Interest theory conceives ideology as a mask and a weapon within a “universal struggle for advantage” (201), while strain theory sees it as a symptom and a remedy for “sociopsychological disequilibrium” (201). The weakness of the evaluative conception becomes evident in the two dominant approaches to the study of the social determinants of ideology, which examine ideology’s social and psychological functions. Only after having understood these programs for the regulation of behavior can we legitimately relate culture to social structure. Groups employ machineries of meaning to orient themselves in the world. This raises the question of how ideology can be an analytic tool in the social sciences when scientists exhibit bias in their arguments. The starting point for a theory of culture, Geertz tells us, is a conception of thinking as a social act: a traffic in significant symbols. For example, Werner Stark paints ideology as psychologically deformed by human emotion, while more sophisticated arguments also present ideology as “a form of radical intellectual depravity” (197). This evaluative conception produces what Geertz refers to as Mannheim’s paradox, whereby the term’s lack of neutrality limits scientific objectivity-in this case, much sociological theory considers the relation between science and ideology in simplistic, judgmental terms. Geertz first defines culture itself as a fully semiotic term, meaning that cultures meaning is unique and ever-changing for every person who conceives of it. Geertz argues that the social sciences have developed only an evaluative conception of ideology.
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