Michael Freeden

Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology

Whether or not nationalism is an ideology is a question that can be illuminated by a study of its conceptual structure. Core and adjacent concepts of nationalism are examined within the context of liberal, conservative and fascist ideologies, contexts that respectively encourage particular ideational paths within nationalist argument, while discouraging others. Employing a morphological analysis of ideological configurations, it is argued that various nationalisms may appear as distinct thin-centred ideologies, but are more readily understood as embellishments of, and sustainers of, the features of their host ideologies.

Eugenics and progressive thought: a study in ideological affinity.

The issues raised by eugenics are of more than passing interest for the student of political thought. In itself a minor offshoot of turn-of-the-century socio-biological thought which never achieved ideological ‘take-off’ in terms of influence or circulation, there was certainly more in eugenics than nowadays meets the eye. The following pages propose to depart from the over-simplistic identification of eugenics, as political theory, with racism or ultra-conservatism and to offer instead two alternative modes of interpretation. On the one hand, eugenics will be portrayed as an exploratory avenue of the social-reformist tendencies of early-twentieth-century British political thought. On the other, it will serve as a case-study illustrating the complexity and overlapping which characterize most modern ideologies. While recognizing, of course, the appeal of eugenics for the ‘right’, a central question pervading the forthcoming analysis will be the attraction it had for progressives of liberal and socialist persuasions, with the ultimate aim of discovering the fundamental affinities the ‘left’ had, and may still have, with this type of thinking.

Ideology and political theory

Ideology, and its study, have been subject to an interpretational tug-of-war among political theorists that, until recently, has devalued their status as an object of scholarship. Disputes have raged over the scientific standing of ideology, its epistemological status, and its totalitarian and liberal manifestations. Many political philosophers have eschewed its group orientation, and the more recent interest of students of ideology in ordinary political language and in the unconscious and the indeterminate. Following an historical survey of changing fashions and more durable features in the analysis of ideology, it is argued that ideology should be explored as the most typical form of political thinking, and that its study conducts political theorists to the heart of the political. Ideology is now seen as ubiquitous, while the methodologies through which ideologies are studied take on board conceptual malleability and ideational pluralism, and offer bridges between identifying ‘social facts’ and their inevitable interpretation.

Liberalism divided : a study in British political thought, 1914-1939

Liberalism Divided is the first detailed study of British liberal thought in the interwar years. The author reassesses progressive liberalism in light of the partial reaction against the state provoked by World War I. The division of liberal thought into two streams--left-liberalism and centrist-liberalism--is explored, and the changing political theories of major new liberals such as L.T. Hobhouse and J.A. Hobson are contrasted with centrist-liberal ideas.

Interpretative realism and prescriptive realism

In recent years some political theorists have been promoting ‘political realism’ as an alternative to the mainstream perspectives fostered by what is perceived as the ideal theory tendency embedded in political philosophy, especially in the schools of thought associated with, or inspired by, Rawlsian liberalism—though that tendency is both preand extra-Rawlsian in its dominance of much 20th-century political philosophy. That political realism should be distinguished from the older focus among scholars of international relations on realism, or Realpolitik, as against idealism, where realism referred to the grim nitty-gritty of power politics, and idealism to the creation of a norms-based, legal international order. But in some of its manifestations it is not entirely removed from that earlier 20thcentury tradition. Central as power is to the political and to political thinking, many realists, past and present are gripped by power as the all-important feature of the political, often to the exclusion of other political core features. Even references to the term ‘idealism’, although dissimilar in their current resonance, have some affinity with the perspectives of yore. What is remarkable, or regrettable, about the resurgence of realism is its insulation from current approaches to the study of ideology, with the result that it is seen to burst through a number of open doors. Those doors have already for a while ushered one into a theoretical and methodological haven from the intellectual frustration occasioned by the colonization of political theory by ethics over the past 40 years. Yet the main representatives of current ‘political realism’ exhibit perspectives markedly different from those associated with the analysis of ideology and of actual political thinking. Consequently, the pursuit of realism is located at a crossroads at which a choice has to be made between a less radical and a more radical dissociation from political philosophy mainstreams. At the heart of that junction lies a distinction that has not been advanced in the existing literature but is nonetheless crucial, one between prescriptive realism and interpretative realism, between placing recommendations and justifications for political action in frameworks more conducive to working from the world as it is, and giving an empirically related account of the features of the political as a basis to understanding politics. The one is a realism that is more matter-of-fact about what desirable ends can be achieved through politics, and the other is a realism that is focused on empirically ascertainable manifestations of political and ideological practices and thought-practices and aims at giving a more accurate account of what the realm of the political embraces. Journal of Political Ideologies (February 2012), 17(1), 1–11

After the Brexit referendum: revisiting populism as an ideology

In late May 2016, shortly before the British referendum on membership of the European Union that resulted in a modest majority of 51.9% for leaving the EU (and among those eligible to vote, a 37.47% vote to leave), I was interviewed on Czech TV on the topic of populism. At the height of the crisis of refugees from Syria, Africa and other middle eastern countries, I pointed to one striking difference between sentiments on migration on the European continent and in the UK. In continental Europe, people were afraid of refugees; in the UK, people were afraid of Europeans. Of course, this needs the kind of fine-tuning that a media soundbite cannot provide. The fear of refugees was unequally distributed spatially across Europe, attaining a higher intensity in its eastern and east-central reaches. The UK avoided similar sentiments of alarm simply by accepting a trifling number of refugees in the first place, so that their visibility was negligible (and in the case of the now dismantled Calais ‘jungle’ camps, forcibly keeping most of them out of British territory). The fear of non-national migrants was also unequally distributed ideologically, broadly affecting more people on the right-of-centre spectrum than on the left-of-centre. Furthermore, that fear was unequally distributed on socio-economic and age indices. And the modes of movement across borders were dissimilar: Europeans from EU countries entered and exited the UK freely, while non-European migrants into the European mainland entered illegally or were subject – usually retroactively – to national quotas. Not least, in a telling twist of vocabulary, public discourse in the UK has for decades inserted a caesura between ‘Britain’ and ‘Europe’, setting Britain adrift from its European geographical location and rendering it, sometimes provocatively, continent-less. Uniquely, the main advocates of Brexit summon up a peculiar insularity, one that ostensibly prefers the distant to the near: The Commonwealth (mainly a one-way love-affair of the British ex-imperialist right that is gradually becoming unrequited), the USA, or China; to the proximate European neighbours of the UK with which mutually deep and significantly growing economic, legal, and cultural ties have been fashioned. The vote for Brexit has occasioned the need to reassess the ranges and guises of populism, especially when populist agendas are voiced in part from within the political Establishment of a democratic state. Whether the UK still is a liberal democratic state, while lacking a liberal government – particularly in view of the current government among whose aims it has been to translate certain strands of populist sentiment into a fundamental restructuring of the state itself, without Parliamentary approval – is a question that focuses the spotlight more broadly on the ideological and institutional relationship between state and government.1 An evaluation of the kind of liberalism the UK may yet be thought to incorporate becomes increasingly pressing. It is certainly insufficient to use criteria commonly employed in international relations theory that rest content with equating liberalism with constitutionalism and the rule of law; with free markets; and with a mid-20th century view of human rights as mainly civil and individual, rather than also social and economic. Liberalism in its many variants is richer and more intricate than that. A commitment to humanist ideals concerning free individual flourishing, social reform based on mutual assistance as expressed in welfare state legislation, the active promotion of the needs and identities of diverse social groups, and a generous helping of tolerance are also

Practising Ideology and Ideological Practices

Although among the categories informing the study of politics there are few as fundamental as those demarcating theory and practice, that distinction is highly problematic when applied to the analysis of ideologies. Many traditional as well as current approaches regard political thought as the area in which issues of moral philosophy pertaining to political entities are aired, with the objective of setting defining ethical and validating criteria which are then to be applied to political practice. A grounding of this view may be found in Kant, for whom individuals were subjected to clear and unequivocal moral duties and were therefore also men of affairs concerned with political right. As Kant argued, ‘... experience cannot provide knowledge of what is right, and there is a theory of political right to which practice must conform before it can be valid’. Hence, ‘not all activities are called practice, but only those realizations of a particular purpose which are considered to comply with certain generally conceived principles of procedure.’ The value of such a practice depended ‘entirely upon its appropriateness to the theory it is based on’.1 This position has recently been restated thus: ‘The major goal of a moral theory is to resolve conflicts arising in moral decision making giving clear guidance on how to act’.2 Building on ancient Greek views, such approaches hold contemplation to be inextricably linked to practical wisdom and virtue.3 As a consequence, politics – inasmuch as it contains conflict – is seemingly transcended, at least until it encounters a new moral dilemma for which further guidance will be available. More recent hermeneutic accounts are subtler in assessing the interaction between theory and practice, identifying a mutual relationship of interdependence, in which the contingencies of politics continuously batter against the walls of our preformed conceptions. Nonetheless, these accounts remain wedded to the eliciting of new truths or holisms from the multiplicity of timeand space-bound human experiences.4

Failures of Political Thinking

The article investigates failures of political thinking as a normal and endemic phenomenon, yet one that is theoretically under-conceptualised. It postulates three criteria for such failure: (1) the failure to deliver ideationally what the political theory in question has itself undertaken through its creator(s) to deliver; (2) the failure to take on board the constraints imposed on the initial construction of a theory or argument by the features and structure of political concepts; and (3) the failure of the specific epistemologies and ideologies that underlie political theorising to confer sufficient conclusiveness on the theories that emerge from them. The underlying causes of those three criteria invoke, in turn, three problems with political language and argument: first, the impossibility of keeping meaning constant over time; second, the indeterminacy that surrounds the eliciting and defining of the concepts and values a theory desires to promote; and third, the inevitable ineffectiveness of offering sufficient comprehensive detail in prescribing paths of political change or reform. Focusing on normatively prescriptive political thinking with regard to the construction of political macro visions and single overarching regulative principles, the article examines classical and contemporary instances of political thought. It studies their failures in the forms of uncontrollable and absent temporal trajectories of argument; conceptual polysemy and decontestation; and the impediments normative thinking encounters when applied to the distinctive circumstances of every individual. Finally, it dismisses any necessary connection between theories of failure and conservatism, arguing instead that liberal epistemologies can accommodate some salient conceptual failures in thinking about politics. The article concludes that modest failure and temporary success may not be that distinct from one another; anything more spectacular in either direction should cause political theorists to ponder.

Confronting the chimera of a ‘post‐ideological’ age

Ideologies are still very much in evidence, although some of their configurations are novel. Their denial typifies utopian and neutralist approaches, but those are instances of misrecognition. Liberal epistemology (as distinct from liberal theory) has contributed to an awareness of ideological diversity, but also to the possibility of choice among ideologies, as items of eclectic – and occasionally inventive – consumption. Pluralism may hence become fragmentation, albeit a constrained one. Liberalism also encourages uncertainty and multiple future paths, endorsing the impermanence and non‐doctrinaire nature of much contemporary political thinking. The mass media, social movements and networks, and popular political language have disseminated new vehicles and forms of ideology, and the notion of a ‘post‐ideological’ age is itself a masking device. Ideologies mutate regularly, their boundaries are porous, and ideological delocalization is countered by cultural decentralization. Yet the fragility of particular ideological arrangements must not be confused with ideological fragility in general.

European Liberalisms An Essay in Comparative Political Thought

After examining different liberal narratives and suggesting that liberalism is open to a range of legitimate methodologies, the fluidity of liberalism is offered as a basis for a study in comparative political thought. Ten propositions on liberalisms structural and semantic features are listed and brought to bear on its adaptations, appropriations and misappropriations in Europe. They are tested in relation to various combinations of liberal components within and outside the family of liberalisms. Different views about the role of the state in Eastern and Western Europe are considered, as is the distinction between constitutional and welfare liberalism in Western Europe. Individual development versions are contrasted with market versions, and the problematic role of civil society is discussed. Finally, some misappropriations are explored with a view to assessing their claims to represent liberal positions. European liberalism emerges as a loosely assembled yet durable ideology around a strong core of value-commitments.