Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking

Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking 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. Departing from the typical focus on intentional silencing and the dominance of logos, the book instead highlights the concealed and unrecognized ways through which silence pervades socio-political life and adopts the guises of the unspeakable, the ineffable, the inarticulable, and the unconceptualizable. Drawing extensively from historical, philosophical, anthropological, psychoanalytical, theological, linguistic, and literary viewpoints, the book demonstrates the common threads that connect silences to those different disciplines, alongside the features that pull them asunder. In extracting and decoding their political implications, it explores both academic literature and colloquial, everyday discourse.Michael Freeden uses select case-studies to explore topics such as Buddhist nondualism, Locke's tacit consent, the submerging of historical narratives, state neutrality, Pinter's miscommunications and menace, and the separate ways ideologies integrate silence into their beliefs. The book offers an analysis of silence from a multi-perspectival range of disciplines, providing a comprehensive and holistic view of silence and the political.

Table 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, University of London. 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.

Review :
Michael Freeden's Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking offers a rich, panoramic overview of silence's multiple valences, modalities, and conceptualizations. Building on insights from multiple disciplines and fields of research, the book is an academic tour de force, displaying a level of erudition and insight many can only aspire to ... a must-read for anyone interested in the nature and numerous functions of silence, not just for political theorists. 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. Michael Freeden stands in a unique position amongst political theorists. More than once in his distinguished and expansive career, he has laid the groundwork for others to follow Freeden has had a long-standing interest in fundamental questions that all political theorists must grapple with - namely, the question of what counts as political thinking and what ought to count as a legitimate object of study in political theory...Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking...is kick-starting a whole new conversation about silence and its politically generative powers. It would be impossible to do full justice to [its] scope and richness...The book is a remarkable achievement, showcasing an indomitable curiosity and an enviable ability to integrate a broad range of literature into its fine-grained understanding of silence. Michael Freeden's Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking traces, categorizes, and organizes silence's vast potentialities...this is a massive and composite undertaking... Freeden's erudition also enlivens the book...Far-ranging, substantive, and in intention, this volume covers as many kinds of silence as Freeden can imagine...To consider silence as central to politics and to recognize its manifold operations and themes, as Freeden does here, proves to be a considerable achievement. Freeden's monograph stands out for its great mastery in dealing with the complexity of silences and its erudite comprehensiveness, which make it a reference for the rising field of silence studies. It is beautifully written with an extremely rich thesaurus. Michael Freeden has set the stage for extending the field of political theory with cross-disciplinary insights into the ambiguous role of silence in political life. He does this in a way that challenges the conventional understanding of the field. The broad and broad-minded presentation of this new disciplinary pathway is ... an invitation to deeper scholarly interpretations of silences in concrete political case studies as well as an invitation to ordinary citizens to reflect critically on silences in public discourses and political processes. Michael Freeden stands in a unique position amongst political theorists. More than once in his distinguished and expansive career, he has laid the groundwork for others to follow… Freeden has had a long-standing interest in fundamental questions that all political theorists must grapple with - namely, the question of what counts as political thinking and what ought to count as a legitimate object of study in political theory…Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking…is kick-starting a whole new conversation about silence and its politically generative powers. It would be impossible to do full justice to [its] scope and richness…The book is a remarkable achievement, showcasing an indomitable curiosity and an enviable ability to integrate a broad range of literature into its fine-grained understanding of silence.