Interview with Michael Freeden: Democracy Was Slow Cooking, This Is Fast Food, Unfiltered Politics

This is my conversation with Prof. Michael Freeden. We spent an hour on a single question, one that sounds simple and is not: what is an ideology, and what does it actually do? Freeden has spent nearly five decades on that question. He taught at Oxford from 1978 to 2011, first at Mansfield College, where he is now a professorial fellow, and he remains Emeritus Professor of Politics there. He founded the Journal of Political Ideologies and wrote the books that most political scientists reach for when they need to think carefully about the subject, among them Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach and Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. What follows is an outline of the ground we covered, for anyone who wants a map before pressing play, or a way back into the argument afterward. Redefining Ideology Freeden's starting point is that ideology is not what people usually mean when they use the word as an insult. In everyday speech, calling something "ideological" suggests it is rigid, dogmatic, closed to evidence. Freeden's own definition runs the other way. For him, an ideology is a framework that organises political thinking, and it does this by settling, at least for a while, the meaning of contested words like justice, freedom, or democracy. Ideology in Ordinary Life This, Freeden argues, is not confined to party manifestos or parliamentary debate. It runs through daily life. Queuing for a bus involves an implicit theory of fairness and of who has authority over whom. Politics, in his account, is not a separate room we enter and leave. It is a layer running underneath ordinary social behaviour. What Comes Next I asked Freeden, at the end, whether he was optimistic. He said he is, though not within his own lifetime, and perhaps only over the next fifty years. He was direct in setting his view against Francis Fukuyama's argument that liberal democracy represented the endpoint of political development, a single line moving toward improvement. Freeden does not see one line. He sees many things moving at once, some getting better while others get worse in the same moment, technology being his example: a source of real medical progress and, elsewhere, a source of new harm.