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Ideological criticism


Ideological criticism is a form of rhetorical criticism concerned with critiquing rhetorical artifacts for the dominant ideology they express while silencing opposing or contrary ideologies. According to Sonja Foss, “the primary goal of the ideological critic is to discover and make visible the dominant ideology or ideologies embedded in an artifact and the ideologies that are being muted in it”. Foss has also mentioned the contribution to ideological criticism of several theoretical schools, including Marxism, Structuralism, cultural studies, and Postmodernism.

The unit of analysis in ideological criticism, or what Foss calls "traces of ideology in an artifact", is the ideograph. It is a symbol representing an ideological concept and is more than what the symbol itself depicts. Michael McGee, a renowned ideological critic, postulated that an “ideograph is an ordinary term found in political discourse” that “is a high-order abstraction representing collective commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal”. Thus, McGee restricted ideographs to words, words that “constitute a vocabulary of public motives, which authorize and warrant public actions”. It is “presumed that human beings will react predictably and autonomically” to the use of ideographs. McGee encourages the study of ideographs (such as “liberty” and “freedom”) to help identify the ideological position of a society. He argues such terms are used in discourse as a means of justifying problematic issues within a society. The meaning of an ideograph is defined by a society and its culture and can change over time. Ideographs need not be only positive in nature, but can be negative as well. For example, tyranny and slavery, can “guide behavior and belief negatively by branding unacceptable behavior". McGee notes that to fully understand ideographs, they must be examined both “diachronically” as well as “synchronically”. That is, ideographs need to be examined across time to determine how their meanings may have changed and all ideographs that are used in a given situation must be considered.


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