On Michael Freeden’s ‘The Stranger at the Feast: Ideology and Public Policy in Twentieth Century Britain’ (1990)

The first issue of Twentieth Century British History reflected the original base of the journal in the academic networks around Oxford University. The journal was published by the University Press and co-edited by the Oxford historians John Rowett and Ross McKibbin. The most influential contribution to the inaugural issue was authored by Michael Freeden, a political theorist based at Mansfield College, Oxford.¹ Freeden was at that time best known as the author of two important books, The New Liberalism (1978) and Liberalism Divided (1986). These books explored the ideological transformation of British liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century, documenting the embrace of a more activist state by liberal thinkers and politicians and their neglected role in promoting state-sponsored social welfare and economic redistribution.

In ‘The Stranger at the Feast: Ideology and Public Policy in Twentieth Century Britain’, Freeden now made explicit the methodological assumptions that had underpinned these books and mounted a wider case about the importance of political ideas in the twentieth-century British history. Freeden shared this latter commitment with several other leading modern British historians of his generation, notably Peter Clarke and Jose Harris (as well as Gareth Stedman Jones for the nineteenth century). This historiographical wave reflected in part a new theoretical emphasis within the humanities and the social sciences on the role played by language in mediating, or even constructing, experience (the so-called ‘linguistic turn’). Within the confines of modern British historiography, scholars such as Freeden, Clarke, and Harris were also specifically challenging dominant styles of political history that focused on electoral, administrative, or biographical considerations but lacked sustained attention to ideas. They firmly rejected the cliché that British politics was pragmatic and untheoretical on the grounds that ideological aims were in fact an ineliminable rather than optional feature of political life. As Freeden pointed out, the necessary function of such ideas was ‘to explain, justify or contest political arrangements within a political community as well as to provide (intentionally or otherwise) plans for action for public political institutions’ (p. 10).

Drawing on his formation in the field of political theory, Freeden argued that political ideologies, understood as patterns of political belief held by social actors seeking to influence public policy, offered the most fruitful lens through which to observe the impact of ideas. The twentieth century, he pointed out, was an outstanding period of ideological contestation. Democratization of the state and society; wider educational access; and a burgeoning print culture had all boosted the supply of, and the demand for, political ideas. However, Freeden’s conception of ideologies was not that discrete and inflexible ‘isms’ unilaterally shaped specific reforms, state decisions, or epochs. Rather he demonstrated (as he had shown in his earlier books on liberalism) that ideologies were themselves constantly evolving and historically entwined with other overlapping ideological families. It made little sense to describe the British welfare state, for example, as ‘liberal’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘conservative’ when all three ideological traditions had fed into the formation of social policy. For the historian to trace these intricate ideological connections, detailed attention was required to the collective production of ideas by groups of writers and activists and not just, as in a certain style of the history of ideas, consideration of the outstanding texts of leading individual thinkers. Freeden downplayed the relative importance of decoding the precise meaning of texts by professional thinkers when contrasted with analysing the reception of ideas by groups closer to political decision-making, such as journalists, activists, and politicians.

Freeden developed these themes more systematically in his magnum opus, Ideologies and Political Theory (1996), but his article for TCBH was a powerful initial statement of a fertile methodology that was widely adopted by later historians of modern Britain. Reflecting the state of the literature at the time he wrote, most of the historical work cited in Freeden’s article focused on the first half of the twentieth century and on liberal or socialist political thought. Since 1990, there has been a boom in the analysis of British political ideologies after 1945, and conservatism has been added to liberalism and socialism as the subject of detailed historical research. Indeed, the main burden of Freeden’s article has now become assimilated into our historical common sense: it would seem strange now to write about Britain in the twentieth century without paying due attention to the ideas that were used to interpret and direct social change. Many economic and social historians now incorporate ideologies into their analysis as a matter of course: think for example of the importance attributed to narratives of ‘declinism’ when analysing Britain’s twentieth-century economic trajectory or to concepts of ‘merit’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ when examining changing class identities after 1945.

As Dean Blackburn has argued in an excellent critical retrospective, though, there is more that historians could do to take up the challenge posed by Freeden’s article. Blackburn suggests, for example, that historians are still prone to depict political parties as the chief sites of ideological production when Freeden’s argument was the reverse: that parties often end up drawing on ideas developed outside of their formal structures.² Freeden observed that students of ideology should not select their subjects on the basis of abstract intellectual sophistication or proximity to state power, but rather consider their importance in generating socially powerful ideas. This approach means that initially marginal discourses sponsored by outsiders to the political elite are as worthy of investigation as the dominant languages used by parties or the state. ‘If politics is indeed the art of the possible’, Freeden wrote, ‘the range of the possible is the realm of ideology’ (p. 24, emphasis in original). As scholars increasingly turn to the history of Britain after the 1960s, there are many fruitful avenues for further research here, including the ideas developed outside of the large political parties by feminists, campaigners for racial justice, the environmental movement, eurosceptics, nationalists, and so on. As I have discussed elsewhere, while the state’s adoption of neoliberal ideas about the market remains indispensable to understanding the late twentieth century, there were other ideological currents that contested or diluted neoliberalism and on which excellent historical research has already begun.³ Freeden’s article therefore repays rereading not only to commemorate the founding issue of a great journal but also to help us think afresh about how to integrate the study of ideology into the history of modern Britain.

Footnotes