The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (200 page)

So named because of its distinctive five-sided building, the Pentagon is the headquarters of the US Department of Defence. The department is responsible for the running of the armed forces and the formulation of military strategy.

 
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A phrase invented to describe countries of ‘socialist orientation’ which could not yet claim to have built socialism itself. It was used first in reference to the ‘fraternal allies’ of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe after the Second World War and then those countries that adopted the Soviet model after decolonization.
SWh 

 
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From a Russian word meaning ‘restructuring’,
perestroika
was adopted as the official policy of the Soviet Communist Party following the plenum of the Central Committee in April 1987. Although the term itself was not new in Soviet political parlance, the policy is inextricably linked in the popular mind with Mikhail Gorbachev . Its meaning, however, is still hotly debated. For many commentators,
perestroika
was another attempt to invigorate the Soviet system by fostering grass-roots initiative without allowing a challenge to the power of the Communist Party itself. For others,
perestroika
was an attempt by sections of the leadership to improve their position
vis-à-vis
rivals in the élite and sections of the recalcitrant bureaucracy by playing the democratic card. For others still,
perestroika
was an essentially democratic movement of those, including some in the leadership, who opposed the authoritarianism and inefficiency of the old system. Whatever the case,
perestroika
resulted in both democratization and the articulation of demands that went well beyond the capacity of the Communist Party to control. It allowed for the end to the Cold War and of the division of Europe, and resulted in the demise of the Soviet Union itself.
SWh 

 
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The view that the role of the state is to promote morally acceptable conceptions of the good life, rather than simply to provide a neutral or impartial framework in which each person may pursue his or her own conception of the good life. To the extent that liberalism has been identified with this second (instrumental) view, perfectionism has had an uncertain relationship with the liberal tradition, illustrated by J. S.
Mill's
endorsement of the so-called higher pleasures within an apparently utilitarian framework. Joseph Raz's defence of the promotion of
autonomy
as a legitimate state activity provides a contemporary example of liberal perfectionism. Such liberal perfectionism may be usefully compared to accounts of the human good provided within the
natural law
tradition (which need not issue in any liberal commitments). Perfectionism may be distinguished from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas about human perfectibility. Liberal perfectionism requires moral discrimination by the state about valuable ways of life; the older doctrine referred to the capacity of persons to move towards perfection.
AR 

 
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See
Athenian democracy
.

 
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The theory, due to
Trotsky
, that a proletarian socialist revolution may develop continuously from a previous non-socialist revolution. His main presentation of it is found in
Results and Prospects
(1906). The actual phrase is taken from Marx's
Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League
(1850).
Trotsky depicted Russia as an example of uneven development, combining the most modern and the most backward social and economic forces. Industrialization had been forced by an absolutist state and financed by foreign capital. As a result, the domestic
bourgeoisie
would not establish
hegemony
and thus could not lead a democratic revolution. In contrast, the
proletariat
acquired a significance beyond its size because of the large scale and concentration of industry and its own levels of organization and consciousness.
Given the impotence of the bourgeoisie, it was left to the proletariat to accomplish the democratic revolution. However a workers' government could not be restricted to those tasks because it would be influenced by the continuing class struggle. Once set in motion the revolution would become an uninterrupted process, the democratic stage merging into the socialist.
Trotsky acknowledged that the material base for socialism did not exist in Russia but he contended that this could be resolved by the second part of the theory-the international character of the revolution. Russia was just a link in the chain; it could not survive without the support of the European proletariat.
GS