Introduction

Discourse and power: combine the two terms and we think of ideology. Ideology has indeed been a very fertile topic of investigation in CDA (Kress and Hodge 1979; Fairclough 1989, 1992; Wodak 1989; van Dijk 1998) and related branches of discourse analysis (Verschueren 1999). The reasons for this are not hard to find: discourse (or semiotic behaviour at large) has been identified by almost every major scholar as a site of ideology. At the same time, the matter is only apparently straightforward. Few terms are as badly served by scholarship as the term ideology, and as soon as anyone enters the field of ideology studies, he or she finds him/herself in a morass of contradictory definitions, widely varying approaches to ideology, and huge controversies over terms, phenomena, or modes of analysis.

To start with the simplest and most basic difference in definition and approach: there are, on the one hand, authors who define ideology as a specific set of symbolic representations – discourses, terms, arguments, images, stereotypes – serving a specific purpose, and operated by specific groups or actors, recognisable precisely by their usage of such ideologies. On the other hand, there are authors who would define ideology as a general phenomenon characterising the totality of a particular social or political system, and operated by every member or actor in that system (see Eagleton 1991; Thompson 1984 for surveys).

Under the first category we can find the well-known ‘-isms’: socialism, liberalism, fascism, communism, libertarianism, anarchism, and so forth.