The Penguin Dictionary of Politics [antikvár]

Preface I was originally asked to be one of three co-authors of this work, but ended up as the sole one. Even more than usual, therefore, I must accept that the good belongs to others, and the blame is mine. In fact the need, with such a work, to have drafts read and re-read by as many, and as different people as possible would in any case require total modesty. My initial enthusiasm for the project arose because of the countless times I have given students an essay topic and wanted to tell them to look up some key word in the title before starting the reading, to ensure they at least started off on the right lines. As I worked on it, I came to see a wide potential usage. All political scientists have to live with the fact that any educated person is sure that he knows as much as they do about politics simply because we are all political animals. Perhaps that is true, but it remains the case that we have a professional vocabulary (which is not the same as admitting to writing jargon) which is not part of the word-stock of the educated layman. Yet increasingly these words—charismatic is a fine example—are expropriated, usually by the media (another good example) and become, with no clarity, part of general discourse. Furthermore there are 'facts', 'ideas', 'ideologies' (a third example), 'doctrines', 'concepts', about which any informed newspaper reader should be aware, but quite bluntly usually is not. Sometimes these words are highly technical and specialized but become important to a wide public because of a public policy concern. No one ought really to try to form their view on nuclear weapons for example, if they cannot follow what is meant by saying that Trident II has a much smaller 'circular error probability' than Trident I, or why that matters. Sometimes they are terms of art in another discipline which can have an importance in general public discourse about politics, where the full rigour of the professional definition in the original discipline is not needed, but where merely a general education will not, in fact, equip the political animal to