Abstract: Provides a novel approach to the analysis of ideologies, through examining their internal conceptual morphology. The result is to interpret ideologies as particular combinations of meaning from an indeterminate range of meanings at the disposal of a society—a process identified as the decontestation of the essentially contestable. This accounts for ideological flexibility and for the overlap, continuous transformation, and regrouping of ideological families. Ideological cores are refined by the adjacent and peripheral ideas in which they are located and by their complex interrelationship with political practice. Hence, ideologies are located at the meeting point between logic (internal constraints on their permutations), culture (the impact of social practices and events over time and space) and the regularities of morphological patterning that they display. The book puts this theory into the broader context of ideology studies, as well as relating it to recent historical scholarship. Primarily, the theory is offered as an alternative method of investigating political thinking to that of political philosophy, and as a departure from Marxist perspectives on ideology. This approach is then applied to liberalism, conservatism, socialism, feminism, and green political thought, through a series of detailed historical studies ranging over the past two centuries.

Keywords: conservatism, decontestation, feminism, ideology, liberalism, political theory, political thought, socialism