does not facilitate communication or opinion formation. No one should really
form a conviction about the federal prospects for Europe if they are unsure
about the meaning of federalism. More specifically, unless one understands the
distinctions between ‘directives’, ‘direct applicability’, ‘regulations’ and ‘direct
effect’, it is very hard to work out exactly what the European Union is actually
doing. (And, by the way, it helps to understand the different roles of the
Commission and the Council!) Similarly the language of ‘rights’ is even more
important than it was twenty years ago, but then the United Kingdom had no
Human Rights Act, and its court structure was much less amenable to ‘judicial
review’. These are highly technical areas, as well as highly emotive ones, and
clarity helps avoid emotiveness getting in the way of serious policy. Politics as
an art (an indefinable art—there is no entry just on ‘politics’), and political
science as a discipline, are overwhelmingly about words, shades of meaning,
ideological linkages neither grammatically nor logically determined. Though
she was talking of something else, the poet Elizabeth Jennings has the lines:
Since clarity suggests simplicity,
And since the simple thing is here inapt
We choose obscurities of tongue and touch,
The darker side of language,
Hinted at in conversations close to quarrel,
Conceived within the mind in aftermaths.This dictionary is meant to penetrate some of the darkness, to reduce obscurity,
to make the conversations less quarrelsome.
Some advice may be useful on using this book. Cross references are to be
found in most entries, indicated in bold type. These are of two main sorts. The
more obvious is where I use, in one entry, a word or concept which has an entry
of its own elsewhere, and where a full understanding of the subject of the main
entry requires an understanding of the highlighted entry. For example, the entry
on Bentham refers to his views onrepresentative democracyand the bold type
thus indicates that there is a separate entry dealing with this concept. Other
cross references are based on the idea that a reader interested in X is likely,
independently, to be interested in Y, which has just been mentioned in passing,
and should be informed that there is an entry on Y. Despite this, each entry is
designed to be as self-contained as possible. Words in the title of an entry, may
not correspond exactly to the words a reader has picked up and been curious
about, but a little searching around should help. It might be said that the book
has been designed and written with one eye to the fact that many people actually
enjoy reading reference booksand thus browsers are an important category of
reader.
A book this long in print, after three editions, presents, finally, a tactical
question about who the author should thank. Tact makes it imperative to decide
whether to thank, truthfully, hundreds of people, or to go for simplicity and
ignore them all. With two exceptions I opt for ignoring everyone, at least in
Prefaceix