Rhetoric and the Spread of the Discourse of Thatcherism

Abstract

This paper puts forward a model of processes of discourse and rhetoric as a way of understanding the attempt of Thatcherism to create a new common sense in British society. The theoretical model is first presented. This includes a notion of the role of a special type of rhetoric (consisting of key words and formulaic phrases) in discursive processes and a notion of the active part played by language users in reproducing and transforming discourses. The aim is to draw a link between macro-processes of social and cultural change and micro-processes of everyday language use. The roots of the rhetoric in the genre of the everyday world facilitate take-up by the mass media and the public and thus the penetration of the discourse of Thatcherism into the language of individual language users. The empirical study which is then presented focuses on the role of one key word, choice, in reproducing and restructuring the discourse of Thatcherism in different sociopolitical domains: official Conservative Party texts and official Labour Party texts (speeches by Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet members to the Annual Party Conferences in 1991), print and broadcast news media (news coverage of the Conferences), the arguments of grass-roots Labour Party members (1991) and grass-roots Conservative Party members (1991 and 1992). It was found that in all the domains studied, the discourse of Thatcherism was reproduced and transformed through the selective use by language users of choice in collocation with other rhetorical terms. A degree of resistance to the discourse was also found. The paper concludes with a short account of the fate of Thatcherist discourse in the UK since the time of the study.