ABSTRACT
In the period since the cold war, there has been a substantial amount of interest in the concepts of ‘identity and difference’. With the decline of a class analysis of politics, writers have felt that the way people see themselves needs to be given much greater emphasis. This is particularly important where someone’s identity diverges from the norm, and the fact that a person is black or gay or female or poor is deemed an attribute that needs to be taken into account when assessing the democratic quality of politics. How people see themselves is obviously linked to the way in which they differentiate themselves from others, so that the concept of difference is linked to the notion of identity and they are dealt with as a pair. Difference, it has been said, is ‘a magic word of theory and politics radiant with redemptive meanings’ (Hughes, 2002: 57).
