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.
Consciousness
Consciousness
Introduction
When dealing with the cognitive dimension of ideologies, another issue needs to be addressed, namely, that of consciousness. In the first place, this notion has been part of the history of the study of ideologies since Marx and Engels, mostly in the form of ‘false consciousness’. Second, we may ask whether social group members have, experience or use their ideologies more or less consciously, or whether these belief systems are acquired, used and changed more or less ‘unconsciously’ or, in other terms, ‘implicitly’.
False Consciousness
The traditional notion of ‘consciousness’ (German: Bewußtsein) plays a central role in the traditional accounts of ideologies, especially in combination with its negative modifier ‘false’.1 This phrase then usually refers to group ideologies that do not reflect the ‘objective’ socio-economic interests ...
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