Summary
Contents
Subject index
The definition of ideology continues to occupy scholars across a wide range of disciplines. In this book, Teun A van Dijk sketches a challenging new multidisciplinary framework for theorizing ideology. He defines ideology as the basis of the social representations of a group, its functions in terms of social relations between groups, and its reproduction as enacted by discourse. Contemporary racist discourse is examined to illustrate these ideological relations between cognition, society and discourse.
Elites
Elites
Who ‘Invents’ Ideologies?
In order to complete the picture of the social basis and dimensions of ideologies, we should now ask where ideologies ‘come from’ in the first place. Who, indeed, ‘invents’ ideologies? Or do they arise and develop spontaneously in a group, as a form of jointly produced social cognition that has no specific authorship, as would be the case for a natural language?
Many ideologies seem to emerge from large groups of people, if not from the ‘masses’. Ecologist, feminist, socialist, nationalist or capitalist ideologies are examples of ideologies that are shared and carried by many people, often across national boundaries and continents. That these should be ‘invented’ by specific individuals, or by a small group of ‘ideologues’, thus seems to be counter to ...
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