannot here conduct such fieldwork systematically. I confine myself to four points that I hope illustrate where Austinian techniques might be constructively pursued in this area and the directions in which they point. (When) (and what) does coercion disrespect? While agents frequently complain of disrespect in everyday life, the ways in which they do so do little to substantiate the liberal contractualist postulate of a close link between

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coercion, disrespect, and wrongdoing. Such complaints often arise in contexts that have nothing to do either with coercion or autonomy. When my son contemptuously ignores my request to tidy his room, my students check their email during my lectures, or my religion is openly mocked by comedians or cartoonists, I may intelligibly complain of disrespect. But these cases plainly involve no coercion and do not imperil my autonomy in any other way. Nor need disrespect be a form of wrongdoing. Ordinary use certainly suggests that disrespect is at least always unwelcome to its target, but that does not show that it necessarily involves wrongdoing. Punishment is unwelcome to its victim, and may be intended (and rightly experienced) as disrespect, but it does not follow that it is wrongly inflicted. Still, even if much disrespect does not involve coercion, it might remain true that all coercion involves disrespect. But surely not always in the same way. Consider the case of redistributive taxation we mentioned earlier: in what ways might this be disrespectful of taxpayers? Blake mentions several different possible dimensions of disrespect: the subjection of one will to another; treating adults like children; failing to take autonomous self-creation seriously. To Blakes list we might add several others also familiar from ordinary life humiliation, dishonor, insult and offense, and ridicule. I find it difficult to imagine circumstances in which complaints about redistributive taxation couched in any of these terms would ordinarily carry much conviction: should citizens who believe their tax rate is too high or who disapprove of the uses to which their taxes are put protest that they are thereby treated like children, mocked, humiliated, offended, dominated, not recognized as self-creators, or dishonored? The fact that these metaphors fail in (or at least stretch) ordinary use swings the onus back onto those who follow Nozick in seeing an analogy between taxation and forced labor, for those metaphors fare far better in standard cases of forced labor. Here, Austinian techniques operate like a crowbar prising Nozicks famous analogy apart. One might query the relevance of these points by denying that the force of Nozicks analogy derives in any important way from claims about disrespect for persons. Perhaps, for example, Nozicks objection to both forced labor and redistributive taxation is grounded, not on any experiences of personal disrespect, but on claims about the importance of certain inviolable rights. In that case, notions of respect for persons do no important work in Nozicks analogy, and redistributive taxation (like forced labor) is objectionable because, and only because, it violates a fundamental right.33 However, stripped of any
33. One natural reading of the libertarian objection to redistributive taxation is that it involves a form of theft. I agree that there is something to this charge; but notice that it does little to support Nozicks forced labor analogy, for surely we shouldnt say that the essential problem with forced labor is that it involves theft.

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connection with notions of personal respect and disrespect, a bare appeal to fundamental rights along these lines is unsatisfying. Sensing that Nozicks notoriously incomplete defense of Lockean rights begs the question against redistributive taxation, many readers persist with Nozicks argument only because they suspect it might capture our intuitions about respecting persons better than do the alternatives. But I have suggested that ordinary use puts pressure on the libertarian claim at just this critical point. To be sure, in ordinary language rights are themselves objects of respect, as are the wishes they protect. But we cannot slide automatically from the useful shorthand that agents legitimate rights and wishes ought to be respected to definitive judgments about which categories of wishes and entitlements must be upheld if we are to avoid seriously disrespecting people, and that is the crucial issue that needs attention. To pose the question in Kantian terms, when does coercion treat agents only as means (and therefore disrespect persons), and when does it at the same time treat them as ends-in-themselves (and hence respect them)? I have contended that ordinary use casts doubt on the libertarian claim that redistributive taxation belongs in the former category. If so, this in turn defuses the criticism we mentioned at the start that consideration of ordinary use has an exclusively therapeutic role and cannot be used to defend substantive normative judgments. Not all Kantians, of course, accept the libertarian view of redistributive taxation. They may argue, following Rawls, that properly designed contractualist tests can establish, with some specificity, when redistributive taxation is compatible with the Kantian imperative never to treat others as means only (and when not). Arguments along these lines by now have a very honorable pedigree, and may well justify the specific conclusions Rawls and others have defended. Yet one can still ask: when it comes to carefully discriminating between respectful and disrespectful coercion, can contractualist thought-experiments beat ordinary language? I would bet against this. Even when consideration of ordinary use supports the same conclusions as those reached by more elaborate contractualist means, it may do so with greater efficiency and sophistication. At the same time, it has the additional advantage of accessing many more relevant intuitions about respect and disrespect than the inevitably more limited set of uses on which any particular contractualist framework must concentrate. Contribution and disrespect. David Schmidtza philosopher whose writings are more than usually attentive to the subtleties of natural languagehas recently linked redistributive taxation and disrespect in an interesting way, one that corresponds to some widely held (though controversial) attitudes in capitalist societies. In a liberal economy, he claims, people participate in the system of production because, in protecting contributors title to the personal profits they yield, that system recognizes their contributions as their own. Although he

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acknowledges the possibility that there is a form of respect that we can have for people even while giving them no credit for the effort and talent they bring, he denies that this is the sort of respect that brings producers to the table . . ., that makes communities work. This leads him to object to those who talk as if justice is about how to divide what people contribute, rather than how to respect what people contribute.34 Schmidtz seems to suggest the gratitude and respect that brings producers to the table requires that we at least restrain the urge to redistribute (divide) the rewards they reap. This line of argument raises many questions, and consideration of pertinent ordinary language allows us to pose them in a particular sharp way. Schmidtz assumes that income represents contribution such that redistributing someones earnings through taxation can amount to dividing their contribution, and hence signaling a kind of disrespect. But would (should) agents ordinarily equate income and contribution in this way? Should you think of your salary as a contribution? (Is a surgeons contribution to society in saving your life equivalent to or represented by the market price of his services? Should we call income tax a tax on our economic contributions?) Does it make sense to speak, with Schmidtz, of agents owning their contributions (as opposed to the income they may command)? If so, could it still count as a genuine contribution? Austinian inquiry into these questions would point us in two worthwhile directions. On the one hand, it forces us to consider how we actually (should) think about contribution in the context of economic cooperation, an issue that theorists of distributive justice have generally neglected. On the other hand, suppose that Austinian techniques substantiate that Schmidtzs way of thinking about contribution, respect, and economic reward abuses the ordinary concepts involved. This would at least put us on the road to establishing that the prevalent attitudes about redistributive taxation as disrespect that Schmidtzs argument reflects represent a certain sort of ideological illusion. I am not here claiming to have substantiated this charge. The point is simply that, in principle, Austinian techniques might help substantiate it: as Orwell reminds us, abuse of words is a common symptom of ideological illusion. But to accept that fieldwork in ordinary use could play this role is to allow that it can accomplish much more than critics like Marcuse and Gellner have supposed. Symbolic Gestures. Implicit in Blakes remark is a contrast between coercion that directly accomplishes a reduction of someones will and coercion that communicates subordination symbolically or by gesture.35 Even if both are objectionable, they are so presumably in different ways and degrees.

34. David Schmidtz, Elements of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15152, 154. 35. Note that symbols are distinct from gestures: giving someone the finger is not a symbol (though the finger involved may be), and the Swastika is not a gesture.

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But since both of these possibilities rest in some sense on metaphors of interpersonal status, it is unclear how one should distinguish symbolic from nonsymbolic treatment in this context, and to what effect for our judgments about publicly accountable wrongdoing (if redistributive taxation is objectionable can it be because we would call it an inappropriate gesture of some sort?). In one of her last papers, Jean Hampton suggested that Paul Grices36 theory of meaning can be used to explicate the symbolic significance of actions that are demeaning or diminishing.37 Hamptons appropriation of Grice opens a possibility that is in some ways the converse of the one for which Austin is most famous, yet surely congenial to an Austinian outlook: just as there are speech-acts, there can be act-speech, and actions we interpret as demeaning, diminishing, or degrading are clear examples. Such actions convey messages about personal standing, worth, and inclusion, which is one reason why they can bother us so deeply. The ordinary metaphors we mobilize to mark treatment as debasing in these ways are virtually constitutive of the micropolitics of abuse to which theoretical arguments about disrespect for persons implicitly appeal. Our understanding of those arguments can only gain from Austinian investigation into how these metaphors actually function in everyday language.38 Dignity as a Trouser Concept. Under the influence of Kantian doctrine, many political theorists attribute the alleged presumption against coercion in general, and redistributive taxation in particular, to an underlying imperative of respect for dignity. However, the concept of dignity has no simple accepted meaning. While it has plenty of ordinary uses that deserve scrutiny,39 it is implausible to suppose that agents complaints about others disrespect can be simply read off some settled schedule of dignitary entitlements. Rather, the content of what we ordinarily demand by way of respect for our dignity is given by what we independently interpret as disrespect, humiliation,

36. Grice was of course a student of Austin; despite his later doubts about ordinary language philosophy, Grice never repudiated Austinian techniques entirely. 37. Jean Hampton, Righting Wrongs: The Goal of Restribution, in The Intrinsic Worth of Persons, ed. Daniel Farnham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12434. 38. There is a large literature in sociology and adjacent disciplines, much of it inspired by Goffman (whose interest in everyday interaction was certainly Austinian in spirit, if not directly influenced by Austin), that could aid in this effort. Particularly suggestive are: Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Transaction, 2010); Philippe Bourgeois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Randall Collins, Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); James Gilligan, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes (New York: G. P . Putnams & Sons, 1996). 39. Consider the way in which diplomats and other official representatives are dignitaries; or a mans complaint about the indignity of a prostate examination; or the way in which a crime or misdemeanor can be (as a speeding ticket I once received put it) an offence against the peace and dignity of a municipality.

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insult, ridicule, contempt, patronization, dismissiveness, giving the lie, exclusion, etc. On this hypothesis dignity turns out to be what Austin called (with apologies for the sexist terminology) a trouser concept, a notion that he elaborated most clearly in his discussion of the ordinary use of the word real. Austin argued that philosophers are misled by syntax into believing that there must be some set of positive attributes characteristic of all those entities that possess reality. But he believed that this erroneous view, typical of scholastic modes of reflection, can be dissipated by noticing that what does the really important work in the different ordinary uses of the word real are the various things that contrast with the real in varying contextscounterfeit, toy, dummy, picture, artificial, illusory, and others.40 It seems plausible to speculate that this is also true of dignity. Dignity covers a large field of experience and evaluative commitment. To apprehend its (possible) use, we have to see how contrasting concepts (diverse forms of indignitybelittlement, ridicule, indecent exposure, humiliation, insult, offence, etc.) cast light and shadow across that field and reveal its topography. Without this detail illuminated, however, the bare concept of dignity is an extremely unforthcoming one, as anyone who has tried to define it can attest. To really understand how the landscape of human dignity is internally structured, why we feel at home in it, and how it is vulnerable to abuse, one needs a closer scale map. Doubtless the stylized categories of Kantian ethics are often a rough and ready guide. But, ultimately, they are no substitute for a more systematic exploration of (and may artificially simplify) the ordinary use of expressions involving disrespect, humiliation, rejection, insult, mockery, belittlement, personal defeat, and violation. As Austin said, [T]oo evidently there is gold in them thar hills;41 I suggest that it is time for political theorists to devote more energy to seeking it, in this and other areas. Colin Bird is Associate Professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Political Philosophy, Policy and Law at the University of Virginia. He is the author of two books, The Myth of Liberal Individualism (Cambridge 1999), and An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Cambridge 2006). He can be reached at colinbird@virginia.edu.

40. Austin, Sense, 7072. 41. Austin, A Plea, 181.