The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 13, Number 2, 2005, pp.

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What Should the Political in Political Theory Explore?*

Michael Freeden
Politics, Manseld College, Oxford

I. THE GAP IN POLITICAL THEORY T is now commonplace among ever-increasing numbers of political theorists to query the state of the art of the sub-discipline, in particular the epistemological and ideal-type disposition of contemporary political philosophy. But it is less common to detail research agenda that attempt to redress the balance and reconnect political theory to the domain of politics. Prior to accomplishing that, a lacuna has to be identieda gap that exists prominently between the main schools that currently occupy centre stage in the study of political thought. Political philosophy, the history of political thought and, more recently, what could be very loosely called post-structural or continental1 political theory have virtually monopolized the analysis of political thinking; yet, as I shall claim, they do not cover the eld of what constitutes political thought. Political philosophy brings to the study of political theory an overriding concern with either or both of the following: the logical validity and argumentative coherence of the political philosophy in question, or the moral rightness of the prescriptions it contains. Many of its versions display a ight from the political, the crowding out of diversity and the shrinking of the political to an area of constructed consensus guided by a vision of the good life; while its methods rely heavily on thought experiments and frequently inapplicable modelling. The history of political thought brings to the study of political theory an overriding concern with the genealogy of arguments, with the conditions for their stability and the causes for their transformation, with contexts, reconstructions of intentions, and changing horizons of interpretation but, with a few notable exceptions, sacrices synchrony for diachrony. Much post-structuralist thought regards politics as obfuscating reality through the articulation of illusions and false categories, while expressing deep distrust towards politics as it is, and is overridingly
*This article is part of an ESRC-funded research programme on the political theory of politics on which I am engaged. 1 Continental refers less to a geographical entity than to a school, much as the label AngloAmerican does. Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.

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concerned with reformulating the political through alternative radical ethical discourses that emphasize transparency, the recognition of identity, equality and diversity, and empowering. All three schools perform crucial roles in our understanding of political theories and in the uses to which we can put them. But their very success papers over an undeniable lack: how do we study political thought from within the discipline of politics? On what kind of political theory ought we to focus, as students of politics and political phenomena, bearing in mind some central characteristics of political concepts and language? In this article I offer some exploratory thoughts on the subject. Much has been written about the shortcomings of current political theory on the metapractical and metatheoretical levels. Thus, John Gunnells seminal books have exposed glaring weaknesses in the methods and issues pursued by Western political theorists.2 Other instances are offered by theorists such as Benjamin Barber and Bonnie Honig.3 Nor do I wish to belittle the extraordinary work done by philosophers and historiansI count myself as a member of both camps. But the fact is that most political theory employs methodological paradigms imported from disciplines external to politics: philosophy and history. They are consequently bound to treat political theory as a sub-set of a larger enterprise, philosophical or historical, however illuminating those perspectives are to the appreciation of political thought, and however crystallized the respective subenterprises have been in the grand traditions and discourses of political thought. II. THE POLITICAL THEORY OF POLITICS This article puts the case for a fourth approach to the study of political theory: the political theory of politics. It is not intended to replace its illustrious and central predecessors, but to offer another dimension: to supply the kind of political theory designed to make immediate, rather than indirect, sense of political thought phenomena, and to equip political theorists with tools they might wish to employ as students of politics simpliciterthrough the political features embedded in thinking about politics. And it is not, as many alternative attempts to reconnect theory and practice have been, primarily another form of normative political theory. Instead, while recognizing the fundamental ethical concerns of political theorists, it points out that the scholarly study of politics as is common among political scientistsengages notably in understanding and in interpretative mapping. That task should not be abandoned by political theorists who are, after all, crucially focused on the meaning of political thinking; indeed, exploring that meaning should therefore also be located empirically in
2 Recently, John G. Gunnell, The Orders of Discourse (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleeld, 1998). 3 B. Barber, The Conquest of Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); 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.

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concrete societies. The consequent analysis will fashion a signicant branch of political theory dedicated to identifying the political and making sense of it. In turn, that appreciation will offer a vital tooland welcome limiting frameworkfor ethicists and philosophers engaged in constructing their exercises in normative improvement. The challenge for political theorists, then, is to distinguish an area they wish to term the political and then to develop strategies that enable them to address directly issues of political thought. In part, this may require the inclusion of new source-material that qualies as thinking about politics.4 But for the most part, it involves asking a new set of questions of existing texts, utterances, discourses, and practices, reassessing the relative importance of their diverse messages, and preparing different methodologies through which to interpret them. That is, incidentally, what I understand by the study of ideology in its broadest sense. It is not a specialized study of certain doctrines, but a particular approach to the study of political thinking as such. It views access to our understanding of political thinking as always mediated through its spatially and temporally contextualized instances; it regards political thinking as a ubiquitous and normal aspect of social life; and it insists that political theory must also (though not only) encompass these phenomena. Politics consists centrally of the area of collective social life that involves decision-making, the ranking of policy options, the regulation of dissent, the mobilization of support for those activities, and the construction of political visions. That is not intended as a denition, nor am I unaware of competing and different perspectives on politics relating to the legal standing of states, or to the good life or, conversely, to a state of dehumanizing subjugation. But we need to make a start, and that is one kind of beginning. It enlists three postulates: First, thinking about politics signicantly relates to the above political issues. Second, thinking about politics relates importantly to the political thinking actually taking place within political entities: the thinking produced by human beings in their political capacity as decision-makers, option-rankers, dissent and conict regulators, support mobilizers, and vision creators; and the thinking consumed by them in that capacity. Politics may have been termed the art of the possible, but it is a possible based on the feasible and its study has always focused on the here and now,5 whether in complacent or critical mode. Third, inasmuch as politics is a social and not merely an individual activity, so too is political
4 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. HampsherMonk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 189203, although he also relates this to the French focus on mentalits. The study of concrete political thought and the study of mentalits 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. 5 By which I mean not on the immediate present but on current and recent politics, with ramications 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.

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thinking. Therefore the latter, too, has to be examined as a series of interactions, of collective conduct, of loosely patterned human thought-practices.6 Of course, the notions of decision, conict and supportand even the production of political visions, as attempts to control the future or to give vent to political emotionrevolve around the concept of power. There is no escaping that politics is about power and there is consequently no escaping that good political theory needs to give plausible accounts of what is entailed, in the broadest sense, by political thinking relevant to power. All this is hardly made easier by the fact that so many political theorists, as distinct from institutional and behavioural analysts, shy away from exploring and understanding power.7 As a tradition, Anglo-American analytical political philosophy, informed by liberalism, is deeply embarrassed by power and tends to ignore it. As a tradition, continental political thought and discourse, to the contrary, sees power as pervading and distorting the networks of human interaction, but offers no clear ways of eliminating that unfortunate by-product of oppressive and invasive human relationships. Both cannot deal with power as a normal, indeed pivotal, political phenomenon and as a potential resource to be harnessed to the attainment of human and social ends. While Anglo-American political philosophy is manic about the feasibility of socio-political relationships without power, the continental tradition is depressive about their saturation with power. If that seems to return us to what may initially appear to be conventional issues that characterize politics, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. Psychology still revolves around human personality and economics around scarcity, no matter which complex intellectual constructs shape their elaboration. Far more signicant is, rst, that the approach we need to foster towards those issues be innovative, not one employed by most existing schools and, second, that we also include more esoteric terms and problems, esoteric only in the sense that they are not saliently on the agenda of philosophical students of justice, or on the curriculum of undergraduate courses on political theory. Political thinking requires analysis as a uid set of conceptual and discursive encounters with issues such as the following: manufacturing stability, handling coercion, the conceptual control of political space and political time, the management of diversity, ambiguity as controlled indeterminacy, ranking and prioritizing (or rationing) demands and values, political commitment/allegiancein addition to political obligationas mobilizing concepts, and the conceptualization and rhetorical marketing of political failure. All those are some of the most typical and central issues on which societies focus when they think consciouslyat any level of articulation and sophistication
6 By a thought-practice I mean an identiable, patterned and recurrent sequence of thinking, not a physical activity that can be observed directly in the world. 7 The introduction of the notion of empowering, mainly in late 20th century feminist discourse, attempts to relate power to theories of autonomy and self-development, and functions primarily as a code for the latter concepts.

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about politics and which, further, are reected unconsciously in their practices. They are the everyday esh and blood of political debate and discourse and through them we can put our nger on the pulse of the body politic. In short, we need to nd new ways through which to make political thought, and its study, work for us. In so doing we must rely heavily on the wisdom and understandings derived from the elds of political philosophy and the history of political thought. But we may also realize why some of the methods designed to satisfy the intellectual concerns of those two disciplines will produce wrong results for the purposes set out above. III. DECISIONS IN THE LIGHT OF AMBIGUITY, INDETERMINACY, INCONCLUSIVENESS AND VAGUENESS I can only briey illustrate some topics and ways of discussing them as part of a larger research project I am undertaking. Let me begin with political decisionmaking. A decision involves a choice among options, and a political decision involves making such choices for, and/or shaped by, a collectivity. Implicit in the concept of choice is the notion of pluralism, at the very least in the sense that more than one option is possible (arguably necessary) when a decision is made. To that are added two further assumptions, namely, that it is normal and unavoidable in any society for more than one voice to exist (even if other voices are suppressed, they are never quite eliminated); and that making choices is necessarily an exercise in ranking. Political theory offers us one highly useful instrument for understanding the nature of decision-making: the notion of essential contestability. In its advanced formulations, it suggests, rst, that political concepts are composed of multiple components, not all of which can be contained in any given formulation of the concept; and, second, that the relative weight of each component is itself variable and the ranking of values is hence inconclusive.8 Consequently there can be no unequivocal way of choosing among the various conceptions of a concept and arriving at a conclusive denition, of which more below. In order to appreciate the linguistic and semantic features that guide the operation of political concepts, and that have immediate bearing on the structuring of political debate, theory, and action, we need to unpack further some of the attributes of those concepts, with particular regard to the manner through which they impart, or fail to impart, meaning. In political science literature, policies are often depicted as being ambiguous.9 Ambiguity relates to
8 See M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 5560. For my most recent thoughts on the subject see M. Freeden, Essential contestability and effective contestability, Journal of Political Ideologies, 9 (2004), 311, 225. 9 See, e.g., James G. Marsh and Johan P. Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations (Bergen: Universitetsvorlaget, 1976); William E. Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

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more than one reading of a practice, image or text by its consumer. As Empson suggested in his classic work, ambiguity is any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.10 But implicit in ambiguity is the possibility of there being clear choices among xed and nite meanings, meanings obfuscated through semantic duality (bank) or through structural and lexical uidity (I saw the man with my binoculars), or through insufcient information-cum-context (Wittgensteins duck-hare). The multiple interpretations of an ambiguous message are potentially dealt with through disambiguation: a rephrasing aimed at removing all meanings but one. Crucially for politics, ambiguity may be intentional as well as unintentional. Ambiguity is often confused with indeterminacy. But indeterminacy is a different attribute of political concepts. First, it is a function of their far greater complexity. We can create a world in which ambiguities are removed, but that would be one based on exceedingly simple premises. The prime minister is the leader of the Labour party is a statement where the ofce, its holder and the ofcial status of leadership are subject to clear and generally accepted semantic rules and, contextually, party does not denote some kind of festive celebration. This state is democratic allows for no such disambiguation, because democracy is not ambiguous; it is indeterminate. Indeed, it would be impossible to construct a sentence in which all the components of democracy would be sufciently disambiguated for an uncontroversial meaning to emerge. Second, indeterminacy refers to an inevitable and ineliminable contingency of meaning. It is a prior ontological standpoint about the impossibility of arriving at xed, determinate interpretations of certain concepts and about the logical (though not cultural) arbitrariness of meaning. It is a fundamental hermeneutical issue.11 Epistemologically, the uncertainty engendered by ambiguity does not rule out certainty (say if information improves), because uncertainty itself is deemed to be the contingent feature. Much rational choice theory follows that line. But indeterminacy rules out determinacy. It can offer merely spurious and temporary determinacy, engineered (1) by the suspension of disbelief in the possibility of determinacy, and (2) by the political awkwardness of belief in the necessity of indeterminacy, a belief that could encourage political paralysis.12 The indeterminacy from which decisionsthose political Ur-actsemanate is a structural corollary of the notion of essential contestability, a notion that also underpins pluralism. Decisions create the illusionoften through style, rhetoric or self-persuasionthat indeterminacy does not exist. Given indeterminacy, decisions are closures that permit policies to be formulated or justied against a multiple path background. If we accept that position, we will regard the political thinking occurring in a political community as an explicit or implicit
W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 1. Cp. T. Bahti, Ambiguity and indeterminacy: the juncture, Comparative Literature, 38 (1986), 20923. 12 On this specic point see Freeden, Essential contestability and effective contestability.
11 10

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competition over the control of political language, and will identify that area as the characteristic domain of ideologies. That control is attempted through the most necessary feature of the ideological act: the decontestation of the essentially contestable, through which a decision is both made possible (accorded an aura of niteness) and justied (accorded an aura of authority). Within the internal logic of politics that is both a heuristic necessity and a practical one, as decisions must be taken and they then need to be either legitimated or enforced. The control over language is an endeavour to monopolize the meanings concepts carry. Legitimation and coercion are two methods of establishing monopolies of meaning, however eeting they may be. That controlthat ideological act of assertive selectionis a basic feature of political thinking. Decontestation, though central to political argument, is never conclusive. Here we add inconclusiveness to ambiguity and indeterminacy as attributes of political concepts. Inconclusiveness relates to the point where competing appraisals of arguments or of policies cannot knock each other out and no further improvement can be made on that situation. It relates to the persuasive or emotional strength of different claims made by various assertions, whether or not through the assembling of evidence. It is a failure of assessment and of weighting; not, as with ambiguity, of the clarication of denitional meaning. But there is another sense of inconclusivelacking a conclusion. It is also tied to the impossibility of reaching an end point in an argumentative chain or string. Say I am an egalitarian who favours greater equalization of wealth, from which I deduce a scheme of public transfers such as graduated taxation, and then have to consider whether to permit voluntary transfers from one member of a family to another, and then ask whether the use of such transfers should be controlled in terms of the goods they purchase, all down to the case of whether Mrs. Appleton of Hyacinth Avenue, Bolton, a widowed ex-terrorist awaiting a hip replacement, whose neighbour is playing very loud music on Saturday nights when she wants to sleep, is a disadvantaged individual who requires occasional compensation from a cash-strapped municipality, even though in the not-distant future she will inherit a large sum of money from her aged uncle, etc. There comes a point where, due to argumentative overload, to the inability to conceptualize, to the inefciency of policy-producing results, or to sheer boredom, such a chain needs to be stopped (or, more likely, it peters out) even though it can still produce endless variations. Those stoppage points may be conditioned by moral paradigms, by conventions of argument, by demands of efcacy, or by other cultural practices. Here the sequence and detailed path of an argument, rather than the internal components of its parts, are curtailed by complexity and the limited resources of mental and emotional energy in the face of innity! Now, political philosophers may perceive many acts of decontestation as examples of poor thinking that, consequently, do not merit serious scholarly examination. As I have argued elsewhere, the concept of decontestation muddies

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the waters of logical imperatives beloved by philosophers by introducing cultural constraints on the logical options contained in an argument. Cultural constraints are inevitable in a system of thinking when the path-structure of logical trees invariably offers a number of entailed solutions, the choice among which would otherwise be arbitrary.13 The very arbitrariness of the logical choices as to which path to follow is a sharp reminder that logic is the coat hanger, not the coat, and that philosophical obsession with logic alone will actually result in substantive indeterminacy unless cultural constraints are factored in. However, there is another argument political philosophers could bring against decontestations. When effected by non-expertsi.e. non-philosophersthey may be taken sloppily, and with insufcient justication. That is often true, but it is not a good reason for ignoring them. First, the study of political thought (and here one nds common ground with historians of political thought) must leave room for theorizing about the bad and the inadequate side by side with the good or the ideal. That is standard practice among political comparativists, for example. This point was captured almost a century ago by Graham Wallas, in response to James Bryce. Bryce had written about the ideal democracy in which every citizen is intelligent, patriotic, disinterested, seeking the right side in each contested issue by using his common sense. What, riposted Wallasin language as pertinent today as it was thendid Bryce mean by common sense?
If it means anything it means the best form of democracy which is consistent with the facts of human nature. But one feels, on reading the whole passage, that Mr. Bryce means by these words the kind of democracy which might be possible if human nature were as he himself would like it to be, and as he was taught at Oxford to think that it was. If so, the passage is a good instance of the effect of our traditional course of study in politics. No doctor would now begin a medical treatise by saying, the ideal man requires no food, and is impervious to the action of bacteria, but this ideal is far removed from the actualities of any known population.14

Second, if politics is centrally about decision-making for collectivities, the political theorist needs to theorize about the kind of thinking that goes into the act of decontestation. Decontestative thinking, and its study, themselves become central to political theory. They have to do different work for us in our capacity as political theorists of politics than in our capacity as political philosophers. We thus need to investigate the methods, arguments, presentations and devices that enable successful decontestation in the political arena. The argument here is loosely parallel to that directed against vulgar Marxist views of ideology, views that summarily dismissed ideology as distorted consciousness instead of exploring those forms of distortion and why they mattered, not only to those
13 See M Freeden, A Very Short Introduction to Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 5760. 14 G. Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London: Constable, 1948; originally published 1908), pp. 1267.

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who thought them, but also to those who studied ideology. Whether or not we like what we nd, as students of society we need to know. Two forms of decontestation are well-known, even if not analysed as decontestations. The one is the attempt to attach very precise allocations of meanings to indeterminate concepts. Characteristic are the carefully-argued conceptual clarications, occasionally denition-constructing, that political philosophers attempt as thought-exercises for the recommended handling of concepts and arguments. Even here these are predicated on the acts of manipulating, limiting, ranking and excluding elds of meaning so as to optimize clarity, acts that themselves are of course saliently political. The second is the stipulative ascription of meaning to a term, often associated with ideologues (in extreme cases totalitarian, caricatured in Orwells 1984 slogans war is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength; but in fact common to all ideologists, as in equality can only be understood as equality of opportunity). This second form of decontestation may be underpinned by rhetoric, by invoking extrahuman sanctication, or by force. Typically, the closure attempted here is buttressed by the conclusive manner in which meaning is attached to the contested term, accompanied by sleight of mouth, by the harnessing of science, God, nature, personal vision, or by threats. One reason for this perceived and intended conceptual condence lies in the nature of authoritativeness, a property that political systems need to generate with respect to their elites and prospective power-wielders, if those elites are to compete successfully over the control of political language. In effect, the two forms of decontestation are not dichotomous but represent two points on a continuum, and the distance between philosophers and ideologues is not as great as some scholars would have it. Stipulative ascription, frequently supported by an appeal to reason, is well within the domain of the political theorist and philosopher (justice is the rst virtue of a society), and the elusive end of authoritativeness is no less sought by scholars of political thought when promoting their own theories. But the closure of debate does not necessarily ensue from the accuracy of the conceptual denition or argumentative solution, or solely from the marketing of dominant meanings. There exists a third and equally signicant form of closure. It could be called simulated decontestation, in which the semblance of decontestation is created by ambiguity and by vagueness. Political philosophers often label the kinds of political thinking emanating from non-professional thinkers, say politicians and the disseminators of popular ideologiesas elusive, if not duplicitous. That is, for instance, an accusation levelled at the phrase the third way and, from the viewpoint of analytical purists, it is a justied one. Ambiguity in that case relates, for instance, to the lack of clarity concerning the rst and second waysboth in terms of their substance (e.g., capitalism versus communism? Free-market versus welfare state?), and in terms of the location of thirdon a continuum dened by rst and second, that is to say middle; or a Hegelian synthesis of rst and second; or outside that frame: an ordinal

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number distinguished simply by its location on a temporal sequence? Ambiguity is, however, also a form of handling political language that is vital to the central political aim of mobilizing support. The generation of support is, in terms of political theory, signicantly dependent on linguistic formulations that are openended, that carry multiple meanings, and that can be consumed differentially. That also connects to the rather different category of vagueness, pertaining to the boundary problems of concepts (to their intension) and to movement across categories. Are both communism and the welfare state, for the purposes of a specic political argument, simply two instances of excessive state control? Is the free-market a sub-set of capitalism or can it be detached from the latter and reattached to forms of democratic socialism? And does that then begin to vitiate the distinction between capitalism and democratic socialism, or are we looking instead at a plethora of ideological congurations as characteristic of real world political discourse, many of which shade off into others? The blurring of boundaries of meaning is often inescapable, but it may also be intentional. Controlled and delimited indeterminacy is a typical and indispensable aspect of political thinking among decision-making elites, especially if in a particular instance the requirement to generate support overrides the requirement for authoritative semantic pronouncements. Decision-making may generate support from admirers of decisiveness, but it is also a loss-maker in terms of the ideational groups it alienates. Accuracy of language (to the extent that it is possible) is an advantage only if precision is needed to corner a particular market of ideological support. Whereas ideological specialization should produce strong decontestation, it also entails a limiting of ambition with regard to potential support or, alternatively, a reliance on coercion. The point is that both ambiguous and vague expressions of political thinking cannot just be dismissed as inferior thought-products. If they are, we miss out as interpreters of the domain of the politicalon identifying major political phenomena and impoverish our understanding of the variety and subtlety of political thinking at the disposal of a society. They are, rather, frequently intentional and importantly functional forms of political thought. And although the general public may see them as conrmation of the bad name given to politics, their elusiveness is not simply dissimulation, trickery or slack thinking though it may be any of thesebut often the deliberate harnessing of political language in order to achieve one of the main ends of politics, quite apart from being an existential feature of political language. From the perspective of analyzing political thought, the indeterminacy of political concepts associated with further properties such as ambiguity (which may allow for answers through disambiguation) and vagueness (which cannot generate specic answers)15 marks out the inevitable tension between the desire
15

R. Sorensen, Vagueness and Contradiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 23,

112.

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for decontestation and its impossibility, due to the surplus of meaning any act of linguistic closure carries. Even strong decontestation (The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way16) cannot endow political language with precision, and will be open to many interpretations, unanticipated as well as anticipated. Particularly for ideologies, competing as they do over political power in societies, certainty as well as elusiveness are two required features, and fundamental to the political process. Both are preliminaries to producing decisions. Liberal polities, especially, are positioned between the need of politicians to deliver condence-generating results, and the requirement of liberal ideologies to be exible in reassessing the meanings and applications of polysemic political vocabulary, as well as to mobilize the pluralist support believed to be structurally distinctive of modern, multiple-identity societies. Sometimes certainty can pay, if a very specic policy is in the making; and the rhetoric and style of certainty are themselves the wielding of political power. At other times, and more typically, elusiveness of meaning is the key to generating consent. Lets put this slightly differently, in the context of recent attempts by political philosophers to attain overlapping consensus and undistorted communication in a society. Devices to attain consensus, whether of the Rawlsian thin type or the Habermasian thicker type, are proffered by those philosophers as a solution to the existence of political disagreement, or as the framework within which only reasonable disagreement can persist and be controlled. Perfect harmony may be posited through utopian thought experiments, and overlapping consensus through an appeal to free-standing shared intuitions and moral capacities. But politics, we might argue, based on past and present observation, is the site of durable dissent as a structural inevitability. Articulatory and augmentative precision therefore exacerbate the destructive potential of dissent, as positions are sharply marked out not only methodologically but substantively. Here I offer one evaluative standpoint from a disciplinary perspective habitually accused of eschewing normative evaluation in favour of interpretation andusually employed in a derogatory mannerdescription. Vagueness and ambiguity are not only the inevitable by-product of indeterminacy, but a recipe for political coexistence. The much-vaunted 1950s consensus on the post WW2 welfare state in the UK was the product of such ambiguity. It allowed for co-operation between very diverse ideological frameworks with the concomitant political stability this engendered. It did that through playing down the different ideological ends welfare measures serviced: political order and economic productivity for the Conservatives, social justice and greater social solidarity for Labour. Imprecision and the elision of meaning are advantageous and desirable, when different priorities among political values would otherwise lead to strife. The tolerance of words in containing multiple, connected but not identical
16

J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London: Dent, 1910), p. 75.

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meanings, is important to the adequate functioning of political and ideological orders. The precision so highly sought by some philosophers may signal the kiss of death for political processes. IV. STRUCTURAL PLURALISMS AND CONCEPTUAL INTERDEPENDENCIES So far, the word ideology has crept into this article, but not predominantly so. In effect, the political theory of politics is closely related to the study of ideologies, but I am very conscious of the contrary and contradictory associations of the concept of ideology. The approach advocated here regards ideologies as synonymous with the political thinking actually occurring in a society, inasmuch as the product is identiable in patterns (or morphological arrangements) and is produced and consumed by politically signicant collectivities. That is not to suggest that the meaning of ideology can now be stretched to take over as the preponderant object of political theory, but rather that political theory must avail itself of the methods and techniques that recent analyses of ideology have developed, in order to gain access to the vast realm of concrete and politically relevant thinking that exists at the heart of the political. It also suggests, as noted above, that we almost always encounter political thought in the form of ideological discourses. What, then, are the understandings and devices we need to bring into play if we wish to do justice as political theorists to this under-researched and underconceptualized area? First, if it makes sense to regard the concept as the basic semantic unit of political thinking, political theory needs to investigate the presentation, interrelationships and internal structure of its concepts. While competition over the control of language should remain pivotal to political theory, its emphasis should lie in the analysis of the productthe congurations of concepts that constitute a political idea and, at more general levels, an instance of political discourse, or an ideology. Second, and I shall return to this below, given indeterminacy, ambiguity, vagueness, and inconclusiveness as fundamental to political argument and its conceptual components, political theory needs to explore the characteristics that these attributes bestow on the political process. How do they structure political discourse? How should that knowledge of the nature of political language shape our understanding of the political and of political thinking? Importantly, this genre of political theory must be sensitive to change, as it is predicated on the impermanence of conceptual content, and is sensitive to the uctuating interchange of conceptual structures with the world of practices, embracing Skinners observation that acts are also texts.17 But it is not centrally
17 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.

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concerned with the reasons or conditions for change as with its manifestations and consequencesthe varied conceptions of key concepts that come together to form patterned yet plastic theories and understandings. Its epistemological underpinning in indeterminacy does not signify a aw in our conception of the world or a temporary stage en route to truth and knowledge, but singles out the very locus of human choice (and hence conceptual exibility) itself. Indeterminacy is not synonymous with chaos or with extreme relativism, but it holds out the promise of innitely rich combinations of ideas from which societies may draw. Methodologically, it underpins the pluralism that guarantees that neither political theory nor ideology will ever die out. It is also far more in tune with the view of human nature that recent welfare theory has identied not one based on a nineteenth century belief in the certainties proffered by human reason and in the forcefulness of practical entrepreneurship, but based on an awareness of human frailty and vulnerability, and hence normally susceptible to unpredictable as well as planned change.18 Does building on the existence of pluralism signify that political theory can only deal with liberal premises and frameworks? Not at all, as the pluralism that is the result of essential contestability is a necessary but not sufcient condition of liberalism, and because political theorists have to entertain the assumption that the ostensible absence of more than one voice, in any ideological system, is achieved not through utopian reasonableness and harmony but only through force or manipulation. Another feature of structural pluralism directs us to a further insight germane to the political theory of politics. Politics focuses, among others, on the study of interrelated individuals and groups, recently rephrased through terms such as networks.19 That existential interdependence is matched by the conceptual interdependence evident in the thought products of political thinkers. In the real world of texts and utterancesas any linguist knowswords come in combinations, and so it is with concepts. Despite the proclivity of analytical philosophers to explore concepts in isolationa necessary exercise when the tolerance and range of a concept is, quite reasonably, subjected to logical and argumentative testingconcepts always appear in clusters that are mutually dening, sustaining and, for that matter, constraining. Those patterns are established through empirical evidence, mediated via the interpretative facilities of the researcher, but superimposed on a spinal conceptual structure that reveals the options available to political thinkers in a given time and space frame.
18 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. 744. 19 See, e.g., R.A.W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance: Policy, Networks, Governance, Reexivity and Accountability (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997); Martin A. Hajer and Hendrik Wagenaar, eds, Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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Take Mills On Liberty, an essay that is not on liberty alone, not even on liberty as a super-value. As Mill makes abundantly clear, he is arguing for the free development of individualitya cluster of concepts that elicit out of each other specic conceptions and that form a particular cultural package chosen from a number of logical possibilities.20 Thus, the conception of liberty is one that contributes to the development of individuals; other conceptions of liberty are structurally ruled out by the proximity engineered to the adjacent concepts; while the conception of development is made to include selfdevelopment, as development not undertaken by free individuals is excluded.21 We thus encounter a virtuous circle, an instance of complex holistic relationships, bearing three features. First, any concept is a means to any other (the circle may be entered into at any point on the conceptual compass). Second, some conceptions of any concept may also intersect with, or constitute, part of another concept: here complex boundary problems emerge. Thirda normative apparelthe conguration of concepts has been constructed so as to constitute collectively a desirable, or attractive, set of human and social circumstances.22 Those are typical ways in which political language and thinking present themselves. Interdependence, applied to the political world, is not tantamount to an allembracing wholeness. In a world of conicting and competing conceptual arrangements, it appears as competing holisms. One salient shape these competing holisms adopt is that of ideologies, which are now to be viewed as all the concrete forms of political thinking in a society that feature either some grand conceptual conguration or, more modestly, a partial one. For each ideology offers a prevailing pattern of the conceptions of many concepts, bound together as a particular discourse. Such holisms are of course not really complete, for two reasons. First, the issue of inconclusiveness noted above: arguments have no clear endpoints. Second, in a holistic structure ideas and policies are interconnected at many points and on many dimensions. Those nodal linkages reect cultural understandings of how and why these connections are, and should be, made. But no holistic political structure can host all possible linkages and paths. The interdependence of any given cluster of political thought lies rather in its particular choice, or presentation, of certain sequential conceptual paths and in some conguration of mutually-sustaining circularity. Disparate nodal linkages vie with each other in giving different holistic readings (i.e. alternative ideological interpretations) of the political practices that are being signied. To recapitulate, the sphere of politics is a major arena in which collective enterprises take place, and ideologies most typically represent the political
Mill, On Liberty, p. 115. I have argued this in greater detail in Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 1457. These possibilities do not exhaust Mills text. The umbrella concept of well-being actson this interpretationas a collective name for the cluster of named goods, but may also, as Mill implies, contain further goods, or further leading essentials.
21 22 20

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thought equivalents of these collective ventures. They are both collectively produced, and designed to be consumed, by collectivities. Hence any political theory aiming at understanding this aspect of the political cannot overlook the fundamental claim that the study of ideologies offers the most immediate and relevant access to the clustered political thinking of collectivities. V. THE ATTRIBUTES OF POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND THE SHAPE OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE Once we are prepared to forgo the presupposition that collectivities ought to act in unison, or that they can leave their differences at the hermetically sealed gate of politics, our focus necessarily readjusts to what happens inside the space occupied by such collectivities and the sub-groups inside them. Here we may borrow an idea from institutional analysts: the notion of multi-level governance. Comparative political scientists have largely abandoned the unitary assumptions about the relationship between politics and the state, and students of political thought need to do the same. Multi-level governance assumes that political systems harbour variable origins of decision-making. That raises the immediate problem of co-ordination. The reection of that structural requirement is negotiationone mechanism for the regulation of any conict that may emerge. The centrality of negotiation to the study of political thought commences with the pluralism and dissent generated by conceptual indeterminacy, and follows them through the political requirement to make decisions. The focal area of the political theory of politics lies thus not in the sphere that Rawls called political liberalism, but expressly in the spheres of comprehensive doctrines that Rawls banished from politics. One of the cores of the politicaldissent and its attempted regulation through negotiationis sited in the relationship between these so-called comprehensive doctrines. Negotiation and compromise are political activities that can prevent the eruption of uncontrollable disorder. The uid structure of political concepts itself holds the potential for negotiation, though not all features of political thinking for instance, oversimplication or excessive competitive zealare amenable to such compromise. Nor can we rule out the many instances of zero-sum relationships among core values, against which Rawlsian-type enterprises are helpless. Pro-choicers and pro-lifers with regard to the deliberate termination of pregnancies constitute one such case, and ambiguityor coercionmay be the only way out. Most political theories and ideologies possess non-negotiable componentsred lines they will never cross. As an aspect of political thought, negotiation normally accompanies decontestation. Negotiation can occur with regard to past conversations within a particular political discourse, or between political discourses. The decontested forms in which we encounter political concepts do not descend from a conceptual heaven but are the product of complex historical and political processes, of

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inching ones way towards positions that are the result of many adaptive conversations. They eventually reach the point where negotiation temporarily stops, due to the exigencies of decision-making, or the tolerance and endurance levels of the ideological producers. That process is parallel to imposing an ephemeral conclusion on inconclusiveness, and it helps us to understand why decisions are, from the point of view of political thinking, quasi-arbitrary and temporary stoppage points in potentially interminable sequences, and why, therefore, a decision is an act of rerouting rather than one of permanently halting. Equipped with the attributes of political concepts, and taking on board the crucial art of political negotiation, how might they be translated into the terms of political discourse? As political theorists we need to explore the impact of conceptual features, and the leeway of conceptual interpretation possible in a conceptual arrangement, before it begins to affect core positions critically. Assume, for example, that we are assessing two policies concerning trafc congestion. Behind them lies a general conception of the public interest involving physical mobility and the quality of urban life. For some, that public interest entails the reduction of pollution in the service of sustainable life on the planet (cars are a public bad). For others, it involves an efcient and consumer-oriented lifestyle necessitating speed of access to places of work, shopping and entertainment. This group could be further divided into those who wish to build additional access roads for private vehicles (cars are a public good because they advance social mobility and accessibility; rather than a private good because they advance individual desires) and those who wish to prioritize public transport (buses are a public rather than private good for the same reasons). For others again, non-intervention in private choices is the relevant conception of the public interest (this is not identical to the aggregate of private interests but a competing evaluation of the good life) and congestion is one of the prices we pay for a free society (the goodness or badness of cars is irrelevant, and the quality of urban life is a consequence of the free choices available to residents). Already, the political terrain is constructed on the indeterminacy of the public good and of the relative weighting of its components, and the vagueness of the boundary relationship between private and public transport (say, between a privately hired school bus and a school bus operated by a private company under licence of the local authority). The town, however, is clogged up and for most people that cost is too high. Can the different conceptions of the good life allow a solution? The municipality decides to assess two options, taking into account the prevalence of those different beliefs concerning the good life and the inevitability of dissent on those matters. The one proposal is to forgo regulation and to anticipate that congestion will make travel so unattractive that individuals will nd it easier to leave their cars at home rather than face gridlock. The other is to impose a

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congestion charge. In decoding these perimeter practices23 we must rst try to set them within the ideological environment that best makes sense of them. The two options offer at least three possible strategies of argument for the rationing of public road space. The rst sees self-rationing as an inevitable consequence of excessive private demand for geographical mobility, and when individuals are penalized by gridlock it relies on private, rational choices. As a market mechanism it is self-regulatory: motorists will despair and vote with their wheels; those who nevertheless insist on driving in city centres will pay the price in time and nerves. The second justies centralized rationing by invoking environmental concerns to trump individual choice, and imposes regulations irrespective of democratic soundingsfor example, the opening of space only to public transport. The third invokes efciency of movement in terms of time and space. However, as happened in London, it combines market practicesleasing public spaceand a regressive tax that penalizes the worse-off while still enabling the wealthy to swan around town centre, with an alternative concern for redistributive justice: namely, the proceeds of the congestion charge are channelled to a considerable extent towards subsidising public transport. The attractiveness of this solutionfor those to whom it may be attractive in the rst placeis that it relies on the ambiguity of the conception of the public good it is intended to satisfy. Whose interests is it serving? Whose view of the good life can it claim to benet? It is not a case of zero-sum ambiguity, where one interpretation may rule out the other (e.g. the desirability of experimenting on animals) but of compatible ambiguity, utilizing the possibility that all parties maywith some tweakingread their preferred, or at least an acceptable, position into the proffered solution. In effect, it illustrates a struggle over a particular cashing out of the public interest, stretched indeterminately between three positions: 1. The predominance of private interests, and freedom from the nuisance of physical intervention by others in my relatively efcient free movement through town (assisted by an ability to pay that itself is a product of market forces). 2. The objective interest of human and extra-human entities, underpinned by a scientic, expert and non-democratic decontestation of (environmental) values. 3. The postulation of a communal, electorally popular, interest best served within current cultural constraints by charging for free choice, and addressing the consequent inequality of opportunity for movement by compensating those unable to avail themselves of it. If conceptual exibility allows for a sustainable overlapping area to elide ideological differences and to reach a policy-decision, then negotiation over the content of political concepts is possible and may result in a compromiseeach side can go back to its supporters and claim reasonable success. Political consensus, to repeat, is
23 For an explanation of perimeter practices see Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 7880.

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predicated on ambiguity, not precision, and as political theorists we must understand both how the construction of ambiguity works, and how to produce it when necessary. Nevertheless, unanticipated strains in that coalition of conceptions may cause it to unravel at any future point, or to react violently back on the stability of conceptual cores. Decontestation is itself subject to continuous reformulation over time and space. Essential contestability engenders slippage as a consequence of the internal exibility of positions and the impossibility (and political undesirability) of holding linguistic meaning constant. There always exists a decontestation continuum, in which subtle reformulations (negotiated or unprompted) are marshalled in order to remain in the competition over the control of political language. That is where inconclusiveness emerges, for the imposition of a congestion charge will effectively be, as argued above, an unavoidably temporary decision. The solution may have to be extended in future, it may be abolished as electorally unsustainable, or its success may create other harms that have to be addressed. VI. RANKING AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF SIGNIFICANCE There is at least one further vital feature of political discourse that assists in engendering support and enabling political decisions. If politics still is, in Harold Lasswells famous phrase, about who gets what, when, how then its discursive equivalent in political theory is the distribution of signicance to open elds of meaning: endowing this meaning of a concept, of an argument, of a practice with greater signicance than that meaning. At the heart of politics are acts of ranking, of expressing preferences, of establishing a pecking order of importance, in a world where there are nite material, intellectual and emotional resources that can be called on to construct, or support, or justify policy. That ranking is a prerequisite of political decision-making, without which decision-makers cannot know what to deal with next. Ranking attempts to transform the essentially indeterminate weighting and sequencing of priority claims into a determinate one. Unlike the notion of hierarchy, it does not necessarily denote a durable institutional structure, nor the bestowal of superior consideration on people and ofces, but rather a process central to political judgment, assessment and choice. How does political thought handle this issue? Notably, some political concepts and some forms of political language are primarily dedicated to ranking. To illustrate, we need to reconsider a well-known concept in political theory from a political, not ethical, perspective. A right, from that viewpoint, is a linguistic device that discharges the function of crucially prioritizing and protecting values and desired objects. It is a concept that shoots other valued concepts to the top of the queue and accords them greater weight and durabilityi.e. it (re)distributes their signicance. Rights are always a protective capsule for other

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valuesrights are not substantive values themselvesand that very act of linguistic protection and ring-fencing is a pristine political act. Rights regulate conict through attempted demarcations of boundaries of human action and expectation. The very language of rights endeavours to render those boundaries impermeable, through adjectival contrivances such as natural or inalienable,24 and that is a major form of coping with essential contestability. Rights are often accompanied by the concepts of legitimacy and authority. These mobilize political support through manufacturing consent and obediencetwo indispensable political goods, irrespective of any ethical worth they may carry, that confer durability on ranking. All these concepts embody the conceptual polysemy and indeterminacy that necessitate ranking exercises in order for political activity to be possible. Ranking is also abetted by persuasivenessan aspect of (political) power pertaining to the assembling of cogent, effective, or attractive arrangements of political concepts and conceptions incorporated in political argument. Here the focus is on utilizing the cultural tools that are best geared to changing peoples opinions or to securing them: rational argument, an appeal to the past, the summoning up of Gods will, or nationalist fervour are some of the options. That too is a major consideration in constructing a political theory of politics, because it examines which devices aid one argument to gain salience over another. VII. REFLECTIONS ON THE ROLE OF POLITICAL THEORISTS Ethicists might have a point when they ask: How does this kind of political analysis further the goals of providing a critique of existing practices and principles, and of prescribing better ones? Simply to argue that the political theory of politics focuses on different aspects of politics is only partially correct. Nor is it quite enough to claim that morality is no more than an attractive way through which to shape legitimacy discourses, and that morality tests are weighty tests of the actions of governments and the ends of regimes. That assigns morality an instrumental value. The greater challenge is to demonstrate that the political theory of politics can provide tools to ethico-political philosophers (conventionally referred to as normative philosophers). True, if we assume that individuals as a rule appreciate good or moral reasons for acting, then legitimacy claims and understandings have to be couched in moral terms. But as analysts of political language and concepts we will want to know which conceptions of which concepts generate and enable arguments about the intrinsic good of political morality. We need to know how political visions are constructed. Does a cocktail of transparency, pluralism and legitimacy offer the winning combination? Or one of loyalty, nationhood and sacrice? Which conceptions
24 I initially developed that approach to rights in M. Freeden, Rights (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1991).

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of these concepts are likely to be permanently available for moral arguments and which are context-dependent? Are there other, parallel combinations? Nevertheless, ethical arguments do not always act as trumps. Lloyd George was not the only politician who felt the need to supplement the ethical case for national health and unemployment insurance with the argument that it made good business sense. In addition, political criticism isin its reective modea consequence and correlate of political pluralism. Only when discursive recognition is accorded to a multiplicity of voices is efcient criticism possible and socially transmissible. Thus the function of critique, from which morality draws its lifeblood, is enhanced when ontological social pluralism is acknowledged. To attain idealtype consensus is, ultimately, to silence criticism by disabling it. In parallel, the notion of indeterminacy should keep political theorists on their toes. They could, of course, retreat into defeatism, fatalism, or some of the less fertile forms of deconstruction. But the alternative is to lay out a world in which intelligent choosing becomes an act of both intellectual and practical survival, in the sense of assigning a variety of meaningsand hence purposes and structuresto socio-political life. Political philosophy, too, may emerge with new renement equipped with that Weltanschauung. Now all these are assumptions that might be queried. They all constitute forks in a road that might lead elsewhere with the switch of a signpost. But if morality entails the capacity for choice, it must also pay attention to a political theory of politics that sees political language itself as suspended between indeterminate meanings and their precarious decontestation, engendering choices that are intended to provide a plausible, intellectually robust, and ethically illuminating, rather than permanent, let alone correct, route towards understanding social phenomena. As noted above, many eminent scholars are aware of the disjuncture between theory and practice in political theory. Rogers Smith has recently and rightly lamented the irrelevance of much political theorizing to understanding political practice.25 The approach adumbrated in this paper takes on board the fundamental centrality of concrete political issues, but rather than calling for the increased impact of existing mainstream political thinking on political practices, makes the case for two additional steps: 1. The empirical analysis of political thinking itselfthinking that is spread across a society as a signicant empirical phenomenon deserving of close attentionas a form of human thoughtbehaviour, or thought-practices, that dene, constrain and enable options open to actors as a consequence of their morphological combinatory features. 2. The development of such investigation not through the conventional methods of statistical aggregation and numerical categorization within a framework of simple matrices (the left-right dimension is a representative example) but through
25 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. Manseld and Richard Sissons (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), pp. 6088.

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theorizing that employs conceptual analyses and interpretative tools pertaining to political ideas and language, and that should stem directly from our training as political theorists. Not the least of the benets might be that political theorists and political scientists start talking to each other again. It is not the past abstractness of political theory that is at fault (as Smith agrees26) but its extreme reluctance to enter the muddied waters of regular political discourse on the one hand, and to illuminate the kinds of core political issues that political theorists have heavily underplayed on the other hand. It is not the lack of relevance to current political issues that is at stake but the lack of relevance to understanding the nature of theorizing and thinking about politics, an enterprise that has largely been abandoned by political theorists, but that has been resurrected and developed by students of ideology. It is not so much a question about which events and practices we ought to focus on. Rather, what needs to be rethought is: what should we be doing as political theorists engaged in understanding and exploring political phenomena? In order to do theoryto analyse and construct new abstractionswhat do we need to know about the political thought produced by the members of a society, and what should we ask about it? Ten years ago I was writing about the gap between political philosophy and the history of ideas, and arguing that the study of ideology lled that gap. Now I am arguing that the space between theory and practice in political studies needs to be lled not just by a convergence between theory and empirical studies, but by developing an approach that lls another gap: between apolitical and political, distanced and immediate, theorizing about politics. That gap, I claim, can be lled through acknowledging that generalized political thinkingnamely, concrete and ubiquitous forms of discourse and debate that shape and reect the political domain, for better or for worseis a major concern of political theory, and then enabling political theory to utilize and develop a vocabulary that will translate that concern into scholarship. If we do not pay attention to those phenomena, we will overlook a vital aspect of politics and of its incarnation in patterns of human thought. Moreover, we shall be deected from what is centrally political in our thought-patterns. True, we also need to be engaged but that is in our role as social ethicists and as citizens. As students of political thinking we need to emulate the practices of anthropologistsdonning the mantle of conceptologistsin order to map and interpret the strange, wonderful and occasionally repulsive world of political ideas on which we all feed and that permeates the conscious and unconscious assumptions incorporated in the activity of thinking about politics. Put differently, there are two types of engagement: the one is with the immediate pressing social, moral and economic issues and movements that require addressing by the intellectuals and decision-makers of the daythat is,
26

Ibid., p. 75.

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the urgent ethical and psychological imperative of expressing outrage or hope, of trying to make a difference in the world. This irtation with missionary zeal has tempted many scholars out of their ivory towers, and so it should be, but such virtuous conduct is often acquired through short-term reactions to what is politically and ethically fashionable. Ironically, such activities could be categorized just as persuasively as ideological rather than as philosophical. The other engagement is with the relevance of the approaches and methods that political theorists, as scholars, employ in order to shed light on their subjectmatter, to understand and interpret it. The rst is more dramatic and would seem to produce more compelling results; but the second is more effective, more carefully self-reexive, more in line with our responsibilities to our profession as academics rather than public intellectuals, and it should produce sturdier frameworks within which longer-term workable results are possible. One cannot discuss real world political issues without having a method that identies the features of real world political thinking. There is still a Rubicon to be crossed: How can this approach gain intellectual and academic respectability in comparison with the heavy-weight and established disciplines of political philosophy and the history of political thought? Well, there is no need for competition if the aims and methods of each are clearly understood and if, most importantly, the boundaries between them are not conceived of as impermeable but may be regularly traversed to mutual benet. All are eminently important, because they discharge such different yet intellectually necessary tasks. But there certainly exists a challenge, one that the political theory of politics can only meet by demonstrating the complexity and rigour of its analysisfor which it must be indebted to philosophyand the interpretative signicance of its ndings. It will do so through establishing the empirical and evidential investigation of political thinking, through developing the analytical categories best suited to the tasks in hand, through the meticulous insistence on discerning both distinctions and the congurations in which they occur, through the micro-analysis of political language as conceptual as well as symbolic, through the sensitivity to political practices as containing ideational import and to political thinking itself as a social practice, through the recognition that intentionality and unintentionality, agency and culture, reason and emotion, interact and inform each other mutually in the political sphere, and through the incorporation of temporal and spatial exibilities and shifts as part and parcel of the uid processes of the formation of political meaning.