Ideology

An ideology is a collection of ideas. The word ideology was coined by Count Destutt de Tracy in the late 18th century to define a "science of ideas." An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare Weltanschauung), as in common sense (see Ideology in everyday society) and several philosophical tendencies (see Political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society (the Marxist definition of ideology - see [

Ideology in everyday society

Every society has an ideology that forms the basis of the "public opinion" or common sense, a basis that usually remains invisible to most people within the society. This dominant ideology appears as "neutral", while all others that differ from the norm are often seen as radical, no matter what the actual vision may be. The philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about this concept of apparent ideological neutrality.

Related Topics:
Society - Common sense - Dominant ideology - Michel Foucault

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Organisations that strive for power influence the ideology of a society to become what they want it to be. Political organisations (governments included) and other groups (e.g. lobbyists) try to influence people by broadcasting their opinions, which is the reason why so often many people in a society seem to "think alike".

Related Topics:
Power - Government

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

When most people in a society think alike about certain matters, or even forget that there are alternatives to the current state of affairs, we arrive at the concept of Hegemony, about which the philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. The much smaller scale concept of groupthink also owes something to his work. Modern linguists study the mechanism of conceptual metaphor, by which this 'thinking alike' is thought to be transmitted.

Related Topics:
Hegemony - Antonio Gramsci - Groupthink - Conceptual metaphor

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There are many different kinds of ideology: political, social, epistemological, ethical, and so on.

Related Topics:
Political - Social - Epistemological - Ethical

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Meta-ideology is the study of the structure, form, and manifestation of ideologies. Meta-ideology posits that ideology is a system of ideas and thoughts bound by an internal logic and a few basic assumptions about reality that have no real factual basis, but are arbitrary choices that serve as the seed around which ideologies grow. According to this train of thought, ideologies are neither right nor wrong, but only a relativistic intellectual strategy for categorizing the world.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~