ideology
Pluralideologies
- 1A body of beliefs, principles, or doctrines held by an individual or group, often shaping their political or social outlook.
Like the foundation under a house: unseen, but holding up everything built on top of it.
The party's ideology rested on free markets and limited government.
Competing ideologies divided the nation throughout the twentieth century.
Similardoctrine, creed, philosophy, worldview, beliefs
Note
Two grammars share the everyday sense. Counted, it names one system among rivals: regionalist ideologies, the ideologies of Occitanism. Uncounted, it treats doctrinaire thinking as a single force. Nigel Harris writes in RAIL (2022) that "ideology constantly gets in the way." Use the plural to compare belief systems and the bare singular to speak of belief-by-doctrine at all. The -logy ending is a leftover from the study of ideas.
- 2The branch of inquiry concerned with the origin and nature of ideas.
Eighteenth-century thinkers founded ideology as the systematic study of how ideas arise.
His lectures on ideology examined the link between sensation and thought.
Note
Here the word still follows its builder's plan: ideo- plus -logy, a "study of ideas." Antoine Destutt de Tracy coined French idéologie in 1796, and English borrowed it. It is a cousin of idea rather than an offshoot. The two are cognate, but ideology was not formed from idea. In this sense it takes no plural, like other names of disciplines.
Practice
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Origin
This word was borrowed from French idéologie, formed from idéo- ("idea") plus -logie ("study of"). It was coined in 1796 by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, and although related to "idea," it is not derived from it. The modern sense of "doctrine" is attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte's use of the related word idéologue as an insult toward political opponents in the early 1800s.