Political Ideology Essay, Research Paper

An ideology is a fairly coherent and comprehensive set of ideas that explains and evaluates social conditions, helps people understand their place in society, and provides a program for social and political action. When people fall under certain ideologies such as communists or feminists we are robbing them of their individuality. There are an infinite number of beliefs, so ideologies should be infinite as well. The few ideologies are not realistic for the billions of individuals. It is not possible to group the entire population into the limited number of ideologies. Not everyone follows all of the tenets of a certain ideology. For example, a feminist could desire equal rights for women in the workplace and in public, but at the same time want males to control all aspects of the government. Thus, she would not be a true feminist , and it is unfair to label her as one. Political ideologies should be more of an individual belief rather than a group label.

On the other hand, ideologies are extremely helpful in numerous aspects of human lives. They help people understand history and help describe and evaluate the nations and communities of the past. People can learn from past mistakes and repeat past achievements. Today s society now can now see both the positive and negative effects of a communist society through researching the Soviet Union and it s past. Ideologies also help us categorize other nations, but once again we cannot categorize the individual people of the nation. People are educated through researching ideologies.

Freedom is essential in any ideology. Without freedom you once again lose the individuality of the person or state. Freedom is what helps create the ideology and without it there would not be the numerous ideologies that are in this world today. Freedom is a controversial topic. There are various types of freedom and different degrees of these types of freedom. When examining an ideology, we must look at its use of freedom and what type of freedom it is concerned with. Freedom plays a key role in all ideologies.

Ideologies perform a number of tasks. From mislabeling to educating, people use ideologies in both positive and negative ways in their lives. Ideologies are essential in the study of politics and the world. In order to understand politics we must first understand political ideology.