We Have a Firm Foundation 71One important facet of these portrayals of political philosophy is again the
separation from both political practice and ideology. Ideology, in this case, looked, in
all these scenarios, deeply suspect. It was this kind of analysis, which basically formed
the wholly dogmatic backdrop to the bulk of Anglo-American political philosophy.
Thus, David Raphael, in a popular text book of 1976, noted that ideology is simply
‘a prescriptive doctrine that is not supported by argument’. This was a widely accep-
ted credo till the last decade of the twentieth century (Raphael 1976: 17; for similar
judgements: Hacker 1961: 6; Corbett 1965: 139–40; Kateb 1968: 8; Gewirth 1965:
2; Quinton 1967: 1; Germino 1967: 42ff.; Copleston 1983: 23; Minogue 1985: 32;
Gaus 2000: 36–42). This might be described as the standard liturgy of conceptual
introductions to political theory throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
In the majority of these introductory works, despite the ritualized claims to analytical
rigour, the judgement of ideology is usually always simply asserted and never argued.
Even for significant recent normative thinkers, such as John Rawls, a similar back-
ground creed holds. In hisPolitical Liberalismbook, Rawls argued, for example,
that philosophical abstraction was required when social divisions were deep. He
commented that in ‘political philosophy the work of abstraction is set in motion
by deep conflict. [and] Only ideologues and visionaries fail to experience deep
conflicts...profound and long-lasting controversies set the stage for the idea of reas-
onable justification’ (Rawls 1993: 44). Again, Rawls offered no evidence or argument
concerning the point that ideology (qua ideologues) never deals with either conflict
or abstraction. Ideology appears as simple-minded and unreflective. In fact, ideology
is abstract through and through from beginning to end and ‘liberal ideology’ (in its
various formats) has always, in fact, suggested the same kind of things that Rawls
advocates. Further, the fact, for example, that Rawls’s writings were often appealed
to in 1980s ideological debates in Britain and America, over social policy and social
justice, might make one pause for a moment’s reflection as to precisely where polit-
ical philosophy ends and where ideology begins. Despite what its promoters say,
the above negative segregation of political philosophy and ideology is not a time-
honoured position, but simply an artifice of a certain type of mid-twentieth-century
political theory.
The final most neglected thesis focuses on thepositive segregationof political philo-
sophy and ideology, namely, where each is seen to make a valuable, if distinct, contri-
bution. There are not many examples of this strategy. One recent and sophisticated
attempt has been by Michael Freeden. For Freeden, ideologies are manifestly not the
poor relation of political philosophy. Conversely, they provide equally valid insights.
They both reflect and produce social and political realities. They are also far more
subtle and pervasive than commonly understood. To neglect the study of ideology is
therefore to ‘weaken our comprehension of political thought’ (Freeden 1996: 2).
Freeden terms his approach towards ideology ‘conceptual morphology’. The
morphological approach is semantically based, focusing on the question, ‘what
are the implications and insights of a particular set of political views, in terms
of the conceptual connections it forms?’. For Freeden, this approach grasps
‘internal ideational arrangements’. Meaning is always dependent onframeworks