Ideology and Rationality

Definitions of the term ideology may be grouped in two main classes, those that imply a negative evaluation, such as “there is something rotten about any and every ideology,” and those that are roughly neutral. The first class, which treats ideology as a dyslogism, may be further divided into two subclasses: definitions that stress illusion, preconception, fanaticism, mistakes, or narrowness, but not insincerity, and those that do refer to insincerity, bad faith, rationalizations in a Freudian sense, distortion, concealed interests, or naked power orientations. Most of the couple of hundred definitions provided in a previous work (Naess et al. 1956) conform to such a classification into neutral or negative definitions.