Introduction

I am extremely grateful to the editors of Policy & Politics for the opportunity to respond to this important, innovative and challenging collection of chapters on the process of depoliticisation and the analytical strategies required to best understand its sources, dynamics and consequences. There has – alas – never been a better time to write about depoliticisation, judging by the contempt in which so many citizens hold political elites in most advanced liberal democracies today and the extent to which political elites continue to respond by placing at one remove the inherent contestability of decisions concerning the provision of collective public goods. Yet, despite the attention that the process of depoliticisation has received, the editors of this collection argue for the need to rethink and reconceptualise much of our existing understanding of this crucial set of linked concerns. They launch, in effect, a ‘second wave’ literature on depoliticisation.

I typically have great sympathy for second waves. They offer a way of correcting the almost inevitable biases and distortions that creep into and accumulate within a new and often hastily developed body of literature prompted by the urgent need to come to terms with a recently identified problem, pathology or societal condition. That, I suspect, is very much the story of the first wave literature on depoliticisation, the limits of which this collection of chapters seeks first to identify and then transcend. ‘Second waves’ are, then, generally rather good things, providing a necessary corrective to errors made in (perhaps forgivable) haste.

Here, however, I find myself somewhat more equivocal than usual. That is no doubt in part a product of being, perhaps for the first and only time in my career, identified as part of a ‘first wave’ – and proponents of first waves, as we know, have a tendency to make stubborn adversaries. I think, however, that there is more to this than that – though I suppose I would…