Critique des idéologies, critique des utopies

This paper aims at describing the dialectical relation between ideology and utopia in Ricœur’s social philosophy and to look at them through the angle of critique. The paper shows the role of critique within Ricœur’s philosophy and describes the presence of several types, functions and subjects of critique in this philosophy, emphasizing the importance, in the context of its relation with Critical Theory, of genealogical, normative and reconstructive critique. Recalling that pathological forms of ideology and utopia must be criticized, but also that both ideologies and utopias, in a positive sense, can also be important tools of critique, the paper aims at pinning down some unresolved problems of the Ricœurian approach to this topic but also at showing that the critical aspect of Ricœur’s philosophy still has a lot to teach us today.