Ideology is a difficult, but frequently-used, concept in the social sciences, and one that has endless submeanings in both academic and everyday discussion. The simplest definition is probably given by a translation of the German word Weltanschauung, which is often used as though intertranslatable with ‘ideology’. This translation would render ‘ideology’ as ‘world-view’, the overall perception one has of what the world, especially the social world, consists of and how it works. An ideology, and most students of ideology would want to say that we all had one, though often without realizing it, is a complete and self-consistent set of attitudes, moral views, empirical beliefs and even rules of logical discourse and scientific testing. However, ideologies, which tell us what we should or do want, and how to achieve these goals, are often held to be highly relative, and even purely subjective. Thus a 15th-century bishop, 19th-century mill owner and 20th-century Russian soldier are all expected to see the world in crucially different ways that might not ever be capable of reconciliation. Not only would they all have different values, they would have different and incompatible explanations for why they valued what they valued.
In the Marxist and Hegelian traditions of social thought these ‘world-views’ are supposed to be related to one’s social, and particularly to one’s class, position. In this version, factory owners and factory workers actually understand their society in quite different ways, although it is also held that the ideology of the ruling class of any society permeates into those of all other classes. Very simply, capitalists will see their profit as the necessary and valid return to their investment of money and effort, while their workers would see it as an unfair result of exploitation, unless they have been ideologically manipulated into accepting the owner’s own views, and into acquiescing into a false consciousness, which leads to an erroneous vision of the capitalist’s version of reality as inevitable and true. There are major theoretical problems with such a full version of the idea of ideology, especially the obvious questions about why one world-view, rather than another, should be given more credence. There are also many much weaker versions of the word ‘ideology’ current in both real political argument and academic political discourse. Often an ideology means nothing more than a particular set of beliefs and values, with no specific view about which set is correct, nor any special theory on how they come about. Some modern social scientists of the behavioural tradition would even wish to deny that ideologies are commonly-found phenomena at all, believing instead that only a minority of the population have coherent and logically-consistent views on the full range of social matters. Even if this is true, it remains possible that human perception is so deeply socially influenced that communication between different socio-economic cultures is always difficult and can never be perfect.
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