Dialogue is a banner word of contemporary politics, religion and culture.

Politicians claim that they wish to have a dialogue and to listen, and demand that opposed parties open dialogue; interfaith dialogue is held up as the answer to the racial and religious tensions that scar modern urban living; art forms are said to enter into dialogue (with society, with their audience, with artistic principles). At one level, it is no surprise that communities that privilege the term democracy will also demand dialogue. From the invention of democracy in fifth-century Athens, dialogue has been central to the political theory and practice of democracy: it is only after hearing both sides of the question and allowing different views to be expressed, that a vote can properly be held. Dialogue is endemic to democracy, though, as we will see, this is not simply a blithely benign claim: with dialogue comes also a recognition of the necessity of dissent, persuasion (spin) and the repression of minority views. The privileging of dialogue spreads to broader cultural issues, so that it would be extremely hard for any serious religious figure in the West to reject dialogue as a form of doing business. It would be to open oneself to the charge of totalitarianism (or worse). In the intellectual arena, Bakhtin has also made ‘the dialogic’ a buzz word. It is associated with anti-authoritarian exploration, playfulness and challenge. The dialogic has consequently been taken up as a positive term in a range of disciplines.