Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ideology and history

2005; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569310500395859

1469-9613

Bo Stråth,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

Ideologies can be seen as cognitive structures with legitimizing functions. There is no principled or very clear demarcation between them and other knowledge structures, although there clearly are differences. In the old understanding ideology was seen in terms of some kind of representation. There was something behind the ideology, and the ideology made this 'something' reappear. The erosion of the concept of representation during last decades has concurred with the erosion of the concept of ideology. This is not to say that ideologies have disappeared. The language of globalization and the ideas of clashes of civilizations are sufficient evidence of the role of ideologies, in the form of master narratives, with totalizing ambitions or pretensions of being the explanation of the world. However, the analysis of ideologies has become much more complex. Instead of taking ideologies as pre-given they must be critically deconstructed and contextualized. Their emergence must be historicized and their appearance must be understood much more in terms of opposition, discontinuities and contradictions, internally as well as externally, than in terms of cohesion and continuity.