Michael Freeden


Michael Freeden is a British political scientist who is an Emeritus Professor of Politics at University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at Mansfield College. He is a leading theorist of ideology and the founding editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies.

Life

He received his MA and DPhil in politics from the University of Oxford. From 1978 to 2011, he engaged in teaching and research there. Between 2013 and 2015, he was Professor of Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. Between 2016 and 2019, he was Professorial Research Associate at the SOAS, University of London. After retirement, he remains as a DPhil supervisor in political theory at University of Oxford.

Academics

Ideology

Freeden's research interests include political theory, emotions, ideology, liberalism, methods, rights and justice. He 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. Just like languages, ideologies consist of certain concepts whose meaning may change and evolve over time. The specific relations between ideological concepts may 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 give different meanings to the same term. In this sense, concepts are 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 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 Friedrich Hayek's form of neoliberalism during the 1980s, or of the Marxist–Leninist trend in the 1920s.

Liberalism

Another side of Freeden’s work, another branch of Freedenism, is the Freeden who embraces more overtly his particular commitment to liberalism, not just in intellectual-historical interpretive mode, but also in ideological, critical or prescriptive mode: the Freeden of The New Liberalism, Liberalism Divided, Rights, and Liberal Languages.

Works