Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking

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. * Anders Berg-Sørensen, The Political Quarterly *
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. * Kennan Ferguson, Perspectives on Politics *
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. * Mihaela Mihai, The Review of Politics *
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. * Karsten Lichau, Contributions to the History of Concepts *
Michael Freeden, emeritus professor of politics at Oxford, and founding editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies, has written a book that presents us with a first comprehensive overview of the field, emphasizing its relevance and delineating its contours for political thinking (if less so for political history), accounting for the contributions that linguistics, communication theory, but also history, anthropology, and theology have made to the emerging field of silence studies. * Karsten Lichau, Contributions to the History of Concepts *
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. * Steph Coulter and Michael Kenny, Journal of Classical Sociology *