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POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00948.x

Rhetoric and the Political Theory of Ideologies

Alan Finlayson
University of East Anglia

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The political theory of ideologies proposes a distinct way of conceiving of and analysing political thought, especially as it appears in the wild. Exploring the claim that there is a form or mode of thinking specic and proper to politics, and that it is the concern of the political theory of ideology, the article examines two of the leading contemporary approaches in this eld: the morphological analysis of Michael Freeden and the discourse analysis associated with Ernesto Laclau. In showing how each produces a distinct object for theoretical analysis (respectively,the concept and the signier) the case is made for constituting a third object the political argument the apprehension of which requires the integration of aspects of the rhetorical tradition into the political theory of ideologies. The conclusion briey outlines some of the possible implications, for political theory and analysis more generally, of the rhetorical conception of political thought and ideology.

Keywords: rhetoric; ideologies; Laclau; Freeden; political argumentation The political theory of ideologies is an established sub-eld of political theory, distinguished by a commitment to studying political ideas as they are found in the wild. Often political theorists attend most to terms, ideas and concepts found in the key texts of the ofcial canon of great political theory. But scholars of political ideologies look also to the everyday and routine political ideas found in, for example, speeches, statements, debates, interviews, pamphlets, newspaper columns, websites, posters, placards, demonstrations and performances. And while some forms of political theory might wish to bridge the gulf between such everyday political expressions and the more perfect conceptions of political philosophy (between doxa and episteme) the political theory of ideologies is concerned to establish how political doxa works how it forms, is manifested, reproduced, develops and decays. The purpose of such study is not to produce a non-normative sociology of political knowledge but to help us conceptualise the specicity of political thinking and to make this available for further philosophical reection and evaluation. In this article I begin by exploring the claim that there is a form or mode of thinking specic and proper to politics, and that it is the concern of the political theory of ideology. I then examine two of the leading contemporary approaches: the morphological analysis of Michael Freeden and the discourse analysis associated with Ernesto Laclau. In showing how each produces a distinct object for theoretical analysis (respectively, the concept and the signier) I make the case for constituting a third object the political argument the apprehension of which requires the integration of aspects of the rhetorical tradition into the political theory of ideologies. In this respect the article is a contribution to the ongoing research programme of the political theory of ideologies; it seeks to extend that research to the argument, and to strengthen it by bringing it into a productive relationship with the rich and vibrant rhetorical tradition. The political theory of ideologies often reects on what its ndings more generally indicate about the nature of political thought and action. Accordingly, in the conclusion I briey outline
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some of the general implications of the rhetorical conception of political ideologies for political theory.

The Specicity of Political Thinking

A question stands behind and informs the political theory of ideologies: is there a valid form of specically political thinking? It is a question that is far from unique to this eld and one that is usually answered in the negative. Platos specication of philosophy, rather than political rhetoric or dramatic poetry, as the only way to speak truly and justly about the polis, continues to inform suspicion of any politics unregulated by a higher-order discourse (be it religious, moral or scientic). Contemporary rational and social choice theory displaces political thinking into a more general form of thinking rational, calculative decision making (see Mackie, 2003) the political form of which is distinguished only by the particular circumstances and institutions in and through which collections of otherwise individual decisions are collated or aggregated. Analogously, much political philosophy displaces political thinking into moral philosophy (or related epistemological arguments) and seeks a stable basis or framework upon or within which it may justly claim the right to govern (or at least evaluate) the thoughts and actions taking place within the non-ideal political realm. As Freeden observes, the consequence for this philosophical genre is that Many of its versions display a ight from the political, the crowding out of diversity and the shrinking of the political to an area of constructed consensus guided by a vision of the good life (Freeden, 2005, p. 113; see also Honig, 1993). In contrast, the political theory of ideologies refuses to displace actual political thinking, taking as a starting position the presumption that politics involves a particular way or mode of thinking which it is necessary to explicate and assess in terms appropriate to it. Thus, for Freeden, The study of ideology becomes the study of the nature of political thought: its building blocks and the clusters of meaning with which it shapes the political worlds we populate, and this is a step towards comprehending what the social product we call political thought is (Freeden, 1998, p. 15). For Freeden ideologies are a major genre of political thought (Freeden, 1998, p. 13) and a ubiquitous and normal aspect of social life (Freeden, 2005, p. 115); they are the thought-products par excellence of the political sphere: they are necessary, normal and they facilitate (and reect) political action (Freeden, 2006, p. 19). This ubiquity derives, in Freedens account, from the essential contestability of political concepts. Relatively determinate but nevertheless shifting organisations of political thought are formed out of the necessity to achieve at least partial or temporary de-contestation, an agreement on the basis of which politics may take place. Such arrangements consist of a specic form of conceptual de-contestation that drives subsequent political thought along certain routes, impacted upon by historical events in ways that are traceable and explicable by historically and theoretically informed analysis. The view that ideologies are ubiquitous, intrinsic and necessary components of political life is one shared by Marxian cultural studies. For instance, Stuart Hall taking his cue from Antonio Gramsci, for whom ideology was the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position (Gramsci, 1971, p. 377) and from the recognition of Louis
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Althusser that ideology is not an aberration but a structure essential to the historical life of societies (Althusser, 1969, pp. 2323) sees ideology as the means by and through which ideas of different kinds grip the minds of political subjects and become a material force (Hall, 1996, p. 27). For Hall, ideologies are mental frameworks the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation through which social groups make sense of themselves and their society (Hall, 1996, p. 26). Now, to the extent that it emphasises only the ubiquity of ideologies, a theory may be no more than an empirical observation (of the kind found in studies of the use by political actors of transaction-cost-cutting cognitive short cuts or schema). But contemporary political theories of ideology do not stop at this empirical observation, nor do they divert from it into a search for a more comprehensive or less contingent basis for political thinking. Instead they propose that ideological thinking is not only a common or necessary property of politics but also a potentially positive one. For instance, accepting the charge that ideologies may not always fully conform to the requirements of analytic philosophy, Freeden nevertheless insists that such failure provides no reason for dismissing them as bad or inferior political thought (Freeden, 1998, p. 37). That is because they have a particular role to play as historically grounded doctrines not model propositions. Ideological claims may be ambiguous but this does not mean they are duplicitous. Ambiguity, Freeden writes, is a form of political language that is vital to the central aim of mobilising support and signicantly dependent on linguistic formulations that are open-ended, that carry multiple meaning, and can be consumed differentially (Freeden, 2005, pp. 1211). Indeed, Freeden (2005, p. 130) perceives that consensus may in fact be predicated on ambiguity, not precision, a view echoed in the work of William Connolly, for whom Modern politics, at its best, is the institutionalisation of ambiguity ... a temporary settlement in areas where common action is needed (Connolly, 1987, p. 14). The contested contexts of political life demand a form of thinking that is historically and socially specic, perhaps ambiguous and certainly tactical and mobile (Norval, 2007). The conguring of the elements of such thinking is vital for the organising of persons, the taking of decisions and the carrying out of subsequent action. In this respect, then, ideology is a property of politics, not a malfunction; it is the political thinking and reasoning that emerges from the particular and peculiar conditions of political life itself; it is something that people do as well as something that is done to them. It is, as Laclau has written, a necessary and constitutive dimension of the social and belongs to the structure of all possible experience (Laclau, 2006, p. 114). At this level, the political theory of ideologies begins to appear as a contribution to the sociology of political knowledge. It has proposed a specic form of thinking that is necessary and appropriate to a particular social activity, and also ways in which it might be examined in its historical and social context. However, proponents of the political theory of ideologies do not refer the production of ideas to any simple or single external cause; they locate political thinking in its historical context but do not reduce such thought to it. Indeed, in the work of Laclau and Freeden as well as Hall (and also that of the historian of political thought Quentin Skinner) we are more likely to nd a celebration of the variety and proliferation of kinds of political thought than their reduc 2012 The Author. Political Studies 2012 Political Studies Association POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012

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tion to instances of a general process. This is indicative of a third feature of current theories of ideology. In addition to their embrace of the phenomenons ubiquity and potential propriety these also propose that ideologies can be creative acts; they are not only and always structural reections or routine expressions, functionally integrative or mysticatory dogmas; although partially unconscious, structured and constrained by cultural context and tradition, ideological expressions are also the intended and sometimes innovative outcomes of individual and collective political action. Thus, for Hall, ideologies are part of the processes by which new forms of consciousness, new conceptions of the world, arise (Hall, 1996, p. 26). Similarly, Freedens analyses show the ways in which thinkers rooted in traditions, facing new challenges and new problems, drew upon those traditions, revised, reassessed and rearticulated them (or failed to do so). Rather than displace it on to purely structural phenomena, the political theory of ideologies directs our attention to the political thinking actually taking place within political entities: the thinking produced by human beings in their political capacity as decision-makers, option-rankers, dissent and conict regulators, support mobilisers and vision creators; and the thinking consumed by them in that capacity (Freeden, 2005, p. 115). It attempts to understand political thoughts not through abstracting them but, as Skinner has put it, through the uses they are put to in argument, examining concepts as tools and weapons of ideological debate (Skinner, 2002a, p. 176). For the political theory of ideologies the thinking that goes on in everyday politics is never merely a failed instantiation of political theory and philosophy; it is a distinct kind of thinking, and a form of political theorising that is a dimension of political life itself. On this basis the political theorist and conceptual historian Kari Palonen has declared that we should renounce our widespread academic contempt for politicians. It is time to take their acting, speaking and thinking seriously. We should not only ... read theorists as politicians but ... read politicians as theorists. That entails making the performances of politicians a distinct object of investigation, examining how they interpret their situation, assessing their contestational imagination and asking questions concerning how they act when they act politically ... how they take a stand, or justify or explicate a certain standpoint (Palonen, 2005, p. 8). The challenge is not to subsume such performances within the philosophy of which we think they are expressions but to disclose or make visible the philosophy they bring forth and dramatise. The political theory of ideologies is thus not solely concerned with the behavioural explanation of adherence to collective dogma, or with the explication of political thinking by reference to its structural function or capacity for obfuscation and mystication. It is also concerned with the historical invention of political thinking. Where some, neo-Kantian, forms of political theory are concerned with the particular cultural-historical foundations upon which universal political ideas can be built, the political theory of ideologies is concerned with the articulation of ideas that, far from being guaranteed by a transcendental fact about cognition, may become historical events that make possible new kinds of fact. And if the practical task of political reason, for the Kantian tradition, is that of bringing concepts and proposals into harmony with the horizon that makes them possible (e.g. Rawls, 1980), then, for the theory of political ideologies, it is that of observing politics in the act of extending, retracting or relocating that horizon.
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Objects of Study
Although they complement each other in identifying political thinking as a specic phenomenon in need of investigation, different approaches within the political theory of ideologies specify rather different objects of analysis. Here we will consider just two of the more prominent approaches Freedens morphology and Laclaus discourse analysis. We will concentrate on these two because both have developed a substantial theorisation of political ideologies which has been applied to a range of case studies (including by others employing their approach) and which has also been directly connected to broader debates as to the nature of political thinking. In contrast, the work of, say, Hall in Marxist theory or Skinner in the history of political thought, while hugely important in this context, has not been placed in such explicit and systematic dialogue with research into political ideologies. In assessing Freedens and Laclaus approach we will look closely at what they take as their object of analysis: for Freeden, the political concept; for Laclau, the signier.1 According to Freeden, the task of the student of political ideologies is to emulate the practice of anthropologists donning the mantle of conceptologists in order to map and interpret the strange, wonderful and occasionally repulsive world of political ideas on which we all feed and that permeates the conscious and unconscious assumptions incorporated in the activity of thinking about politics (Freeden, 2005, p. 133). Concepts are capable of a variety of meanings, Freeden argues, but cannot simultaneously carry them all; any particular denition will exclude some others. Consequently there cannot be straightforward agreement on a concepts intension, its range, its internal architecture (Freeden, 2004b, p. 4). Furthermore there is dispute over the relative weighting within a concept of its components; key terms are ambiguous, denitions sometimes contingent and political argument indeterminate (Freeden, 2005, pp. 11724). Concepts then, may be organised and interpreted in various ways. Ideologies consist of de-contestations and are characterised by the precise way in which they do this: the range of concepts of which they are composed, how these are valued and the meanings assigned them. Importantly this sets ideologies on a trajectory that is both logical (in that given particular kinds of de-contestation only certain subsequent moves may follow) and historical (over time the ideology adapts and develops in relation to events). Morphological analysis explores this trajectory, conceiving of ideologies as composed of an ineliminable core exercising organising control with logically and culturally adjacent concepts that are further connected to peripheral concepts found at the edge of the ideology in its historical, geographical and cultural context (Freeden, 1998, p. 79). That periphery is made up of concepts that add a vital gloss (Freeden, 1998, p. 178) and includes ideas at the perimeter which straddle the interface between the conceptualisation of social realities and the external contexts and concrete manifestations in and through which those conceptualisations occur (Freeden, 1998, p. 79). These ideas are more concrete than the core and adjacent concepts, perhaps taking the form of very specic ideas or policy proposals. Where morphological analysis makes the political concept its object of study, discourse analysis constitutes the signier as its special domain. Signication is not ontologically xed, discourse theorists argue, and any such xity is the outcome of social-historical acts that are both a form and an expression of social power.What Freeden called de-contestation is here
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conceived of as hegemony (Norval, 2000), the temporary stabilising of meaning in a system that organises elements through their articulation (their joining together in a way that alters the meaning of each), the establishment of relations of equivalence and of difference, of frontiers between inside and outside (Howarth, 2005, p. 317; Howarth et al., 2000, p. 4; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Discourse analysis attends to the reproduction and transformation of such structures (Glynos and Howarth, 2007, p. 5), their sedimentation and reactivation (Laclau, 1990). Latterly discourse analysts have emphasised the constitution and interaction of different logics, the combination of the rules governing systematisation and the objects or entities these presuppose (Glynos and Howarth, 2007, p. 323). David Howarth, for instance, proposes a methodology that combines interpretive, comparative and historical case studies (Howarth, 2005, pp. 32933) with the identication of phenomena such as overwording, unusual collocations, and specic rhetorical gures (Howarth, 2005, p. 335). In apprehending such signiers Laclau has argued that rhetoric is a privileged eld but he limits rhetoric to the theory and practice of tropic signication. He writes that the rhetorical organisation of social space (the ordering of equivalence and difference through tropological displacements of meaning) is the very logic of the constitution of political identities (Laclau, 2006, p. 78) and emphasises the trope of catachresis a violent or unexpected act of naming, or of naming the unnameable (see Parker, 1990) claiming that there are grounds to think that catachresis is not a specic trope but the mark of rhetoricity as such, present in all tropes (Laclau, 2006, p. 107). Laclaus work has thus come to focus ever more on such acts of ultimate naming: the empty signiers that organise the myths at the base of all political movements (Laclau, 1996, p. 109). As Simon Critchley writes, echoing Laclau, Politics is always about nomination. It is about naming a political subjectivity and organizing politically around that name (Critchley, 2007, p. 103). For both Laclau and Freeden the source or cause of ideologies of political thinking is, we might say, semiotic rather than behavioural. That is, their approaches rest on a claim about the production and organisation of meaning. For Freeden that claim consists of a modied endorsement of Gallies inuential proposition that political concepts are essentially contested (Freeden, 2005; Gallie, 1956; see also Connolly, 1974). Ideologies are organised in response to this, as arrangements enabling a temporary de-contestation. The ontological claim underpinning discourse theory is that of the inessentiality of all signication; ideologies are fundamentally acts of naming around which a putatively universalising discourse is structured. On the basis of these propositions both approaches have been incredibly productive for analyses of the internal structure, or logic, of ideologies. However, they have also tended to emphasise that internal structure, to the detriment of attending fully to the external (and putatively persuasive) manifestations of ideological expressions. For instance, in Freedens model the direction of movement runs from core to perimeter with a corresponding decline in sophistication (Freeden, 1998, p. 80). The model may thus prioritise the thought in the thought-action, making activity at the perimeter appear as only a working out of the central concepts. Similarly, discourse analysis tends to focus on the relationship of an ideological structure to the subjects who think within it (that is to an ideological discourse
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that they already profess). Explaining the relationship through the addition of Lacanian formulae regarding fantasy and identication (Glynos, 2001; Laclau, 2000; Stavrakakis, 2007) risks representing the process as a kind of ritualistic interpellation that has always already happened (echoing the religious analogy that was central to the original Althusserian formulation [Althusser, 1971; Butler, 1995]), emphasising the maintenance of subjects containment within fantasmatic structures rather than their recruitment. These are problems of emphasis rather than of core conceptions. However, they derive from the way in which theories grounded in a claim about the essential and semiotic nature of contestation implicitly assign the source of contestation to that same semiotic instability. But while dispute about or around justice or freedom is certainly made possible by the instability of these signiers, and is clearly an important dimension of that dispute, it is not always reducible to that instability. Indeed, disputes often have sources external to the efforts of a particular ideology to de-contest concepts or to establish a hegemonic formation (see also Newey, 2001). That is to say, ideologies are not only inward facing and driven by an internal logic of essential contestability; they also are shaped by and respond to external events and externally generated contestation from alternative ideologies (including direct attacks on justice or freedom). In response to criticism of the thesis of essential contestability Freeden has recognised the fact that contestation may be an aspect not only of concepts but of political life itself given its historical and contextual specicity (Freeden, 2004b, pp. 810). He has emphasised the fact that political concepts are permeated at their perimeters by real-world externalities that impact on their cores. Political thinking, then, is part of strategic action called forth by concrete experiences of contestation; a response to the strategies of others whose thinking may have a very different context to our own, requiring us to extend and alter not only the range and intension of concepts but also their appearance and tone at the perimeter where they are communicated. Here ideological activity does not consist only of de-contestation the constraint or restriction of the semiotic ow but also of its productive and creative employment as a way of responding to specic conicts and of trying to persuade others. As Freeden has previously remarked, ideologies are contained within and presented through a communicative and action-inspiring pattern (Freeden, 1998, p. 54). The political theory of ideologies helps to make clear that this is not a secondary or subsidiary part of ideological activity but an intrinsic aspect. At the perimeter an ideology is a way of making political claims, proving judgements and staging interventions in ways that might persuade others to assent to them. The political theory of ideologies thus has to conceptualise not only the movement from core to perimeter, or the xing of signiers, but what happens at the perimeter where an ideology, an arrangement of political thoughts, encounters unexpected and unforeseen, perhaps unusual or unknowable, contingencies, rival conceptions and perspectives. To Freedens concept and Laclaus signier we must therefore add a third object of analysis: the argument.

Rhetoric and Argumentation

The political theory of ideologies is concerned with the ubiquity, propriety and creativity of political thinking. One of its objects of analysis is the arrangement and dispersal of political concepts. Freedens work has demonstrated that the history of politics is in part the
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history of such arrangements and rearrangements. Another object of analysis is the structuring of discourses, their anchoring through key signiers with which subjects identify. The many applications of Laclaus theory of discourse have uncovered numerous examples of the logics of such signication as manifested in political life. We have proposed an addition to these objects of analysis: the argument.We have done so in recognition of the active and persuasive aspects of ideologies. Ideologies are not only inward-facing structures that condition actors political thinking. They are also outwardfacing expressions, responses to events, defences against attack and attempts to win the assent or consent of those not already thinking within the ideology in question. The study of such arguments is a study not only of semiotic conditions but also of political action the strategies of political actors as they express and embody their political thinking and communicate it to others. Ideologies provide a series of reasons for thinking one sort of thing rather than another and an actor may draw upon these when formulating responses to external events, problems and rival challenges, and when seeking ways to persuade others to share the same perspective. This may be conceived in the terms of Roman rhetorical debate as a movement between general quaestiones, debatable points, and particular causae or cases (e.g. Quintilian, Institutes, III, V). The former are broad controversies without a specic or denite expression such as is charitable giving a virtue? or is it ever right to lie? The latter involve specic judgements or actions would it be good to give this much to this charity? or would it be right to lie to these people right now? Philosophical habit inclines us to see the former as primary; to class causae as sub-sets of quaestiones, even as demonstrations. Often we choose an example (or invent an imaginary one) to illustrate the veracity or utility of a general claim. However, in real political arguments actors do not always get to choose their own causae. They appear as something new, unexpected or ambiguous, or as the inventions of opponents and rivals, which trigger a search among our stock answers to quaestiones for guidance in both understanding and responding (and the manner and extent to which a particular ideology is open to such adaptation in response to such situations is one of its dening characteristics). Ideological thought and expression are never simply a working out of a series of concepts or propositions but a dynamic interaction of predispositions with both opponents and events, mediated by political actors who must make choices about how to understand and persuasively present a case they must perform. The classical name for this activity is rhetoric. Laclaus important and immensely valuable incorporation of rhetoric into the discourse analysis of ideologies is, as we have seen, largely conned to a focus on the gures and especially on tropes of naming. However, the domain of rhetoric contains much more than tropes. They are one vital element of rhetorical style which is itself just one aspect of rhetorical practice, taking its place alongside the skills of delivery, narrative arrangement and, most importantly, the invention of reasons suitable for presentation to others. Thus, rhetoric, for Aristotle, is the counterpart to dialectic; it is the theory and practice not of tropes but of persuasion in civic contexts where the grounds for such are not already given but something that the argument must itself invent. To think rhetorically is to think about how to bridge the gulf between what we know to be the case and what we think others imagine it to be. In formulating responses the rhetorical actor must simultaneously think
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the necessary and the possible appreciation of the gulf between these being a hallmark of political thinking. Ideologies provide actors with a series of locally established commonplace arguments which must be adapted to the demands of the situation. The rhetorical acts that emerge are not merely manifestations or expressions of the ideology but part of what it is. All ideologies cannot be argued for in the same way; as well as substantive arguments they also provide criteria of what counts as a good, substantive, argument and of what is a bad one, what are appropriate and inappropriate ways of persuading people. For instance, the securing of assent through threat or fear is not something that liberal ideology can countenance whereas the use of force to silence opponents is an intrinsic element of some fascist ideologies. Specic ideologies are characterised by the limits or specications they set for themselves on what counts as proof. Analysis of such ideological argument opens on to broader matters that, strictly speaking, are external to any single ideology: the general organisation of deliberation, the institutional and cultural context that structures relations between speakers and audiences; the specic history of a dispute or debate which sets the terrain for contemporary contest (see Finlayson, 2007; Finlayson and Martin, 2008). Here we will conne ourselves to considering in a general way the organisation and expression of kinds of proof, drawing on their classical categorisation into ethos, pathos and logos. Ideologies differ in the way they arrange and emphasise or de-emphasise these different modes of proof and in attending to them we afrm Freedens injunction that political theorists of ideology must readmit the role of the emotional as well as the intellectual attraction of arguments, and ... examine cultural as well as logical validation of political thinking (Freeden, 1998, p. 37).

Ideologies and the Rhetorical Appeal to Ethos

The appeal to ethos is often equated with the argumentum ad verecundiam, or the argument that relies on our respect for what an authority has said. Rejection of this proof was an important component of Enlightenment critiques of scholastic disputation.When men are established in any kind of dignity, wrote Locke in the Essay Concerning Understanding,It is thought a breach of modesty for others to derogate any way from it, and question the authority of men, who are in possession of it ... and it is looked upon as insolence, for a man to set up, and adhere to his own opinion, against the current stream of antiquity (Locke, 1838 [1690], p. 524). Locke sees the appeal to authority as a kind of illegitimate use of force the attempt to cow an interlocutor by daring them to risk the appearance of immodesty in challenging that which is commonly thought to be unchallengeable. But while Locke argues that such a proof cannot advance knowledge and judgement, he does briey admit that it might dispose me, perhaps, for the reception of truth. That is, he recognises its potential rhetorical validity. What interests the political theory of ideologies is how authorities are identied and sustained, and how this varies across ideologies. For instance, research into speeches by British political party leaders suggests a greater tendency among Labour politicians to cite traditionally conservative newspapers than is found among Conservatives; the same research also shows an increased tendency across all parties to cite ordinary people, the anecdotal
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experiences of citizens presented as proofs of the success or failure of a policy (Atkins and Finlayson, 2010). These are not contingent differences. The need to secure establishment support is part of the ideology of British social democracy, whereas taking it for granted is central to the ideology of British conservatism. One thing an ideology is, then, is a specication of legitimate authorities. However, the argument from ethos is not only and not primarily about such citations of authority. It is above all about inviting audiences to accept an argument because of who is making it, and is thus about the character of the speaker. That may include all sorts of general attributes such as trustworthiness, honesty, sincerity, expertise or intelligence (although the relative importance of each varies across political forms and movements). It also and importantly involves the attempt to justify claims on the grounds that they are made in a manner and by a character whom we, the audience, admire, respect, trust, think shares our interests and so on. That is, ethos is fundamentally about what the American rhetorician Kenneth Burke (1969) thought the main function of rhetoric: the creation of community through forms of identication. Recognition of this aspect of ethos refers us back to the emphasis placed by discourse analysts on the fantasmatic dimensions of ideological identication. That this may involve identication with or through an authoritative leader is of course well documented. But that is only one mode of such identication and more often ethos is an invitation to identify as the kind of person who adheres to the principles on offer. In the contemporary world, as Marshall McLuhan once remarked, charisma consists of seeming to be just like everyone else. But in the realm of political ideology it is not that people subscribe to a politics because they are that kind of person; they subscribe as a proof that they are that kind of person. In this respect the appeal to ethos exceeds its justicatory dimension, is not tied to the authority of a particular individual and takes the form of a promise regarding what we will be when the ideology is actualised. Indeed, where an ideology falls between these two poles may be a distinguishing feature. One dimension along which ideologies vary, then, is the extent to which they emphasise ethos and the manner in which appeals to ethos are related to other claims. At the perimeter to use Freedens term political actors and movements attempt to embody their causes and perform their politics. A political style takes on the form of a proof that can be identied as a denitive aspect of a form of political thinking. Characterisations as varied as the powerful and reliable leader or the lone seeker of truth and justice, the humble and representative everyman-outsider or the exciting polemicist may function as demonstrative exemplars as personications or embodiments of the ideology, of who or what it holds to be most authorised to speak on some matter and also of the sort of person who shares in this. These performances are not simply or only a tool to promote political viewpoints that otherwise exist independently of them. The characters of, say, Sarah Palin (Ferguson, 2008) or Anne Coulter (Chambers and Finlayson, 2008) are embodied arguments for a historically specic strand of North American conservatism, as was that of Reagan before them. Similarly, the persona of Margaret Thatcher embodied a new mode of authoritarian conservatism in the United Kingdom (Hall and Jacques, 1983; Nunn, 2003) and Tony Blair a series of claims about modernised social democracy (Finlayson, 2003).
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Ideologies and the Rhetorical Appeal to Pathos

Quintilian, in Book VI of the Institutes of Oratory, identied appeals to ethos as a form of emotional appeal (VI, II, 8). And the affective or emotive tone of ideologies is another signicant dimension of ideologies. Appeals to the emotions are perhaps some of the most frowned upon normatively. They are considered to be, at one extreme, simplistic (easy sentimentality substituting for clear thought) and at the other, sinister (exploiting our fears and prejudices). However, a range of contemporary political theorists acknowledge the potential importance of emotions in politics, their capacity to be a source and form of knowledge about states of affairs and of our own relationships to them (Connolly, 2002; 2006; Damasio, 2006), enhancing our capacity to exercise judgement (Nussbaum, 2003). From the perspective of the political theory of ideologies the emotional or affective register is a vital dimension of motivation. Political argument always concerns the taking of, or refraining from, some kind of action. But not all ideologies can appeal to emotions of the same sort or in the same way. That is, what distinguishes one from another is not only that they promote the love or hatred of one sort of person rather than another but the extent to which hate or love are part of their overall tone. Emotional tenor is part of what an ideology is and traditions of political thinking can be characterised by their particular emotional tones and their combination in specic contexts. This raises an interesting question concerning the characterisation and categorisation of ideologies. For instance, is a socialism for which resentment is a major mood in fact a different ideology to a socialism of collective fraternal feeling? Perhaps the difcult cohabitation of these moods is a central aspect of the history of socialist politics? (See also Connollys perspicacious analyses of conservatism and the politics of resentment in Connolly, 1981; 2008.)

Ideologies and the Rhetorical Appeal to Logos

As well as invocations of character and emotion, rhetorical political argument also employs a range of quasi-logical forms of argument attempts to produce in audiences conclusions taken to follow naturally from certain premises. Chaim Perlman, in the landmark The New Rhetoric, identied a range of such arguments: denitions, relations of various kinds such as division, appeals to probability, reciprocity and classical rhetorical topoi such as cause and effect, means and end. He also identied the extent to which public arguments rest on appeals to the structure of reality attempts to derive something from a claim about the given nature of the world. These claims in turn rely on rhetorical gures and techniques such as analogy, examples and various other forms of metaphor (Perlman and OlbrechtsTyteca, 1969, pp. 350410). In classical rhetoric this is the realm of the enthymeme, wrongly thought to be no more than a weak or truncated syllogism. The enthymeme (which Aristotle called the body of persuasion) is an attempt to bring together reality and commonly accepted premises what everyone knows to be the case. It involves showing how things are, inviting people to consider things and to see them as like this rather than like that (see also Burnyeat, 1994). Thus, in politics, the emphasis of argument often falls on quite a different place to that usually attended to by political philosophy. For instance, an issue such as euthanasia produces a range of philosophical arguments about how to judge cases, the appropriate way to derive conclusions and the procedures for doing so. But in
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political argument the burden falls not on the derivation but on the premise. The weight is carried by denition by names such as euthanasia or assisted suicide as opposed to murder or state killing. In the contestation around such an issue nobody actually tries to show how we might justify murder or why we should prolong suffering.What is at issue is the nature of the event or phenomenon, which is produced in its description and through the narrative context in which it is placed (see also Roe, 1994; Rorty, 1989). Denitions as Laclau has shown are essential elements of ideological structures. Their importance lies not only in their conceptual content but also in their capacity to induce chains of quasi-logical reasoning.When a socialist refers to wage-slavery or a neo-liberal to the free movement of labour they are not merely name calling but attempting to constitute premises. Similarly, it makes all the difference if a given action is baptised as an instance of criminality, terror or war; if we think we are in an economic downturn, crisis or recession. The establishment of such names relies on a range of tropes. As well as catachresis there are varieties of analogy (see Aronovitch, 1997; Norval, 2007; Panagia, 2001), redescription or paradiastole (see Palonen, 2003; Skinner, 1997; 1999; 2002a; 2002b) and metaphors (see Beer and Landtsheer, 2004; Charteris-Black, 2004). Such tropes do not function apart from the rest of an argument. They support and are supported by constructions of ethos and by emotive appeals, and they form part of larger narratives, descriptions of how we got here emphasising some elements of a situation and downplaying others constituting presence in Perlmans terms (Perlman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969, pp. 115120). In combination these constitute what Hall has called denitions of the situation the painting of a picture of the situation in which we nd ourselves, disclosing what is so that what will be is shown logically to follow.

The Invention of Common Sense

Importantly, there is often a gulf between the denitions and premises within an ideological formation and those external to it. The challenge of political thinking and communication is to bring those premises into alignment, to make matters explicable through terms congruent with what an audience already for the most part holds to be true. In this respect political argument is quite unlike ideal-typical Kantian public deliberation, for the public is not a tribunal but a participant, a source of elements that must be incorporated into ideological reasoning. The political-rhetorical imagination must, therefore, be conceived in connection to invention, a reective process through which a rhetorical actor attempts to bridge the gap between the specic topoi of an ideological tradition and the more general doxa of the community being addressed. Although this has a conservative moment because it contains political thinking within the horizons of given traditions the interaction between them makes possible (in fact it often demands) innovation, the kind of gurative and imaginative communication that Ernesto Grassi (2001) has described as evangelic in character because it reveals and shows rather than demonstrates. Here the political theory of ideologies is most at odds with Kantian and neo-Kantian conceptions.Where the latter posit a singular sensus communis, the existence of which acts as the transcendental guarantor of public reason, the rhetorical conception of political thinking does not assume that the common sense is singular, enclosed or always identical with itself. This is not an epistemological claim to the effect that because common sense, common
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interest or the common good is unknowable it is thus an object of (essential) contestation. Rather, the claim is that because the sensus communis is divided and open-ended it is susceptible to transformation through its apprehension. As Linda Zerilli has written:
when we appeal to the sensus communis, we are not appealing to a xed set of opinions but to what is communicable. Far from guaranteeing agreement in advance, sensus communis allows differences of perspective to emerge and become visible. Sensus communis is not a static concept grounded in eternal truths but a creative force that generates our sense of reality (Zerilli, 2005, p. 173).

On these grounds Zerilli substitutes for the rule of communicative reason the imaginative power of rhetoric, acts of discursive disclosure grounded in a common rhetorical poetic capacity to call the world into being, and which for Grassi is the ground of the social (Grassi, 1994; 2001). What interests us here, in the context of the political theory of ideologies, is that these themes draw our attention to the way in which ideologies may seek to invent common sense, retroactively declaring it the basic premise of an argument. And that reminds us that a central concern of all political rhetoric and all political ideology is the audience to which thought-actions are directed. Indeed, just such an interest in the audience, and preparedness to adapt to it, is the hallmark of rhetorical thinking and acting and led to the Platonic charge of pandering. The attempt to specify the characteristics of audiences and thus the best ways to address them spurred Aristotle into psychological reections and Cicero to sociological observation. But no matter the extent of such empirical study (including todays ubiquitous opinion polls and focus groups) the audience is not a unitary or stable referent and is always in some measure a ctive creation around which rhetorical invention is built. That is, rhetorical acts rst require a conception of the audience at whom they are directed, the common sense to be worked on and, again, this should be understood as a denitive component of an ideology and no mere fringe addition. Consequently, vital questions to ask of a political ideology concern to whom it is talking, how it denes these and species, for itself, those for whom it must adapt. The answers to such questions may include pseudo-empirical inventions such as the working class, middle England, the heartland, the squeezed middle or hard-working families. But the specication of audiences by ideologies is also an aspect of communicative form. Classical rhetoricians specied three genres political-deliberative, legal-forensic and ceremonial-epideictic partly in terms of the role each assigned to the audience (people making a decision, judges of truth and falsehood, spectators). In contexts where the genre is not predetermined, rhetoric has the opportunity (and also the obligation) to convince the audience to perform such a role to think of itself as there to convict the guilty men, to weigh up options, to experience the afrmation of values. Ideologies may, then, differ in the genres they employ and the ways in which they assign roles to audiences. To inquire after the audience for political ideological communication is also to inquire as to the audience it takes to be universal, that is, its picture of the normal and reasonable person who could and should be expected to understand and agree. Here the study of the rhetoric of ideologies, which has taken us to the perimeter, returns to the centre, to the core propositions of political thinking: who we imagine to be the subject of politics.
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Conclusion
Freedens morphology can illuminate the complex historical development and change of the conceptual assemblages that make up political ideologies. Similarly, Laclaus discourse analysis greatly illuminates political articulations, opening up to consideration their fantasmatic appeal and drawing attention to the importance of tropes of naming. However, in addition to concepts with a particular content, arranged in a way that emphasises some more than others and which modies the meaning of each, an ideology is a way of expressing and proving those concepts to others; as well as names and chains of signiers an ideology is an argumentative form that places such names into narratives which are presented in a way that may invoke emotional and ethical experiences. The relative prominence of one or other appeal (and within that the prominence of particular affects or justicatory personae) is not merely how an independently established ideology proves itself. It is part of what that ideology is. Thus, research into political ideologies must supplement the study of concepts and signiers with investigation into arguments and into what happens at the perimeter where ideologies take up a position in relation to others, formulating and employing methods of persuasion and justication. The political theory of ideologies, as we saw at the start of this article, is also a proposition about political thinking its ubiquity, propriety and potential creativity.What, then, is the contribution of a rhetorical approach to this proposition and to the problems of political theory more generally? Interestingly, and importantly, theorists of deliberative democracy have recently become very interested in rhetoric, especially in its usefulness as a tool for bridging what might otherwise be heterogeneous discourses. They have also sought to establish criteria for evaluating good rhetoric from bad (Dryzek, 2010; also Chambers, 2009; Yack, 2006). The rhetorical-political theory of ideologies is similarly interested in the evaluation of political thoughts and arguments. However, it emphasises an aesthetic mode of evaluation that sets the political theorist of ideologies the challenge of being historian and critic of a certain art of politics; one who examines the nature and provenance of particular ideological-rhetorical works, explores the development, defence and overturning of particular traditions and explains the successes and failures of ideological and rhetorical responses to the matters with which they were concerned. Such a theorist and critic might also seek out new sources and new manifestations that teach us more about what the art of politics can achieve (and what it cannot). Such political-theoretical work is not unrelated to a more common kind of normative critique. However, rather than look for critique based on the neutral assessments of disinterested observers, the rhetorical political theory of ideologies looks for critique from the partisan who invents a new argument and poses it against opponents. Aestheticising everyday or wild political thinking, the political theory of ideologies may make visible, within the formulation of normativity, a relationship of both creativity and reception which renders norms visible as speculative inventions that are then subject not to the regulation of an observing (or reading) public but to the contestation of participants. Such regulation does not take the form of a prior consensus converted by philosophers into criteria for validation applied as rules. Instead it takes the form of political action: the public expression of dissent and the proposition of an alternative political thought. In this situation there is no
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a priori certainty as to who is the inventor and who the spectator, which is judge and which are judged; the act of judgement takes the form not of a ruling but of a creative response such as the formation of a new question, the raising of an objection in a different way, the expression of a sensibility not yet accounted for (see also Rancire, 2011). This conception of politics is the special contribution of the rhetorically informed political theory of ideologies to political theory in general and, in particular, to the critical theory of deliberation. These remarks have taken us beyond the scope of the present article, which has sought to show the analytical and conceptual potential of complementing the morphological and discourse theories of political ideologies with rhetorically informed attentiveness to political thinking in the wild. But this, I would like to suggest in closing, enables the political theory of ideologies to bring into view a particular conception of political justice. Stuart Hampshire spoke of justice as conict, the playing out on the public stage of the varied and contending elements of the soul of a city through forms of argumentation alert to the passions and able to employ plausible analogies that might incline without necessity. The nest collective attainment of this art of contention was, he thought, a smart compromise ... where the tension between contrary forces and impulses, pulling against each other, is perceptible and vivid, and both forces and impulses have been kept at full strength with the tension of a Heraclitean bow, an irresolvable tension such as that felt in excellent musical performances and in great works of literature (Hampshire, 1999, p. 39). It is these works and performances that the student of rhetoric and political ideologies makes into an object for explication, evaluation and sometimes celebration. (Accepted: 28 June 2011) About the author
Alan Finlayson is Professor of Political and Social Theory in the School of Political, Social and International Studies, University of East Anglia. Alan Finlayson, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich NR4 7RJ; email: a.nlayson@uea.ac.uk

Notes
Versions of this article have been presented to the Centre for the Study of Political Ideologies at Oxford University and The Centre for Theoretical Studies, University of Essex in 2008. It was also presented, in the form of a public lecture, at the University of Jyvskyl, Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change in 2009. I am grateful to my interlocutors on all these occasions. Their comments and questions assisted me greatly. Helpful advice was also provided by Judi Atkins, Samuel A. Chambers, Katherine Dommett, James Martin and Iain M. MacKenzie. The research was conducted in the context of a research project, How the Leader Speaks: British Political Rhetoric and Argumentation, generously supported by The Leverhulme Trust (Ref: F/00,391/O) and to whom I am most grateful. 1 On morphology see Freeden, 1994; 1996; 1998; 2000; 2003; 2004a; 2005; 2006, and for discussion and application see Eccleshall, 2003, ch. 1; Grifn, 1996; Humphrey, 2002; 2005; Norval, 2000; Stanley, 2008; Vincent, 2009, ch. 1. On discourse analysis see Laclau, 1990; 1993; 1996; 2000; 2007; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985. For discussion and application see Critchley and Marchart, 2004; Glynos and Howarth, 2007; Howarth, 2000; Howarth and Torng, 2005; Howarth et al., 2000; Laclau, 1994; Marchart, 2007.

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