Original scientific paper
The End of Ideology or “a Grand Narrative” about the End of “Grand Narratives”
Rade Kalanj
; Department of Sociology, University of Zagreb
Abstract
The article analyzes the theses about the end of ideology, which arouse from the circumstance of the fifties and remained as the referent stereotype of all later analyses about the function of ideological factors in social life. After a historical reconstruction of the concept of ideology, arguments are offered which show that the concept is one of the “grand narratives” of modernity which went through its metamorphosis as did the modem society’ itself. The thesis about the end of ideology is nothing else but a new “grand narrative” because ideology lives in the contemporary social experience and plays three key functions: dissimulation, legitimization, and integration. We can speak about the end or crisis of total ideologies, but also about a very' vital pluralism of specific ideologies as useful compacts of ideals which foim a part of human beliefs, orientations and symbolic imaginaries.
Keywords
ideologem; integration; truth; false consciousness; legitimization; power; symbolic imaginaries; social relations; science of man
Hrčak ID:
154348
URI
Publication date:
30.6.2000.
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