Michael Freeden, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham and Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of Oxford.

Eminent political theorist and historian of political thought Michael Freeden will be talking about his new book: The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice.

The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice explores what it means to maintain that human beings think politically, and what is distinctive about that kind of thinking. That question is all-too infrequently asked by political theorists, or is dealt with through abstractions and dichotomies. The book examines the actual patterns people display when thinking politically, identifying six features of political thinking. They include the role of making ultimate decisions and regulating all social affairs, ranking collective priorities, mobilizing or withholding support for groups, conceptualizing social order and stability as well as disorder and instability, projecting future visions and constructing plans for a society, and engaging the power embedded in language in the form of reason, rhetoric, emotion or menace. This is the first systematic study of political thinking as a cluster of thought-practices, combining insights from traditional and recent political theory, the study of language and discourse, and political science. It aspires to challenge many conventional understandings of political thought in the current literature, to tease out what is political—not philosophical or ethical—in political theory, and to characterise it as a complex and ubiquitous social practice present at all points of human interaction and at diverse levels of articulation.

Michael Freeden is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham and Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of Oxford. His books include The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978); Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914-1939 (Oxford, 1986); Rights (Milton Keynes, 1991); Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 1996); Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003); Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and 20th Century Progressive Thought (Princeton, 2005); The Political Theory of Political Thinking (Oxford, 2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (co-edited, Oxford, 2013). He is the founder-editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies. In 2012 he was awarded the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize for Lifetime Contribution to Political Studies by the UK Political Studies Association, and the Medal for Science, Institute of Advanced Studies, Bologna University.