Ideology as Persuasive Belief and Theory

Abstract

A group of shipwrecked sailors, in danger of death in stormy seas, might believe, falsely or without good evidence, that help would come to them in time. Nobody would call such a belief ideological merely because the sailors clung to it to allay their fears. To be ideological a belief must be one that people resort to on most or many occasions of a given kind. But a belief like this ordinarily goes along with other beliefs. It belongs to a set of related beliefs to which a community or group resort in situations that recur quite frequently. The people who share these beliefs may acquire them gradually without even being aware that they form a more or less consistent set of beliefs. It might take a sociologist or a social anthropologist to explain how these beliefs are related to one another and to define the situations in which they are resorted to.