ABSTRACT
All discussion of politics involves assumptions about the way in which decisions are reached in government, and about the way in which they ought to be reached. This is as true of gossip about politics as it is of systematic study, even if in the latter case the assumptions are supposed to be more carefully scrutinized. It is just because discussion of politics involves assumptions about the activity of politics that it feeds back into that activity by influencing the way in which decisions are made and the extent to which those decisions are regarded as authoritative; hence the temptation for those with political power to censor the modes of political argument. The activity of politics and discussion of that activity are thus inextricably intertwined. For this reason, it is appropriate to ask what assumptions underlie any mode of discussion about politics, and to look for its implications for policy-making and the structure of political authority. These questions are especially important for societies where, as in the Soviet Union, discussion of politics is stringently censored (see Mackenzie 1967:13–20).
