Ideology and Art
Ideology and Art

Summary/Abstract: The term ‘ideology’ was first introduced in the 18th century by the French politician and philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who used the word idéologie to signify the science of ideas. Although an academic discipline by that name never actually emerged, various disciplines did start delving into the meaning of the concept, in search of an answer to the question of what the thing called ideology actually was. The original use of the word envisioned ideology primarily as a science that studied the formation of ideas in the human mind – a view that had a clear emancipatory dimension – but this sense began to fade in the late 19th century, at which point ideology began to be associated with false consciousness or processes by which power relations were reproduced.

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