Self-Presentation and Representative Politics

The book has an introduction outlining the conceptual framework that gives meaning to the six collected texts that follow. This framework derives from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. He stated that ‘everything is social,’ which means that all discourses have to be understood in their own terms (as ‘structured structures’) and in relation to the social conditions in which they developed (‘structuring structures’). As social individuals we are constrained by the structures defining our situation but we also have the capacity to alter those structures. With particular reference to the ‘field’ of politics, the Introduction considers theoretically the nature of the ‘presentation of self’ (Goffman) of citizens and the nature of parliamentary democracy as ‘presentation’ or ‘representation’ (as discussed in Habermas: The structural transformation of the public sphere). The six main chapters reproduce texts written or spoken about politics at intervals in the period from 1960 until 2020. Brief in