Emeritus Professor Michael Freeden (MA, DPhil (Oxon))

Post: Emeritus Professor of Politics

Introduction

Professor of politics at Oxford University and professorial fellow at Mansfield College, where I have been tutor in politics since 1978. Former Director of the Centre for Political Ideologies at the DPIR and founding editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies. ESRC Professorial Fellow from 2004 to 2007, researching into the political theory of politics. Co-ordinator of programme on the comparative study of political thought.

Research Areas and Interests

My main interest is in the study of actual political thinking at various levels of articulation. Ideologies are the vehicles through which access to such political thinking invariably takes place, constituting as they do patterns of political thought and conceptual arrangements. In parallel and intersecting with that I have worked extensively on liberal thought from the 19th century to the present. Currently I am working on the specifically political features of political thinking and the distinctive methodologies that students of political thought might develop. In addition I have written on welfare thinking and rights, on the nature and attributes of political concepts, on eugenics, on New Labour, on political practice, and on conceptual history.

Teaching Responsibilities

Currently D.Phil. supervisor in political theory

Publications

Books:

The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978)

Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914-1939 (Oxford, 1986)

J.A. Hobson: A Reader (London, 1988)

Minutes of the Rainbow Circle 1894-1924, edited and annotated (London, 1989)

Reappraising J.A. Hobson: Humanism and Welfare (ed.) (London, 1990)

Rights (Buckingham, 1991)

Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 1996)

Reassssing Political Ideologies: The Durability of Dissent (ed.) (London, 2001)

Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003)

Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth Century Progressive Thought (Princeton, 2005)

Taking Ideology Seriously: 21st Century Reconfigurations (co-editor with G. Talshir and M. Humphrey) (London, 2006)

The Meaning of Ideology: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (ed.) (Routledge: Abingdon, 2007)

numerous scholarly articles in politics, philosophy and history journals, and chapters in edited books, including:

 'Thinking Politically and Thinking about Politics: Language, Interpretation and Ideology', in D. Leopold and M. Stears (eds.), Political Theory: Methods and Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 196-215.

'European Liberalisms: An Essay in Comparative Political Thought', European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 7 (2008), 9-30,

'What should the "Political" in Political  Theory Explore', Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 13 (2005), 113-134 

‘The Coming of the Welfare State’, in T. Ball and R. Bellamy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 7-44 

 'The Ideology of New Labour', Political Quarterly, vol. 70 (1999), 42-51.