Ideology is a system of concepts and views that serves to make sense of the world while obscuring the social interests that are expressed therein, and by its completeness and relative internal consistency tends to form a closed system and maintain itself in the face of contradictory or inconsistent experience.

Terry Eagleton, in his book Ideologies, lists a range of meanings:

--the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;

--a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;

--ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;

--false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;

--systematically distorted communication;

--that which offers a position for a subject;

--forms of thought motivated by social interest;

--identity thinking;

--socially necessary illusion; the conjecture of discourse and power;

--the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;

--action-oriented sets of beliefs;

--the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;

--semiotic closure;

--the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;

--the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality.