To talk about royalty is to talk of many things: privilege, equality, nationality, morality, family life, parenting, divorce, the media and more. Important themes and issues flow through the seemingly trivial everyday chatter about royalty.
Now with a new preface, Talking of the Royal Family was the first serious full-length study of royalty to emerge from this rhetorical perspective and remains relevant today.

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. It also offers a novel approach to contemporary social psychological issues. Citing examples from a wide range of sources, Michael Billig illustrates the argumentative dimension in such phenomena as attitudes, roles, categorizations, etc., and, in so doing, he is able to stress the theoretical importance of...

A collection of studies which aims to develop a rhetorical approach to social psychology, this book suggests that old insights about the rhetorical nature of argumentation can be used for exploring contemporary issues of ideology and opinion. Propaganda, arguments and prejudice are discussed.

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

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This delightful book tackles the prevailing assumption that laughter and humour are inherently good. In developing a critique of humour the author proposes a social theory that places humour - in the form of ridicule -...

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.

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. Freud and Repression also offers new insights on the current debate about recovered memories and the ideological background to psychoanalysis, which will guarantee its interdisciplinary appeal.

The author of this study turns his attention to the everyday, less visible forms of nationalism that are deeply ingrained in contemporary consciousness. This form of nationalism, which is neither exotic nor remote, he describes as banal nationalism.

This book examines the nature and operation of social thought and language as used in everyday life, and looks at social thinking through the complex patternings and functions of discourse. It is based on extensive empirical evidence about the language of contemporary racism and nationalism, drawn from the vast corpus of the discourse of Swiss racism gathered by the author from a variety of written and spoken sources. Three principal investigations, of sociocentrism, causality and the perception of time, are used to sinuate and define the nature and working of everyday speech and reasoning....