This thesis engages critically with the question of how poststructuralist notions of ethics and responsibility might inform practical politics. The thesis reviews extant literature in Politics and International Relations which addresses this question and identifies a series of problematic assumptions that underlie these approaches. These tensions are, I argue, a result of a disjuncture between the question asked and the literature drawn upon to answer it. To explore these issues further the thesis then goes back to the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy which underpins much of the secondary literature, to provide alternative readings of these authors which allow for a different framing of responses to this question. Rather than approaching ethics and politics as originally separable or derivable from one another the thesis argues that the focus needs to shift instead to the relationship between these concepts. The originary ethics drawn from Levinas in order to provide an ethical politics is, I argue, not straightforward. Instead, as the question is traced through this literature the notion of a transcendent Other and the corresponding idea of a pure ethical or responsible relation as a necessary or possible starting point for ethics is challenged. Nancy’s focus on the line or limit refigures the relationship between ethics and politics in such a way that they are only on the line which both separates and joins them. In this alternative reading both immanence and transcendence are corrupted as grounds, so nothing remains to provide answers on the better way to proceed. Ultimately, returning to the original question, this means that there are no grounds—particularly ethical ones—on which to construct a ‘politics of’ anything; only ethical-political decisions on possible answers can be made.

This thesis aims to answer the question ‘What is the political?’ While much has been written on individual conceptions of ‘the political’, the main aim of this thesis was to conduct a comparative research between different conceptions of the political. In particular, the thesis presents the conceptions of the political by Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Chantal Mouffe, and analyses in what sense and where their conceptions differ. In doing so, three aims were set as a framework of comparison: 1) to clarify the relation between politics and the political; 2) to question the dissociative and associative traits of the political; and 3) to shed light on the relation between the notion of humanity and the concept of the political. The main conclusions drawn as a result of this research are thus also threefold: 1) the relation between the political and politics should not amount to privileging of the former, and contra contemporary emphasis on a political ontology, Schmitt and Arendt do not envision the political in these terms – instead, their conceptions of the political serve as a desired state of politics; 2) any actual association is one that functions according to the logic of democratic exclusion, whereby the distinction between associative and dissociative traits of the political become superfluous; and 3) utilising the notion of humanity, Schmitt and Arendt aim to overcome the restrictive imposition of the political, while Mouffe embraces the democratic principle of exclusion. The concluding chapter aims to bring together the findings of individual scholars and to pave way for a concept of the political that integrates the individual elements found in each scholar.

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This research analyses online political communication in China by applying Habermas’ public sphere theory as a normative framework. The three institutional criteria (equality, problematization of unquestioned areas, and principally inclusive) and two political functions (expressional function and corresponding function) stemming from the public sphere theory act as analytic lenses to analyse the power relations, expressions, languages, and interactions in the communications. By using three events as case studies, this research applies a combination of content and discourse analysis to study them. It argues that there is a semi-structured public sphere in China, in the sense that it is a sphere that shows both promise and limitations in terms of facilitating equal, inclusive, liberal and critical political communications in China. It can act as a normative space for Chinese net-users to communicate about their concerns, but is not powerful enough to put real pressure on government to achieve sustained changes at policy level. Equal and inclusive debates are facilitated as net-users are given equal rights to express their opinions, and these opinions are inclusively available online; but they are also limited since pre-existing status has not been dis-regarded. Opinions generated by social and political elites and media organisations are constructed with pre-determined significance, and as a result, opinions are unequally accessed and valued. Through the online public sphere, Chinese net-users have debated different political issues. Through expressions and linguistic choices that are both critical and creative, they have challenged the government’s decisions and roles, and resisted censorship. The government still censors online debates, but has begun to recognise the significance of the online public sphere, and in a limited way, has engaged in communications with net-users, although they treat these communications as ways to promote and reinforce their interests, rather than truly seeking out opinions from the public.

The study compares and examines parliamentary rhetoric against newspapers editorials in Malawi to establish whether or not there are parallels in the way political issues are presented in both arenas. The study intends to establish whether or not newspapers in Malawi provide critical and analytical voices for newspaper readers or whether or not they simply reflect the political positions of their owners’ political parties by reflecting those political parties’ rhetoric in parliament. The study uses three case studies. Specifically, these are the one hundred days following 1994, 1999 and 2004 elections. Newly elected governments tend to use the early days of their election into office to articulate and lay the foundations of implementing their policies. The study uses frame theory analysis as a theoretical and analytical tool. The four main components of a frame: Problem Definition, Causal Interpretation, Moral Evaluation and Treatment Recommendation are used to detect frames in the corpora. Data were coded in accordance with the grounded theory method. Findings indicate that in 1994 and 1999, newspaper editorial writers framed political issues by reflecting the positions of their owners. However, in the 2004 case study, while the newspapers’ framing of political issues did not differ from parliamentary framing, changes in ownership and owners’ political re-alignment affected framing. The newspapers no longer reflected the position of the political parties, there was no division along political party-lines, and they did not take cues from parliament The study contributes to the study of political communication in Malawi by studying frames emerging from editorial and parliamentary discourse. Further, it contributes to a further understanding of linkages between issue-specific frames and generic frames in the African context.

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This thesis aims to critically examine the relationship between post-socialism and post-Marxism, between a historical context opened by the collapse of `really existing' socialist states in Eastern Europe, and a theoretical shift fashioned upon the idea of the immanent demise and overcoming of Marxist theory. The thesis is split into two parts. In the first part, my aim is to trace, through a detailed assessment of the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser - and also via the examination of the relationship between the two thinkers -a specific development of the problem of the `superstructures' in Marxist theory, of questions of politics, the State and ideology. If Gramsci, in his conceptualisation of the politics of hegemony, and in his attempt to reformulate Marxism as a `philosophy of praxis', pushes the issues of the theoretical and practical autonomy of revolutionary politics to the very limits of Marxism, then Althusser represents a further radicalisation of Gramsci. Arguing against a post-Marxist call for a `return from Althusser back to Gramsci', and especially against the attempt, such as can be found with Laclau and Mouffe, to reinterpret the Gramscian problematic through a revalorisation of the fundamental concepts of the liberal-democratic tradition, I argue for a need to reassess the singularity of Althusser's philosophical contributions to Marxism, and for their importance for a contemporary reinvigoration of Marxism. In this sense, I place particular stress on two moments in the theoretical apparatus of Althusser: a) his conception of philosophy as an act, or an intervention - which seems as a powerful solution to the question of `practicality of thought', to the injunction to `change the world' philosophically, without a reduction of philosophy to a simple servant of political practice and its immediate ideological objectives; and b) his theorisation of politics, or, more exactly, of the specificity of revolutionary politics, which Althusser is at pains to extract and separate from the `autonomy of the politicalthat is, to render heterogeneousto the general, `autonomous', sphere of the Law, of the State and of ideology. With Althusser, the true question of the autonomy of politics can only come via a radical negation of the `autonomy of the political', and, at the same time, through an affirmation of an irreducible singular dimension of political practice. In the second part of the thesis, I focus more concretely on the historical context of post-socialism, whilst drawing from the field of theoretical problems opened by the previous discussions of Althusser, Gramsci and post-Marxism. In this, I attempt to demonstrate that a certain rethinking and revitalisation of Marxism, and namely, of Althusser's contributions, seems as a necessary part of a critical confrontation with the post-socialist political, ideological and socio-economic realities. In the three analyses of the second part, I focus on some of the symptomatic moments of what I call the postsocialist political reason: a) the precise historical role of post-Marxist theory in the genesis of post-socialist reality, which I read via an examination of the political significance of Laclau and Mouffe's notion of hegemony in the context of the Slovenian Spring of the late 1980s; b) the relationship between liberal-democracy and nationalism, and in this, the specific structural dialectic of violence internal to the liberal State as a historical form, which I read against the paradoxes of `democratisation' in the context of the break-up of Yugoslavia; and c) the effects of the fetishism of legal categories and of the general tendency to reduce politics to Law in the post-socialist ideological `spectrum, which I contrast to the singularity of the revolutionary politics of Yugoslavia

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This study does not purport to be an intellectual biography of Orage, nor does it claim to comprehend Guild Socialism in all of its forms. It is, rather, an attempt to analyse the influence of A.R. Orage and <i>The New Age</i> upon the development of Guild Socialist ideas. The first part of the study deals with the influence of Orage upon the development of Guild Socialism in <i>The New Age</i>. It concentrates upon the relationship between his philosophical and political ideas, and argues that the tension between his search for the spiritual liberation of the individual and his hopes for the liberation of the national character had significant repercussions on his relations with the guildsmen of <i>The New Age</i>. This is illustrated by focussing upon his dialogues with A.J. Penty, S.G. Hobson, Ramiro de Maeztu and Major C.H. Douglas. We find that Orage travelled through so many forms of Guild Socialism because none of his associates were able to satisfy his philosophical and political aspirations. The thesis then moves on to trace some of the ideas developed by Orage and <i>The New Age</i> and attempts to evaluate their impact upon two other Guild Socialist organisations. This section deals with selected themes and focuses, in particular, upon economic ideas, conceptions of the state, and industrial policies. It begins with an analysis of G.D.H. Cole and the National Guilds League, and concludes with chapters on Maurice Reckitt and the Church Socialist League. It is argued that Orage and his associates in <i>The New Age</i> were important in both the origins and development of Guild Socialism. In particular, they were responsible for developing 'right wing' ideas which attracted influential sections of the movement.