Few words in contemporary political life are deployed more carelessly than “ideology.” Politicians use it to dismiss opponents. Commentators use it to explain what they don’t understand. Ordinary people use it to mean something like beliefs I disagree with or politics taken too seriously. None of this is what the word actually means, or why it matters. The term idéologie was coined in 1796 by the French philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy. He meant it as a neutral, scientific description: the study of ideas and their origins, a kind of intellectual anatomy, not necessarily or strictly political. It was Napoleon Bonaparte, who initially welcomed the idéologues as useful intellectuals, who later turned the word into an insult — accusing them of constructing abstract systems disconnected from political reality. The pejorative sense of the word thus begins with a general-emperor who found philosophers inconvenient. Nothing new under the sun: Alexander the Great executed his official historian Read More…

What is an ideology — and why should Christians care?