Over its long history, the concept of ideology has acquired a vast and at times incommensurable roster of meanings: positive and negative, analytic and critical, philosophical, psychological and scientific. But how precisely should we understand and study ideology today? What is its connection to key issues in social life and social research, such as capitalism and class, democracy and partisanship, nationality, sex and gender, race and ethnicity?

In this book, Marius S. Ostrowski navigates a path through the complex maze of ideology’s rival interpretations, tracing the shifting fortunes of ideology analysis from its classical origins to its recent renaissance. The result is a concise interdisciplinary overview of how ideologies combine and arrange ideas and how they manifest in our psychology and behaviour. Drawing on a wide array of examples from across the world, the book outlines the historical preconditions that allowed modern ideologies to emerge and illuminates how we experience ideology’s influence in our day-to-day lives.

Ideology will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars across the social sciences and anyone seeking to understand the way ideology shapes how we understand the world around us.