Michael Freeden | |
|---|---|
 Freeden at the conference "Modus Vivendi" in Münster | |
| Born | 1944 |
| Occupation | Professor |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Political scientist |
| Sub-discipline | Ideology studies |
| Institutions | University of Oxford School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London University of Nottingham |
| Notable students | Uri Gordon Marius Ostrowski |
Michael Freeden is a British political scientist who is a Professor at the Department of Politics and International Studies at theSchool of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is also Emeritus Professorial Fellow atMansfield College, Oxford. Between 2013 and 2015, he was Professor ofPolitical Theory in theSchool of Politics and International Relations at theUniversity of Nottingham.[1] He is a leading theorist of ideology and the founding editor of theJournal of Political Ideologies.
Freeden has been noted for his analysis of contemporaryideologies. He has rejected the traditional definition of ideologies, which sees the latter as static "belief systems" and instead bases his analysis on modernsemantics. Just likelanguages, 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 respectivesemantic fields.
Each ideology may be seen as having both "core" concepts (that is, those of the highest importance, e.g.class conflict inMarxism orfreedom in liberalism) and "peripheral" (or secondary) concepts. Concepts may gain or lose importance over time, just as new concepts may emerge (or be borrowed from other ideologies) or fall out of use entirely.[2] Different ideologies may give different meanings to the same term (a concept such asequality will have amaterial definition inMarxism while inliberalism it will rather have alegal and political importance). 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 (Marxism will thus rejectprivate property as a product of theexploitative nature ofcapitalism, just as liberalism may viewstate intervention as an infringement ofindividual freedoms).[2]
This decontestation is not only the product of aninter-ideological competition (between ideologies), but it is also the product of anintra-ideological competition (within ideologies): hence the success ofFriedrich Hayek's form ofneoliberalism during the 1980s, or of theMarxist–Leninist trend in the 1920s.
