Ideology as a false pretense of universality

Abstract

This article aims to show that the concept of ideology can be understood as a case of false or inadequate pretension of universality and as a variant of the fallacy of abusive generalization. To achieve this, the starting point is the conceptions of ideology in Marx and Engels and their revision by authors such as Ricoeur, Adorno, Habermas and Bakhtin-Voloshinov. We seek to retake a critical concept of ideology that is useful for critical discourse studies, and in this sense, we oppose the neutral use of the same concept that has been proposed by discourse analysts such as Teun van Dijk and economists such as Thomas Piketty, among many others. To achieve this purpose, concepts from the analytical philosophy of language (G. Frege), from the theory of speech acts (Austin and Searle), from the critical theory of the Frankfort School (Adorno), from the theory of argumentation or New Rhetoric (Perelman-Olbrechts) and from the theory of communicative action (Habermas) are used. The notion of the fallacy of abusive generalization, present since Aristotle in the theories of formal and informal logic, is also used.