Whether or not nationalism is an ideology is a question that can be illuminated by a study of its conceptual structure. Core and adjacent concepts of nationalism are examined within the context of liberal, conservative and fascist ideologies, contexts that respectively encourage particular ideational paths within nationalist argument, while discouraging others. Employing a morphological analysis of ideological configurations, it is argued that various nationalisms may appear as distinct thin-centred ideologies, but are more readily understood as embellishments of, and sustainers of, the features of their host ideologies.

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.

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Ideology, and its study, have been subject to an interpretational tug-of-war among political theorists that, until recently, has devalued their status as an object of scholarship. Disputes have raged over the scientific standing of ideology, its epistemological status, and its totalitarian and liberal manifestations. Many political philosophers have eschewed its group orientation, and the more recent interest of students of ideology in ordinary political language and in the unconscious and the indeterminate. Following an historical survey of changing fashions and more durable features in the analysis of ideology, it is argued that ideology should be explored as the most typical form of political thinking, and that its study conducts political theorists to the heart of the political. Ideology is now seen as ubiquitous, while the methodologies through which ideologies are studied take on board conceptual malleability and ideational pluralism, and offer bridges between identifying 'social facts' and their inevitable interpretation. Ideology: The problem-child of political analysisWe are saddled with a difficult word, 'ideology'. Here is a term once designed to signify the study of ideas, even the science of ideas, yet it has come to denote one area of the domain it is supposed to study (the word 'politics' has, at many UK departments of politics, curiously travelled in the opposite trajectory). Moreover, as a term invoking a subject-matter the word 'ideology' has proved to be very offputting for the general public-the combination of ideas and 'logies' seems to indicate the kind of high abstraction that is remote from the experience and the language of regular people, even though it is the latter on which ideology studies have come to be chiefly focused. In the Anglo-American world, with its naïve