often strongly divergent inclinations towards pejorative or non-pejorative understandings of ideology, the various approaches to ideology analysis consistently feature a core roster of essential debates, which can be framed as a series of contrasting pairs. The most fundamental of these concerns whether ideology is true or false. This debate hinges on whether ideologies as integrated bodies and ‘tellings’ of ideas correspond closely and demonstrably with reality, or whether they act as ‘alternative realities’ that obscure, deflect from, or contrast with reality ‘as it actually is’. On the former side, ideology is presented as a set of claims about reality, either as it is or as it should be. Ideologies and their constituent ideas are themselves real, acting as generalised ‘placeholders’ for everything from personal mindsets to societal institutions; they are also true in that we ‘hold’ ideas, which influence us into actions and reactions that are likewise real. Moreover, since our encounters with reality in our social existence and actions are always ultimately through (our own and others’) subjective experiences, to all intents and purposes the reality ‘that matters’ is our ideological construction of it, so that ideology is ‘true as far as we are concerned’. Meanwhile, the latter side instead sees ideology as an attempt to portray reality as something other than it is: a ‘mask’ placed over the actual facts, a misdescription of ‘how things really work’ or ‘why things really are the way they are’, a superficial explication and justification that (often deliberately) does not capture the deep societal forces at play. It distracts from other, more important motive influences on our existence and behaviour, such as our interests, drives, or contextual incentives. Above all, ideology creates and maintains a tension between our perception and our experience of society, since there is still a reality ‘out there’ beyond our capacity to ‘name’ it.
A closely related question is whether ideology is a necessary or unnecessary factor in our engagement with reality. The core consideration here is whether all humans rely unavoidably on (in)formal ideological frameworks of meaning, knowledge, and value to understand the world and their place within it, or whether some at least can – and should – transcend ideologies’ convenient, insufficiently considered hermeneutic and epistemic ‘shortcuts’ to reach a ‘higher’, clearer, and direct form of understanding. One approach argues that our ‘access’ to reality is only possible via some form of ideology – even if it does not call itself by that name – in the sense that some ‘account’ of ideas is required to make any claims about reality at all. Ineradicable societal division and disagreement over how to engage with reality engenders several viable alternative ways of ‘telling’ ideas and manifesting them in society (via factions, movements, parties, etc.), laying the foundations for ideological disputes. Moreover, since reality is itself inherently changeable and indeterminate, ideas and their meanings can always be challenged and revised. By contrast, the opposing line is that it is both possible and highly desirable to attain a stance towards reality that lies ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ ideology, typically through applying scientific and critical methods of enquiry. It finds that all divisions can be bridged or overcome, and that compatibilising different ‘tellings’ provides permanent resolutions to ideological disputes, leading in effect to ideology’s elimination. Similarly, it is possible to ‘settle’ how ideas should be ‘recounted’ and integrated, and a healthy dose of logical reasoning and empirical testing can mostly remove reality from ideology’s ‘reach’.
The next dispute is over whether ideology represents a temporary or a permanent fixture in society. This concerns whether ideology is uniquely a feature of certain forms, phases, or time-periods of human society’s developmental trajectory, with an identifiable beginning and end, or a constant presence wherever human society exists, with at most marginal qualitative changes in its essential character. The former position identifies modernity as the ‘starting point’ of ideology, characterised by increasingly dense, urbanised populations, the shift to mass production in agriculture and manufacturing, innovations in communication and transport, and an increase in the purview and complexity of state and legal functions. Ideology, on this account, is the fortuitous product of intersections between industrial capitalism and class conflict among bourgeois business owners and proletarian wage-workers, constitutional parliamentary democracy and electoral competition among parties, and contingent Western European geoeconomic–geopolitical–geocultural primacy. It likewise has an identifiable ‘end point’ through the transition to a new societal form or phase (e.g., ‘final communism’, globalised liberal democracy). The latter view, meanwhile, denies that ideology can have a definite beginning and, instead, points to clear milestones of qualitative ideological transformation from its long premodern history, tied to theological disputes, feudal rivalries, or personalist courtly factionalism. It observes that ideology is not only present but has often pursued parallel, entirely unrelated trajectories in different societies that are (at least partly) independent of capitalist, democratic, or Eurocentric developments. Accordingly, it is sceptical that there can ever be an ‘end of ideology’ and, instead, conceives of large-scale societal transition as a change in the dynamics of ideological ‘dominance’ or ‘hegemony’, expecting ever new social divisions around which future ideologies can take shape.
Another dimension of debate is over whether ideology is best conceived as a singular or a plural phenomenon: as ideology or ideologies. The key question here is whether it should be grasped as a totality alongside other powerful social forces, without becoming distracted by petty internal differences that do not alter its overall effects, or whether treating it monolithically prevents detailed analysis of how complex interpersonal and intergroup social dynamics play out through inter-ideological encounters. One side insists that ideology must be understood, first and foremost, as a discrete social domain with dedicated functions, ranked alongside (and sometimes subordinated to) the economic and political domains and sometimes elided with ‘discourse’ or ‘culture’. On this conception, ideas and how they are ‘recounted’ or ‘told’ are epiphenomenal to ideology’s social functions, and differences between ideologies are inconsequential compared to the gulf between them and society’s economic and political ‘drivers’. Insofar as ideology is significantly internally differentiated, it can be modelled as a single spectrum along which people’s positions can be ranked (e.g., liberal–conservative, left–right, radical–reactionary), often using scalar numerical quantifications. The other side argues for a more refined breakdown of ideology that incorporates its extensive range of different social manifestations: its legal, religious, media, and educational aspects as well as its economic and political forms. Likewise, it holds that the precise hierarchy, ordering, juxtaposition, and deployment of ideas is vital to charting simultaneous and intertemporal differences within and between ideologies and their effects on the shape of society. On this granular account, ideology is a collection of many different partly overlapping bodies of ideas – older or newer, larger or smaller, more or less complex and stable – which can be meaningfully sketched out only in multidimensional space.
A further question concerns whether ideology is primarily an individual or a collective phenomenon. This debate is about whether the locus at which ideology’s social effects should be evaluated is human beings’ personal mental and bodily status and behaviours, or whether it is more promising to treat ideology as the expression of various societal group dynamics. One view frames ideology in terms of identity, as a mechanism to impose social salience on our personal biological and demographic features, and to create, recognise, and/or push back against our positions in hierarchies of privilege and discrimination. It sees ideology as a social force operating on our personal psyches – mobilising our unconscious and subconscious, crafting correlations with our personality-traits, fostering certain emotions and forms of reasoning, and influencing our evaluative and epistemological judgments. Moreover, it shapes our social behaviours, from voting and consumption preferences to labour decisions and choices over ‘personal growth’ and self-development (e.g., sport, fitness, leisure pursuits). The alternative view examines ideology as an articulation of social group solidarity based on posited commonalities of contextual situation and experience, motive drives and interests, and social aims and plans. For it, ideology chiefly affects and manifests in the mass psyche, steering the substantive content, direction, and intensity of social attitudes
