Ideology

An ideology is a set of ideas, values, emotions and beliefs shared by a social or political group, which interprets reality, compares it with an ideal model and guides action to bring it closer to that model. Its distinctive feature is that its practical elements weigh as much as its theoretical ones, and it often serves concrete interests.

The term was coined in 1796 by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, a French Enlightenment aristocrat and philosopher, who proposed it to designate a "science of ideas": the study of their origin, their character and the laws that govern them, as well as their relations to the signs that express them. His aim was to ground the moral and political sciences on the sensations people experience and the ideas that arise from them. Over time the word changed meaning. Napoleon used the expression "the ideologues" to disparage his opponents, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in The German Ideology, gave it a critical sense: a set of principles that explain the world according to the modes of production of each society and that, in systems based on exploitation, help keep the oppressed from perceiving their condition.

For authors within that tradition, ideologies usually have two parts: a representation of the existing system, seen from a particular perspective, and a programme of action aimed at transforming it. According to their stance on change, they may be conservative, reformist, revolutionary or restorative. A simple example: two groups describing the same economic situation can reach opposite conclusions because they start from different values and interests, and each conclusion rests on a framework of ideas that makes it seem natural.

In current usage the term keeps both its descriptive sense, as a system of political beliefs, and its critical sense, which links ideology to false consciousness and dogmatism. Debates focus on whether all social thought is ideological, on the relation between ideology and truth, and on the distinction from worldview, which applies to a whole civilisation, whereas ideology refers to a group or a particular project.