You would never know this from the "ideologists of ideology" that ideology as a over-technical concept, which requires endless dialectical hand-ringing and more and more obscure analysis. We begin with Engels' analysis, which is readable by any good school boy or girl, and move to the such as the relatively readable Gramsci to the interesting (specialized) Kantian reflections of Lukacs, to the Freudian variations of the Frankfurt school, to the more and more arcane Lacanian derived ideas of Althusser and Zizek. No one has ever showed me that "ideology" is a technical concept or that it can't be understood with the everyday language of Marx and Engels of the German Ideology, or the language of Chomsky, or if you prefer Frankfurt derived neo-Freudian pseudoscience, the readable prose of Erich Fromm.
As a matter of intellectual history, Marx himself used the term "ideology" often in the period of 1845-46. The term "ideology" remains in the writings of Marx and Engels through the period of 1847-52. After 1852 the term ideology is rarely found in the texts of either Marx or Engels until Engels himself revives it in the _Anti-Duhring_ in the late 1870s. Now the fact is that "The German Ideology" where the term is elucidated to its fullest extent was an unpublished text. The term ideology does not appear in Marx's work for _Capital_ especially the the _Grundrisse_ or the _Theories of Surplus Value_. In Marx's best exploration of the political moment _The 18th Brumaire_ the term ideology does not appear.
On the point that the term ideology cannot be found in _Capital_ let me quote Balibar, the happy "post-marxist."
"Above all there is nothing about ideology in _Capital_, which, whether one likes it or not, is the cornerstone on which the Marxist edifice rests. It can no doubt be argued that a good number of the theoretical models that figure in the classical analyses of ideology are well and truly represented in _Capital_, those pertaining to commodity and money fetishism and, more generally, to the inverted relation between the deep sphere of production and the superficial sphere of exchange. Clearly these analyses, by dint of their object ought to be part of a field of a theory of ideology..., either to explain the specific effects of ideology or to give an account of its genesis. That only makes more conspicuous the absence of ideology in the theoretical space of _Capital_ and generally within what can be called the moment of _Capital_ in the history of Marxism."
Well here is the problem right here. There is no "field of a theory of ideology" and no one has developed such a field that is non-trivial, explanatory, and/or has produced a working theoretical "model" or a set of scientific concepts and principals that are both non-trivial and explanatory.
I will quote Chomsky from his Amnesty International lecture in Dublin once again to counter the Angels theoretical spaciness.
"(1) Facts matter, even if we do not like them.
"(2) Elementary moral principles matter, even if they have consequences that we would prefer not to face.
"(3) Relative clarity matters. It is pointless to seek a truly precise definition of "terror," or of any other concept outside of the hard sciences and mathematics, often even there. But we should seek enough clarity at least to distinguish terror from two notions that lie uneasily at its borders: aggression and legitimate resistance."
In (3) substitute the word "ideology" for the word "terror" and substitute for the words "aggression" and "legitimate resistance", for words such as hypocrisy, self-deception, hypocrisy, propaganda, dogma, indoctrination on the former side of the "and" and on the latter side put words such as world-view, point-of-view, realistic model, skepticism and attempts to decode on the other side.
Rewritten in this context:
"Relative clarity matters. It is pointless to seek a truly precise definition of "ideology" or of any other concept outside of the hard sciences and mathematics, often even there. But we should seek enough clarity at least to distinguish _ideology_ from [other] notions that lie uneasily at its borders: self-deception, hypocrisy propaganda, dogma, indoctrination and world-view, point-of-view, realistic model, skepticism, attempts to decode obscurantism."
Very ungainly and not well written but as far as I can see it has the advantage of being pretty much true and not that hard to understand.
Angelus has not once showed me that such statements as Chomsky's are not incorrect. The same with the following.
"Critical analysis in the ideological arena seems to me to be a fairly straightforward matter as compared to an approach that requires a degree of conceptual abstraction. For the analysis of ideology, which occupies me very much, a bit of open-mindedness, normal intelligence, and healthy skepticism will generally suffice."
"For example, take the question of the role of the intelligentsia in a society like ours. This social class, which includes historians and other scholars, journalists, political commentators, and so on, undertakes to analyze and present some picture of social reality. By virtue of their analyses and interpretations, they serve as mediators between the social facts and the mass of the population: they create the ideological justification for social practice. Look at the work of the specialists in contemporary affairs and compare their interpretation with the events, compare what they say with the world of fact. You will often find great and fairly systematic divergence. Then you can take a further step and try to explain these divergences, taking into account the class position of the intelligentsia.
"Such analysis is, I think, of some importance, but the task is not very difficult, and the problems that arise do not seem to me to pose much of an intellectual challenge. With a little industry and application, anyone who is willing to extricate himself from the system of shared ideology and propaganda will readily see through the modes of distortion developed by substantial segments of the intelligentsia. Everybody is capable of doing that. If such analysis is often carried out poorly, that is because, quite commonly, social and political analysis is produced to defend special interests rather than to account for the actual events.
"Precisely because of this tendency one must be careful not to give the impression, which in any event is false, that only intellectuals equipped with special training are capable of such analytic work. In fact that is just what the intelligentsia would often like us to think: they pretend to be engaged in an esoteric enterprise, inaccessible to simple people. But that's nonsense. The social sciences generally, and above all the analysis of contemporary affairs, are quite accessible to anyone who wants to take an interest in these matters. The alleged complexity, depth, and obscurity of these questions is part of the illusion propagated by the system of ideological control, which aims to make the issues seem remote from the general population and to persuade them of their incapacity to organize their own affairs or to understand the social world in which they live without the tutelage of intermediaries. For that reason alone one should be careful not to link the analysis of social issues with scientific topics which, for their part, do require special training and techniques, and thus a special intellectual frame of reference, before they can be seriously investigated.
"In the analysis of social and political issues it is sufficient to face the facts and to be willing to follow a rational line of argument. Only Cartesian common sense, which is quite evenly distributed, is needed ... if by that you understand the willingness to look at the facts with an open mind, to put simple assumptions to the test, and to pursue an argument to its conclusion. But beyond that no special esoteric knowledge is required to explore these "depths," which are nonexistent." [Language and Responsibility_ p. 3-5.]
Now as far as saying anything "deeper" about the analysis of ideology in the real world nothing in what has been written has shown me why Chomsky's about what I would wish to call "Plato's two problems", leaving Orwell out of it, is not a good starting point. In fact no one has ever shown me why reading Thucydides, or the debates around the Sophists, cannot provide as much insight into ideology as Marx.
"Plato's problem, then is to explain how we know so much, given that evidence to us is so sparse. Orwell's problem is to explain why we know and understand so little, even though the evidence available to us is so rich." Noam Chomsky _Knowledge of Language_ p. xxvii
One place where I disagree with Carrol is casting the question of "why we know and understand so little though the evidence available is so rich" as a propaganda. I think that Trivers' notion of "self-deception" and how self-deception works in society is as good a "scientific" starting point as any. But as I said their is as yet no possibility to develop a theoretical model of "ideology."