Political Identity, Political Discourse and Philosophical Analysis: An Introduction

This chapter is an introduction to the concept of “political identity” and to its relevance for political discourse and for political philosophy. It distinguishes the political use of the expression by supporters of identitarian views from a technical sense, according to which political identity is the property of a polity to be itself and different from other polities. The chapter considers briefly how the issue of political identity, in the technical sense, is addressed by liberal approaches to politics and by post-structuralist approaches. The former deal with it by assuming that it coincides with national identity, but fail to explain the criteria of identity of a polity. The latter criticise identity politics for nourishing stereotypes, but fail to explain how the particularity of an individual can be spelled out without appealing to its identity. The chapter suggests that action theory, political philosophy and metaphysics in the analytic tradition jointly have the resources account for the concept of political identity