Complicity in Discourse and Practice

This is a book of a respected scholar, but not a scholarly book. Jef Verschueren, professor emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Antwerp, gives his opinions about a broad range of social and political topics in a personal tone directed to a broader readership (“you and me, the public” p. 17), without any substantial foundation in scientific research and debates. It is a presentation of mainstream academic morality in the Low Countries and probably much broader. The little more than 100 pages of text are divided into a prologue, three chapters—the long “In society” (starting with the terror acts of Anders Behring Breivik, continuing with more terrorism, passing various (bad) practices of representative politics, populism, migration, discrimination, multilingualism, “political correctness,” to finish with political respect and solidarity), the shorter “At the university” and “Through the media”—and a brief “Recap: Sharing responsibility” and “Prospect: An ecology of the public sphere?” Three concepts are central: