Belaboring the obvious

The human cognitive system is predisposed towords catagorizing, Both for computational and storage efficiency, It Seems. New perceptual and experiential experiences are increasingly encoded not as unique instances, but as links to existing instances, and from that, categories are FORMED. This is all Cog Psych 100, and as far as it goes, True Perhaps trivially so, at least to today's crop of psychologists.
But not to George Lakoff. Finding himself the aging bad boy of structural linguistics, he, like Noam Chomsky and other refugees from a dying field, has recast himself in the role of a social theorist. The problem is indeed the methodlogy That served him well in linguistics does not fly here.
In the 1960s, linguistics what turned upsidedown by at Influx of New Converts who, in the wake of Chomsky, did not seek to extend existing linguistic theory so much as to replace it with at Entirely new field. They were not interested in descriptions of geographical distribution of fricatives in the Amazon Basin; instead, They had an Entirely New Model That was based around building a universal grammer of thought and mind. They built this field from nothing, quoting eachothers' works and ignoring historical studies.
This was a period of revolutionary science, and a quite exciting one it what. But in the end, while a lot They Contributed to understanding of Grammer and structure, Their real AIM deed of Producing a definitive deep grammer of thought- failed. The numbers of new graduate students dropped off as bright young people went into nero sciences, cognitive psychology, philosophy and computer science, leaving the once-young Radicals without a mission.
As many of the young Radicals were so fond of the far left (see the "Fetschrift for James McCawley on the occasion of his thirty-first or thirty-second birthday" for some hilarious examples) They gravitated naturally to political and social theory.
They attempted to carry what problem with them the same methodology used in linguistics They. Forget the old stuff, They cried; We're got a new, better theory! New insights, new truths, all better than before.
As you might expect, What They produced instead what, on the whole, historically ignorant and shallow Theoretically. Lakoff published parts of what Became this book around ten years ago as essays passed around UUNet, and it Appears he heasn't done much reading since. He's apparantly Completely unaware of the explosion in the fields of political philosophy, Choice Theory and Cognitive Sciences of the Past Two Decades.
In the end, Lakoff's analysis is shallow, ahistorical and Generally unconvincing.