In my own usage, I try to follow the usage of Barbara Jeanne Fields in
her essay, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,"
New Left Review, May/June 1990. I like it because (a) it offers a fairly
clean distinction between ideology, propaganda, and theory and (b) it
enables a quite powerful explanation of the relationship between the way
people live/act and their spontaneous responses to that experience. (I
think a crude but useful reduction of her view would be that "ideology =
common sense.") Her definition seems to overlap the first and third you
offer, but does not quite coincide with either. I give the key
paragraphs below. It leaves open the question of whether, in any give
case, ideology can be equated with "false consciousness." (Incidentally,
Engels defined it as the belief that ideas have a history of their own.
That is useful, for instance, in critiquing the "history of ideas"
discipline. An immense amount of literary scholarship from, say, 1930 to
1980 made this assumption.)
Carrol
>From Barbara Jeanne Fields:
The material you presented on ideological forms and Engels formulation is insightful.
Melvin P.
