An ideology is a set of conscious and unconscious ideas that constitute one.docVIP

An ideology is a set of conscious and unconscious ideas that constitute ones goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology is a comprehensive vision, a way of looking at things (compare worldview) as in several philosophical tendencies (see political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society (a received consciousness or product of socialization). Ideologies are systems of abstract thought applied to public matters and thus make this concept central to politics. Implicitly every political or economic tendency entails an ideology, whether or not it is propounded as an explicit system of thought. The term ideology was born in the highly controversial philosophical and political debates and fights of the French Revolution, and acquired several other meanings from the early days of the First French Empire to the present. The word was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796,[1][2] assembling the parts idea (near to the Lockean sense) and -logy. He used it to refer to one aspect of his science of ideas (to the study itself, not the subject of the study). He separated three aspects, namely: ideology, general grammar, and logic, considering respectively the subject, the means, and the reason of this science.[3] He argues that among these aspects ideology is the most generic term, because the science of ideas also contains the study of their expression and deduction. According to Karl Mannheims historical reconstruction of the shifts in the meaning of ideology, the modern meaning of the word was born when Napoleon Bonaparte (as a politician) used it in an abusive way against the ideologues (a group which included[citation needed] Cabanis, Condorcet, Constant, Daunou, Say, Madame de Sta?l, and Destutt de Tracy), to express the pettiness of his (liberal republican) political opponents. Perhaps the most accessible source for the near-original meaning of ideology is Hippolyte Taines work on the Ancien Regime (the