ideology
- 01 C1 Advanced
a set of ideas and principles that a group of people or a political party believes in.
a comprehensive set of normative beliefs, conscious and unconscious ideas, that an individual, group, or society holds.
Simple“The two political parties have a very different ideology regarding how to spend tax money.”
In context“The prevailing economic ideology of the late twentieth century prioritised market deregulation and the privatisation of state-owned industries.”
UsageOften used with adjectives like 'political', 'economic', or 'religious'.
Synonyms
“They inherited it, already formed, from attitudes about gender that many of their recruits held before they ever found an ideology to attach it to.”
“It pushes back against both an ideology that frames adults as superior over children and the practices that are based on this belief, such as excluding teens from decision-making.”
Borrowed from French idéologie, from idéo- + -logie (equivalent to English ideo- + -logy). Cognate with, but not derived from, idea. Coined 1796 by Antoine Destutt de Tracy. Modern sense of “doctrine” attributed to use of related idéologue (“ideologue”) by Napoleon Bonaparte as a term of abuse towards political opponents in early 1800s.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.