This thesis examines the relationship of ideology to policy-making on two levels: on the theoretical level, it advances a distinction between philosophical, commentative and participant ideology; on the policy level, it takes as its major case study the reforms initiated by New Labour in the Departments of Social Security, Health and Education and Employment between 1997 and 2001. The thesis pays particular attention to the deployment of morphological analysis as a means to interpret and decode New Labour's policy practices and thereby opens up new areas for research on the role of ideas in politics. It also delineates the conceptual formulae for the core concepts of New Labour's ideology, stressing conceptual interconnections and contributing to interpretative and normative political theory. Using these to frame the analysis, it presents an account of New Labour's conceptual patterns easily accessible to political philosophers. Finally, the thesis counters the dominant modes of analysing ideology in social policy and shows the strong similarities between the morphological conception of ideology and standard forms of institutional and social policy analysis. New Labour is shown to create the following patterns: Individuals have rights to the conditions of freedom as self-development, which generate duties sanctionable by legal and direct socioeconomic penalties on others. Where rights do not apply, individuals have personal responsibilities that are presented as supererogatory expectations. The conditions of freedom are to be distributed equally in a manner consistent with progress and social justice for all members of a community who, relating to each other ultimately on the basis of enlightened self-interest, are interdependent and working together across the spheres of a social conception of civil society, a strongly representative and government-dominated conception of democracy and a capitalist market conceived of as a common good. By so doing, each enjoys the freedom of self-development.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:442925 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Román Zozaya, Carolyn |
| Contributors | Freeden, Michael |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d4d4cfe0-2798-498a-9395-0085cbe514a1 |
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