ABSTRACT
Political criticism’ is a broad term, however, and it covers criticisms of many different types which have little in common except their target. Clarification, and especially the clarification of concepts, is the form of philosophical activity which is most respectable at the moment. One way of organising different, or even conflicting, senses of a concept is to isolate a primary or fundamental sense of that concept and to explain how the others derive from it. Etymology is suggestive when one is deciding the primary sense but it is not the final arbiter: in some cases the etymology of a term may be uncertain, and anyway it is not clear from the philosophical point of view what is to count as the etymology of a word, whether the Latin or Old English root or the more basic Indo-European. The term ‘reassurance’ draws attention to the fact that what will be done will be to portray morality as something reasonable.
