Product Description: Today new forms of critical psychology are challenging the cognitive revolution that has dominated psychology for the past three decades. This book explores the historical roots of these new psychologies. It demonstrates that their ideas are not quite as new as is often supposed...read more

Product Description: From Thomas Hobbes' fear of the power of laughter to the compulsory, packaged "fun" of the contemporary mass media, Billig takes the reader on a stimulating tour of the strange world of humour. Both a significant work of scholarship and a novel contribution to the understanding of the humourous, this is a seriously engaging book' - David Inglis, University of Aberdeen This delightful book tackles the prevailing assumption that laughter and humour are inherently good...read more

The public seem to have an insatiable appetite for information about the Royal family. Every day the media carry news and pictures about the most famous family in the world. Yet social scientists have virtually ignored this strange mass obsession. Now, Michael Billig, a social psychologist, examines the significance of this interest in royalty. He argues that the Royal family is a symbol of continuity in national consciousness. He supports this claim with analyses of 63 English families discussing the Royal family. As the families talk about royalty, they are talking about much more: about gender, nationality, family life, the media, inequality, sex. Above all, they are talking about themselves. The book shows how this talk can be simultaneously serious and funny. There are jokes, criticism, praise and, above all, acceptance. Billig does much more than simply portray `attitudes' towards royalty. He shows how our commonsense attitudes and ordinary desires are constructed and contributes new insights about ideology and popular memory. This book should be of interest to students of sociology, cultural studies, psychology, and the general reader.

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Product Description: Freudian Repression presents an original reformulation of Freud's concept of repression, showing that in his theory of the unconscious he fails to examine how people actually repress shameful thoughts. Billig suggests that language is both expressive and repressive; he examines some of Freud's classic case histories and Freud's own life to show that even Freud himself can be seen to be repressing...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Freudian Repression presents an original reformulation of Freud's concept of repression, showing that in his theory of the unconscious he fails to examine how people actually repress shameful thoughts. Billig suggests that language is both expressive and repressive; he examines some of Freud's classic case histories and Freud's own life to show that even Freud himself can be seen to be repressing...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Michael Billig's rhetorical approach has been key to the discursive turn in the social sciences. His witty and original book examines argumentation and its psychological importance in human conduct, and traces the connections between ancient rhetorical ideas and modern social psychology...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Michael Billig presents a major challenge to orthodox conceptions of nationalism in this elegantly written book. While traditional theorizing has tended to the focus on extreme expressions of nationalism, the author turns his attention to the everyday, less visible forms which are neither exotic or remote, he describes as `banal nationalism'...read more

Product Description: This interdisciplinary book addresses the key questions posed by the postmodernist challenge: Is it possible to reflect and criticize in an age when every claim to truth is placed under suspicion? Are social critics contaminated by the same ideological distortions they identify in society? The text reviews different responses to such dilemmas and thus examines ways to reconstruct social theory and critique following the postmodern attack on the traditional foundations of knowledge...read more

In this thought-provoking book, Billig presents major essays which develop and illustrate his rhetorical approach to social psychology. His position is that everyday thinking, including the holding of opinions, is of its essence both rhetorical and ideological. The very process of thinking is a process of argumentation and debate - with self, with others and with the ideologies inherent in the social stock of commonsense knowledge. Following an elaboration of the theoretical basis and implications of his argument, the author demonstrates how a rhetorical perspective can be applied empirically. He explores the concept of prejudice, argumentation within the family, commonsense opinions about monarchy and the operations of ide

Product Description: Emphasises the underlying ideas and intellectual debates in social psychology.

Product Description: A major contribution to the social scientific understanding of how people make sense of their lives, Ideological Dilemmas presents an illuminating new approach to the study of everyday thinking. Contradictory strands abound within both ideology and common sense...read more