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This book investigates silence as a normal, ubiquitous, and indispensable element of political thinking, theory, and language. It explores the diverse dimensions in which silences mould the different core features of the political, as a highly flexible power resource, both enabling and constraining major social practices, traditions, and currents.
List of contents
- A Non-Musical Prelude
- Intermezzo: A Taster
- Part I: Interpreting and Mapping: Conceptualizations of Silence
- 1: Layers of Silence
- 2: The Political Elements of Silence
- 3: Analysing Silence: Initial Considerations
- 4: Silence, Stillness and Solitude
- 5: Absence, Lack and Removal
- 6: The Dog that did not Bark: Listening for Silence
- 7: Seven Modalities of Silence
- 8: Silence in Language and Communication
- Part II: Decoding and Investigating: Silences in the Lived World
- 9: Processing Silence: Theologies, Temporalities, Disciplines
- 10: Superimposed and Invented Voice
- 11: Tacit Consent and Attributed Consent
- 12: The Socio-Cultural Filters of Silences
- 13: State and Government Silences
- 14: Ideological Assimilations of Silence
- Coda
- Bibliography
About the author
Michael Freeden is Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford; and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He has also held positions at Nottingham University and at SOAS, London University. He has written extensively on liberal thought, the study of ideologies, and the nature of political thinking, as well as on conceptual history, and was the founder-editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies. 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.
Summary
This book investigates silence as a normal, ubiquitous, and indispensable element of political thinking, theory, and language. It explores the diverse dimensions in which silences mould the different core features of the political, as a highly flexible power resource, both enabling and constraining major social practices, traditions, and currents.
Additional text
Michael Freeden is an immensely influential, as well as very atypical, political theorist ... His astute and distinctive reflections on the nature of political thinking ... have garnered him a significant readership within Anglophone circles and beyond. His latest book, Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking, represents a further stage on his very distinctive intellectual journey... The manifold, constructed silences on which politics rests, rather than arguments about political silencing, are his real quarry, and in the course of examining them he aims to make us think very differently about the nature of the political ... A potentially fascinating and important research agenda is intimated by these reflections.
