Ideology

While there is no one unambiguous definition of ideology shared by contemporary social scientists, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided a general and accessible definition of the term in their 1847 work The German Ideology. They describe ideology as the social production of ideas, imaginations, concepts, and consciousness by a certain society about itself. Ideology can be regarded as a complex concept, both in conceptual debates of the theoretical humanities and in its concrete applications in the social sciences.

As now used by the majority of social scientists, and perhaps expressing the most ordinary meaning of the word, the term ideology pertains to a set of conventions, views, beliefs, political repertoires, thought forms, and an implicit but determinate conceptual ordering of ideas. This modern usage of ...