Ideology

Mainly for MG but others can enjoy too... Sixteen possible definitions of ideology:

• the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;
• a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
• ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
• false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
• systematically distorted communication;
• that which offers a position for a subject;
• forms of thought motivated by social interests;
• identity thinking;
• socially necessary illusion;
• the conjecture of discourse and power;
• the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
• action-oriented sets of beliefs;
• the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
• semiotic closure;
• the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;
• the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality.

From Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 1-3. Here quoted from Rosina Lippi-Green, Language ideology and language change in Early Modern German: a sociolinguistic study of the consonantal system of Nuremberg (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1994), p.7.