This is my conversation with Prof. Michael Freeden. We spent an hour on a single question, one that sounds simple and is not: what is an ideology, and what does it actually do?

Freeden has spent nearly five decades on that question. He taught at Oxford from 1978 to 2011, first at Mansfield College, where he is now a professorial fellow, and he remains Emeritus Professor of Politics there. He founded the Journal of Political Ideologies and wrote the books that most political scientists reach for when they need to think carefully about the subject, among them Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach and Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. What follows is an outline of the ground we covered, for anyone who wants a map before pressing play, or a way back into the argument afterward.

Redefining Ideology

Freeden's starting point is that ideology is not what people usually mean when they use the word as an insult. In everyday speech, calling something "ideological" suggests it is rigid, dogmatic, closed to evidence. Freeden's own definition runs the other way. For him, an ideology is a framework that organises political thinking, and it does this by settling, at least for a while, the meaning of contested words like justice, freedom, or democracy.

Ideology in Ordinary Life

This, Freeden argues, is not confined to party manifestos or parliamentary debate. It runs through daily life. Queuing for a bus involves an implicit theory of fairness and of who has authority over whom. Politics, in his account, is not a separate room we enter and leave. It is a layer running underneath ordinary social behaviour.

What Comes Next

I asked Freeden, at the end, whether he was optimistic.

He said he is, though not within his own lifetime, and perhaps only over the next fifty years. He was direct in setting his view against Francis Fukuyama's argument that liberal democracy represented the endpoint of political development, a single line moving toward improvement. Freeden does not see one line. He sees many things moving at once, some getting better while others get worse in the same moment, technology being his example: a source of real medical progress and, elsewhere, a source of new harm.

This week I come to you in podcast form as I promised earlier.

I interviewed Faisal Devji, a top historian and a public intellectual. He is the Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at Oxford and a Fellow of Balliol College. He is the author of some of the most original books written on Muslim political thought in the past two decades, among them The Impossible Indian, on Gandhi, and Muslim Zion, his study of Pakistan as a political idea.

He is also, I should say, a friend, and one of those rare people I get to call a friend while also looking up to him. As an intellectual, as an academic, as a teacher, Faisal has a depth and an integrity that I have come to treat as a kind of benchmark. And he is also genuinely a kind person, which in our line of work does not always travel together with brilliance.

His new book is The Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, published by Yale University Press. It is a history of an idea, the idea of Islam as a global political force, and its central claim is that this idea is dying.

Devji traces the birth of Islam as a protagonist in history to the nineteenth century, when Muslim societies fell under European empire. Reformers responding to that crisis began to imagine their faith anew, as a power in the world, something that could decline, be defended, and be revived.

Over the following century that imagination passed through three hands. First the modernists, who presented Islam as a great civilisation. Then the Islamists of the Cold War, who hardened it into a political ideology to rival communism and liberalism. Then the militants of our own era, who reduced it to a bare identity worth killing and dying for. At each stage, he argues, God and the Prophet were pushed further into the background. The louder the politics became, the thinner the theology grew. And now, he says, the whole project is exhausted.

From the Arab Uprisings to the protests in Iran, India, and Bangladesh, Muslims are mobilising in their millions without invoking Islam as their cause. So, the crescent of his title is waning, not because the faith is weakening, but because the political career built in Islam’s name is coming to a close.

It is a bold thesis. Some of its parts I do not agree with, but this is exactly why I wanted to sit with him in his office in one of Oxford’s most famous colleges, Balliol.

This week I am including an interview in podcast form in Angle, Anchor and Voice. The reason is really simple: to let you hear the experts speak directly to you. My hope is that you come away from each conversation holding a better-formed version of the question that drew you in, rather than a neater version of its answer.

For this opening conversation I could not have asked for a more fitting scholar than Nathalie Tocci, a thinker I read with consistent admiration and one of the most incisive voices on what Europe is and on what it keeps failing to become. She holds a professorship of practice at Johns Hopkins in Bologna and a senior fellowship at Bocconi University’s Institute for European Policymaking. Between 2015 and 2022 she served as special advisor to two successive High Representatives, Federica Mogherini and then Josep Borrell, and in that role she drafted the 2016 EU Global Strategy, the text that gave the Union the language of “principled pragmatism” and “strategic autonomy” it has been struggling, with uneven results, to inhabit ever since. Her books are many, among them a co-authored volume on Turkey’s relationship with the EU. Her recent documentary, Why Europe Matters, has just been released. Here is the link to that.

I wanted to talk to her because the EU finds itself, once again, in the predicament it understands best and resents most, the predicament of having to make decisions it would rather defer. It has to decide how to deal with a Turkey that is both indispensable and impossible. It has to decide what to do about the credibility it has bled on Gaza, on enlargement, on the rule of law within its own borders. And it has to decide how to read Ursula von der Leyen, who told a Hamburg audience last month that the EU’s task was to complete the European continent so that no part of it would fall to Russia, Turkey or China. The two days that followed were spent in Brussels trying to soften the sentence. What was it all about? What is the current sentiment in Europe regarding Turkey?

Nathalie elaborates that Turkey is not viewed as one of the “baddies,” but it is also not on the “map of the goodies.” The current EU enlargement narrative is driven by a geopolitical logic of integrating a “free, secure and democratic grey zone” to prevent it from falling under adversarial influence. That logic, applied to Ukraine and Moldova, does not match Turkey’s situation.