Ideology

Ideology is a relatively universal and multifaceted social process through which individual and social actors articulate their beliefs and behavior. It is a form of “thought-action” that penetrates most of social and political practice and that is conveyed through the distinct conjectural arrangements of a particular social order. Its contents often surpass experience because they are, for the most part, nontestable, offering a transcendent grand vista of collective authority. Ideological messages are constructed to make potent appeal to advanced ethnical norms, superior knowledge claims, to individual or group interests, or to popular emotions to justify actual or potential social action. Ideology is a complex process whereby ideas and practices come together in the course of legitimizing or contesting power relations.

[Page 334]Traditionally, ideology was conceived as a rigid, closed system of ideas governing social and political action. Typically, individuals were deemed to be ideological if they expressed unquestioned loyalty to the principles set out in the doctrine they adhered to, or if they followed a particular ideological doctrine so that they acted contrary to their own self-interests. The representative examples of such rigid systems of thought would include followers of closed religious sects or radical political organizations. Recent studies have questioned such understandings of ideology by emphasizing the flexibility and plasticity of ideological beliefs and practices, as well as the indispensability of ideology for making sense of one's social and political reality. In a number of highly influential works, Michael Billig has demonstrated that the popular reception of ideological messages is always unsystematic and riddled with contradictions. Beliefs are often anchored in the shared categories and concepts of recognizable ideological traditions and are commonly perceived not as ideological but as obvious, normal, and natural, and yet these categories of thought are rarely if ever treated as monolithic systems of meaning. Rather, popular beliefs and practices are filled with “ideological dilemmas” originating in the social environment where there are always competing hierarchies of power. Hence, when ideology confronts the complexities and contingencies of everyday life, human beings find themselves in ongoing “contradictions of common sense.” In addition to its flexibility, Michael Freeden also emphasizes the cognitive necessity of ideological belief and practice. In his view, ideology maps one's social and political world. Social facts and political events never speak for themselves and thus require a process of decoding, and the use of a particular ideological map helps one understand and contextualize these facts and events. Ideology imposes coherence and provides structure to contingent actions, events, and images so that ideological narrative assists in creating socially comprehensible meaning.