The Taiping Ideology: Its Sources, Interpretations, and Influences

From the Introduction: An analytical study of an ideology is believed to be a key to the understanding of the society in which it takes form. This belief is based on the assumptions that ideas are functions of the persons who express them and that "the shape that ideas take is relative to the culture and era in which they develop and are used." On the other hand we are also aware that "there are internal standards of validity in ideas themselves." It is precisely this study of the intrinsic validity of 8ideas themselves (or categories of understanding, according to philosophers) that distinguishes philosophy from ideology, the latter being a system or systems of ideas always conceived n conjunction with social, economic, political, and other objective conditions.