Ideology, perspective, and praxis

Abstract

has political utility as well as some consistency of meaning. The pejorative uses of "ideology" point to elements of practical political life which social scientists might designate by an alternative term but which nonetheless remains "ideology" in everyday terms. "Ideology" invites not terminological attention, then, but concern with the epistemological (and other philosophical) assumptions of social scientists. Social-scientific uses of "ideology" may rest on epistemological assumptions that obscure distinctions between ideologies and other types of belief systems. Terminological shifts only gloss such naivete.2