ABSTRACT
This chapter refers to a piece of work on the way certain forms of political deviance and political activism are handled by mass media and labelled in the political domain. The study of deviance and of politics has little or nothing to say to one another. Yet events in the real world are increasingly revealing the operational and ideological content of this formal proposition about politics. Political deviance does not figure prominently in the study of deviant behaviour. H. S. Becker suggests that this is because, in many forms of social deviance, ‘The conflicting segments or ranks are not organized for conflict; no one attempts to alter the shape of the hierarchy.’ C. Geertz argues that the study of ideology as a specific social praxis lacks ‘anything more than the most rudimentary conception of the processes of symbolic formulation’.
