Of all the concepts spotlighted in The War of Words, democracy is
surely the richest and most genuinely contested. When we speak about it, do we
mean liberal democracy or its illiberal cousin? Workplace democracy or
constitutional democracy? Market democracy or social democracy? Does it live in
the practice of elections and voting, in the language of law and rights, or in
daily habits? Is it a substantive achievement or a procedural one? Democracy
would appear to be an ideal candidate for the Jamesian approach, making it all
the stranger that he has so little to say about it. Democracy, he explains
briskly, but without much reference to any specific time or place, has a
“strong normative definition,” by which he seems to mean that it is
aspirationally about rule of, by, and for the people. All political ideas are
normative, of course, and so this is not an especially distinguishing characteristic.
Rather than breaking the concept down into constituent parts or analyzing its
competing components (in the manner of, say, Astra
Taylor), James instead dashes
off 10 vague and clichéd “lessons” from Weimar Germany about democratic failure—a
poor man’s Timothy Snyder, and not all that relevant to the decluttering
work at hand.
How, exactly, are citizens bamboozled and mistaken about the terms James
has selected? The book takes for granted that we’re all irritated by the
delirious state of current political discussion, but doesn’t do much to explain
how, more specifically, people are locked into conceptual impasses around
notions like hegemony or geopolitics, let alone socialism or capitalism. What
James does propose is that some of our best terms have swollen in their
metaphorical meaning and moralistic charge. He writes regretfully about how
words that once referred neutrally to “concrete political or social phenomena”
are now “easy labels, usually of condemnation,” rife with “quasi-metaphorical
meanings” that smuggle ethical judgment into intellectual or policy
discussions. The title of his own book is, naturally, a metaphor, and The
War of Words relies on a range of others to make its case: describing
political discourse as a marketplace, words in terms of currency, and language
as a kind of blockchain technology. The irony here is well and truly lost.
There is perhaps a useful distinction to be drawn, which James doesn’t,
between technical terms that need fixed definitions and universal legibility in
order to function, and political ideas for which that kind of thing is genetically
hopeless. The most interesting words here fall in this latter category. Ideas
like capitalism and socialism relate to the things we most value, and therefore
tend not to have single or universal semantic meanings. In fact, terms like democracy or freedom or Europe or liberalism (strangely omitted from this book) are politically
resonant exactly because of the chameleon quality that so badly annoys James,
because they can be used to channel so many varied desires, because they can do
so much work in the world. In their slipperiness lies their charm.
For words like these ones, Raymond Williams recognized in the 1970s, “it
is not only an impossible but also an irrelevant procedure” to fix meanings so
authoritatively. Rather, it is “the range that matters.” Political words resist
being flash-frozen by elites because they “embody different experiences and
readings of experience,” claimed Williams, a fact that remains true in spite of
“the clarifying exercises of scholars or committees.”
