The changes since 1992 have been more incremental than the huge change,
the end of the Cold War, that occurred between the first and second edition. But
they have given us a world of such groping uncertainty that the need for a book
like this is perhaps even greater. I have done my best to capture the crucial ideas
and points of this political world, tentative and uncertain as it is both at the
international level but also in the domestic politics of all nations.
What has not changed, because it defines the book and has well stood the test
of time, is the expository technique. Unlike most such reference works it is
single-authored, and consists not of a very large number of brief entries, but of
around 500 short essays. This dual technique imposes its own constraints. There
is much of technical importance that a reader will not find here—an encyclo-
pedia should be consulted. What he or she will find is one man’s attempt both to
describe and evaluate many of the most important ideas that shape modern
politics. Because this book is fundamentally about ideas. It is not restricted to ‘-
isms’, of course. But an important concept, idea, thought, view, ambition, lies
behind every entry. People are in the book, relatively rarely, because of some-
thing they have stood for over and above their own political careers; events are
in the book not because they were suddenly vitally important, but because they
shape the way we come to think. So, for example, 11 September 2001 is here not
because it was an undoubted tragedy, but because it is a symbol both for an
actual problem and, more importantly, a way of thinking about that problem.
Mrs Thatcher is in the book, though in many ways only another successful Tory
leader, because a senior member of the ‘New’ Labour Party very recently
thought it not only valid, but useful, to address a group of socialists with the
message that ‘we are all Thatcherite now’. For that matter ‘class’ might be said
to be in the book more because the current ‘New Labour’ British Prime Minister
once thought in intelligible to tell the his electorate that they were ‘all middle-
class now’ as because class actually shapes politics—it clearly does not do so as
much as when the first edition was published.
The underlying structure and the analytic approach are much the same as in
the first edition. My initial enthusiasm for this 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 their reading, to ensure that
they got off on the right lines. Later I came to see a wider potential use. All
political scientists have to live with the fact that any educated person believes
him- or herself to know as much as they do about politics because, after all, we
are (as Aristotle tells us) all political animals. Yet thereisa professional
vocabulary (as well as a lot of awful jargon) which is not part of common
parlance. Increasingly these words (‘charismatic’ is an example—we were once
told that Bill Clinton is charismatic, and nowadays that Berlusconi is) are
expropriated and, too often, misused by the media, becoming a part of general
discourse more likely to confuse than inform. And, of course, there are ‘facts’,
‘ideas’, ‘concepts’ about which any serious newspaper reader should be
informed but, bluntly, usually is not.
Public policy concerns frequently make such technical terms vitally impor-
tant, and ignorance of their meaning on the part both of journalists and readers
Preface
viii