Introduction

Summary

This book is not about ‘self-presentation’. It is rather more about ‘representative politics’, but my discussion of this subject is not abstract. It is systematically linked to an account of the process of my attitude formation through time (my developing self-constitution and self-presentation). The emergent attitude towards representative politics which the book displays is overtly relative to my personal social and intellectual trajectory. This historical account culminates in the argument that political processes should be re-defined by re-assigning primacy to social encounters. This concluding argument tries to reverse the current trend in which self-reliant social discourse is proscribed politically. The form adopted in the book is a device to seek to enact what it finally argues. The historical account of my intellectual progression is offered as a model for reflexive socio-analytic exchanges within society, designed simultaneously to encourage mutual understanding between socially constituted individuals and to discourage acquiescence in the domination of professionalised politics.

The book assembles six papers which I have written during the course of my career, from 1962 until the present, all of which impinge on politics. Each is prefaced by a short introduction which gives an account of the circumstances of its production and offers some retrospective discussion of content and context. The individual chapters written at different times with varying emphases are threaded together through a developing analytical framework consolidated by my encounter with Bourdieu. A line of development is evident from the chapter taken from my PhD with its philosophical concerns, closer to a history of ideas approach (Chapter 2B), in part reprised two decades later in a more structured sociological analysis of citizenship and nationhood in a Bourdieusian manner (which is only sketched out in Chapter 3B). In Chapter 4B, I am engaged in an argument, via Burke and Barker, about electoral politics that attempts to expose the static symbolic representations of MPs to a sociology of the origins and life trajectories of competing politicians. A brief return to the details of a local political sub-field in the final chapter (6B) brings the reader full circle, now more fully buttressed by Bourdieusian phenomenology. A postscript reflects on the tripartite divisions of cultural capital over the course of an academic career and its determinants.