Daniel Şandru, The critical-ideological analysis and the issue of utopia
The critical-ideological analysis and the issue of utopia
Initially placed within different fields of human thinking, ideology and utopia have become elements in the discourse specific to social-political philosophy and theory, even if sometimes this state of affairs has done nothing but deepen the conceptual ambiguity of these two central figures of the social imaginary. The various perspectives from which the relationship between ideology and utopia has been analysed cannot claim to provide a rigorous explanation of the meanings that they hold, or, implicitly, of the roles that they play within the sphere of social knowledge. The two concepts seem to be intertwined, and therefore any investigation of the social imaginary which seeks to delimit the influence of ideology on institutional practices and human behaviours is inevitably accompanied by considerations about utopia. Precisely from this perspective, this paper aims to capture the grounds of the theoretical-political interpretation regarding the issue of utopia. What I intend to highlight shall be framed by the main coordinates of the critical-ideological analysis, a type of analysis which, from my viewpoint, is applicable to both utopianism and political mythology.
Keywords: ideology, utopia, ideological analysis, historicism, dialectics, social engineering
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