Conceptions of ideology: An exegesis and critique

Conceptions of ideology exhibit an awesome diversity. From an exegesis of nine different conceptions, this paper argues that it is the historical materialist view of ideology that reflects its specificity as a critical concept. From exegesis, the paper moves to diagnosis, using the critical idea that it is the systematic concealment of social contradictions that defines the ideological dis-ease. Thus, the positivist hard systems approach is found to suffer from the ideology of economic individualism. The structuralist hard systems approach suffers from the ideology of sociological unitarism. The soft systems approach suffers from the ideology of naturalism, thereby laying itself open, by default, to ideological penetration, especially of the sociological unitarist type. In programmatic terms, this unmasking of ideologies in the interest of enlightenment is one of the necessary functions for the liberation of systems theory.