Political ideology

Ideology (from Greek ιδεολογία) is a collection of beliefs held by an individual, group or society. It can be described as a set of conscious and unconscious ideas which make up one's beliefs, goals, expectations, and motivations. An ideology is a comprehensive normative vision that is followed by people, governments, or other groups that is considered the correct way by the majority of the population, as argued in several philosophical tendencies (see political ideologies). It can also be a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of society such as the elite to all members of society as suggested in some Marxist and critical-theory accounts. While the concept of "ideology" describes a set of ideas broad in its normative reach, an ideology is less encompassing than the ideas expressed in concepts such as worldview, imaginary and ontology.

Ideology refers to the system of abstracted meaning applied to public matters, thus making this concept central to politics. Implicitly, in societies that distinguish between public and private life, every political or economic tendency entails ideology, whether or not it is propounded as an explicit system of thought. In the Althusserian sense, Ideology is "the imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence".

The term "ideology" was born in the highly controversial philosophical and political debates and fights of the French Revolution, and acquired several other meanings from the early days of the First French Empire to the present. The word was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796, assembling the words idea, from Greek (near to the Lockean sense) and -logy, from . He used it to refer to one aspect of his "science of ideas" (to the study itself, not the subject of the study). He separated three aspects, namely: ideology, general grammar, and logic, considering respectively the subject, the means, and the reason of this science. He argues that among these aspects ideology is the most generic term, because the science of ideas also contains the study of their expression and deduction.

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