Ideologies and Political Theory

Abstract

Provides a novel approach to the analysis of ideologies, through examining their internal conceptual morphology. The result is to interpret ideologies as particular combinations of meaning from an indeterminate range of meanings at the disposal of a society—a process identified as the decontestation of the essentially contestable. This accounts for ideological flexibility and for the overlap, continuous transformation, and regrouping of ideological families. Ideological cores are refined by the adjacent and peripheral ideas in which they are located and by their complex interrelationship with political practice. Hence, ideologies are located at the meeting point between logic (internal constraints on their permutations), culture (the impact of social practices and events over time and space) and the regularities of morphological patterning that they display. The book puts this theory into the broader context of ideology studies, as well as relating it to recent historical scholarship. Primarily, the theory is offered as an alternative method of investigating political thinking to that of political philosophy, and as a departure from Marxist perspectives on ideology. This approach is then applied to liberalism, conservatism, socialism, feminism, and green political thought, through a series of detailed historical studies ranging over the past two centuries.

The pathway out of neoliberalism and the analysis of political ideology in the post-crisis world

“…Ideologies, like liberalism and conservatism, crashed and bounced off each other, morphing and redefining themselves over the field of political activity for the purpose of binding people to a particular course of action. 94 This morphological, technique shared elements of its wider approach with the Cambridge school of political thought which, in the 1970s and 80s, had involved a similar analytic of ideology as the study de-contested meaning through which historical societies constituted their political culture. alter-ideology of global significance, the antagonist to their earlier notion of globalism.…”

A Portuguese exception to right-wing populism

“…Michael Freeden (1996) suggested that there are some ideologies which can be combined with other main ideologies. Populism, as the literature shows, is one example of those (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2008;Jagers and Walgrave, 2007;Lucardie and Voerman, 2012;Mudde, 2004;Stanley, 2008;Taggart, 2000).…”

What is Populism and How to Explore It?

“…S jedne strane, populizam uvijek ima središnju jezgru koja obuhvaća pozitivno referiranje na narod i antielitizam, ali, s druge strane, dodatni ideološki elementi, ako ih neki populizam iskazuje, mogu biti različiti i stoga ne mogu predstavljati definicijska obilježja. Pokušavajući prihvatiti ovo razlikovanje populizma i "pravih" političkih ideologija, dio istraži-vača (primjerice, Stanley, 2008) smatra kako se na populizam može primijeniti koncept "slabe" (thin) ideologije, što ga je razvio Michael Freeden (1996Freeden ( , 2003. Prema Freedenu (2003, str.…”