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Name:
Nisar Khan
Roll No:
2022-131
Submitted to:
Dr. Shamim Ullah
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Need and importance of ideology

Introduction
Political ideology is a set of ideas, beliefs, values, and
opinions, exhibiting a recurring pattern, that competes
deliberately as well as unintentionally over providing
plans of action for public policy making in an attempt to
justify, explain, contest, or change the social and political
arrangements and processes of a political community.
Political ideology is a coherent set of views on politics and
the role of the government and encompasses a wide
range of issues.
Eighteenth century, Antoine Destutt de Tracy is often
credited with first employing the term ideology in the late
18th century.
By ideology Tracy meant a “science of the formation of
ideas,” which, in line with prevailing enlightenment
aspirations, he believed could promote social progress
and the common good.
The meanings have shifted over time and often make
sense in context of the political struggles through which
they emerged.
Ideology is excessively used in interpretation, formulation
and functioning of many state’s political systems.
A political ideology focuses on the political system
wherein societies make decisions about their most
important values or as Easton said “the authoritative
allocation of values” for a society is made.
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Development of Ideologies
Most ideologies owe their origin and gradual developed to
some social movements that took place in in a society.
Be that modern democracy in the seventeenth century,
Marxism and anarchism in the nineteenth century, and
fascism and National Socialism, feminism, Liberation
Theology in last century and environmentalism, Pan-
Islamism or Globalism in recent decades.
Ideologies provide the apparatus through which variety of
issues are interpreted and explained to make meanings
for its adherents.4th
Ideology in the stricter sense stays fairly close To Destutt
de Tracy’s original conception and may be identified by
five characteristics:
1.
It contains an explanatory theory of a more or less
comprehensive kind about human experience and the
external world;
 It sets out a program, in generalized and abstract
terms, of social and political organization;
 It conceives the realization of this program as
entailing a struggle.
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 It seeks not merely to persuade but to recruit loyal

adherents, demanding what is sometimes called
commitment;
 It addresses a wide public but may tend to confer
some special role of leadership.
David W. Minar describes six different ways the word
“ideology” has been used:
 As a collection of certain ideas with certain kinds
of content, usually normative
 As the form or internal logical structure that
ideas have within a set
 By the role ideas play in human-social
interaction
 By the role ideas play in the structure of an
organization
 As meaning, whose purpose is persuasion
 As the locus of social interaction.

Terry Eagleton outlines characteristics of

ideologies
 The process of production of meanings, signs and
values in social life
 A body of ideas characteristic of a particular social
group or class
 Helps legitimate a dominant political power
Systematically distorts communication offer a
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position for a subject Is motivated by social interests

Identity thinking conjuncture of discourse and power.
 Provides means of a Socially necessary illusion
 Provides a medium in which conscious social actors
make sense of their world
 Action-oriented sets of beliefs
 The confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality
Semiotic closure
 The indispensable medium in which individuals live
out their relations to a social structure
 The process that converts social life to a natural
reality.
Natural of political ideology
The study of ideology is an indispensable part of social
and political analysis.
Political systems, social and political movements, and
relations of power and domination are always interwoven
with various kinds of ideas, beliefs, and symbolic forms.

The Feature of Ideology

Some of the features of Ideology are:
 Provides Worldview: help to structure how the world
is understood and explained
 A system of beliefs, normative values, attitudes and
symbols that guide collective action
 Advocates a particular pattern of social relationships
and arrangements,
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 justifies a particular pattern of conduct (which its

proponents seek to promote, realize, pursue or
Source for ordering, defining and evaluating
political reality
 Establishes political identities
 Gives meaning: in identifying friends and foes in the
international system
 Propels social machinery into action for change
 Provides/motivates a course of action (sometimes
even a revolution to overthrow and replace the
existing social order)
 Presents/Establishes a normative goal (ought to be)
as antithesis of present scenario and orders
preferences.
That is why we see that adherents of a particular
ideology display considerably
 The Marxist tradition views it pejoratively as distorted
consciousness, reflecting an exploitative material
reality, that can be overcome through unmasking.
 Ideologies are viewed by Marxists as fictitious
narratives necessary to maintaining the social order.
Non. Marxist approaches split into three
perspective
1. Abstract, closed and doctrinaire, largely impervious
to empirical evidence and superimposed on a
society.
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2. A series of empirically ascertainable attitudes

towards political issues that can be explored by
means of behavioral methods.
3. As indispensable mapping devices of cultural
symbols and political concepts that constitute a
crucial resource for understanding and shaping
sociopolitical life.

Marxist & NEO-MARXIST perspectives

o Within the Marxist tradition Antonio Gramsci (1971)
strengthened the notion of ideology-cum-power
through his theory of the hegemony of a consensual
historical bloc, but he also detached ideology from its
ephemeral and dogmatic nature.
o Gramsci analyzed the role of mass political activity in
shaping popular culture through secular faiths, and
recognized ideology in its highest sense as a
conception of the world consolidated by intellectuals,
directing social and Political practices, and present in
all manifestations of collective life, including art,
religion, literature and law.
o European political scene saw an increasing struggle
among competing political ideologies, in particular
among conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. While
Marxists could dismiss most of these as bourgeois
illusions, The power of ideas as a means to
o Organize political action, through political parties and
their programs, as well as in extra-parliamentary
forms, became evident
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o Karl Mannheim (1936) changed the conceptual

interpretation of ideology, accepted the Marxists‟
historical and social genesis of thought, but
expanded ideology to cover the multiple social
understandings of diverse social groups.

End of ideologiess
Daniel Bell (1962) said on account of their emphasis on
passions and emotions they could be called secular
religions.
He concluded that extreme ideologies were apparently
burning themselves out, leading to the end of ideologies.
Such views underestimated the emotive power of political
ideas.
They also incorporated a definitional constraint that
ignored Additional features of ideology that render the
political „center‟ just as ideological as the „right‟ and the
„left,‟ or that cannot account for the rise of social
movements such as feminism and environmentalism—
political and ideational expressions of new social concern.
Due to emergence of Post-structuralism, Micro-
structuralism, Semantics And Hermeneutics, Post
Marxism etc.
The Analysis Of Ideologies Has Undergone Considerable
Transformation.
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At the beginning of the twenty-first century,

developments in the analysis of ideology display two
tendencies.
Post-Marxist and poststructuralist theory regard ideology
as a modernist construct through which narratives
Necessary to maintaining the social order are produced.