Ideology

IDEOLOGY. - Etymologically (from ἰδέα and λόγος) it is the science of ideas.

The term was used for the first time by Destutt de Tracy: «L'idéologie est la science des idées (Éléments d'idéologie, I, Paris 1801, p. 5). Windelband notes however: «It is not excluded that de Tracy took this name from Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre» (Storia della filosofia, Ital. trans. by C. Dentice D'Accadia, II, Palermo 1938, p. 133, note). I. was understood by Destutt de Tracy as the study of representative mental facts, in their origin and psychological nature and in their expression by means of language. Given the prevalence, toward the end of the 18th century, particularly in France, of the psychological-descriptive approach (as a continuation of the work of Condillac), ideologues were then called philosophers in general, and in particular, with a pejorative sense for the abstractness that inspired their system, the group Diderot, Cabanis, Volney, Helvetius, D'Alembert, etc.

In Italy the term was used by M. Gioia, B. D'Aquisto, F. Soave, P. Galluppi, A. Rosmini and others. For Galluppi «i. is the science of the origin and generation of i.s» (Elementi di filosofia, II, Livorno 1852, ch. 1, § 1), and particularly of the ideas essential to the human intellect, that is, of those ideas without which human knowledge would be impossible, such as, for example, substance, quality, space, number, cause, effect, body, I. For Rosmini «i. treats of the origin and nature of ideas and therefore of being as pure and absolute idea, in which all the others are contained» (Teosofia, I, national ed., Rome 1938, p. 33). It is therefore the study of ideal being, that is, of the original form of thought: «I. is the science of the intellectual light with which man renders intelligible to himself the sensible things, from which he draws universal knowledge..., i. does not create nor invent this light..., but it transfers it from the order of intuition to that of scientific reflection and thus forms a science of it» (Logica, I, cited ed., ibid. 1942, p. 1, no. 1).

In Neoscholastic philosophy, the term was sometimes used, not without analogy with the Rosminian meaning, to indicate the psychological-gnoseological treatise on the origin and value of ideas or general concepts (cf. A. Farges-D. Barbedette, Philosophia neoscolastica, I, 63rd ed., Paris 1936, p. 369). But the use is today almost disappeared. In current language, with a tendency, often, toward the pejorative sense, i. is equivalent to a philosophical system or a set of principles and conceptions that characterize an epoch, an age, a culture, a people, a group: e.g., spiritualist, materialist, liberal i. See also ENLIGHTENMENT; POSITIVISM; SENSISM.

Ugo Viglino