Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Michael Freeden Page B

to be proximate to a highly sociable conception of human nature. In the first case it will entail political arrangements that secure an optimal private sphere for individuals; whereas in the second it will recognize the importance of social interaction in order to develop one’s individuality. Ideologies constitute the necessary space in which political concepts take concrete shape.
    The feature of
priority
indicates that the meaning of every political concept in an ideology, as well as of the general arguments of that ideology, is dependent on which concepts (and which conception of each concept) are allocated core significance and which are relegated to the periphery of the ideology. Ideologies experience continuous shifting of the units of furniture within their ‘rooms’. A unit may be a centrepiece and be moved later to the side of the room, or even covered up. In the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, private property migrated within liberal ideology from a core position in the liberal room to a more marginal one. One of the principal functions of ideologies is to rank the major political concepts. Together these concepts are available as a pool of ideas at the disposal of a society, but each ideology chooses those it wishes to emphasize and then arranges the selection in a pecking order. The result is to offer a menu for public consumption through which political decisions may be taken.
    Ranking results in a structure of sorts. When we suggest that, to begin with, all ideologies have cores, these are not immanent features that an ideology would have only ideally and irrespective of experience. Instead, these are the ineliminable key concepts that it is deemed to have in actual political usage. Liberalism containsliberty and progress as core concepts not because this is ordained in some metaphysical outreach, but because that is a conclusion we arrive at by listening systematically to liberals and their critics, and by reading the texts they have written. By analogy, kitchens are not invariably products of a cosmic logic. They are convenient spaces that have developed over time in order to satisfy a basic need – food preparation. By common convention, itself a cultural elaboration of basic needs – and not by natural law – kitchens have cookers and sinks. Those are core units, a minimum kit, without which a kitchen would cease to be a kitchen. Likewise, what we have come to call liberalism would no longer be liberalism if it did not place liberty and progress at the core of its concerns – a necessary if not sufficient minimum for sustaining what has become known as liberalism. If this argument is circular, it is simply replicating the circular logic of a language game. But it also reflects sustained empirical, historical usage.
    Surrounding the core are adjacent and peripheral concepts. Adjacent concepts flesh out the core. They restrict its capacity for multiple interpretations and pull it in a more defined direction (for liberalism, an adjacent concept might be democracy, as a way of guaranteeing liberty and progress). Peripheral concepts or ideas are more specific and detailed. Most are still significant to the central meanings carried by the ideology, though some may be marginal (for liberalism, a significant peripheral concept might be opposition to censorship, while an increasingly marginal one might be the right to inherit social status). Most of them are situated on the perimeter of an ideology, between thought and action. That is the point where concepts lose their abstraction (‘liberty’) and are interwoven with the concrete practices sanctioned or condemned by an ideology (‘free entry for refugees into a country’). Peripheral concepts are also historically context-bound and therefore more open to change within the broader framework set by the core concepts. Occasionally, though, changes at the periphery may work through back to the core: the equal rights of women, marginal to