The Political Elements of Silence

Abstract

AbstractThe study of concealed silences is predicated on an expansive view of the political developed in my book The Political Theory of Political Thinking. The features of political thinking differ among cultures and periods, yet share omnipresent characteristics in all walks of life and interaction: (1) having the last say in decision making for collectivities; (2) distributing ideological and ethical importance through prioritizing specified social arrangements above others; (3) mobilizing or withholding public support for communal and group discourses and activities; (4) articulating and implementing cooperative or conflictual measures in managing social interaction; (5) constructing and projecting collective future-oriented plans and visions; (6) exercising power and influence by employing persuasion, rhetoric, emotion, and menace as well as through operating cover-ups. Each of those involve silences that: (1) underline conclusivity and endorse boundaries or compliance; (2) eliminate challenges to the prominence of political actors, or veil their shortcomings; (3) filter the consent, acquiescence, or dissent on which political agents, institutions, and ideologies depend; (4) smoothen or dislocate the socio-political order by affecting stability or conflict through supplying uncontested continuity or introducing rupture; (5) manage the political construction of time necessary to aid or resist political identities and futures, including the reconstruction of collective memory; (6) intensify or quash the impact of ideas, arguments, and events by modulating their circulation, reception, and transformation. The emphasis is not on the ethical propriety of silences or their function in democratic traditions, but on their empirical centrality in analysing political thought.