Liberal Languages

Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought, by Michael Freeden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 2005; pp. 271. Pb. £12.95). Collections of an author's papers, often written over a long period, raise suspicion in the minds of publishers and occasionally some bemusement among readers puzzled by repetitious thought and an incoherent assemblage of ideas originally meant for a different audience and, against this background, Michael Freeden does comparatively well. It is true that the twelve pieces collected here traverse a period from 1979 to 2003 and reflect major developments in the author's approach to the study of ideologies over that quarter of a century. But the early material is mostly focused in the first part of the book that takes one back to Freeden's concern with Hobson, Hobhouse and progressive liberalism before the First World War. The second half widens the focus and brings under review ideological refractions observed in the discourse of eugenics, nationalism, environmentalism and the malleable components of Blair's New Labour. Inevitably, perhaps, the second half of the book is the more arresting. There was only so much blood in Hobson and Hobhouse: they must surely have been bled dry by now. When Freeden turns his more recent thinking about ideology towards contemporary targets or the act of studying ideology at all, his writing becomes by contrast urgent and persuasive. He wants to move away from Rawlsian formulae and to consider ideologies as fluid systems of language that have proved assimilable to diverse, sometimes contradictory, political positions. Freeden's moving has plainly been painful since his early work betrayed an almost essentialist understanding of political concepts. That has gone, and rightly so, but what has replaced it sometimes has a sense of tension with what went before in ‘core’ concepts, that he sees as necessary in order to supply some fundamental identity for political ideas, that stand in a flexible relation to peripheral notions which migrate from one nucleus to another like excitable electrons. He goes beyond spatial metaphors of this kind to think, too, across time which makes his thinking especially valuable to historians, though his book spends little time on them. Perhaps he is not always clear whether he wants to talk about history or the past and by mixing them up he makes assertions about the given-ness of his subject matter that may leave reflexive historians uneasy; but at least he insists that ideologies are a form of collective narrative that must be understood diachronically, which is surely the right way to go about the enquiry. By subjecting New Labour to the test of time, for example, he is able to show in the best of these essays how distant its public positions have become from the liberalism that infused early progressivism. If there is an overall reservation attaching to Freeden's interesting and timely reflections, then it perhaps lies in an impression that he believes, for all his sophisticated depictions of ideology as inter-penetrative persuasions and assumptions, that his subject can be reified into an object of study untainted by the ideology of its student who seemingly wears a white laboratory smock. This is not only implausible in itself but it also fights against some of the contentions made about the insidious nature of ideology throughout the book. The moment may have come, therefore, to put down Hobson and pick up Heisenberg

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