Distinguishing Worldview, Philosophy, and Ideology

I frequently encounter and occasionally use the terms "worldview," "philosophy," and "ideology." The problems I have wrestled with are:
- What idea does each term name?
- How are the ideas--and the facts they subsume--related?

My answer is that a worldview is a comprehensive set of ideas that, taken together, explain at least: (1) the basic nature of the world in which one lives; (2) one's own basic nature (including the way one knows about the world around us); and (3) the manner in which one should act in the world. "Worldview" is the genus for two species: religion and philosophy. The essential characteristic distinguishing religion and philosophy is the method by which a theologian or philosopher comes to his conclusions: mysticism for religion versus reason for philosophy.

Whether they are religions or philosophies, worldviews are universal in the sense that they are meant by their developers to apply to all individuals, at all times, and in all places. For example, in Christianity, the virtue of charity wasn't meant by Christians to apply only to the people of the Eastern Mediterranean in the first century AD. Likewise, in Objectivism, the virtue of honesty--facing facts of reality--will apply as much 1000 years from now as it does today.

By contrast, an ideology is an application of a universal worldview (particularly its ethics and politics) to the current milieu, that is, a certain broadly defined time and place. An ideology is not merely the worldview's ethics and politics lopped off from their base in epistemology and ontology. An ideology explains (1) the nature of a society's current situation in history, especially the political aspects, and (2) what should, in the most general terms, be done next to create the ideal society. For example, Marxism is an ideology applying a Kantian philosophy to the time of Marx and his successors in the countries dominated by "capitalists." For another example of an ideology, see the title essay in Ayn Rand's For the New Intellectual.

Conclusion: Worldview, philosophy, and ideology have distinct, logically related meanings. They are not synonyms.

Burgess Laughlin
Author, The Power and the Glory:The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith

(The Ayn Rand Lexicon contains informative entries for "Ideology," "Religion," and "Philosophy.")