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What Should the Political in Political

Theory Explore?*

Michael FreedenPolitics, Mansfield College, Oxford

I. THE GAP IN POLITICAL THEORY

IT is now commonplace among ever-increasing numbers of political theorists

to query the state of the art of the sub-discipline, in particular the

epistemological and ideal-type disposition of contemporary political philosophy.

But it is less common to detail research agenda that attempt to redress the

balance and reconnect political theory to the domain of politics. Prior to

accomplishing that, a lacuna has to be identifieda gap that exists prominently

between the main schools that currently occupy centre stage in the study of

political thought.

Political philosophy, the history of political thought and, more recently, what

could be very loosely called post-structural or continental1 political theoryhave virtually monopolized the analysis of political thinking; yet, as I shall claim,

they do not cover the field of what constitutes political thought. Political

philosophy brings to the study of political theory an overriding concern with

either or both of the following: the logical validity and argumentative coherence

of the political philosophy in question, or the moral rightness of the prescriptions

it contains. Many of its versions display a flight from the political, the crowding

out of diversity and the shrinking of the political to an area of constructed

consensus guided by a vision of the good life; while its methods rely heavily onthought experiments and frequently inapplicable modelling. The history of

political thought brings to the study of political theory an overriding concern

with the genealogy of arguments, with the conditions for their stability and the

causes for their transformation, with contexts, reconstructions of intentions, and

changing horizons of interpretation but, with a few notable exceptions, sacrifices

synchrony for diachrony. Much post-structuralist thought regards politics as

obfuscating reality through the articulation of illusions and false categories,

while expressing deep distrust towards politics as it is, and is overridingly

The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 13, Number 2, 2005, pp. 113134

Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 238 Main Street,Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.

*This article is part of an ESRC-funded research programme on the political theory of politicson which I am engaged.

1Continental refers less to a geographical entity than to a school, much as the label Anglo-American does.


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concerned with reformulating the political through alternative radical ethical

discourses that emphasize transparency, the recognition of identity, equality

and diversity, and empowering. All three schools perform crucial roles in our

understanding of political theories and in the uses to which we can put them.

But their very success papers over an undeniable lack: how do we study political

thought from within the discipline of politics? On what kind of political theory

ought we to focus, as students of politics and political phenomena, bearing in

mind some central characteristics of political concepts and language? In this

article I offer some exploratory thoughts on the subject.

Much has been written about the shortcomings of current political theory on

the metapractical and metatheoretical levels. Thus, John Gunnells seminal books

have exposed glaring weaknesses in the methods and issues pursued by Western

political theorists.2 Other instances are offered by theorists such as BenjaminBarber and Bonnie Honig.3 Nor do I wish to belittle the extraordinary work

done by philosophers and historiansI count myself as a member of both camps.

But the fact is that most political theory employs methodological paradigms

imported from disciplines external to politics: philosophy and history. They are

consequently bound to treat political theory as a sub-set of a larger enterprise,

philosophical or historical, however illuminating those perspectives are to the

appreciation of political thought, and however crystallized the respective sub-

enterprises have been in the grand traditions and discourses of political thought.

II. THE POLITICAL THEORY OF POLITICS

This article puts the case for a fourth approach to the study of political theory:

the political theory of politics. It is not intended to replace its illustrious and

central predecessors, but to offer another dimension: to supply the kind of

political theory designed to make immediate, rather than indirect, sense of

political thought phenomena, and to equip political theorists with tools they

might wish to employ as students of politics simpliciterthrough the political

features embedded in thinking about politics. And it is not, as many alternative

attempts to reconnect theory and practice have been, primarily another form of

normative political theory. Instead, while recognizing the fundamental ethical

concerns of political theorists, it points out that the scholarly study of politics

as is common among political scientistsengages notably in understanding and

in interpretative mapping. That task should not be abandoned by political

theorists who are, after all, crucially focused on the meaning of political thinking;

indeed, exploring that meaning should therefore also be located empirically in

114 MICHAEL FREEDEN

2Recently, John G. Gunnell, The Orders of Discourse (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,1998).

3B. Barber, The Conquest of Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); B. Honig,Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Bothemphasise the malady rather than the cure, or see the cure in terms of new ethical dimensions.


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concrete societies. The consequent analysis will fashion a significant branch of

political theory dedicated to identifying the political and making sense of it.

In turn, that appreciation will offer a vital tooland welcome limiting

frameworkfor ethicists and philosophers engaged in constructing their

exercises in normative improvement.

The challenge for political theorists, then, is to distinguish an area they wish

to term the political and then to develop strategies that enable them to address

directly issues ofpoliticalthought. In part, this may require the inclusion of new

source-material that qualifies as thinking about politics.4 But for the most part,

it involves asking a new set of questions of existing texts, utterances, discourses,

and practices, reassessing the relative importance of their diverse messages, and

preparing different methodologies through which to interpret them. That is,

incidentally, what I understand by the study of ideology in its broadest sense. Itis not a specialized study of certain doctrines, but a particular approach to the

study of political thinking as such. It views access to our understanding of

political thinking as always mediated through its spatially and temporally

contextualized instances; it regards political thinking as a ubiquitous and normal

aspect of social life; and it insists that political theory must also (though not

only) encompass these phenomena.

Politics consists centrally of the area of collective social life that involves

decision-making, the ranking of policy options, the regulation of dissent, themobilization of support for those activities, and the construction of political

visions. That is not intended as a definition, nor am I unaware of competing and

different perspectives on politics relating to the legal standing of states, or to the

good life or, conversely, to a state of dehumanizing subjugation. But we need to

make a start, and that is one kind of beginning. It enlists three postulates: First,

thinkingabout politics significantly relates to the above political issues. Second,

thinking about politics relates importantly to the political thinking actually

taking place within political entities: the thinking produced by human beings in

their political capacity as decision-makers, option-rankers, dissent and conflict

regulators, support mobilizers, and vision creators; and the thinking consumed

by them in that capacity. Politics may have been termed the art of the possible,

but it is a possible based on the feasible and its study has always focused on

the here and now,5 whether in complacent or critical mode. Third, inasmuch as

politics is a social and not merely an individual activity, so too is political

WHAT SHOULD POLITICAL IN POLITICAL THEORY EXPLORE? 115

4This point is persuasively made by Pierre Rosanvallon, Towards a Philosophical History of the

Political, The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed. D. Castiglione and I. Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 189203, although he also relates thisto the French focus on mentalits. The study of concrete political thought and the study ofmentalitsis similar, but the differences lie mainly in the equal emphasis the latter assigns to a broad range ofpolitical culture, while the former foregrounds political thought and concepts against a backdrop ofpolitical culture.

5By which I mean not on the immediate present but on current and recent politics, withramifications to more distant paths and beckoning futures. Comparative politics extends the hereto various parts of the globe but follows roughly the same temporal pattern.


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thinking. Therefore the latter, too, has to be examined as a series of interactions,

of collective conduct, of loosely patterned human thought-practices.6

Of course, the notions of decision, conflict and supportand even the

production of political visions, as attempts to control the future or to give vent

to political emotionrevolve around the concept of power. There is no escaping

that politics is about power and there is consequently no escaping that good

political theory needs to give plausible accounts of what is entailed, in the

broadest sense, by political thinking relevant to power. All this is hardly made

easier by the fact that so many political theorists, as distinct from institutional

and behavioural analysts, shy away from exploring and understanding power.7

As a tradition, Anglo-American analytical political philosophy, informed by

liberalism, is deeply embarrassed by power and tends to ignore it. As a tradition,

continental political thought and discourse, to the contrary, sees power aspervading and distorting the networks of human interaction, but offers no clear

ways of eliminating that unfortunate by-product of oppressive and invasive

human relationships. Both cannot deal with power as a normal, indeed pivotal,

political phenomenon and as a potential resource to be harnessed to the

attainment of human and social ends. While Anglo-American political

philosophy is manic about the feasibility of socio-political relationships without

power, the continental tradition is depressive about their saturation with power.

If that seems to return us to what may initially appear to be conventionalissues that characterize politics, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that.

Psychology still revolves around human personality and economics around

scarcity, no matter which complex intellectual constructs shape their elaboration.

Far more significant is, first, that the approach we need to foster towards those

issues be innovative, not one employed by most existing schools and, second,

that we also include more esoteric terms and problems, esoteric only in the

sense that they are not saliently on the agenda of philosophical students of

justice, or on the curriculum of undergraduate courses on political theory.

Political thinking requires analysis as a fluid set of conceptual and discursive

encounters with issues such as the following: manufacturing stability, handling

coercion, the conceptual control of political space and political time, the

management of diversity, ambiguity as controlled indeterminacy, ranking

and prioritizing (or rationing) demands and values, political

commitment/allegiancein addition to political obligationas mobilizing

concepts, and the conceptualization and rhetorical marketing of political failure.

All those are some of the most typical and central issues on which societies focus

when they think consciouslyat any level of articulation and sophistication

116 MICHAEL FREEDEN

6By a thought-practice I mean an identifiable, patterned and recurrent sequence of thinking, nota physical activity that can be observed directly in the world.

7The introduction of the notion of empowering, mainly in late 20th century feminist discourse,attempts to relate power to theories of autonomy and self-development, and functions primarily asa code for the latter concepts.


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about politics and which, further, are reflected unconsciously in their practices.

They are the everyday flesh and blood of political debate and discourse and

through them we can put our finger on the pulse of the body politic.

In short, we need to find new ways through which to make political thought,

and its study, work for us. In so doing we must rely heavily on the wisdom and

understandings derived from the fields of political philosophy and the history of

political thought. But we may also realize why some of the methods designed to

satisfy the intellectual concerns of those two disciplines will produce wrong

results for the purposes set out above.

III. DECISIONS IN THE LIGHT OF AMBIGUITY, INDETERMINACY,

INCONCLUSIVENESS AND VAGUENESS

I can only briefly illustrate some topics and ways of discussing them as part of

a larger research project I am undertaking. Let me begin with political decision-

making. A decision involves a choice among options, and a political decision

involves making such choices for, and/or shaped by, a collectivity. Implicit in the

concept of choice is the notion of pluralism, at the very least in the sense that

more than one option is possible (arguably necessary) when a decision is made.

To that are added two further assumptions, namely, that it is normal and

unavoidable in any society for more than one voice to exist (even if other voicesare suppressed, they are never quite eliminated); and that making choices is

necessarily an exercise in ranking. Political theory offers us one highly useful

instrument for understanding the nature of decision-making: the notion of

essential contestability. In its advanced formulations, it suggests, first, that

political concepts are composed of multiple components, not all of which can

be contained in any given formulation of the concept; and, second, that the

relative weight of each component is itself variable and the ranking of values

is hence inconclusive.8 Consequently there can be no unequivocal way of

choosing among the various conceptions of a concept and arriving at a conclusive

definition, of which more below.

In order to appreciate the linguistic and semantic features that guide the

operation of political concepts, and that have immediate bearing on the

structuring of political debate, theory, and action, we need to unpack further

some of the attributes of those concepts, with particular regard to the manner

through which they impart, or fail to impart, meaning. In political science

literature, policies are often depicted as being ambiguous.9 Ambiguity relates to


8See M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1996), pp. 5560. For my most recent thoughts on the subject see M. Freeden, Essentialcontestability and effective contestability,Journal of Political Ideologies, 9 (2004), 311, 225.

9See, e.g., James G. Marsh and Johan P. Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations (Bergen:Universitetsvorlaget, 1976); William E. Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity (Madison, WI: Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1987).


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more than one reading of a practice, image or text by its consumer. As Empson

suggested in his classic work, ambiguity is any verbal nuance, however slight,

which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.10 But

implicit in ambiguity is the possibility of there being clear choices among fixed

and finite meanings, meanings obfuscated through semantic duality (bank) or

through structural and lexical fluidity (I saw the man with my binoculars), or

through insufficient information-cum-context (Wittgensteins duck-hare). The

multiple interpretations of an ambiguous message are potentially dealt with

through disambiguation: a rephrasing aimed at removing all meanings but one.

Crucially for politics, ambiguity may be intentional as well as unintentional.

Ambiguity is often confused with indeterminacy. But indeterminacy is a

different attribute of political concepts. First, it is a function of their far greater

complexity. We can create a world in which ambiguities are removed, but thatwould be one based on exceedingly simple premises. The prime minister is the

leader of the Labour party is a statement where the office, its holder and the

official status of leadership are subject to clear and generally accepted semantic

rules and, contextually, party does not denote some kind of festive celebration.

This state is democratic allows for no such disambiguation, because

democracy is not ambiguous; it is indeterminate. Indeed, it would be impossible

to construct a sentence in which all the components of democracy would be

sufficiently disambiguated for an uncontroversial meaning to emerge. Second,indeterminacy refers to an inevitable and ineliminable contingency of meaning.

It is a prior ontological standpoint about the impossibility of arriving at fixed,

determinate interpretations of certain concepts and about the logical (though not

cultural) arbitrariness of meaning. It is a fundamental hermeneutical issue.11

Epistemologically, the uncertainty engendered by ambiguity does not rule out

certainty (say if information improves), because uncertainty itself is deemed to

be the contingent feature. Much rational choice theory follows that line. But

indeterminacy rules outdeterminacy. It can offer merely spurious and temporary

determinacy, engineered (1) by the suspension of disbelief in the possibility of

determinacy, and (2) by the political awkwardness of belief in the necessity of

indeterminacy, a belief that could encourage political paralysis.12

The indeterminacy from which decisionsthose political Ur-actsemanate is

a structural corollary of the notion of essential contestability, a notion that also

underpins pluralism. Decisions create the illusionoften through style, rhetoric

or self-persuasionthat indeterminacy does not exist. Given indeterminacy,

decisions are closures that permit policies to be formulated or justified against

a multiple path background. If we accept that position, we will regard thepolitical thinking occurring in a political community as an explicit or implicit

118 MICHAEL FREEDEN

10W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 1.11Cp. T. Bahti, Ambiguity and indeterminacy: the juncture, Comparative Literature, 38 (1986),

20923.12On this specific point see Freeden, Essential contestability and effective contestability.


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competition over the control of political language, and will identify that area as

the characteristic domain of ideologies. That control is attempted through the

most necessary feature of the ideological act: the decontestation of the essentially

contestable, through which a decision is both made possible (accorded an aura

of finiteness) and justified (accorded an aura of authority). Within the internal

logic of politics that is both a heuristic necessity and a practical one, as decisions

must be taken and they then need to be either legitimated or enforced. The

control over language is an endeavour to monopolize the meanings concepts

carry. Legitimation and coercion are two methods of establishing monopolies of

meaning, however fleeting they may be. That controlthat ideological act of

assertive selectionis a basic feature ofpoliticalthinking.

Decontestation, though central to political argument, is never conclusive. Here

we add inconclusiveness to ambiguity and indeterminacy as attributes of politicalconcepts. Inconclusiveness relates to the point where competing appraisals

of arguments or of policies cannot knock each other out and no further

improvement can be made on that situation. It relates to the persuasive or

emotional strength of different claims made by various assertions, whether or

not through the assembling of evidence. It is a failure of assessment and of

weighting; not, as with ambiguity, of the clarification of definitional meaning.

But there is another sense of inconclusivelacking a conclusion. It is also tied

to the impossibility of reaching an end point in an argumentative chain or string.Say I am an egalitarian who favours greater equalization of wealth, from which

I deduce a scheme of public transfers such as graduated taxation, and then have

to consider whether to permit voluntary transfers from one member of a family

to another, and then ask whether the use of such transfers should be controlled

in terms of the goods they purchase, all down to the case of whether Mrs.

Appleton of Hyacinth Avenue, Bolton, a widowed ex-terrorist awaiting a hip

replacement, whose neighbour is playing very loud music on Saturday nights

when she wants to sleep, is a disadvantaged individual who requires occasional

compensation from a cash-strapped municipality, even though in the not-distant

future she will inherit a large sum of money from her aged uncle, etc. There

comes a point where, due to argumentative overload, to the inability to

conceptualize, to the inefficiency of policy-producing results, or to sheer

boredom, such a chain needs to be stopped (or, more likely, it peters out) even

though it can still produce endless variations. Those stoppage points may be

conditioned by moral paradigms, by conventions of argument, by demands of

efficacy, or by other cultural practices. Here the sequence and detailed path of

an argument, rather than the internal components of its parts, are curtailed bycomplexity and the limited resources of mental and emotional energy in the face

of infinity!

Now, political philosophers may perceive many acts of decontestation as

examples of poor thinking that, consequently, do not merit serious scholarly

examination. As I have argued elsewhere, the concept of decontestation muddies



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the waters of logical imperatives beloved by philosophers by introducing cultural

constraints on the logical options contained in an argument. Cultural constraints

are inevitable in a system of thinking when the path-structure of logical trees

invariably offers a number of entailed solutions, the choice among which would

otherwise be arbitrary.13 The very arbitrariness of the logical choices as to which

path to follow is a sharp reminder that logic is the coat hanger, not the coat,

and that philosophical obsession with logic alone will actually result in

substantive indeterminacy unless cultural constraints are factored in.

However, there is another argument political philosophers could bring against

decontestations. When effected by non-expertsi.e. non-philosophersthey

may be taken sloppily, and with insufficient justification. That is often true, but

it is not a good reason for ignoring them. First, the study of political thought

(and here one finds common ground with historians of political thought) mustleave room for theorizing about the bad and the inadequate side by side with

the good or the ideal. That is standard practice among political comparativists,

for example. This point was captured almost a century ago by Graham Wallas,

in response to James Bryce. Bryce had written about the ideal democracy in

which every citizen is intelligent, patriotic, disinterested, seeking the right side

in each contested issue by using his common sense. What, riposted Wallasin

language as pertinent today as it was thendid Bryce mean by common sense?

If it means anything it means the best form of democracy which is consistent withthe facts of human nature. But one feels, on reading the whole passage, that Mr.Bryce means by these words the kind of democracy which might be possible ifhuman nature were as he himself would like it to be, and as he was taught at Oxfordto think that it was. If so, the passage is a good instance of the effect of ourtraditional course of study in politics. No doctor would now begin a medicaltreatise by saying, the ideal man requires no food, and is impervious to the actionof bacteria, but this ideal is far removed from the actualities of any knownpopulation.14

Second, if politics is centrally about decision-making for collectivities, the

political theorist needs to theorize about the kind of thinking that goes into the

act of decontestation. Decontestative thinking, and its study, themselves become

central topoliticaltheory. They have to do different work for us in our capacity

as political theorists of politics than in our capacity as political philosophers. We

thus need to investigate the methods, arguments, presentations and devices that

enable successful decontestation in the political arena. The argument here is

loosely parallel to that directed against vulgar Marxist views of ideology, views

that summarily dismissed ideology as distorted consciousness instead ofexploring those forms of distortion and why they mattered, not only to those

120 MICHAEL FREEDEN

13See M Freeden, A Very Short Introduction to Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),pp. 5760.

14G. Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London: Constable, 1948; originally published 1908),pp. 1267.


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who thought them, but also to those who studied ideology. Whether or not we

like what we find, as students of society we need to know.

Two forms of decontestation are well-known, even if not analysed as

decontestations. The one is the attempt to attach very precise allocations of

meanings to indeterminate concepts. Characteristic are the carefully-argued

conceptual clarifications, occasionally definition-constructing, that political

philosophers attempt as thought-exercises for the recommended handling

of concepts and arguments. Even here these are predicated on the acts of

manipulating, limiting, ranking and excluding fields of meaning so as to optimize

clarity, acts that themselves are of course saliently political. The second is the

stipulative ascription of meaning to a term, often associated with ideologues (in

extreme cases totalitarian, caricatured in Orwells 1984 slogans war is peace;

freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength; but in fact common to all ideologists,as in equality can only be understood as equality of opportunity). This second

form of decontestation may be underpinned by rhetoric, by invoking extra-

human sanctification, or by force. Typically, the closure attempted here is

buttressed by the conclusive manner in which meaning is attached to the

contested term, accompanied by sleight of mouth, by the harnessing of science,

God, nature, personal vision, or by threats. One reason for this perceived and

intended conceptual confidence lies in the nature of authoritativeness, a property

that political systems need to generate with respect to their elites and prospectivepower-wielders, if those elites are to compete successfully over the control

of political language. In effect, the two forms of decontestation are not

dichotomous but represent two points on a continuum, and the distance between

philosophers and ideologues is not as great as some scholars would have it.

Stipulative ascription, frequently supported by an appeal to reason, is well within

the domain of the political theorist and philosopher (justice is the first virtue of

a society), and the elusive end of authoritativeness is no less sought by scholars

of political thought when promoting their own theories.

But the closure of debate does not necessarily ensue from the accuracy of the

conceptual definition or argumentative solution, or solely from the marketing of

dominant meanings. There exists a third and equally significant form of closure.

It could be called simulated decontestation, in which the semblance of

decontestation is created by ambiguity and by vagueness. Political philosophers

often label the kinds of political thinking emanating from non-professional

thinkers, say politicians and the disseminators of popular ideologiesas elusive,

if not duplicitous. That is, for instance, an accusation levelled at the phrase the

third way and, from the viewpoint of analytical purists, it is a justified one.Ambiguity in that case relates, for instance, to the lack of clarity concerning the

first and second waysboth in terms of their substance (e.g., capitalism versus

communism? Free-market versus welfare state?), and in terms of the location of

thirdon a continuum defined by first and second, that is to say middle; or

a Hegelian synthesis of first and second; or outside that frame: an ordinal



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number distinguished simply by its location on a temporal sequence? Ambiguity

is, however, also a form of handling political language that is vital to the central

political aim of mobilizing support. The generation of support is, in terms of

political theory, significantly dependent on linguistic formulations that are open-

ended, that carry multiple meanings, and that can be consumed differentially.

That also connects to the rather different category ofvagueness, pertaining to

the boundary problems of concepts (to their intension) and to movement across

categories. Are both communism and the welfare state, for the purposes of a

specific political argument, simply two instances of excessive state control? Is the

free-market a sub-set of capitalism or can it be detached from the latter and

reattached to forms of democratic socialism? And does that then begin to vitiate

the distinction between capitalism and democratic socialism, or are we looking

instead at a plethora of ideological configurations as characteristic of real worldpolitical discourse, many of which shade off into others? The blurring of

boundaries of meaning is often inescapable, but it may also be intentional.

Controlled and delimited indeterminacy is a typical and indispensable aspect of

political thinking among decision-making elites, especially if in a particular

instance the requirement to generate support overrides the requirement for

authoritative semantic pronouncements. Decision-making may generate support

from admirers of decisiveness, but it is also a loss-maker in terms of the

ideational groups it alienates. Accuracy of language (to the extent that it ispossible) is an advantage only if precision is needed to corner a particular

market of ideological support. Whereas ideological specialization should

produce strong decontestation, it also entails a limiting of ambition with regard

to potential support or, alternatively, a reliance on coercion.

The point is that both ambiguous and vague expressions of political thinking

cannot just be dismissed as inferior thought-products. If they are, we miss out

as interpreters of the domain of the politicalon identifying major political

phenomena and impoverish our understanding of the variety and subtlety of

political thinking at the disposal of a society. They are, rather, frequently

intentional and importantly functional forms of political thought. And although

the general public may see them as confirmation of the bad name given to

politics, their elusiveness is not simply dissimulation, trickery or slack thinking

though it may be any of thesebut often the deliberate harnessing of political

language in order to achieve one of the main ends of politics, quite apart from

being an existential feature of political language.

From the perspective of analyzing political thought, the indeterminacy of

political concepts associated with further properties such as ambiguity (whichmay allow for answers through disambiguation) and vagueness (which cannot

generate specific answers)15 marks out the inevitable tension between the desire

122 MICHAEL FREEDEN

15R. Sorensen, Vagueness and Contradiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 23,112.


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for decontestation and its impossibility, due to the surplus of meaning any act

of linguistic closure carries. Even strong decontestation (The only freedom

which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way16)

cannot endow political language with precision, and will be open to many

interpretations, unanticipated as well as anticipated. Particularly for ideologies,

competing as they do over political power in societies, certainty as well as

elusiveness are two required features, and fundamental to the political process.

Both are preliminaries to producing decisions. Liberal polities, especially, are

positioned between the need of politicians to deliver confidence-generating

results, and the requirement of liberal ideologies to be flexible in reassessing the

meanings and applications of polysemic political vocabulary, as well as to

mobilize the pluralist support believed to be structurally distinctive of modern,

multiple-identity societies. Sometimes certainty can pay, if a very specific policyis in the making; and the rhetoric and style of certainty are themselves the

wielding of political power. At other times, and more typically, elusiveness of

meaning is the key to generating consent.

Lets put this slightly differently, in the context of recent attempts by political

philosophers to attain overlapping consensus and undistorted communication in

a society. Devices to attain consensus, whether of the Rawlsian thin type or the

Habermasian thicker type, are proffered by those philosophers as a solution to

the existence of political disagreement, or as the framework within which onlyreasonable disagreement can persist and be controlled. Perfect harmony may be

posited through utopian thought experiments, and overlapping consensus

through an appeal to free-standing shared intuitions and moral capacities. But

politics, we might argue, based on past and present observation, is the site of

durable dissent as a structural inevitability. Articulatory and augmentative

precision therefore exacerbate the destructive potential of dissent, as positions

are sharply marked out not only methodologically but substantively. Here I offer

one evaluative standpoint from a disciplinary perspective habitually accused of

eschewing normative evaluation in favour of interpretation andusually

employed in a derogatory mannerdescription. Vagueness and ambiguity are

not only the inevitable by-product of indeterminacy, but a recipe for political co-

existence. The much-vaunted 1950s consensus on the post WW2 welfare state

in the UK was the product of such ambiguity. It allowed for co-operation

between very diverse ideological frameworks with the concomitant political

stability this engendered. It did that through playing down the different

ideological ends welfare measures serviced: political order and economic

productivity for the Conservatives, social justice and greater social solidarity forLabour. Imprecision and the elision of meaning are advantageous and desirable,

when different priorities among political values would otherwise lead to strife.

The tolerance of words in containing multiple, connected but not identical


16J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London: Dent, 1910), p. 75.


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meanings, is important to the adequate functioning of political and ideological

orders. The precision so highly sought by some philosophers may signal the kiss

of death for political processes.

IV. STRUCTURAL PLURALISMS AND

CONCEPTUAL INTERDEPENDENCIES

So far, the word ideology has crept into this article, but not predominantly

so. In effect, the political theory of politics is closely related to the study

of ideologies, but I am very conscious of the contrary and contradictory

associations of the concept of ideology. The approach advocated here regards

ideologies as synonymous with the political thinking actually occurring in a

society, inasmuch as the product is identifiable in patterns (or morphologicalarrangements) and is produced and consumed by politically significant

collectivities. That is not to suggest that the meaning of ideology can now be

stretched to take over as the preponderant object of political theory, but rather

that political theory must avail itself of the methods and techniques that recent

analyses of ideology have developed, in order to gain access to the vast realm of

concrete and politically relevant thinking that exists at the heart of the political.

It also suggests, as noted above, that we almost always encounter political

thought in the form of ideological discourses.What, then, are the understandings and devices we need to bring into play

if we wish to do justice as political theorists to this under-researched and

underconceptualized area? First, if it makes sense to regard the conceptas the

basic semantic unit of political thinking, political theory needs to investigate the

presentation, interrelationships and internal structure of its concepts. While

competition over the control of language should remain pivotal to political

theory, its emphasis should lie in the analysis of the productthe configurations

of concepts that constitute a political idea and, at more general levels, an instance

of political discourse, or an ideology. Second, and I shall return to this below,

given indeterminacy, ambiguity, vagueness, and inconclusiveness as fundamental

to political argument and its conceptual components, political theory needs to

explore the characteristics that these attributes bestow on the political process.

How do they structure political discourse? How should that knowledge of the

nature of political language shape our understanding of the political and of

political thinking?

Importantly, this genre of political theory must be sensitive to change, as it is

predicated on the impermanence of conceptual content, and is sensitive to thefluctuating interchange of conceptual structures with the world of practices,

embracing Skinners observation that acts are also texts.17 But it is not centrally

124 MICHAEL FREEDEN

17Q. Skinner, The rise of, challenge to, and prospects for a Collingwoodian approach to thehistory of political thought, The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed. Castiglioneand Hampsher-Monk, p. 186.


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concerned with the reasons or conditions for change as with its manifestations

and consequencesthe varied conceptions of key concepts that come together

to form patterned yet plastic theories and understandings. Its epistemological

underpinning in indeterminacy does not signify a flaw in our conception of the

world or a temporary stage en route to truth and knowledge, but singles out

the very locus of human choice (and hence conceptual flexibility) itself.

Indeterminacy is not synonymous with chaos or with extreme relativism, but it

holds out the promise of infinitely rich combinations of ideas from which

societies may draw. Methodologically, it underpins the pluralism that guarantees

that neither political theory nor ideology will ever die out. It is also far more in

tune with the view of human nature that recent welfare theory has identified

not one based on a nineteenth century belief in the certainties proffered by

human reason and in the forcefulness of practical entrepreneurship, but basedon an awareness of human frailty and vulnerability, and hence normally

susceptible to unpredictable as well as planned change.18 Does building on the

existence of pluralism signify that political theory can only deal with liberal

premises and frameworks? Not at all, as the pluralism that is the result of

essential contestability is a necessary but not sufficient condition of liberalism,

and because political theorists have to entertain the assumption that the

ostensible absence of more than one voice, in any ideological system, is achieved

not through utopian reasonableness and harmony but only through force ormanipulation.

Another feature of structural pluralism directs us to a further insight germane

to the political theory of politics. Politics focuses, among others, on the study of

interrelated individuals and groups, recently rephrased through terms such as

networks.19 That existential interdependence is matched by the conceptual

interdependence evident in the thought products of political thinkers. In the real

world of texts and utterancesas any linguist knowswords come in

combinations, and so it is with concepts. Despite the proclivity of analytical

philosophers to explore concepts in isolationa necessary exercise when the

tolerance and range of a concept is, quite reasonably, subjected to logical and

argumentative testingconcepts always appear in clusters that are mutually

defining, sustaining and, for that matter, constraining. Those patterns

are established through empirical evidence, mediated via the interpretative

facilities of the researcher, but superimposed on a spinal conceptual structure

that reveals the options available to political thinkers in a given time and space

frame.


18See M. Freeden, The coming of the welfare state, The Cambridge History of Twentieth CenturyPolitical Thought, ed. T. Ball and R. Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),pp. 744.

19See, e.g., R.A.W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance: Policy, Networks, Governance,Reflexivity and Accountability (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997); Martin A. Hajer andHendrik Wagenaar, eds, Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the NetworkSociety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).


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Take Mills On Liberty, an essay that is not on liberty alone, not even on

liberty as a super-value. As Mill makes abundantly clear, he is arguing for the

free development of individualitya cluster of concepts that elicit out of

each other specific conceptions and that form a particular cultural package

chosen from a number of logical possibilities.20 Thus, the conception of liberty

is one that contributes to the development of individuals; other conceptions of

liberty are structurally ruled out by the proximity engineered to the adjacent

concepts; while the conception of development is made to include self-

development, as development not undertaken by free individuals is excluded.21

We thus encounter a virtuous circle, an instance of complex holistic relationships,

bearing three features. First, any concept is a means to any other (the circle may

be entered into at any point on the conceptual compass). Second, some

conceptions of any concept may also intersect with, or constitute, part of anotherconcept: here complex boundary problems emerge. Thirda normative

apparelthe configuration of concepts has been constructed so as to constitute

collectively a desirable, or attractive, set of human and social circumstances.22

Those are typical ways in which political language and thinking present

themselves.

Interdependence, applied to the political world, is not tantamount to an all-

embracing wholeness. In a world of conflicting and competing conceptual

arrangements, it appears as competing holisms. One salient shape thesecompeting holisms adopt is that of ideologies, which are now to be viewed as

all the concrete forms of political thinking in a society that feature either some

grand conceptual configuration or, more modestly, a partial one. For each

ideology offers a prevailing pattern of the conceptions of many concepts, bound

together as a particular discourse. Such holisms are of course not really complete,

for two reasons. First, the issue of inconclusiveness noted above: arguments

have no clear endpoints. Second, in a holistic structure ideas and policies are

interconnected at many points and on many dimensions. Those nodal linkages

reflect cultural understandings of how and why these connections are, and should

be, made. But no holistic political structure can host all possible linkages and

paths. The interdependence of any given cluster of political thought lies rather

in its particular choice, or presentation, of certain sequential conceptual paths

and in some configuration of mutually-sustaining circularity. Disparate nodal

linkages vie with each other in giving different holistic readings (i.e. alternative

ideological interpretations) of the political practices that are being signified.

To recapitulate, the sphere of politics is a major arena in which collective

enterprises take place, and ideologies most typically represent the political

126 MICHAEL FREEDEN

20Mill, On Liberty, p. 115.21I have argued this in greater detail in Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 1457.22These possibilities do not exhaust Mills text. The umbrella concept of well-being actson this

interpretationas a collective name for the cluster of named goods, but may also, as Mill implies,contain further goods, or further leading essentials.


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thought equivalents of these collective ventures. They are both collectively

produced, and designed to be consumed, by collectivities. Hence any political

theory aiming at understanding this aspect of the political cannot overlook the

fundamental claim that the study of ideologies offers the most immediate and

relevant access to the clustered political thinking of collectivities.

V. THE ATTRIBUTES OF POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND

THE SHAPE OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Once we are prepared to forgo the presupposition that collectivities ought to act

in unison, or that they can leave their differences at the hermetically sealed gate

of politics, our focus necessarily readjusts to what happens inside the space

occupied by such collectivities and the sub-groups inside them. Here we mayborrow an idea from institutional analysts: the notion of multi-level governance.

Comparative political scientists have largely abandoned the unitary assumptions

about the relationship between politics and the state, and students of political

thought need to do the same. Multi-level governance assumes that political

systems harbour variable origins of decision-making. That raises the immediate

problem of co-ordination. The reflection of that structural requirement is

negotiationone mechanism for the regulation of any conflict that may emerge.

The centrality of negotiation to the study of political thought commences withthe pluralism and dissent generated by conceptual indeterminacy, and follows

them through the political requirement to make decisions. The focal area of the

political theory of politics lies thus not in the sphere that Rawls called political

liberalism, but expressly in the spheres of comprehensive doctrines that Rawls

banished from politics. One of the cores of the politicaldissent and its

attempted regulation through negotiationis sited in the relationship between

these so-called comprehensive doctrines.

Negotiation and compromise are political activities that can prevent the

eruption of uncontrollable disorder. The fluid structure of political concepts itself

holds the potential for negotiation, though not all features of political thinking

for instance, oversimplification or excessive competitive zealare amenable to

such compromise. Nor can we rule out the many instances of zero-sum

relationships among core values, against which Rawlsian-type enterprises are

helpless. Pro-choicers and pro-lifers with regard to the deliberate termination

of pregnancies constitute one such case, and ambiguityor coercionmay be

the only way out. Most political theories and ideologies possess non-negotiable

componentsred lines they will never cross.As an aspect of political thought, negotiation normally accompanies

decontestation. Negotiation can occur with regard to past conversations within

a particular political discourse, or between political discourses. The decontested

forms in which we encounter political concepts do not descend from a conceptual

heaven but are the product of complex historical and political processes, of



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inching ones way towards positions that are the result of many adaptive

conversations. They eventually reach the point where negotiation temporarily

stops, due to the exigencies of decision-making, or the tolerance and endurance

levels of the ideological producers. That process is parallel to imposing an

ephemeral conclusion on inconclusiveness, and it helps us to understand why

decisions are, from the point of view of political thinking, quasi-arbitrary and

temporary stoppage points in potentially interminable sequences, and why,

therefore, a decision is an act of rerouting rather than one of permanently

halting.

Equipped with the attributes of political concepts, and taking on board the

crucial art of political negotiation, how might they be translated into the terms

of political discourse? As political theorists we need to explore the impact of

conceptual features, and the leeway of conceptual interpretation possible in aconceptual arrangement, before it begins to affect core positions critically.

Assume, for example, that we are assessing two policies concerning traffic

congestion. Behind them lies a general conception of the public interest involving

physical mobility and the quality of urban life. For some, that public interest

entails the reduction of pollution in the service of sustainable life on the planet

(cars are a public bad). For others, it involves an efficient and consumer-oriented

lifestyle necessitating speed of access to places of work, shopping and

entertainment. This group could be further divided into those who wish to buildadditional access roads for private vehicles (cars are a public good because they

advance social mobility and accessibility; rather than a private good because they

advance individual desires) and those who wish to prioritize public transport

(buses are a public rather than private good for the same reasons). For others

again, non-intervention in private choices is the relevant conception of the public

interest (this is not identical to the aggregate of private interests but a competing

evaluation of the good life) and congestion is one of the prices we pay for a free

society (the goodness or badness of cars is irrelevant, and the quality of urban

life is a consequence of the free choices available to residents). Already, the

political terrain is constructed on the indeterminacy of the public good and of

the relative weighting of its components, and the vagueness of the boundary

relationship between private and public transport (say, between a privately hired

school bus and a school bus operated by a private company under licence of the

local authority).

The town, however, is clogged up and for most people that cost is too high.

Can the different conceptions of the good life allow a solution? The municipality

decides to assess two options, taking into account the prevalence of thosedifferent beliefs concerning the good life and the inevitability of dissent on

those matters. The one proposal is to forgo regulation and to anticipate that

congestion will make travel so unattractive that individuals will find it easier to

leave their cars at home rather than face gridlock. The other is to impose a

128 MICHAEL FREEDEN


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congestion charge. In decoding these perimeter practices23 we must first try to

set them within the ideological environment that best makes sense of them. The

two options offer at least three possible strategies of argument for the rationing

of public road space. The first sees self-rationing as an inevitable consequence

of excessive private demand for geographical mobility, and when individuals

are penalized by gridlock it relies on private, rational choices. As a market

mechanism it is self-regulatory: motorists will despair and vote with their wheels;

those who nevertheless insist on driving in city centres will pay the price in time

and nerves. The second justifies centralized rationing by invoking environmental

concerns to trump individual choice, and imposes regulations irrespective of

democratic soundingsfor example, the opening of space only to public

transport. The third invokes efficiency of movement in terms of time and space.

However, as happened in London, it combines market practicesleasing publicspaceand a regressive tax that penalizes the worse-off while still enabling

the wealthy to swan around town centre, with an alternative concern for

redistributive justice: namely, the proceeds of the congestion charge are

channelled to a considerable extent towards subsidising public transport.

The attractiveness of this solutionfor those to whom it may be attractive in

the first placeis that it relies on the ambiguity of the conception of the public

good it is intended to satisfy. Whose interests is it serving? Whose view of the

good life can it claim to benefit? It is not a case of zero-sum ambiguity, whereone interpretation may rule out the other (e.g. the desirability of experimenting

on animals) but of compatible ambiguity, utilizing the possibility that all parties

maywith some tweakingread their preferred, or at least an acceptable,

position into the proffered solution. In effect, it illustrates a struggle over a

particular cashing out of the public interest, stretched indeterminately between

three positions: 1. The predominance of private interests, and freedom from the

nuisance of physical intervention by others in my relatively efficient free

movement through town (assisted by an ability to pay that itself is a product ofmarket forces). 2. The objective interest of human and extra-human entities,

underpinned by a scientific, expert and non-democratic decontestation of

(environmental) values. 3. The postulation of a communal, electorally popular,

interest best served within current cultural constraints by charging for free

choice, and addressing the consequent inequality of opportunity for movement

by compensating those unable to avail themselves of it. If conceptual flexibility

allows for a sustainable overlapping area to elide ideological differences and to

reach a policy-decision, then negotiation over the content of political concepts

is possible and may result in a compromiseeach side can go back to its

supporters and claim reasonable success. Political consensus, to repeat, is


23For an explanation of perimeter practices see Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory,pp. 7880.


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predicated on ambiguity, not precision, and as political theorists we must

understand both how the construction of ambiguity works, and how to produce

it when necessary.

Nevertheless, unanticipated strains in that coalition of conceptions may cause

it to unravel at any future point, or to react violently back on the stability of

conceptual cores. Decontestation is itself subject to continuous reformulation

over time and space. Essential contestability engenders slippage as a consequence

of the internal flexibility of positions and the impossibility (and political

undesirability) of holding linguistic meaning constant. There always exists a

decontestation continuum, in which subtle reformulations (negotiated or

unprompted) are marshalled in order to remain in the competition over the

control of political language. That is where inconclusiveness emerges, for the

imposition of a congestion charge will effectively be, as argued above, anunavoidably temporary decision. The solution may have to be extended in future,

it may be abolished as electorally unsustainable, or its success may create other

harms that have to be addressed.

VI. RANKING AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF SIGNIFICANCE

There is at least one further vital feature of political discourse that assists in

engendering support and enabling political decisions. If politics still is, in HaroldLasswells famous phrase, about who gets what, when, how then its discursive

equivalent in political theory is the distribution of significance to open fields of

meaning: endowing this meaning of a concept, of an argument, of a practice

with greater significance than thatmeaning. At the heart of politics are acts of

ranking, of expressing preferences, of establishing a pecking order of importance,

in a world where there are finite material, intellectual and emotional resources

that can be called on to construct, or support, or justify policy. That ranking is

a prerequisite of political decision-making, without which decision-makers

cannot know what to deal with next. Ranking attempts to transform the

essentially indeterminate weighting and sequencing of priority claims into a

determinate one. Unlike the notion of hierarchy, it does not necessarily denote

a durable institutional structure, nor the bestowal of superior consideration on

people and offices, but rather a process central to political judgment, assessment

and choice.

How does political thought handle this issue? Notably, some political concepts

and some forms of political language are primarily dedicated to ranking. To

illustrate, we need to reconsider a well-known concept in political theory fromapolitical, not ethical, perspective. A right, from that viewpoint, is a linguistic

device that discharges the function of cruciallyprioritizingandprotectingvalues

and desired objects. It is a concept that shoots other valued concepts to the

top of the queue and accords them greater weight and durabilityi.e. it

(re)distributes their significance. Rights are always a protective capsule for other

130 MICHAEL FREEDEN


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valuesrights are not substantive values themselvesand that very act of

linguistic protection and ring-fencing is a pristine political act. Rights regulate

conflict through attempted demarcations of boundaries of human action and

expectation. The very language of rights endeavours to render those boundaries

impermeable, through adjectival contrivances such as natural or inalienable,24

and that is a major form of coping with essential contestability. Rights are often

accompanied by the concepts of legitimacy and authority. These mobilize

political support through manufacturing consent and obediencetwo

indispensable political goods, irrespective of any ethical worth they may carry,

that confer durability on ranking. All these concepts embody the conceptual

polysemy and indeterminacy that necessitate ranking exercises in order for

political activity to be possible.

Ranking is also abetted by persuasivenessan aspect of (political) powerpertaining to the assembling of cogent, effective, or attractive arrangements of

political concepts and conceptions incorporated in political argument. Here the

focus is on utilizing the cultural tools that are best geared to changing peoples

opinions or to securing them: rational argument, an appeal to the past, the

summoning up of Gods will, or nationalist fervour are some of the options. That

too is a major consideration in constructing a political theory of politics, because

it examines which devices aid one argument to gain salience over another.

VII. REFLECTIONS ON THE ROLE OF POLITICAL THEORISTS

Ethicists might have a point when they ask: How does this kind of political

analysis further the goals of providing a critique of existing practices and

principles, and of prescribing better ones? Simply to argue that the political

theory of politics focuses on different aspects of politics is only partially correct.

Nor is it quite enough to claim that morality is no more than an attractive way

through which to shape legitimacy discourses, and that morality tests are weighty

tests of the actions of governments and the ends of regimes. That assigns morality

an instrumental value. The greater challenge is to demonstrate that the political

theory of politics can provide tools to ethico-political philosophers

(conventionally referred to as normative philosophers). True, if we assume that

individuals as a rule appreciate good or moral reasons for acting, then legitimacy

claims and understandings have to be couched in moral terms. But as analysts

of political language and concepts we will want to know which conceptions of

which concepts generate and enable arguments about the intrinsic good

of political morality. We need to know how political visions are constructed.Does a cocktail of transparency, pluralism and legitimacy offer the winning

combination? Or one of loyalty, nationhood and sacrifice? Which conceptions


24I initially developed that approach to rights in M. Freeden, Rights (Buckingham: OpenUniversity Press, 1991).


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theorizing that employs conceptual analyses and interpretative tools pertaining

to political ideas and language, and that should stem directly from our training

aspoliticaltheorists. Not the least of the benefits might be that political theorists

and political scientists start talking to each other again.

It is not the past abstractness of political theory that is at fault (as Smith

agrees26) but its extreme reluctance to enter the muddied waters of regular

political discourse on the one hand, and to illuminate the kinds of core political

issues that political theorists have heavily underplayed on the other hand. It is

not the lack of relevance to current political issues that is at stake but the lack

of relevance to understanding the nature of theorizing and thinking about

politics, an enterprise that has largely been abandoned by political theorists, but

that has been resurrected and developed by students of ideology. It is not so

much a question about which events and practices we ought to focus on. Rather,what needs to be rethought is: what should we be doing as political theorists

engaged in understanding and exploring political phenomena? In order to do

theoryto analyse and construct new abstractionswhat do we need to know

about the political thought produced by the members of a society, and what

should we ask about it?

Ten years ago I was writing about the gap between political philosophy and

the history of ideas, and arguing that the study of ideology filled that gap. Now

I am arguing that the space between theory and practice in political studies needsto be filled not just by a convergence between theory and empirical studies, but

by developing an approach that fills another gap: between apolitical and

political, distanced and immediate, theorizingabout politics. That gap, I claim,

can be filled through acknowledging that generalized political thinkingnamely,

concrete and ubiquitous forms of discourse and debate that shape and reflect the

political domain, for better or for worseis a major concern of political theory,

and then enabling political theory to utilize and develop a vocabulary that will

translate that concern into scholarship. If we do not pay attention to those

phenomena, we will overlook a vital aspect of politics and of its incarnation in

patterns of human thought. Moreover, we shall be deflected from what is

centrallypoliticalin our thought-patterns. True, we also need to be engaged

but that is in our role as social ethicists and as citizens. As students of political

thinking we need to emulate the practices of anthropologistsdonning the

mantle of conceptologistsin order to map and interpret the strange, wonderful

and occasionally repulsive world of political ideas on which we all feed and that

permeates the conscious and unconscious assumptions incorporated in the

activity of thinking about politics.Put differently, there are two types of engagement: the one is with the

immediate pressing social, moral and economic issues and movements that

require addressing by the intellectuals and decision-makers of the daythat is,


26Ibid., p. 75.


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the urgent ethical and psychological imperative of expressing outrage or hope,

of trying to make a difference in the world. This flirtation with missionary zeal

has tempted many scholars out of their ivory towers, and so it should be, but

such virtuous conduct is often acquired through short-term reactions to what

is politically and ethically fashionable. Ironically, such activities could be

categorized just as persuasively as ideological rather than as philosophical. The

other engagement is with the relevance of the approaches and methods that

political theorists, as scholars, employ in order to shed light on their subject-

matter, to understand and interpret it. The first is more dramatic and would seem

to produce more compelling results; but the second is more effective, more

carefully self-reflexive, more in line with our responsibilities to our profession as

academics rather than public intellectuals, and it should produce sturdier

frameworks within which longer-term workable results are possible. One cannotdiscuss real world political issues without having a method that identifies the

features of real world political thinking.

There is still a Rubicon to be crossed: How can this approach gain intellectual

and academic respectability in comparison with the heavy-weight and established

disciplines of political philosophy and the history of political thought? Well,

there is no need for competition if the aims and methods of each are clearly

understood and if, most importantly, the boundaries between them are not

conceived of as impermeable but may be regularly traversed to mutual benefit.All are eminently important, because they discharge such different yet

intellectually necessary tasks. But there certainly exists a challenge, one that the

political theory of politics can only meet by demonstrating the complexity and

rigour of its analysisfor which it must be indebted to philosophyand the

interpretative significance of its findings. It will do so through establishing the

empirical and evidential investigation of political thinking, through developing

the analytical categories best suited to the tasks in hand, through the meticulous

insistence on discerning both distinctions and the configurations in which they

occur, through the micro-analysis of political language as conceptual as well as

symbolic, through the sensitivity to political practices as containing ideational

import and to political thinking itself as a social practice, through the recognition

that intentionality and unintentionality, agency and culture, reason and emotion,

interact and inform each other mutually in the political sphere, and through the

incorporation of temporal and spatial flexibilities and shifts as part and parcel

of the fluid processes of the formation of political meaning.

134 MICHAEL FREEDEN

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