Brexitspeak: Demagoguery and the Decline of Democracy

"In democracies, demagoguery is now deeply embedded in political structures and processes. Democratic freedom of expression – as the ancient philosophers feared – has an inherent potential for demagoguery."

Were we talked into Brexit? And who is 'we'? It's impossible to do politics without words and a context to use them in. And it's impossible to make sense of the phenomenon of Brexit without understanding how language was used – and misused – in the historical context that produced the 2016 referendum result. This interdisciplinary book shows how the particular idea of 'the British people' was maintained through text and talk at different levels of society over the years following World War II, and mobilised by Brexit propagandists in a socially, economically and culturally divided polity. The author argues that we need the well-defined tools of linguistics and language philosophy, tied in with a political science framework, to understand a serious, modern concept of demagoguery. 

Written in an accessible manner, Brexitspeak: Demagoguery and the Decline of Democracy, is essential reading for anyone who wants to probe the social, political and ideational contexts that generated Brexit.

Published by Cambridge University Press the book is currently available for pre-order.

Professor Paul Chilton, Class of 1963, is a British cognitive linguist and discourse analyst known for his work on conceptual metaphor, cognitive stylistics, and political discourse. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Lancaster. He is also an Associate Member of the Faculty of Linguistics at the University of Oxford and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Warwick.