Ideology’s shift from science of ideas to system of ideas demands historical explanation

Evidence

How the concept of Ideology passed from meaning “science of ideas” and “analysis of the origin of ideas” to meaning a specific “system of ideas” needs to be examined historically. In purely logical terms the process is easy to grasp and understand. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1336

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• QUESTION: The historical analysis Gramsci gestures toward here — the passage from sensationalist epistemology to ideology-as-system — is the very conceptual genealogy that later theory (including Said’s Orientalism) retraces; worth chasing in the secondary literature.
• DEFINE: Names the critical terminological watershed in the concept of ideology that the reader’s toolkit needs.

Related

• The original meaning of ideology was the science of how ideas derive from sensations (similarity 0.90)
• Ideologies that explain everything from a single premise are a recent phenomenon (similarity 0.88)
• The term ‘ideology’ conflates necessary superstructure with arbitrary individual fancies (similarity 0.86)
• Ideologies apply the logic of an idea to history as an unfolding process. (similarity 0.85)
• Mass ideology must be distinguished from its great philosophical cornerstones (similarity 0.84)
• Ideology can be reconceived as a terrain of struggle, drawing on Gramsci and Laclau. (similarity 0.83)
• The concept of ideology was born torn between historical relativism and universal truth. (similarity 0.83)
• An ideology in its highest sense is a world-conception permeating all social life (similarity 0.83)
• Ideology is shaped within material institutions, not by class or economics. (similarity 0.83)
• Organic versus traditional intellectuals is the key axis for analysis (similarity 0.82)
• Philosophical elaboration must be performed within the history of philosophy (similarity 0.82)
• Mass ideology differs from the scientific syntheses that anchor it. (similarity 0.82)
• Ideology is a material system of meaning, not merely false consciousness (similarity 0.81)
• Ideologies are material relations enacted through institutions and practices (similarity 0.81)
• Ideology must be conceived as a terrain of struggle, not just functional cement (similarity 0.81)