Marnie Holborow, The politics of English. London: Sage, 1999. Pp. vii, 216. Hb $78.00.

Abstract

The politics of English is an oddly unifying book. If one were to wonder what Fairclough and Tannen, Bernstein and Saussure, Crystal and Kress, the Milroys and Foucault, Kachru and the British Council, Hume and Pennycook, Conrad and Fishman, Pinker and Chomsky, Cheshire and Trudgill, Holmes and Schiffrin, Lakoff and Labov, and a rather lengthy roster of others have in common, it would be the scorn for their work manifested by Holborow. This low esteem is based on the failure of these scholars to have given Marx and Engels, Voloshinov, and (“some”) Vygotsky a careful enough reading. In the author's view, there is little to be said – not just about English or the politics of English, but about applied linguistics, discourse, and sociolinguistics more generally – that was not already laid down by these very few authorized writers. This book will find few readers within these fields, I would think, since most of the practitioners would find the arguments made against their work oddly authoritarian, coming as they do from an author who argues that a materialist, economic argument is the only valid one.