This book provides an introduction to the range of ideologies that frame the way political debates are conducted and political issues are decided. These debates and decisions are not the preserve of ‘specialists’ such as academics and politicians for, as argued in Chapter 1, we are all ideologists in the sense that we have understandings of the way the world works and values which guide our assessments of how it could be improved.
As the subtitle of the first chapter suggests, ideologies can be seen as contesting the nature of the ‘good society’—advancing rival claims about how the world works and could be improved through political action—and this conception is used throughout the book to set out and analyse each ideology. However, it is important to understand that ideology is a contested concept which can be defined and used in different ways, and developing this understanding is one of the main objectives of the first chapter.