just as a suggestion that men might be better suited to some forms of work and
women to others would be banned. One way of defining politically correct
language is that it avoids utterances which might be described as one of a large
number of ‘isms’, such as ageism,racism, physicalism (people are not crippled
or disabled, but ‘physically challenged’), sexism, ethnicism (accepting that
ethnic divisions in society have any relevance), creedism (making allowance
for the fact that different faiths hold profoundly different beliefs and attitudes),
and so on. It must be noted immediately that if political correctness is an issue,
it is an issue only for the minority of the population in universities or the
educated professions. One is not going to find anyone attacked for politically
incorrect thinking in a diner on Main Street, Hicksville, though one would in
a bistro on Broadway, New York. This last sentence is an example of
politically incorrect writing, committing several sins involving social classism
and metropolitanism.
Though on the whole the politically correct are somewhat of a joke, the
tendency to intolerance of incorrectness found in some US intellectual
establishments has meant that great injustice can be, and perhaps has been,
done to unfashionable thinkers. An even greater problem is the insidious effect
of promoting blandness in language, and requiring enormous circumlocution
to express many views safely.
Polyarchy
Polyarchy is a concept invented by RobertDahl, and taken up by other
pluralists, to define modern self-described democratic states. In this theory
society is controlled by a set of competing interest groups, roughly as in
Bentley’sgroup theory, with the government as little more than an honest
broker in the middle. The derivation is, of course, from the Greek, along
Aristotelian lines, meaning the rule of the many, although notdemocracy,
the rule of the people. The best description and analyses of polyarchy are
found in thecommunity powerstudies, where details of influence and
power in small social settings are shown to involve this sort of group
competition.
Popular Front
Popular fronts in general are alliances, either just for electoral tactics or as
would-be governing conventions, between all left-wing (and sometimes
liberal-centrist) parties in a political system. Typically they involve some form
of co-operation with a communist party which would otherwise be confined
to the fringe of political life. The most famous popular front, and the one
usually meant by the phrase, was the alliance formed in France in the mid-
Polyarchy