Stage 3: Consider whether the social order ‘needs’ the social wrong.
It is not awfully obvious what this means, and I shall try to clarify it by again anticipating the example. I indicated above that the social wrong I shall focus on when I get to the example is the suppression of political differences over the global economy and national responses to it in favour of seeking to create a national consensus, which is substantively realized in discourse. In what sense might the social order ‘need’ this ? Perhaps in the sense – again anticipating the discussion below – that the internationally dominant strategy for globalizing an economic order based upon neo – liberal principles requires that states be able to operate in support of this strategy without being encumbered by the ‘old’ adversarial politics. Stage 3 leads us to consider whether the social wrong in focus is ingerent to the social order, whether it can be addressed within it, or only by changing it. It is a way of linking ‘is’ to ‘ought’: if a social order can be shown to inherently give rise to major social wrongs, then that is a reason for thinking that perhaps it should be changed. It also connects with questions of ideology: discourse is ideological in so far as it contributes to sustaining particular relations of power and domination.