What should the 'political' in political theory explore?

Journal of Political Philosophy

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 113-134

  Freeden, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 18844420844     PISSN: 09638016     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2005.00216.x     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. 'Continental' refers less to a geographical entity than to a school, much as the label 'Anglo-American' does.
2. Recently, John G. Gunnell, The Orders of Discourse (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).
3. B. Barber, The Conquest of Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988);
4. B. Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Both emphasise the malady rather than the cure, or see the cure in terms of new ethical dimensions.
5. This 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. 189-203, although he also relates this to the French focus on mentalités. The study of concrete political thought and the study of mentalités is similar, but the differences lie mainly in the equal emphasis the latter assigns to a broad range of political culture, while the former foregrounds political thought and concepts against a backdrop of political culture.
6. By which I mean not on the immediate present but on current and recent politics, with ramifications to more distant paths and beckoning futures. Comparative politics extends the 'here' to various parts of the globe but follows roughly the same temporal pattern.
7. By a thought-practice I mean an identifiable, patterned and recurrent sequence of thinking, not a physical activity that can be observed directly in the world.
8. th century feminist discourse, attempts to relate power to theories of autonomy and self-development, and functions primarily as a code for the latter concepts.
9. See M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 55-60.
10. For my most recent thoughts on the subject see M. Freeden, 'Essential contestability and effective contestability', Journal of Political Ideologies, 9 (2004), 3-11, 225,
11. See, e.g., James G. Marsh and Johan P. Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations (Bergen: Universitetsvorlaget, 1976);
12. William E. Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
13. W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 1.
14. Cp. T. Bahti, 'Ambiguity and indeterminacy: the juncture", Comparative Literature, 38 (1986), 209-23.
15. On this specific point see Freeden, 'Essential contestability and effective contestability'.
16. See M Freeden, A Very Short Introduction to Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 57-60.
17. G. Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London: Constable, 1948; originally published 1908), pp. 126-7.
18. R. Sorensen, Vagueness and Contradiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 23, 112.
19. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London: Dent, 1910), p. 75.
20. Q. Skinner, 'The rise of, challenge to, and prospects for a Collingwoodian approach to the history of political thought', The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed. Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk, p. 186.
21. See M. Freeden, 'The coming of the welfare state', The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Political Thought, ed. T. Ball and R. Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 7-44.
22. See, e.g., R.A.W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance: Policy, Networks, Governance, Reflexivity and Accountability (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997);
23. Martin A. Hajer and Hendrik Wagenaar, eds, Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
24. Mill, On Liberty, p. 115.
25. I have argued this in greater detail in Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 145-7.
26. These possibilities do not exhaust Mill's text. The umbrella concept of well-being acts - on this interpretation - as a collective name for the cluster of named goods, but may also, as Mill implies, contain further goods, or further 'leading essentials'.
27. For an explanation of perimeter practices see Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 78-80.
28. I initially developed that approach to rights in M. Freeden, Rights (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1991).
29. Rogers M. Smith, 'Reconnecting political theory to empirical inquiry, or, a return to the cave?' The Evolution of Political Knowledge: Theory and Inquiry in American Politics, ed. Edward D. Mansfield and Richard Sissons (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), pp. 60-88.
30. Ibid., p. 75.