An ideology claims the key to history or universal hidden laws

Evidence

Until the fateful days of the “scramble for Africa,” race-thinking had been one of the many free opinions which, within the general framework of liberalism, argued and fought each other to win the consent of public opinion. Only a few of them became full-fledged ideologies, that is, systems based upon a single opinion that proved strong enough to attract and persuade a majority of people and broad enough to lead them through the various experiences and situations of an average modern life. For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the “riddles of the universe,” or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 432

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s formal definition of ideology (vs. simple opinion) — a load-bearing concept for the whole field’s critical vocabulary.
• XREF: Directly comparable to Gramsci’s hegemony — ideology as common sense that masses will no longer accept facts contradicting it. — connects to: Historical materialism needs hidden theology to win its game — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 601; All theories of history covertly organize around a hypothesis of a vanished plenitude — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 91
• DEEPTHINKING: The point that ideologies made ‘free public opinion’ itself unable to accept facts not in agreement — a dense mechanism linking ideology, consent, and perception.