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ideology, a form of social or political philosophy in which practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones. It is a system of ideas that aspires both to explain the world and to change it.
This article describes the nature, history, and significance of ideologies in terms of the philosophical, political, and international contexts in which they have arisen. Particular categories of ideology are discussed in the articles socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, nationalism, liberalism, and conservatism.
Origins and characteristics of ideology
The word first made its appearance in French as idéologie at the time of the French Revolution, when it was introduced by a philosopher, A.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy, as a short name for what he called his “science of ideas,” which he claimed to have adapted from the epistemology of the philosophers John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, for whom all human knowledge was knowledge of ideas. The fact is, however, that he owed rather more to the English philosopher Francis Bacon, whom he revered no less than did the earlier French philosophers of the Enlightenment. It was Bacon who had proclaimed that the destiny of science was not only to enlarge human knowledge but also to “improve the life of men on earth,” and it was this same union of the programmatic with the intellectual that distinguished Destutt de Tracy’s idéologie from those theories, systems, or philosophies that were essentially explanatory. The science of ideas was a science with a mission: it aimed at serving people, even saving them, by ridding their minds of prejudice and preparing them for the sovereignty of reason.
Destutt de Tracy and his fellow idéologues devised a system of national education that they believed would transform France into a rational and scientific society. Their teaching combined a fervent belief in individual liberty with an elaborate program of state planning, and for a short time under the Directory [1795–99] it became the official doctrine of the French Republic. Napoleon at first supported Destutt de Tracy and his friends, but he soon turned against them, and in December 1812 he even went so far as to attribute blame for France’s military defeats to the influence of the idéologues, of whom he spoke with scorn.
Thus ideology has been from its inception a word with a marked emotive content, though Destutt de Tracy presumably had intended it to be a dry, technical term. Such was his own passionate attachment to the science of ideas, and such was the high moral worth and purpose he assigned to it, that the word idéologie was bound to possess for him a strongly laudatory character. And equally, when Napoleon linked the name of idéologie with what he had come to regard as the most detestable elements in Revolutionary thought, he invested the same word with all of his feelings of disapprobation and mistrust. Ideology was, from this time on, to play this double role of a term both laudatory and abusive not only in French but also in German, English, Italian, and all the other languages of the world into which it was either translated or transliterated.
Some historians of philosophy have called the 19th century the age of ideology, not because the word itself was then so widely used, but because so much of the thought of the time can be distinguished from that prevailing in the previous centuries by features that would now be called ideological. Even so, there is a limit to the extent to which one can speak today of an agreed use of the word. The subject of ideology is a controversial one, and it is arguable that at least some part of this controversy derives from disagreement as to the definition of the word ideology. One can, however, discern both a strict and a loose way of using it. In the loose sense of the word, ideology may mean any kind of action-oriented theory or any attempt to approach politics in the light of a system of ideas. Ideology in the stricter sense stays fairly close to Destutt de Tracy’s original conception and may be identified by five characteristics: [1] it contains an explanatory theory of a more or less comprehensive kind about human experience and the external world; [2] it sets out a program, in generalized and abstract terms, of social and political organization; [3] it conceives the realization of this program as entailing a struggle; [4] it seeks not merely to persuade but to recruit loyal adherents, demanding what is sometimes called commitment; [5] it addresses a wide public but may tend to confer some special role of leadership on intellectuals. In this article the noun ideology is used only in its strict sense; the adjective ideological is used to refer to ideology as broadly defined.
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On the basis of the five features above, then, one can recognize as ideologies systems as diverse as Destutt de Tracy’s own science of ideas, the positivism of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, communism and several other types of socialism, fascism, Nazism, and certain kinds of nationalism. That all these “-isms” belong to the 19th or 20th century may suggest that ideologies are no older than the word itself—that they belong essentially to a period in which secular belief increasingly replaced traditional religious faith.