Introduction: The Politics of Moderation

Ido de Haan and Matthijs Lok introduce the topic of political moderation. Despite the fact that moderation is often called for as a way to overcome deep-seated conflict, the politics of the middle has also manifest moral and political weaknesses. In an overview of approaches to political moderation they distinguish political moderation as a moral virtue, an effect of an institutional order, an aspect of sociological relations, and moderation as an ideology. They discuss the methodology of conceptual analysis and serial contextualism as a way to identify the varieties of political moderation. In the end, they ask whether political moderation is a recurrent pattern in the search for a way out of extreme conflict, or also an independent ideological tradition. Thus introducing the contributions to the volume, they conclude that political moderation as an ideology of the middle, or third way, is highly vulnerable to moral and political critique.