Michael Freeden


Michael Freeden is a Professorial Research Associate at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is also Emeritus Professorial Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford. Between 2013 and 2015, he was Professor of Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He is a leading theorist of ideology, and the founding editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies.

Study of ideologies

Freeden has been noted for his analysis of contemporary ideologies. He has rejected the traditional definition of ideologies, which sees the latter as static "belief systems", and instead bases his analysis on modern semantics. Ideologies - just like languages - consist of certain concepts whose meaning may change and evolve over time. The specific relations between ideological concepts may thus be analyzed by being set in their respective semantic fields.
Each ideology may be seen as having both "core" concepts and "peripheral" concepts. Concepts may gain or lose importance over time, just as new concepts may emerge or fall out of use entirely. Different ideologies may thus give different meanings to the same term. Concepts are thus defined by their relation to other concepts. According to Freeden, it is precisely these conceptual relations that should attract our attention, as they will be likely to evolve in the long term.
By studying the conceptual evolution of ideologies, Freeden observes that the relative "political success" of an ideology depends on its ability to impose the belief that its own conceptual definitions are the "correct ones". This thus gives rise to a form of "conceptual competition", in which each ideology performs a continuous "decontestation" of its concepts - that is, it tries to eliminate all possible contestation of its own conceptual definitions, thereby rejecting competing definitions.
This decontestation is not only the product of an inter-ideological competition, but it is also the product of an intra-ideological competition : hence the success of Hayek's form of neoliberalism during the 1980s, or of the Marxist-Leninist trend in the 1920s.

Works