A therapist asks his client, “So why did you respond that way?” Silence. A professor queries her class: “What is the author trying to do with this sentence?” Silence. In a crowded bar, a woman responds to a stranger’s crude pickup line, “What did you just say to me?” Silence.
Silence, it turns out, can operate in many ways. Michael Freeden’s Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking traces, categorizes, and organizes silence’s vast potentialities. Political science often overlooks, ignores, or marginalizes silence, seeing speech and action as the sole vehicles for politics. In contrast, Freeden traces and compiles a vast array of exemplary cases where silence does politics—there are so many examples, in fact, that the popular idea of silence as outside the political begins to appear absurd.
In some ways, this constitutes new territory for Freeden. One of political theory’s most trenchant analysts of ideology, he has long focused on carefully differentiating and classifying the widely divergent modes and methods in which ideological power functions. Silence—which is seemingly devoid of ideology—appears to be a considerable deviation from this interest. Unlike language, ideas, histories, or events, silence proves difficult, if not impossible, to trace and analyze across time and culture.
But Freeden draws on methods familiar from his previous work. His ultimate goal here, alongside showing that silence operates politically, is showing how silence operates politically. Freeden thus identifies and examines the distinct qualities and operations of diverse silences. Such an approach not only appeals instinctually but also entails extensive specification. The silence of a Chinese philosopher is not the silence of a Mirandized American detainee; the silence of an ostracized minority differs from the silence of a Quaker protest. Their distinctions identify their contrasting kinds of political intent, operation, and effect.
The familiarity of this approach reflects the central role of classification as a prototypical basis of political science. Science, of both the social and natural kinds, must act as a neutral arbiter. Taxonomy allows for the discovery of similarities, lines of descent, and divergences. Freeden’s contribution to political theory emerges from this vein. Even when he has hinted at a normative stance in his work—for example, in recurrent investigations of the histories of liberalism and progressivism in British thought—he has used methods far more surgical and comparative than celebratory. Biology, grounded in Linnaean classification, does not falter in the face of the vast diversity of terrestrial life; instead, it finds increasingly minute features of similarity and difference for its syntaxonomic systems. Categorizational political theory aims to do the same.
In silence, Freeden has found a challenging subject, and his methods reflect the multiple possibilities it allows. “The options for mapping silence are complex,” he argues, “presenting several plausible axes of classification that stand in a complementary relation one to another” (p. 35). Freeden does not kid. He develops four classificatory systems, which he terms “schemes,” for emphasizing the politics of silence. Each scheme has multiple subdivisions, typologizing silence in complementary ways. For example, Scheme A, which treats silences as sociological phenomena (or, less dramatically, as psychological dynamics), differentiates “aspirational silences,” “existential silences,” “solidaristic silences,” “positioning silences,” and “fear-inducing silences.” Silence as a semi-individualized moral or theological practice (e.g., meditative or monastic) slots into the first category; as a collective ceremonial interdependence (e.g., moments of silence) the third; as threatening, oppressive, and subjugating, the fourth.
He posits three other schemes. One analyzes silence as an epistemological structure, subdivided into four “constellations.” Another—somewhat confusingly conceptualized as an “elaboration” of the fourth constellation of Scheme B (38)—uncovers how listeners interpret silence; this section consists of six subdivisions or “clusters.” The final scheme, which makes up the majority of the book, investigates those silences we often overlook or ignore and comprises seven “micro-modalities.”
To be clear, this is a massive and composite undertaking. Freeden’s point in these later chapters that the “unsayable” differs profoundly from the “ineffable” is not only right but also important in that each forecloses certain political articulations. The vastness of silence stretches to locales far beyond those usually considered by political theory. Freeden’s erudition also enlivens the book; throughout its pages, one is as likely to encounter Mies van der Rohe, Richard Nixon, or the Tao-te-Ching as Locke, Laclau, or Lacan. Far-ranging, substantive, and in intention, this volume covers as many kinds of silence as Freeden can imagine.
And that is undoubtedly the goal: to completely and definitively conceptualize the world of silence and politics. One tell: Freeden employs the term vade mecum twice (pp. 40, 246) to describe his method: the imperative to “walk with me” is embedded in the Latinate popular terminology for a guidebook from the 1760s to the end of the nineteenth century. He seeks to provide the most comprehensive classificatory system possible, a template through the dense and foreboding thickets of silences.
Traditional political theory plays a critical if not entirely central role in this project. For example, pages 181–94 develop an intriguing and wholly original thesis concerning the importance of silence for Locke and, by extension, for much of the contractarian tradition. Noting the importance of silence in the face of political postulation, Freeden draws from Locke an ontology of silence that allows its practitioner to toggle back and forth between the political and the prepolitical. It does not guarantee “a protest, even an unvoiced one, nor is it the abdication of political loyalty” (p. 188). Instead, it allows for a mode of simultaneity, of both belonging and opposition, that should be familiar to anyone engaged in policy, parties, or nations.
If the book has a failing then, it is not in its comprehensiveness. Nor is it a matter of engagement, importance, or capaciousness. My major criticism—or, more precisely, departure—concerns the possibility of its aspirations. Perhaps silence does not exist in multiplicities and variances at different times but in different registers simultaneously. If so, if it operates in multiple places with multiple meanings, all at once, neither an encyclopedia nor a vade mecum can make sense of it.
This review began with three exemplary silences from everyday life; even now I am unsure into which of Freeden’s categories they must fall. A classroom silence may involve various parts embarrassment, resentment, shyness, evocation, fear, and hangover. The silence between two people with different goals in a bar may include a mixture of bravado, anger, admiration, lust, disgust, and a desire to keep up appearances before others. If these examples may be so multiply comprised, so too might political silences. In that case, a classificatory system may be incapable of showing relations; their practices will always exceed their taxonomic place.
Thus, any taxonomic system remains incomplete, partial, and particular (as does any guidebook). Such limits, however, do not make them useless or dull their insights. 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.
