Abstract
The recent interdisciplinary interest in the problems of metaphor has had a mixed effect on political studies. Some writers have stressed the creativity of metaphorical utterances, others their ambiguity and vagueness. This difference has arisen because the meaning of a metaphor is the product of an interpretation of an utterance in a given context. Its meaning is thus inherently unstable given the variety of possible contexts. On pragmatic grounds it is suggested that the student of politics is best served by seeking historical contexts for metaphorical meaning, where political metaphors are located in a ‘field’ of meanings composed of previous interpretations.
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