Ideology - Analysis

Analysis

Meta-ideology is the study of the structure, form, and manifestation of ideologies. Meta-ideology posits that ideology is a coherent system of ideas, relying upon a few basic assumptions about reality that may or may not have any factual basis, but are subjective choices that serve as the seed around which further thought grows. According to this perspective, ideologies are neither right nor wrong, but only a relativistic intellectual strategy for categorizing the world. The pluses and minuses of ideology range from the vigor and fervor of true believers to ideological infallibility. Excessive need for certitude lurks at fundamentalist levels in politics and religions.

The works of George Walford and Harold Walsby, done under the heading of systematic ideology, are attempts to explore the relationships between ideology and social systems. Charles Blattberg has offered an account which distinguishes political ideologies from political philosophies.

David W. Minar describes six different ways in which the word "ideology" has been used:

1. As a collection of certain ideas with certain kinds of content, usually normative;
2. As the form or internal logical structure that ideas have within a set;
3. By the role in which ideas play in human-social interaction;
4. By the role that ideas play in the structure of an organization;
5. As meaning, whose purpose is persuasion; and
6. As the locus of social interaction, possibly.

For Willard A. Mullins, an ideology is composed of four basic characteristics:

1. it must have power over cognition
2. it must be capable of guiding one's evaluations;
3. it must provide guidance towards action;
4. and, as stated above, it must be logically coherent.

Mullins emphasizes that an ideology should be contrasted with the related (but different) issues of utopia and historical myth.

The German philosopher Christian Duncker called for a "critical reflection of the ideology concept" (2006). In his work, he strove to bring the concept of ideology into the foreground, as well as the closely connected concerns of epistemology and history. In this work, the term ideology is defined in terms of a system of presentations that explicitly or implicitly claim to absolute truth.

Though the word "ideology" is most often found in political discourse, there are many different kinds of ideology: political, social, epistemological, ethical, etc.