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 The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 2, Number L, 1994, pp. 140-164

Political Concepts and Ideological Morphology

MICHAEL
FREEDEN

Politics, Mansfield College, O x f o r d

T HE study of ideology, in deference to Marxist schools of thought, has

focused centrally on epistemological questions of truth, falsehood and dis-
simulation, and on sociological questions of power, dominance and exploitation.’
A parallel, though methodologically distinct, approach has been to identify the
functions of ideology as an organizing frame of reference for action-orientated
political thinking, devoid of any inherently pejorative or transient attributes.2 In
the following pages a third perspective is proposed, the purpose of which is to
locate the analysis of ideologies firmly within the scholarly context in which
political theorists operate. It attempts to respond to the questions: what does an
ideology look like? How does it ‘behave’? We are presented with the ubiquitous
phenomenon of people constructing, deliberately or unintentionally, thought-
edifices which serve to organize their perceptions of their political environments,
to direct them towards certain types of political conduct, and to provide or
support plans of action for public political institutions. This vital area of
‘thought-behavio~r’~ is still critically under-researched; but more importantly, it
is critically under-conceptualized.
The building blocks of political thought are the political concepts-indicated
by terms such as liberty, justice, power and rights-that constitute its main foci.
Ideologies, it is submitted, are the complex constructs through which specific
meanings, out of a potentially unlimited and essentially contestable universe of

1 I would like to thank the British Academy for supporting a larger project, of which this article
is a part, by electing me to a two-year Research Readership.
A good discussion of these approaches may be found in J. B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory
of Ideology (Oxford: Polity Press, 1984).
3 By thought-behaviour it is not implied that thought is distinct from language but that it is often
poorly articulated and needs to be inferred from-because it cannot be reduced t m f t - i n ad eq u at e
speech and writing acts, which may contain additional meanings that are unintentionally commu-
nicated. See also P. Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1 9 5 7 ) ~pp. 78, I S .

0 1994Basil Blackwell Inc., 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142,USA, and 108 Cowley Road,
Oxford, OX4 IJF, UK.
 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY 141

meanings, are imparted to the wide range of political concepts they inevitably
employ. Political concepts acquire meaning not only through temporally accu-
mulative traditions of discourse, and not only through spatially diverse cultural
contexts, but also by means of their particular structural position within a
configuration of other political concepts. That meaning is crucially imparted
through the morphological attributes of ideologies for, whatever else they are,
ideologies are particular patterned clusters and configurations of political con-
cepts. An ideology is hence none other than the macroscopic structural arrange-
ment that attributes meaning to a range of mutually defining political concepts.
But this is no simple structuralist assertion. For the history of an ideological
tradition, the conventions through which it is understood and perceived, and its
geographical variations play central roles in attributing meaning to the ideology
in question, superimposing diachronic on synchronic a n a l y ~ i sThe
. ~ specific struc-
tures of political thinking embedded within an ideology are themselves formed
by permissible and legitimated meanings at the disposal of a particular society.
An ideology is thus located at the meeting point between meaning and form: it
constitutes a significant sampling from the rich, but unmanageable and incom-
patible, variety of human thinking on politics, contained within and presented
through a communicable and action-inspiring pattern.

I. REASSESSING ESSENTIAL CONTESTABILITY

If ideologies are particular configurations of political concepts, what are the
features of the concepts they contain? Political concepts are not simply stipulative
or arbitrary constructs, but complex entities that inject order and meaning into
observed sets of political phenomena and hold together an assortment of con-
nected ideas. Words and their meanings are invariably the product of the social
dimensions of language, and political concepts are doubly related to a socio-
historical context from which they emanate and which they seek to interpret and
shape. Because political concepts do not have correct meanings, their mode of
employment (as distinct from their philosophical validity or moral appeal) is
subject only to the test of acceptability to significant numbers of their users.
Any examination of political concepts must be indebted to Gallie’s seminal
notion of essentially contested concepts. However, while building on Gallie’s
treatment, the following discussion will attempt to show some of its limitations
as well as introduce the paramount but unacknowledged preliminary field of
inquiry-morphological analysis-that must precede Gallie’s analysis. The fea-
ture of ideological morphology, I suggest, identifies a cause in relation to which
essential contestability is but an effect. Gallie has noted a wide range of concepts,

4 For a discussion of the dual importance of these perspectives see R. Koselleck, Futures Past
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), esp. pp. 73-91.
142 MICHAEL FREEDEN

including political ones, over whose uses insoluble disputes exist. On Gallie’s
own assessment the following are the most important characteristics of essentially
contested concepts. They have to be ( I ) appraisive, signifying or accrediting
‘some kind of valued achievement’; (2)internally complex; (3) containing various
rival descriptions of their component parts; and (4) open to modification in the
light of changing circumstances.s If Gallie were merely saying that, because
political concepts have normative elements within them, and because there are
no universally agreed schemes of values, it is impossible to agree on the worth
of a political concept-on whether, say, it is good or bad to pursue equality-
essential contestability would boil down to a matter of moral choices and human
tastes. It is however more than that, even on Gallie’s understanding, though he
does not supply us with sufficient grounds for appreciating why his notion is a
richer one.
To begin with, Gallie adopts a confusing characterization of an essentially
contested concept as appraisive, signifying a valued achievement. True, when we
identify a political concept such as liberty, we may wish to attach value to it.
Me may, for example, include the notion of self-determination within our concept
of liberty, and regard the former as a good, as valuable. But two major qualifi-
cations need stating. First, not all essentially contested concepts signify valued
achievements; they may equally signify disapproved and denigrated phenomena,
the ambiguity attached to the concept of power being a suitable example. ‘Ap-
praisive’ cannot solely mean ‘valued’ and certainly not, as Connolly suggests,
‘moral’;6 it must include, as Gallie does not, the notions ‘unvalued’ and ‘deval-
ued’. Second, political concepts are not merely appraisive, and this applies to
essentially contested concepts as well. To suggest that self-determination is a
value is not to deny that it also has descriptive aspects, that something must
happen in or with a person for that person to be designated as self-determining.
Concepts may have empirically describable and observable components that may
in addition be conceived of as desirable and thus become values. In similar
fashion, the speed of a car is a fact that can be described, but its speed may also
be a value if ‘time is of the essence’. Those components of concepts must be
distinguished from words and concepts that are always positively appraisive-
beautiful, wise, just. For some people liberty is always positively appraisive, but
for others it may signify an ascertainable human condition irrespective of any
desirability or undesirability that may additionally accrue to it. It is only in the
first instance that essential contestability will pertain to the simple issue of the
positive evaluative appraisal; in the second instance, as I shall presently argue,

W. B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings ofthe Aristotelian Society, 56 (1955-

56), pp. 167-98 at pp. 169, 171-2, 180.
W. E. Connolly, The Terms ofPoliticul Discourse (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company,
19741, PP. 7-74.
 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY I43

it will pertain to a different question: to which concatenations of human behav-

iour and of social arrangements are we entitled to apply the term ‘liberty’?
From here to the third and most important point. Gallie collapses two mean-
ings of ‘appraisive’ into one and thus underplays the crucial structural nature of
essentially contested concepts. To be fair, he clearly identifies two central struc-
tural features of such a concept. Giving democracy as an example, Gallie main-
tains that it must be ‘internally complex in such a way that any democratic
achievement . . . admits of a variety of descriptions in which its different aspects
are graded in different orders of importance’.’ But there is no follow-up to this
intriguing observation about the structural nature of concepts. Instead, tucked
into Gallie’s notion of ‘appraisive’ but unnoticed by him is a second meaning,
which relates not to the evaluative and normative aspects of a concept, but to a
judgment concerning the questions: what is the intension of a concept? The
inclusion of which features within a concept facilitates a particular extensionZ8
And, by default, which features are excluded from a particular, contested inter-
pretation of a concept’s intension? What is the range of components from which
the concept is, or can be, fashioned? What are the methods used to accord
priority to certain parts of the concept over others?
Now this is a very different sort of contest, and a concept can thus properly
be designated as essentially contestable not just when the norms and values it
contains are contestable, but crucially, when all or any of its components are
contestable. The issue in this case is not one of the adequate description of the
components of a concept, because, as Connolly has rightly observed, description
is itself the singling out of certain features ‘from one or more possible points of
view’.9 The issue is hence either that of employing analytical judgment or that
of expressing a cultural preference concerning what is proper, relevant, edifying
or intellectually justifiable to include within the compass of a concept.’O In that
important sense, our concepts create, through their ‘topography’, the reality to
which we relate and to which we attribute significance. Those judgments or
preferences, moreover, are in turn applied to two areas that are essentially
contestable: I. The range of the components to be included; z. The potential
but inescapable ambiguity of many of the components, once included, that allows
for more than one characterization. An example of conceptual usage that illus-
trates both areas would be: I. A decision to designate equality of opportunity

Gallie, p. 184.
For a discussion of intension, see Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis, ed. G . Sartori
(Beverly Hills: Sage, 1984),esp. Sartori, ‘Guidelines for Concept Analysis’, pp. I 5-85. Intension
refers to the features and properties included in a concept. Extension pertains to the referents, in the
external (including social) world, to which a concept applies.
Connolly, pp. 22-3.
lo As Feinberg has rightly pointed out in another context, a decision on a matter such as whether
foetuses can be included in the category of rights-bearers ‘is a conceptual, not a moral, question’
(J. Feinberg, Rights, Justice and the Bounds of Liberty [Princeton: Princeton U.P., 19801, p. 180).
I44 MICHAEL FREEDEN

as a distinguishing component of the concept of equality; 2. A further and

inevitable choice, within the multiple and ambiguous meanings of equality of
opportunity, between identifying it as minimal formal and legal equality, or
(more maximizing) social and economic equality.
It is hence impossible to discuss the notion of appraisal without entertaining
a conception of a concept, in actual practice, as consisting of various empirically
ascertainable and describable, as well as normative, parts. By ‘empirically ascer-
tainable’ I do not mean to imply that those units necessarily have objective or
real referents. Rather they demonstrably exist within the intension of the concept
in question as social, historical and cultural constructs, in the thought-patterns
expressed through actual linguistic usage. Both normative and empirical aspects
are equally important. For instance, the concept of rights contains contestable
normative judgments about protecting fundamental human attributes: are they
worth defending, is the right to life always desirable, are rights more compelling
than the interests that may override them? But it also may contain, to employ
Hohfeld’s categories, liberties, claims, powers, or immunities, or any combination
of the above.**It may apply to all individuals, or to specific kinds of individuals
(e.g. those who are rational, or adult, or law-abiding), or to groups. It may
involve legal rights or moral and human rights. It may designate rights as
absolute, prima facie or culture-relative.12 The presence of these intension-form-
ing components is to a considerable extent, as I shall later argue, a matter of
temporal and spatial conventions: hence our analytical judgments concerning
intension may be vitally affected by our cultural preferences. There is no logical
necessity for including or excluding any of the above particular components, as
long as some components are included in the concept, which would otherwise
be vacuous. Because the structure of the concept is multi-faceted, any agreed
position on its range will be logically arbitrary.
But surely, one might argue, if only the concept of rights were to be extended
sufficiently, it could encompass all eventualities, so that at least the intension of
its components would not be essentially contestable? This is not so. Although
some of the above sets may overlap, not all co-exist with each other completely.
Gallie too subscribes to the view that variety of description is part of essential
contestability. But he is concerned with order of importance alone. There is more
to it than that. Sometimes indeed there may be direct competition over the status
of rights-bearer, as-from some ethical viewpoints-in the case of abortion:
mother versus foetus. In other cases it is not a question of the order of impor-
tance, but of logical compatibility: rights cannot be both absolute and culture-
relative, nor can all rights be absolute. In other cases again the contestability

See W. N. Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919).
l2 For a discussion of these issues, see M . Freeden, Rights (Milton Keynes: Open University Press,
‘99I), PP. 34-42.
 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY 14s

may be culturally rather than logically essential in the human worlds as we know
them. For example, for a complete set of positive legal rights to be identical to
that of moral human rights, we would have to postulate a counter-factual world
where the law is perfect, where everyone’s understanding of fundamental human
needs is in total accord, where there is an agreed morality that generates no new
ethical thinking. This logically-conceivable philosopher’s paradise falls short of
the possibilities incumbent in socially-embedded practices. Inevitably, certain
legal rights will be preferred to others.
Contestability, in sum, will apply to both levels: the obvious contestability of
normative judgments will co-exist with the equally important contestability of
the range of components deemed to contain the empirically ascertainable units
of the concept. Nor is it necessary, for a concept to be essentially contestable,
that all its components be incompatible, or capable of being ranked in order of
importance, or culturally unrealizable. Essential contestability would obtain, even
if its units displayed internal ambiguity or multiplicity in one area alone.
Finally, Gallie’s use of ‘contested’ rather than ‘contestable’ suggests actual
conflicts on a level of ideational awareness. However, concepts can be essentially
contestable even when they are not in fact contested in a given usage, or when
not all aspects of the concept are contested. In ideological practice it is quite
possible for a concept to be contested with limited or no awareness on the part
of the contesters. Nor is it plausible to suggest, as Gallie does, that a contested
concept is derived from an original exemplar whose authority is acknowledged
by all the contestant users.13 The postulation of an original exemplar is inimical
to the very notion of essential contestability, as it presumes an agreed or correct
position from which deviations have o ~ c u r r e d . ’ ~

11. THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICAL CONCEPTS

Connolly has usefully proposed the term ‘cluster concept’ when examining po-
litical concepts. It is unfortunately unclear whether it denotes the internal struc-
ture of a concept or the interconnections among concepts, nor does Connolly
spell out the ways in which these two separate problems might overlap.l5 The
first set of questions that needs addressing is: what is the common denominator
of a cluster concept? What entitles us to use the same word for its manifestations?
Specifically, does it have a common core shared by all its instances? If indeed
the concept of liberty has a central nucleus, how can we account for the very
different uses it is accorded at different times and places, or by different users

Gallie, p. 180.
l4 That fallacy has been maintained by some analysts of political thought influenced by Quentin
Skinner. See ‘Introduction’, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, eds T. Ball, J. Farr and
R. L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),p. 4.
Is Connolly, p. 14.
146 MICHAEL FREEDEN

within the same cultural context? And if liberty is a capsule that incorporates a
variety of properties, some overlapping with others but some possibly quite
distinct, are we talking about the same concept or about the same polysemic
word that may disguise the existence of different concepts?
The guidelines adopted to tackle this issue derive from the assertion that
words have no intrinsic meanings, but are social constructs whose meaning is
determined by their usage. Meaning has consequently to be ascertained empiri-
cally, and on that basis it will be contended that there exist a number of main
political concepts. By the main political concepts I refer to the recurrence, in
general as well as academic discourse, of terms (in no particular order of pref-
erence) such as liberty, rights, equality, justice, power, democracy, etc. To that
extent, the tradition of usage acts as a rough indicator of the presence or absence
of a political concept, though not of its agreed content. Nor does this rule out
the emergence of new political concepts as social and cultural conditions change,
or as knowledge increases. The merit of this approach is to relate empirically to
those concepts that exist as linguistic and cultural artifacts and that are, further,
in reasonable general use; otherwise the minimum permanence and spread nec-
essary to locate the very socio-cultural existence of a concept would be lacking.
Put differently, the interpretation of the meaning of political concepts must rely
on diachronic perspectives, even if-as will presently be suggested-their mor-
phology incorporates important synchronic aspects.
I now proffer the following proposition concerning the morphology of polit-
ical concepts: The main political concepts-those found both in political theo-
rizing and in ideological discourseronsist of both ineliminable features and
quasi-contingent ones.
The ineliminable features of political concepts will display two properties:
I. They are not intrinsic or logically necessary to the meaning of the word to
which they attach, but result from actual linguistic usage. In that sense, they
come close to Saussure’s notion of the ‘arbitrary’, except that we append arbi-
trariness to whatever substantive meaning is incorporated in the ineliminable
feature.I6 The feature is ineliminable simply in the sense that all known usages
of the concept employ it, so that its absence would deprive the concept of
intelligibility. Thus equality as a political concept appears always to have some-
thing to do with differences among human beings and the alleviation of those
differences, rather than, say, with mathematical identity. 2 . They cannot carry
the concept on their own, that is, the concept cannot be reduced to its inelimin-

‘ 6 Whereas Saussure appends arbitrariness to the employment of linguistic signs and their internal
relationships in a linguistic system (langue). See F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
(London: Duckworth, 1983), pp. 71-8, and R. Harris, Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1988), pp. 47-50.
 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY I47

able component.’’ At this stage we shall merely observe that the concept will
therefore contain more than its ineliminable component, though its precise con-
tents are impossible to establish.
The choice of the word ‘ineliminable’ rather than ‘core’ is deliberate. Many
political theorists suggest that concepts have a clear core or centre and a hazy
circumference where they merge into other concepts.18 Linguists have argued
persuasively that the signified needs no essential core of meaning in order to be
the proper signified for the ~ignifier.’~ I wish to advance beyond that assertion
of relationship to examine the question of conceptual cores itself. There is reason
to doubt the clarity of the core, even to query in which sense an ineliminable
component constitutes a core or part of one. Later I will attempt to set out more
precisely the relationship between the integral components of a concept and its
circumference. If a core implies a pivotal and specific element, lucidly spelled out
and able to stand on its own, to which more marginal components are added in
order to enrich it, the main political concepts do not possess cores. Rather, they
have components that are inelirninable not in a logical sense, but simply in the
sense that an empirically-ascertainable cultural consensus ascribes to them some
minimal element or elements. Democracy may mean the rule of the people, as
its etymological meaning indicates (taking into account the burdens of translation
from the Greek), but there is no logically entailed definition of either ‘rule’ or
‘people’, or any logical reason why this arbitrary word-combination, which
signals the apparently ineliminable component of democracy, should not be
altered or made unrecognizable to earlier users. Indeed, the deft implicit insertion
of ‘liberal’ into many current accepted uses of democracy suggests a struggle-
unsuccessful to date-over granting ineliminable-component status to a new,
tacitly implied, notion.
Inasmuch as the actual linguistic usage of a concept displays a generally shared
and therefore de facto conventionally ‘constant’ feature, that feature may be
termed an ineliminable aspect of it: to eliminate it means to fly against all known
usages of the concept (though this does not rule out its removal in future). To
deny that political concepts have or can have such an ineliminable element is to
concede that the word used to represent the concept in question refers to more
than one concept. But to do that, to break down major political concepts into
hosts of minor ones, is heuristically unmanageable as well as ontologically un-
necessary. The prevalence of a particular political term that covers ostensibly

As we shall see below, the quasi-contingent features cannot carry the concept on their own
either, though their further relationship with the given ineliminable component is a complicated one.
18 B. Parekh, ‘Social and Political Thought and the Problem of Ideology’, Knowledge and Belief
in Politics: The Problem of Ideology, eds R. Benewick, R. N. Berki and B. Parekh (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1973), pp. 57-87 at p. 77.
I9 J. Culler, Saussure (London: Fontana, x976), p. 23.
148 MICHAEL FREEDEN

different meanings and relates to different observable phenomena is an indication

of an understood similarity that merits, at the very least, serious consideration.
Let us illustrate the above by referring again to the concept of liberty. There
is a strong empirical case for maintaining that all known usages of liberty contain
the notion of non-constraint, and that if that notion is absent in a discussion of
liberty, we are in fact looking at another concept usurping the word ‘liberty’. It
would be well-nigh impossible to discover an example of a thought or speech-
act about liberty that does not contain the notion of non-constraint. That notion
appears in one of two forms: I. The subject claiming or desiring to be free will
either feel, or hope to feel, unconstrained in some area of thought or action.
2. Observers will describe the subject as being in a state of non-constraint, or
claim such non-constraint on behalf of the subject-irrespective of the subject’s
own views and feelings on the matter.20 The attribute of non-constraint is an
integral and ineliminable component of the concept of liberty because, deprived
of that attribute either in its ‘feeling free’ or ‘being free’ version, the concept
would collapse.
That argument is not tantamount to asserting that non-constraint, rather than
another notion, is logically necessary to liberty. It suggests instead that non-
constraint has become central to the ordinary language and to the philosophical
employment of liberty. For that reason, we may leave open the question whether
the ineliminable component is also the central or core component in anything
more than a conventional sense. It is simply a fact that human beings have
organized the concept of liberty in such a way as to make the ineliminable and
identifying component indispensable to it; though we may still wish to insist that
other aspects of liberty, say, self-development or autonomy, are more central or
core elements in terms of their importance for human and social life.
Nor is the argument tantamount to asserting that non-constraint is identical
to liberty. It must be stated emphatically that no political concept can be reduced
to its ineliminable element-i.e. narrowed down to its minimum component.21
It needs further components without which the concept cannot be fleshed out.
The reduction of liberty to non-constraint alone would render it entirely vacuous.
We would lack further information about non-constraint without which that
notion is form devoid of content. After all, non-constraint entails a relationship
between an object and a ‘force’ that has the potential of restricting an activity,
or oppressing the sense of space, of the object. Dialectically, the notion of non-
constraint is only possible when its opposite, constraint, is postulated. But who

20 See W. L. Weinstein, ‘The Concept of Liberty in Nineteenth Century English Political Thought’,
Political Studies, 13 (1965), 145-62; M. Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Poiiticaf
Thought 1914-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 280-5.
21 For that reason, MacCallum’s triadic analysis offers a necessary, but insufficient, characterization

of the concept of liberty (G. MacCallum, ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’, Philosophy, Politics and
SocieQ, 4th Ser., ed. P. Laslett, W. G . Runciman and Q. Skinner [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 19723,
PP. 174-93).
 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY ‘49

or what would not be constrained: individuals, groups, states, any living or social
entity? And by what would they not be constrained: physical actions, internal
hindrances, impersonal forces, other objects? And how would that non-constraint
manifest itself: through not impeding the actions of the free entity, through not
interfering with its development (or non-development), through permitting the
exercise of its abilities? And would non-constraint be a valuable or deplorable
condition to be in? We can immediately see that an isolated and abstract discus-
sion of non-constraint leaves us with far too many imponderables to be able to
make sense of it. Political concepts are always richer and more sophisticated
constructs than could be inferred from their ineliminable components alone.
Why do political concepts have ineliminable components? Mainly because
concepts are idea-artifacts that serve human convenience as ways of coming to
terms with the world, and because, arguably, this is how our mind makes sense
of that world. Certain political ideas, however vague, are deemed to be both
fundamental and different from each other. They each become centrally inelim-
inable anchors for different concepts that are designed, or are formed, around
them. If liberty were to be defined entirely by a randomly fluid collection of
components, and would therefore be bereft of a stable meaning, it would have
no specific defining attributes and could be dispensed with as a specific political
concept. But this is not the case. The specificity of political concepts derives from
the combination of two factors: the presence of an ineliminable component,
albeit an undifferentiated form rather than hard and substantive; and a non-
random, even if widely variable, collection of additional components that are
locked in to that vacuous ‘de facto’ core in a limited number of recognizable
patterns.
An analogy with the overworked table might be useful here.22All tables have
one ineliminable feature: they constitute raised surfaces on which objects can be
placed; they therefore have the property of raised levelness (or approximate
levelness: the fact that tables can be tilted and caused to lose that property
temporarily does not annihilate it, just as blindfolding people will not destroy,
but simply interfere with, their capacity of sight). The further fact that not all
objects with raised level surfaces are tables merely serves to illustrate that the
ineliminable component of one item (or concept) is not necessarily exclusive to
it, but may be found within the clustered features of other items (or concepts).
By analogy, non-constraint-the ineliminable feature of liberty-may be an op-
tional feature in the cluster of the concept of rights, in particular those rights
termed choice-rights.
The attribute of a level raised surface, while indispensable to the idea of a
table, is insufficient. We have not spelled out any of its additional properties and
we have no notion of what it will look like. The surface may be brown, it may

22 Connolly draws this analogy but his discussion lacks the notion of quasi-contingency.
150 MICHAEL FREEDEN

stand on four legs, and it may be made out of wood. None of these attributes
is essential; we can dispense with any of them and yet may still have a table.
Likewise, the additional elements that attach to the ineliminable core of a political
concept are not likely to be geographically or historically universal features of
that concept.
Here, however, we encounter the important notion of quasi-contingency. The
additional components of a table, while individually dispensable, occupy cate-
gories that may not be. A table will have a colour, it will incorporate some device
to raise it from the ground, it will be made of a hardish material. Those categories
are necessary, while their particular instances are contingent. We are consequently
able to choose within each category, to offer a variety of different combinations.
Moreover, there is no inherent reason why one instance of a category should
have preference over another, why a table should be brown or white, have four
rather than three or six legs, or be made of wood rather than plastic. Because
this is structurally the case, the choice we exercise is essentially contestable, and
the feature selected to fill each necessary category is contingent to the general
idea of a table, though explicable in particular contexts and circumstances.
Why is such a category necessary? First, because without some additional
categories the core will remain vacuous, devoid of content and meaning. Second,
because particular concepts will need a specific range of categories: liberty re-
quires the notion of a subject, it requires the idea of obstruction, and it may
require an evaluation as to its desirability if it is in competition with other
concepts. Specific, contingent occupiers of those necessary categories accord sense
to the core of non-constraint. However, third, there may exist entirely contingent
categories that attach to political concepts as they may attach to tables, but have
no bearing on the fully-fledged concept or object. For example, some theorists
will regard the question of the utility of liberty as superfluous. It is similarly
beside the point whether a table is a work of art, or whether it supports a bowl
of fruit.
We have now come one step further. The above argument implies that there
are constraints on the indefinite range of meanings the idea of essential contest-
ability may be thought to invoke. The initial limitation suggests that the main
political concepts will each have to include certain categories, such as a unit of
political analysis, a view of human nature, a notion of social structure, a con-
ception of moral ends, and so forth. Beyond that there will be categories asso-
ciated specifically with the concept in question: all approaches to the concept of
authority, for example, will have to call up the concept of power. It may be
further surmised that, although the concrete instances of each category will be
contingent, their broad permutations may be limited. After all, the unit of
political analysis will have to be the individual, or society, or some other group,
or more than one such entity, but nothing else. And social structure is usually
viewed on a spectrum that, roughly speaking, takes in positions from atomism
 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY 151

to organicism. It is important for those who regard the essential contestability

of political concepts as a cloak for relativism to appreciate that it does not allow
for infinite variety.
We now focus on a further paramount feature of a political concept: its
location in a number of idea-environments, which are necessary to bestow on it
significant meaning. Some elements in that environment will be other concepts,
adjacent and related, which can be swallowed up whole to form part of the
concept we are initially examining, or they can be cannibalized for useful parts;
some will be narrower ideas or attributes that are available for general purposes.
For instance, autonomy has the status of a distinct political and moral concept,
yet can be found within the quasi-contingent zones of the concept of liberty. On
the other hand, the idea that ‘man is wolf to man’ is not in itself a concept, but
has frequently been harnessed to the service of political concepts such as power,
authority or social justice. One conclusion which ensues from the above is that
political concepts do not relate to each other entirely by negation. Parts of
concept A may also ‘belong’ to other concepts, yet be logically entailed as a
category by the ineliminable component of concept A, or be incorporated in
concept A because there exists a social convention in a particular society to do
so. Political concepts overlap and reinforce each other; it might be far neater if
each were to occupy a distinct space, but such conceptual utopias are not the
stuff of which normal human thinking is made. In the analysis of the actual
manifestations of political thinking we must take human thought-behaviour as
we find it, to the best of our understanding.
To argue that a component of a concept is logically entailed by its ineliminable
components is not to suggest that it must become an ineliminable part of the
concept itself. For a key distinction to be made when discussing the adjacent
environment of a political concept is that between logical adjacency and cultural
adjacency. As we have seen, the concept of liberty has as its ineliminable com-
ponent a notion of non-constraint. But concepts logically adjacent to non-con-
straint will include autonomy, self-determination, self-development and power.
They are logically adjacent because they refer to necessary options and permu-
tations which are invariably brought into play by any concretization of non-
constraint. Because those adjacent concepts are themselves essentially contest-
able, there is no way of establishing which of their own components will be
embraced by the concept of liberty. All we can say at this stage is to recall the
notion of quasi-contingency and to observe that some aspect of each of the
following: autonomy, self-determination, self-development and power, will nec-
essarily be called on to play a role in fleshing out any concept of liberty. Some
instances of these logically adjacent categories will be locked into the ineliminable
and integral component of the concept of liberty-non-constraint-and consti-
tute further parts of that concept, just as the woodenness of a table may, in one
design scheme, become one of its attributes. For although woodenness is not
152 MICHAEL FREEDEN

logically inevitable, it is a logical necessity that a table be fashioned of some

material or other. Without the particular pattern created by these interlocking
parts, a concept such as liberty will remain a barren notion, bearing of course
in mind that multifold patterns of liberty are available.
Logical adjacency is both a constraintz3 on the indefinite variety of a concept
and an opening for its pluralistic structure. Using the notion of logical adjacency
we are slowly moving towards our first glimpse of the concept of liberty itself.
We could now, for example, assert that liberty concerns the ability to self-
determine without hindrance, or perhaps the ability to self-develop without
hindrance. But we also now know that those abilities will display manifold
shades and that such variety is in the nature of the concept. We can hence
appreciate why the ‘essential contestability’ problem is a consequence of the
structure of political concepts. But that appreciation is in turn informed by the
realization that, when any concept is formed, the process through which incor-
poration-choices are made among adjacent ideas and parts of adjacent concepts
is more complex than originally appeared to be the case.
First, as we have seen, even though some answer or other to the question
‘what mechanisms of human thought, will and conduct are activated in a situ-
ation of non-constraint?’ must be logically entailed, the choice among answers
is not. It is not illogical to suggest that non-constraint is compatible with state
intervention, if that intervention is intended to protect individuals from coercion
by others. But how do we arrive at that choice among a number of logically
adjacent options? Second, not every possible permutation of a concept follows
logically from positing the notion of non-constraint. It does not logically follow,
for instance, that people’s life-plans must never be interfered with, though it may
be part of a concept of liberty held by libertarians. In other words, there must
be a method other than, and parallel to, logical adjacency through which concepts
are fleshed out. Again, what is that method? The answer to both questions is
this: decisions about which paths to follow within a large network of logical
adjacency, as well as decisions to establish illogical adjacent connections, will be
socially mediated through the notion of cultural adjacency, which imposes further
constraints on the structure of political concepts. This is more than simply
asserting that such concepts are socio-cultural products. Rather, their specific
structure, attached to the initial ineliminable component, is shaped by tempo-
rally- and spatially-bounded social practices, institutional patterns, ethical sys-

23 This notion of constraint differs from the familiar one used by P. E. Converse, ‘The Nature of
Belief Systems in Mass Publics’, Ideology and Discontent, ed. D. E. Apter (New York: Free Press,
1964), pp. 207-12. Converse provides no theory concerning the constraints operating on the internal
structure of concepts, sees such constraints as more prevalent among elites than mass publics, rather
than a property of political concepts irrespective of their articulators, and does not allow for the
overriding of logical by cultural constraints.
 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY 153

tems, influential theories and beliefs (to include reactions to external events and
to unintentional or non-human occurrences).
The first type of cultural adjacency acts as a brake operating within the
framework of logical adjacency. For whereas logical adjacency must draw into
the meaning of liberty all the additional components that are entailed by the
ineliminable component, thus overloading the concept with more parts than it
can simultaneously hold (owing to possible incompatibilities among them), cul-
tural adjacency will intervene against making all those logical connections and
will thus preserve the viability of the concept. For example, it may be that in
one observed version of the concept of liberty, the answer to the logically adjacent
question ‘what is the effect of non-constraint on the subject?’ will be self-
development rather than self-determining stagnation. The choice of self-devel-
opment follows the introduction of a cultural or historical preference for an
intervening factor, in this case a specific conception of human nature, subject to
processes of evolution and maturation and capable of self-activating or enhancing
those processes. This particular conception of human nature cements the quasi-
contingent relationship between non-constraint and self-development and pre-
vents both developmental and non-developmental conduct from simultaneously
being expressions of liberty. Similarly, the cultural translation of the concept of
rights into civil and political rights is only one logical possibility, but in the
Western political tradition it would be inconceivable not to include them in any
reasonable discussion of the term.
The second type of cultural adjacency refers to elements that do not follow
logically from the ineliminable components of a concept, but are regarded in
ordinary usage as legitimate, if not indispensable. Wittgenstein observed that
‘when a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless.
But a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn
from c i r ~ u l a t i o n . Here
’ ~ ~ the opposite happens. A combination of words, which
logicians and some philosophers would disallow, is accorded social and ideational
legitimacy. For example, it is not logical to espouse the concept of political
equality, to regard women as human beings, and yet to deny them the vote.
Nevertheless, this variant has frequently been employed even within liberal-
democratic systems, most notably Switzerland. Alternatively, ostensibly logically
paradoxical features may be culturally pressed into one concept. Some versions
of liberty will allow for force to be used in order to attain the behaviour
considered consonant with non-constraint. If non-constraint is construed as
applying to the removal of rational hindrances to individual choice, and those
hindrances are deemed internal to the subject rather than caused by others, then

24 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 19581, para. 500.

154 MICHAEL FREEDEN

the formula ‘forced to be free’ may be culturally acceptable despite what appears
to be its defective logic.
Cultural adjacency, then, refers to specific historical and socio-geographical
circumstances that encourage the association of different political concepts or
smaller idea-units within a political concept, and which either operate within
broader categories that are logically interlinked, or override such logical linkage.
It will relate to a historical and geographical usage of ideas and of language that
may either be customary or innovative. This analysis need not lead to a radically
relativist position, for it may well be the case that universal, or nigh-universal,
usages of political ideas can be demonstrated to exist. We may term this phe-
nomenon contingent universalism, for although such universalism is not an
invariable attribute of the structure and meaning of the political concept in
question, it can pertain to the concept at a particular point in time for socio-
cultural reasons.
Concepts have occasionally been analysed as composed of parts that are
combined in a particular way. These attempt to correspond, on the whole un-
successfully-as Wittgenstein argued-to the empirically observable component
parts of something composite from which we construct our picture of reality.2s
But an important element has usually been missing in such philosophical expla-
nations. When Wittgenstein claimed that a triangle can be seen as a mountain,
a wedge, a geometrical drawing, and so forth, or when he gave his famous duck-
rabbit example, using a drawing that could signify either, he was attacking the
notion of ‘what is really seen’ as a poor guide to defining a material concept.
But the failure to interpret the object known as a duck-rabbit results from the
isolated contemplation of the object. Were the duck-rabbit to be depicted as
floating on a pond, the likelihood that it was a duck rather than a rabbit would
be extremely high. Were the duck-rabbit to be located in a warren, or were a
picture of it to appear on the cover of a book called ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’,
the likelihood that it was a rabbit would be similarly high.
The point is that the empirical context of the material object accords its
related concept a particular interpretation. In parallel, political concepts will
gather meaning from their empirically-ascertainable ideational context, from the
idea-environment in which they are located. To that extent the synchronic rela-
tional perspective of Saussure is a useful one.Z6 Wittgenstein does indeed raise
the problem of looking at objects and concepts from multiple viewpoints, and
he usefully regards concepts as having blurred edges.27 It is precisely because
concepts are not hermetically sealed and allow for fluid, if controlled, movement

25 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paras 39, 59.

26 Saussure regarded language primarily as a synchronic system, whose components derived mean-
ing from their contingent relationships at a particular point in time. See Saussure, Course in General
Linguistics, pp. 122-3, 126.
27 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 71.
 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY 155

across their vague boundaries that the areas beyond those boundaries-the idea-
environments-acquire importance. However, Wittgenstein does not take the
extra step of exploring the possibility that the multivalence of concepts is revealed
only when detaching them from a given environment.28
In addition, as we have seen, political concepts regularly exhibit a feature that
material objects display infrequently and only with difficulty, namely, some of
their constituent parts are also part of their idea-environment, because they
appear simultaneously in other, external concepts. Ideas, after all, are not limited
to a particular time or space; they can be both here and there. We can hence
conceive of a concept as turned inside out, by externalizing its so-called internal
parts and treating them as free-floating units that intersect with the concept’s
ineliminable component. In other words, the analysis of a (political) concept is
inadequate in so far as all its components or properties are treated as internal
to it, as independent, self-supporting, and sharply demarcated from other con-
cepts. Conversely it will benefit from a viewpoint that sees most of those com-
ponents as externalized, and available to be drawn, in different patterns, into its
skeletal structure. Obviously, in the absence of that skeleton-the ineliminable
component-the concept would be annihilated. Its presence, however, is insuf-
ficient for the concept to emerge. Were we not to attach that skeleton, or vacuous
structure, to any one of a number of logically and culturally adjacent environ-
ments, the interpretation of a phenomenon, and the transformation of words
into meaning-endowing concepts, would become impossible tasks.

111. IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY

The analysis of ideologies may now be advanced by utilizing a three-tier for-

mation: the components of a concept, a concept, and a system of concepts, just
as by analogy we could talk about a level surface, a table, and a furnished room.
So far we have been discussing the internal structure of a single concept. Ideo-
logies, however, are combinations of political concepts organized in a particular
way. Here we alight on the major morphological distinction between political
philosophies and ideologies: the different methods by which they handle the
problem of essential contestability. Pure philosophical argument would have to
engage one of two methods. It would either have to explore and account for all
logical adjacencies to a given ineliminable component of a concept, or it would
have to present a rationally and morally justifiable case for a choice among such
adjacent component^.^^ Ideological argument, while not necessarily ignoring

28 Wittgenstein appreciated that concepts are formed through ‘aspects of organization’, namely,
through associating different parts (Philosophical Investigations, p. Z O ~ ) ,but he did not go on to
develop the notion that locating a vacuous concept in a context or idea-environment is a prime
method of such association.
29 Even then, many soi-disant philosophers do not escape ideological argument.
156 MICHAEL FREEDEN

logical adjacencies will allow, by relying heavily on the notion of cultural adja-
cency, a socially-situated and partisan value-arbitrated choice among adjacent
components, and the result will display various mixes of rational criteria, emo-
tional inclinations and cultural value-preferences. A similar process of choice
will also be at work in deciding how to organize the wide range of political
concepts encompassed by any ideology and how to interlink them.
In parallel to logicians, most linguists would challenge the attribution of a
one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified. A word may be related
to many meanings and to changing meanings. Ideologies, however, behave in
precisely the converse manner. They aim at cementing the word-concept rela-
tionship. By determining the meaning of a concept they can then attach a single
meaning to a political term. Ultimately, ideologies are configurations of decon-
tested meanings of political concepts, when such meanings are ascribed by meth-
ods at least partly foreign to those employed by scientists, philosophers, linguists
or political theorists. Political philosophers, on the other hand, may choose not
to decontest meanings at all when they are engaged in the clarification of con-
c e p t ~ and
; ~ ~when they do engage in decontesting, they may claim to do so by
means which preserve accepted philosophical or moral standards of analysis.
In concrete terms, an ideology will link together a particular conception of
human nature, a particular conception of social structure, of justice, of liberty,
of authority, etc. ‘This is what liberty means, and thut is what justice means’, it
asserts. Ideologies need, after all, to straddle the worlds of political thought and
political action, for one of their central functions is to link the two. The political
sphere is primarily characterized by decision-making, and decision-making is an
important form of decontesting a range of potential alternatives. Thus, while the
very nature of political concepts lies in their essential contestability, the very
nature of the political process is to arrive at binding decisions that determine the
priority of one course of action over another. Ideologies serve as the bridging
mechanism between the two, converting the inevitable variety of options into
the monolithic certainty that is the unavoidable feature of a political decision. It
is plain to see why so many theorists of ideology connect that term with power,
for the act of decontesting, of deciding, of closing options, is an instance of
power-wielding. Competing ideologies are struggles over the legitimate meanings
of political concepts and the sustaining arrangements they form. But it is equally
plain that the nature of action-orientated thinking necessitates such decisions, so
that to attribute a pejorative connotation to the power aspect of ideology, in the
absence of an alternative, is a meaningless qualification. Similarly, social psy-
chologists draw attention to the inevitable cognitive ordering of the perceived
(political) world required by individuals in order to make it intelligible and

30 See D. D. Raphael, Problems of Potiticd Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 11-17,
although the possibility of clarification that does not assign meaning is questionable.
 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY 157

increase its predi~tability.~~What is meaningful is why one specific decontesta-

tion, one ordering of the political world, prevails over another. This is where
morphology is joined by culture and history.
Central to any analysis of ideologies is the proposition that they are charac-
terized by a morphology that displays core, adjacent, and peripheral concepts.
For instance, an examination of observed liberalisms might establish that liberty
is situated within their core, that human rights, democracy, and equality are
adjacent to liberty, and that nationalism is to be found on their periphery. The
existence of concepts adjacent to the ideological core is essential to the formation
of an ideology. The notion of logical and cultural adjacency, which we have
explored within the framework of a single concept, is equally vital to the artic-
ulation of an entire ideology. On further examination of a specific case, for
example, it would be evident that liberty is given a particular meaning-self-
determination-because of its close association with democracy, while, con-
versely, democracy is given a particular meaning-limited popular government-
because of its structural interlinkage with liberty. So while the concepts of
democracy and of liberty each have ineliminable cores in turn, they are filled out
in a distinctive way due to their mutual proximity. This is a feature of the
Western political tradition, in which liberty has become conventionally affiliated
with democratic self-government, or with the kinds of equality that make self-
government possible and that allow the generalization of liberty. Ideas drawn
from equality and democracy have come in turn to create an ideational context
that colours our understanding of liberty. In sum, all these skeletal or ‘thin’
concepts develop, both logically and culturally, elements that form overlapping
and shared areas, which then react back on their separate ineliminable compo-
nents to constitute full but mutually dependent concepts. These mutually influ-
ential relationships exist among the manifold concepts that make up an
ideological system, and these ‘spatial’ structural networks give the ideology its
distinguishing features. Like political concepts, an ideology will have concept-
categories that are both culturally and logically necessary to its survival, though
the particular instances of those categories are not.
In addition, an ideology will contain peripheral concepts that add a gloss to
its core concepts. Often these will be specific ideas or policy-proposals rather
than fully-fledged concepts, lacking the generalization and sophistication asso-
ciated with a concept. They may also be applications of more general concepts
to specific cases. But they may well be concepts in their own right, concepts that
may be found situated closer to the core of other ideological configurations. Any
specific belief item within an ideology will be identified by a particular route
from the core, through adjacent concepts, to a peripheral one. Thus, the assertion

31 See S. W. Rosenberg, Reason, Ideology and Politics (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988),esp. pp. 18-
‘9.
158 MICHAEL FREEDEN

of the importance of a viable national health service may be decoded as encom-

passing a core belief about human welfare, decontested (and valued) as human
flourishing; attached to adjacent concepts such as community, power and re-
sponsibility (jointly decontested as involving state intervention to further the core
belief), human rights (decontested as rights to social services), and the public
interest (decontested as the maintenance of human capacities at their highest
possible level); and rounded off by peripheral concepts such as pain and suffering
(decontested as undesirable, especially when avoidable), and need (decontested
as the provision of medical services to all who require them). This rudimentary
scheme does not rule out other interpretations.
Peripheral concepts are specialized and not essential to the comprehension of
the core or the survival of the ideology. Each concrete instance of liberty within
liberalism will have referents in a particular context which may give a short-
lived but spatially and temporally comprehensible meaning to its usage. Civil
disobedience or free trade are instances of peripheral concepts that have been
attached to liberty within the ideological framework of liberalism. Social order
could be an example of a concept peripheral to liberalism but close to the heart
of conservative ideologies. Peripheral concepts have the important function of
endowing an ideology with relevance, of contextualizing it within a cultural
setting, of updating and linking it to issues that help to confer on it both vitality
and the capacity to solve political problems. Conversely, they may be dysfunc-
tional to its survival and direct it towards ideational dead ends, as was the case
with Labour’s increasingly peripheral post-war attachment to nationalization. In
such circumstances they may be discarded in order to pick up new peripheral
concepts, and thus prevent the alienation of the ideology from potential and
actual supporters.
We can now appreciate that ideologies are groupings of decontested political
concepts. The mutual influence of these concepts is paramountly affected by the
specific morphological arrangements that place them in relation to each other;
they constitute what Ollman has termed systems of internal relations.32 Ideologies
constitute semantic fields in that each component interacts with all the others
and is changed when any one of the other components alters.33 In some cases
ideologies will constitute virtual freeze-frames of the meanings of the concepts
employed, though this would only be so were an ideology to be saddled with an
artificially rigid logic, or were specific cultural meanings to be forcefully imposed.
Otherwise their structures will display degrees of flexibility. Ideologies will be
capable of bending under pressure, and of hosting a number of variations on

32 For a useful discussion, which incidentally reinforces Saussurian insights, see B. Ollrnan, Alien-
ation, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 256-62.
33 See Sartori, op. cit., p. 5 2 .
 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY 159

each of their concepts without collapsing. However, if completely alien meanings

of concepts are injected into a particular ideology, its structure may snap.
The morphology of an ideology exhibits both similarities and differences in
comparison to the structure of a political concept. Because ideologies assign to
their constituent concepts clear meanings, be these ever so logically contestable
and culturally partisan ones, it is not uncommon to encounter the belief that
they have permanent cores, as well as fixed relationships between core, adjacent
and peripheral concepts. This is frequently presented as true of the major ideo-
logical families or traditions. However, in view of the above elaboration on the
essential contestability of concepts, the likelihood that different exponents of,
say, socialism would display a fixed and common ideational profile is remote.
There are as many socialisms as there are instances of that ideology, and hence
a degree of fluidity will apply within any ideological grouping. This fluidity may
be more characteristic of ideologies than of political concepts, for the latter are
more stringently controlled through linguistic socialization than the former. Ideo-
logies may be held unconsciously and hence offer fewer opportunities for regu-
lating their usage; even when consciously embraced, they are more complex
constructs than political concepts and more capable of diverse forms.
But having now introduced the term ‘ideological grouping’, how can we
determine which ideologies belong to which groupings? How can ideological
morphology be classified into sets of distinctive arrangements that constitute the
ideological ‘fingerprint’ we can then call conservatism, liberalism or socialism?
Any attempt to answer this must begin with a related question: Do ideologies
have ineliminable concepts, just as political concepts have ineliminable compo-
nents? In general, this is indeed the case, though the question allows for no easy
answer. Liberty is rightly central to liberalism in the sense that its eradication is
destructive of that ideology. No known variants of liberalism dispense with the
concept of liberty. On the other hand, the ineliminability of concepts in an
ideology is not particularly interesting. This is due to the simple reason that
virtually all political concepts will be found, deliberately or by default, within
the ambit of any ideology. Precisely because ideologies are general, even total,
political world views-either by design or because they have implicit positions
on all social issues-the mere presence within them of any particular concept is
not a definitional property. In that sense most concepts within an ideology are
ineliminable. Of far greater significance therefore will be the location secured by
a political concept within the ideological framework. In effect, ideologies may
be distinguished by the relative ordering in which they deploy similar concepts,
on which depend both the precise decontesting of the concepts and the overall
interpretation of any ideology’s messages.
But what then is the core of an ideology? If it refers to a structurally fixed
and substantively permanent set of concepts, ideologies do not have cores. The
I 60 MICHAEL FREEDEN

term ‘core’ may be employed only as a flexible and empirically ascertainable

collection of ideas, fashioned by social conventions. Some core concepts may
migrate, over time and space, across the structure of an ideology. Others may
be refused that right to travel: liberalism does not permit the concept of liberty
to migrate to an adjacent or peripheral position. Its centrality is part of what
constitutes the liberal ‘fingerprint’.
Moreover, if a core refers to a single constituent concept, ideologies do not
have cores, either. They are not typified by one central organizing concept; in
fact, they can invariably be described as having more than one core concept.
That description pertains primarily to the actual verbal behaviour of the adher-
ents of the ideology in question, bolstered by scholarly judgment. It would, for
example, be far too simplistic to assert that liberty alone is found at the liberal
core-indeed, one scholar has even identified that core, with equal implausibility,
as equality.34 Rather, the core is itself a cluster of concepts. Furthermore, the
same family of ideologies may present variants of a core cluster, each of which
will emphasise different component concepts, or even exclude some and include
others. Nevertheless, all these variants may legitimately bear the same ideological
tag. Thus some socialists will stress equality as their most important core concept;
others, welfare, the class-struggle or the attainment of species-being-though all
four may appear in different variations of the socialist core. Alternatively, there
may be disagreement concerning which concepts are core, adjacent or peripheral
within the same ideological system. Different positions have, for instance, been
claimed for property within the family of liberalism. Over the centuries that
concept has travelled, in some liberal variants, from the core position to the
periphery. The assessment of the conceptual components of an ideology will
depend in part on the synchronic standards the evaluator employs (the self-
definition of a stated liberal, the view of the society of that liberal, or of other
liberals in that society), and in part on the diachronic tradition of liberal inter-
pretation the evaluator taps into (and there are as many such traditions as
legitimate versions of liberalism, constituted by competing recognized conven-
tions that have evolved over time and space).
A parallel between the structure of a concept and of an ideology exists also
on another level. The core concepts of an ideology are non-specific, allowing for
many interpretations to be attached to them by means of adjacent and peripheral
concepts. By bolting together a large number of concepts, each of which has
been decontested through its association with its neighbouring concepts, ideo-
logies obtain clear ideational profiles. Hence, for example, liberalism will rule
out some of the meanings of its core concepts of liberty, rationality, and individ-
uality simply by attaching a specific range of additional concepts to that core.

34 R. Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’, Public and Private Morality, ed. S . Hampshire (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1978), pp. 113-43.

 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY 161

Mill decontested rationality by assuming the possibility of harmonious devel-

opment, and individuality by linking it to pluralist views of eccentricity and the
human ability to form life-plans. Liberty was decoded within these sets of con-
straints. Hence the meaning of each of the concepts within an ideological system,
as well as the overarching meaning the system in toto is held to represent, will
depend heavily on ideological morphology. That morphology will invariably
reflect the fact that ideologies permit logical adjacency to be restricted by cultural
adjacency. This vital mechanism enables ideologies to overcome, or at least
minimize, the problem of internal inconsistency by creating acceptable connec-
tions between terms and arguments in order to escape logical c r i t i c i ~ m The.~~
association of nationalism and socialism within German fascism is a salient
instance of forging links between viewpoints considered by many to be incom-
patible, logically as well as culturally. A further comparison between Nazism
and Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’ illustrates the range of possible combi-
nations of socialism and nationalism within different cultural contexts and idea-
environments.
The specific morphology of an ideology that entitles us to group a number of
its instances under one heading may be illustrated by an extension of the table/
concept analogy. Ideologies may be likened to rooms that contain various units
of furniture in proximity to each other. Two important, if obvious, observations
need to be kept in mind: I. Rooms may be distinguished by the kinds and
combination of units of furniture they accommodate (kitchens will have sinks
and refrigerators; studies will have desks and bookshelves). 2. The same type of
room will appear in an infinite variety of furniture-combinations (there are
hundreds of different don’s studies in Oxford). This is precisely the position with
reference to ideologies. Though it is impossible to give a clear-cut definition of
liberalism, it is empirically ascertainable that liberalism has always contained
units such as liberty, human rationality and individualism. Subtract one of them
from the liberal configuration and profound question marks begin to appear.
Subtract two and it is no longer liberalism. Similarly, a kitchen without a sink
is hardly a kitchen; without a cooker as well its identity is destroyed. Note also
that, though there are countless kinds of cookers, they are all cookers; the same
rule will apply to varieties of individualism. In sum, the appearance of certain
items in a pattern endows an ideology with a distinctive nature.
The example, however, is an extreme one: kitchens and studies share few
items of furniture; tables and chairs being the most probable ones. But what if
a common pool of furniture is used? Here we alight on the critical issue of
organization. It is unlikely that in the hands of different furnishers the same

3s For a psychological exploration o f the problems o f consistency and dissonance-reduction in

order to achieve psychological harmony, see M. Billig, Ideology and Social Psychology (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1982), p. 162 ff.
I62 MICHAEL FREEDEN

room will be repeatedly cloned; far more probable that identical units of furniture
may be used to create very different rooms. That is, after all, what modular
furniture is designed to achieve. Ideologies, as we have argued, will display most,
if not all, of the major political concepts within their system. The key lies in the
relation of the units to one another, in their positioning vis-5-vis the centre and
in the way units are made to interlock and support each other. A room with a
table at its centre may be a billiard room, a dining room or a study. It is unlikely
to be a bedroom. If a table is surrounded by four chairs and a tablecloth, rather
than by strong arc lights, surgical equipment and an anaesthetised person, it is
most probably a dining-table, not an operating one. Now this is exactly the case
with an ideology. If we find liberty, rationality and individualism at its centre,
while equality-though in evidenceaecorates the wall, we are looking at an
exemplar of liberalism. If order, authority and tradition catch our eye upon
opening the door, while equality is shoved under the bed or, at best, one of its
weaker specimens is displayed only when the guests arrive, we are looking at a
version of conservatism. Core, adjacent and peripheral units ‘fingerprint’ the
room so that we can categorise it. It must be emphasized that only closed
ideologies will succeed in forcing out a concept altogether. Open ideologies will
have to engage, by default at least, all the major political concepts.
Matters can, albeit, become more complicated. What if my study also happens
to contain a sink and a fridge in a salient position? What if-taking this further-
two ideologies, one calling itself liberalism and the other conservatism, happen
to share the decontested concepts of limited power, liberty from intervention by
other people, constitutionalism, and private property? This is perhaps the most
important facet of ideological morphology: the absence of absolute boundaries
which separate the features of ideological systems. Multiple instances exist of
ideological hybrids that could only be described as conservative liberalism, liberal
socialism, and the like. This is however the crux of any analysis. To compart-
mentalize ideologies into prefabricated categories called socialism or liberalism
flies in the face of the evidence. Ideologies are modular structures, frequently
exhibiting a highly fluid morphology. The myriad variants they manifest can
only be broadly reduced to the few main categories, or families, we are conversant
with. It is empirically useless to entertain the notions of precise ideological
boundaries, or of features exclusive to one ideology or the other. These are
merely popular as well as scholarly conventions for simplicity’s sake. They are,
unfortunately, conventions that have caused great misunderstandings both in the
world of politics and of academe, and have frequently vitiated the subtlety
requisite for the serious investigation of ideologies.
An appreciation of ideologies as multi-conceptual constructs, and as loose
combinations of decontested concepts with a variety of internal combinations,
provides the clue to understanding the linkage between political concepts and
the many forms ideologies adopt. The comparative study of ideologies-syn-
 POLITICAL CONCEPTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY 163

chronic and diachronic comparison being the touchstones of scientific study-

can only commence on that basis. The various profiles ideologies adopt are to a
significant extent explained by the morphology of the ideational subject-matter
on which they build. Nevertheless, comparison can also lead to classification.
‘Family resemblances’ are the product of ideological patterns that emerge through
continuous historical-linguistic usage. Ideologies are, after all, the products of
groups, not isolated individuals. The bunching together of political concepts in
long-term relationships is a central ideological feature and suggests that ideolog-
ical meaning is not as contingent as some post-structuralists would have it.
That bunching may well follow a developmental sequence during which its
components will subtly change; indeed, over a long period of time, as with the
process of biological evolution, an ideological core may shed or acquire concepts,
and its morphology may undergo some transformation. The history of a tradition
may assist in a decision whether to classify a particular instance as within or
outside its confines. Because we know that British liberalism abandoned private
property as a core concept and introduced a notion of community, while retaining
other identifiably liberal features, we need not commit one error of classifying
liberal communitarianism as a form of socialism, or another error of presenting
liberalism and communitarianism as mutually exclusive positions. To do that
would be to rename a variant of liberalism incorrectly. But on another dimension,
the name of an ideology-its signifier-may remain constant. Some variants of
liberalism have retained both the name and the conceptual morphology over
time; while other ideological variants parade the name ‘liberalism’ but reveal
under close scrutiny the existence of a different ideology.36
The study of political thought has attained great respectability and high
scholarly status in the sphere of political philosophy, which is engaged primarily
in clarifying human thought, in evaluating its coherence and validity, and in
making ethical statements and recommendations. It is proposed here that it
would also attain invigorating impetus and methodological refinement by focus-
ing on the interrelationships of its basic concepts as the clue to their decoding.
This must be accomplished both through borrowing from philosophers and
linguists analytical rigour with respect to words and concepts, and from histo-
rians, cultural sociologists and anthropologists the ability to situate those words
and concepts temporally and spatially. In so doing we may also cast new light
on the complex nature of modern ideologies and attempt to reintegrate their
study into the central substance of political theory rather than, as so frequently
is the case, regard them as a dubious and imperfect adjunct to a mainstream that
supposedly can exist independently of them.

36 Thus while J. S. Mill and L. T. Hobhouse display strong morphological similarities, the liber-
tarianism of Hayek, by excluding the notion of rationally-guidedprogress, shares insufficient elements
with them, while it shares with some conservatives the notion of a self-generating spontaneous order.
I 64 MICHAEL FREEDEN

The introduction of a morphological perspective into the study of political

thought is long overdue. It is essential to the extent that for quite a few centuries
political theory has been pivotally concerned with the nature of political concepts.
It is chiefly through the study of ideologies, the receptacles of the actual usage
of political concepts, that a parallel kind of political theory can be promoted:
an analysis of the ‘behavioural’ and structural properties of political concepts,
without which our understanding of existing political thought as well as our full
ability to formulate new theories will be deficient.