New book explores how silences are integral to the way we communicate and embedded in thought and practice

In Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking, Emeritus Professor of Politics Michael Freeden investigates silence as a normal, ever-present and crucial element of political thinking, theory and language.

Professor Freeden argues that–far from being a simple absence–silence is a rich and multi-faceted phenomenon packed with messages vital to channelling social and political life.

In what is a first study to take a complete view of silence and the political, he explains that what isn’t said or written, when we might expect it to be, should stimulate our curiosity about how and why it is hidden from participants in those communications and from those who study them as well.

The book discusses various types of silence including:

• Unspeakable: things we cannot talk about because of taboos or upset;
• Ineffable: things that for some are unutterable, such as the names of God or sacred rituals;
• Inarticulable: things we have blocked and can't put into words, such as traumas; and
• unconceptualizable: things we cannot even wrap our minds around because we lack the conceptual apparatus to imagine them: i.e: the profound nothingness preceding time and the Big Bang.

Professor Freeden uses select case-studies to explore topics such as Buddhist nondualism, Locke's tacit consent, the submerging of historical narratives, state neutrality, Pinter's miscommunications and menace, and the separate ways ideologies integrate silence into their beliefs.

He said: “The book is the culmination of a fifty years’ research trajectory that has taken me from investigating a particular ideology—liberalism—to developing a theory of ideologies, to analysing the nature of political thinking, and now to minding the gaps that linguistic communication and its failures invariably produce as aspects of the political itself.”