Political Correctness: A Conceptual History
Perhaps no other concept has so drastically altered the nature of contemporary public debate as that of 'political correctness', or 'PC' for short. The concept rose to public awareness in the early 1990s in relation to debates about higher education in the United States, but it very quickly spread to countries on the other side of the Atlantic, and has become the hub of debates about ethnicity, feminism, free speech, and democracy ever since. Even so, there is as yet a very poor understanding of how this highly controversial concept emerged. The present study rectifies this situation. Drawing on materials made available digitally through various research and newspaper databases, the study provides the first empirically substantiated account of the history of the concept. Combining procedures adapted from corpus linguistics with rhetorical analysis, the project also considers how developments in (leftwing) critical theory no less than in (rightwing) conspiracy theory are enmeshed with the history of concept of PC.
Throughout, the project provides empirical evidence that has previously not been available when discussing PC, to enable us to talk about this concept on the basis of facts rather than pre-conceived ideological assumptions. Besides making clear how, when, and why PC became a controversial concept, the study makes substantial contributions to the history of the women's liberation movement in the USA, literary theory, American studies, and rhetoric.
Throughout, the project provides empirical evidence that has previously not been available when discussing PC, to enable us to talk about this concept on the basis of facts rather than pre-conceived ideological assumptions. Besides making clear how, when, and why PC became a controversial concept, the study makes substantial contributions to the history of the women's liberation movement in the USA, literary theory, American studies, and rhetoric.
Final report
As I mentioned in my application, the aim of the project has been to turn my research on the concept of ‘political correctness’ (PC, for short) into a monograph. As that work is not entirely completed, there are as yet no publications from the project; however, it will result in a monograph preliminarily entitled A New Style of Writing: A Conceptual History of ‘Political Correctness’, which will be the first study to systematically trace the development of said concept, from its pre-history in the freedom movements in the US, over its development within the Women’s Liberation movement in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, to something of a hub for the polarization of public debate from the 1990s onwards. In three parts, spanning three chapters each, the book tells the story of how political correctness goes from being a strategic method within the feminist movement, to being a conspiratorial concept that casts feminists and other champions of oppressed groups as thought police threatening free speech, or even as woke terrorists whose freedom of speech must be curtailed to ensure social stability.
In the process, the study significantly deepens our understanding of this concept, making important contributions to
1) feminist historiography and feminist theory, by highlighting the importance of the women’s liberation movement and its development for the articulation of PC;
2) sociology, by approaching the concept of PC as a symptom of the postliberal public sphere, extending the pivotal work of Jürgen Habermas; and
3) literary studies, by paying special attention to the literary public sphere in the postliberal/postmodern period, rethinking the way literature as a category needs to be conceived in this period.
The first section of the book, Personal Politics: The Feminist Origins of ‘Political Correctness’, accounts for the origins of the concept of PC, disproving the received view that it stems from the left in general, and that it was used ironically practically from the start. The first chapter looks at the features of the postliberal public sphere that developed in the USA after the second world. It notes that the era’s principal freedom movements – the Civil Rights’, Students’, and Women’s Liberation movements – all stress that politics not some abstract set of principles but something that affects people on a personal level, an insight most memorably expressed via the feminist slogan that the personal is political. This circumstance supports sociologist Jürgen Habermas’s contention that the distinction between the public and private spheres of life that was a constitutive feature of bourgeois ideology from the eighteenth century onwards had broken down in the twentieth century. Yet in the wake of that collapse, new ways of generating democratic agency emerged, as the freedom movements mentioned all make evident. The chapter duly sketches the constitutive features of what I call the postliberal public sphere of postmodernity, paying special attention to ways in which the literary public sphere changed as a result of the emergence of new literary forms, unique to twentieth century media. Most importantly, pop music, especially in the radical form of rock’n’roll, presented personalities in new ways that had a direct impact on how people conceived of race and gender alike.
The second chapter presents the way PC-terms were used in the US alternative press in 1969 to 1989, which in practice translates into an account of how the terms were used in the feminist alternative press, as feminists were the only ones who used the term with any regularity. The account is based on an analysis of all usages of PC-terms in the Independent Voices database, that at the time of my analysis (June 2020) covered some 819 journals amounting to a total of just under 20,000 individual issues, comprising a good bit over half-a-million (524,646) pages.
The third chapter makes use of similar method, but accounts for the way PC-terms prior to 1990 have been used in articles collected on JSTOR, the largest database for academic articles in the humanities and social sciences. The results confirm that in an academic context, too, women’s studies was the only field in which PC-terms were used with any regularity before 1990. The chapter also shows how a hotly debated feminist conference held at Barnard College on 24 April 1982 sparked a controversy in academic feminist circles that eventually spilled over to other fields, and thus contributed to making PC a topic of some controversy within the humanities and social sciences more generally in the latter half of the 1980s.
The second section of the book, Oppressive Speech: Disseminating Neoliberal PC, deals with ways the concept changed as it was disseminated to a general audience. Chapter four looks at how PC was related to debates about higher education, and in particular at how neoconservatives presented PC as a threat to supposedly Western values. It notes that much of the debate about how PC in general, and specifically in its feminist guise, was an attack on foundational liberal academic principles, can much more plausibly be seen as the inevitable consequences of the ongoing expansion of higher education, and had in fact been predicted already by Martin Trow in 1970.
Chapter five explores how such an ideologically motivated resistance to theory was expressed in the form of queer theory. It begins by noting that PC was recoded as heteronormativity by the very group of feminists who had originally given the term PC its ironic inflection. It looks specifically at Gayle Rubin’s account of an oppressive sex hierarchy, at Michael Warner’s and Lauren Berlant’s notion of a queer public as a world-making project, and at Eve Kosfsky Sedgwick’s radically restricted conception of the female reader. While all of these critics attempt to provide tools to oppose some putatively politically correct but actually oppressing norm, they proceed by means of assumptions that make them repeat in practice the moves they oppose in theory, and as a result end up denouncing theory (equated with ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’), because it allegedly is a means to oppress rather than liberate readers.
If a somewhat paranoid conception of theory can be detected in much purportedly leftwing scholarship in the period, chapter six makes evident that the radical right at the time was developing conspiratorial conceptions of PC that were much more extreme. The chapter traces the equation of PC with ‘cultural Marxism’ to the conspiracy theories of Lyndon LaRouche, and shows how they were taken up and slightly modified by paleoconservatives like William S. Lind and Paul Weyrich. This utterly conspiratorial understanding of PC was then circulated widely via various thinks tanks, not least those of David Horowitz, whose early involvement in Internet magazines helped to establish this conception of PC within the counter-Jihad communities that flourished in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers. The chapter ends by underscoring the importance of the shift from print to digital media, and the way that shift affects the act of reading.
The third section of the book, A New Kind of Writing: Nationalist PC in Practice, is largely concerned with the fallout of the dissemination of various notions depicting PC as a hate ideology. Chapter seven shows how such views permeate Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s 2083, of which it provides a sustained reading. It highlights the fact that Breivik himself presents the document as a pedagogical tool for spreading the notion that PC is a hate ideology, while describing his terrorist attacks as simply its “promotional campaign.”
Chapter eight then uses Toril Moi’s discussion of Breivik in The Revolution of the Ordinary to illustrate the shortcomings of the so called post-critical position she defends (and that chapter five has shown to be a further development of queer theory).
As a further illustration of how the concept of PC has long since outrun its original US context, chapter nine goes back in time, looking at the way PC first entered Swedish mainstream discourse as a loan-word from the US in the 1990s, but then was exported back to the US in the inflection it was given in the extreme right in the Nordic countries.
The conclusion, finally, begins by reminding us of how Donald Trump used the concept in his campaign for the 2016 presidential election, before sketching how the concept has since spawned a functional synonym in woke, and in various other ways continues to skew public debate. It ends by underscoring the contingent nature of the history of the concept of PC that has been accounted for. Even so, this history may help us understand why it has become increasingly difficult to uphold distinctions such as those between fiction and fact in the postliberal public sphere, but no less urgent that we try.
*
At JFK in Berlin, in addition to having access to first rate library facilities, I had the great privilege of being able to sit in regularly on seminars and lectures, and also benefited a great deal from informal conversations of my work (and those of others) with members of staff, not least with Ulla Haselstein, who kindly arranged for me to have an office space at the department, and Stefanie Müller, the present head of the Literary Department, who has invited me to come back and lecture on my work in conjunction to it being published.
The project has as yet not resulted in a publication, but I have sent out a prospectus of the book to several publishers and all have expressed a keen interest in publishing it.
In the process, the study significantly deepens our understanding of this concept, making important contributions to
1) feminist historiography and feminist theory, by highlighting the importance of the women’s liberation movement and its development for the articulation of PC;
2) sociology, by approaching the concept of PC as a symptom of the postliberal public sphere, extending the pivotal work of Jürgen Habermas; and
3) literary studies, by paying special attention to the literary public sphere in the postliberal/postmodern period, rethinking the way literature as a category needs to be conceived in this period.
The first section of the book, Personal Politics: The Feminist Origins of ‘Political Correctness’, accounts for the origins of the concept of PC, disproving the received view that it stems from the left in general, and that it was used ironically practically from the start. The first chapter looks at the features of the postliberal public sphere that developed in the USA after the second world. It notes that the era’s principal freedom movements – the Civil Rights’, Students’, and Women’s Liberation movements – all stress that politics not some abstract set of principles but something that affects people on a personal level, an insight most memorably expressed via the feminist slogan that the personal is political. This circumstance supports sociologist Jürgen Habermas’s contention that the distinction between the public and private spheres of life that was a constitutive feature of bourgeois ideology from the eighteenth century onwards had broken down in the twentieth century. Yet in the wake of that collapse, new ways of generating democratic agency emerged, as the freedom movements mentioned all make evident. The chapter duly sketches the constitutive features of what I call the postliberal public sphere of postmodernity, paying special attention to ways in which the literary public sphere changed as a result of the emergence of new literary forms, unique to twentieth century media. Most importantly, pop music, especially in the radical form of rock’n’roll, presented personalities in new ways that had a direct impact on how people conceived of race and gender alike.
The second chapter presents the way PC-terms were used in the US alternative press in 1969 to 1989, which in practice translates into an account of how the terms were used in the feminist alternative press, as feminists were the only ones who used the term with any regularity. The account is based on an analysis of all usages of PC-terms in the Independent Voices database, that at the time of my analysis (June 2020) covered some 819 journals amounting to a total of just under 20,000 individual issues, comprising a good bit over half-a-million (524,646) pages.
The third chapter makes use of similar method, but accounts for the way PC-terms prior to 1990 have been used in articles collected on JSTOR, the largest database for academic articles in the humanities and social sciences. The results confirm that in an academic context, too, women’s studies was the only field in which PC-terms were used with any regularity before 1990. The chapter also shows how a hotly debated feminist conference held at Barnard College on 24 April 1982 sparked a controversy in academic feminist circles that eventually spilled over to other fields, and thus contributed to making PC a topic of some controversy within the humanities and social sciences more generally in the latter half of the 1980s.
The second section of the book, Oppressive Speech: Disseminating Neoliberal PC, deals with ways the concept changed as it was disseminated to a general audience. Chapter four looks at how PC was related to debates about higher education, and in particular at how neoconservatives presented PC as a threat to supposedly Western values. It notes that much of the debate about how PC in general, and specifically in its feminist guise, was an attack on foundational liberal academic principles, can much more plausibly be seen as the inevitable consequences of the ongoing expansion of higher education, and had in fact been predicted already by Martin Trow in 1970.
Chapter five explores how such an ideologically motivated resistance to theory was expressed in the form of queer theory. It begins by noting that PC was recoded as heteronormativity by the very group of feminists who had originally given the term PC its ironic inflection. It looks specifically at Gayle Rubin’s account of an oppressive sex hierarchy, at Michael Warner’s and Lauren Berlant’s notion of a queer public as a world-making project, and at Eve Kosfsky Sedgwick’s radically restricted conception of the female reader. While all of these critics attempt to provide tools to oppose some putatively politically correct but actually oppressing norm, they proceed by means of assumptions that make them repeat in practice the moves they oppose in theory, and as a result end up denouncing theory (equated with ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’), because it allegedly is a means to oppress rather than liberate readers.
If a somewhat paranoid conception of theory can be detected in much purportedly leftwing scholarship in the period, chapter six makes evident that the radical right at the time was developing conspiratorial conceptions of PC that were much more extreme. The chapter traces the equation of PC with ‘cultural Marxism’ to the conspiracy theories of Lyndon LaRouche, and shows how they were taken up and slightly modified by paleoconservatives like William S. Lind and Paul Weyrich. This utterly conspiratorial understanding of PC was then circulated widely via various thinks tanks, not least those of David Horowitz, whose early involvement in Internet magazines helped to establish this conception of PC within the counter-Jihad communities that flourished in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers. The chapter ends by underscoring the importance of the shift from print to digital media, and the way that shift affects the act of reading.
The third section of the book, A New Kind of Writing: Nationalist PC in Practice, is largely concerned with the fallout of the dissemination of various notions depicting PC as a hate ideology. Chapter seven shows how such views permeate Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s 2083, of which it provides a sustained reading. It highlights the fact that Breivik himself presents the document as a pedagogical tool for spreading the notion that PC is a hate ideology, while describing his terrorist attacks as simply its “promotional campaign.”
Chapter eight then uses Toril Moi’s discussion of Breivik in The Revolution of the Ordinary to illustrate the shortcomings of the so called post-critical position she defends (and that chapter five has shown to be a further development of queer theory).
As a further illustration of how the concept of PC has long since outrun its original US context, chapter nine goes back in time, looking at the way PC first entered Swedish mainstream discourse as a loan-word from the US in the 1990s, but then was exported back to the US in the inflection it was given in the extreme right in the Nordic countries.
The conclusion, finally, begins by reminding us of how Donald Trump used the concept in his campaign for the 2016 presidential election, before sketching how the concept has since spawned a functional synonym in woke, and in various other ways continues to skew public debate. It ends by underscoring the contingent nature of the history of the concept of PC that has been accounted for. Even so, this history may help us understand why it has become increasingly difficult to uphold distinctions such as those between fiction and fact in the postliberal public sphere, but no less urgent that we try.
*
At JFK in Berlin, in addition to having access to first rate library facilities, I had the great privilege of being able to sit in regularly on seminars and lectures, and also benefited a great deal from informal conversations of my work (and those of others) with members of staff, not least with Ulla Haselstein, who kindly arranged for me to have an office space at the department, and Stefanie Müller, the present head of the Literary Department, who has invited me to come back and lecture on my work in conjunction to it being published.
The project has as yet not resulted in a publication, but I have sent out a prospectus of the book to several publishers and all have expressed a keen interest in publishing it.