Ideology was invented in a Terror-era prison as a science of ideas
Antoine Destutt de Tracy spent November 1793 to October 1794 locked up awaiting trial during the Reign of Terror, reading Locke and Condillac. Out of that confinement came a new word, idéologie, meant to name a rigorous science of how ideas form. Within a decade Napoleon had turned it into an insult.
Tracy, a French aristocrat and Enlightenment philosopher, coined the term in 1796 from the Greek words for notion and study. His plan was to ground moral and political science in two things: the sensations people receive from the material world and the ideas those sensations produce in the mind. He also saw his project as a liberal philosophy defending individual liberty, property, free markets and limits on state power. His major work, The Elements of Ideology, appeared in parts between 1804 and 1815 and was quickly translated across Europe.
In Karl Mannheim's reconstruction, the modern meaning was born when Napoleon dismissed his opponents as the ideologues. For the next century the word swung between praise and contempt. Liberal thinkers in Italy, Spain and Russia who tried to revive revolution in the early 1820s, including the Carbonari and the Decembrists, drew on it approvingly. Karl Marx took Napoleon's side of the argument, sneering at Tracy as a cold-blooded bourgeois dogmatist and treating ideology as consciousness produced by economic relations that serves the ruling class.
By 1907 English speakers were using the word for any comprehensive framework of beliefs through which people interpret the world, and over time it lost much of its sting to become a neutral term of political analysis. Scholars still define it in competing ways. Manfred Steger and Paul James stress patterned clusters of ideas that carry claims about power and social truth, while David Minar counted six distinct uses of the word, from normative content to persuasion.
Everyday speech keeps a trace of the old scorn. An ideologue is someone committed to an ideology, usually with connotations of blind partisanship or fanaticism, and Teun van Dijk has observed that people tend to reserve the word for other people's rigid ideas while treating their own as simply true. Belief itself can run anywhere from passive acceptance to fervent advocacy.
Source: Ideology
