Birth and Fall

The Encyclopédie, the work mainly of men whose political convictions the idéologues adopted and extended, does not, as is well known, contain the word idéologie. Even doctrine is not dealt with as a separate item, but only doctrine chrétienne. It is described as the aim of a religious congregation founded in Cavaillon, Provence, to teach the people in imitation of the apostles the mysteries of the Christian faith. Idée we find equated with logic, including sensation and idée proprement dite. The latter can assume the form of abstract ideas – idées générales ou universelles. These reflect a manner of thinking in relation to universals whose existence is ideal only but which are founded in the nature of things or in the resemblance to particulars. The separate definition of idéal severs the bond with reality and already has that pejorative tinge which was to recur in the political connotation possessed almost from the outset by the term idéologie. ‘On dit c'est un homme idéal, pour déligner le caractère chimérique de son esprit.’ The equation of ideal and chimerical precludes the attribution of a corrective function to an ideal since no concession to its realizability is intimated here. In this spirit Napoleon gave the newly coined word idéologie his unimaginative but alas effective twist.