ABSTRACT
We live in a pervasively and self-consciously politicized age and culture. Everything for us must now possess a political dimension, and if something does not already have one, it is not long before one is discovered for i t We glibly talk about business politics, educational politics, the politics of the mass media, academic politics, family politics, environmental politics, and even of sexual (or sexist) politics. The spectrum of protest politics is truly vast and all-embracing : any disadvantaged group or category, we now concede, owns rights to self-expression which can only be realized through the politics of liberation. Further evidence of this general ized and indiscriminate politicization is to be found in the increasing use of such essentially political words as anarchist, revolutionary, radical, liberal, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, imperialist, and fascist as terms of approval or abuse in our per sonal relations - often outside a strictly political context.
