In this large study, Paul Ricoeur takes as its starting point the theory of Karl Mannheim who understood the concepts of ideology and utopia as intimately related, but defining them as two forms of diversion or inconsistency regarding reality.  Ricoeur contrast to this negative view a positive interpretation, considering that both phenomena there is also a positive factor and even necessary for the construction of discourses on real social life. Only if you are not too far from it can fulfill its positive role-narrative symbolic of the real development. For Ricoeur, the conjunction of these two opposing functions typifies the social and cultural imagination. Thus, the analysis of ideology and utopia is part of his broader philosophy of Ricoeur was imagination while developing the project. The speeches, both ideological and utopian, are the places where society places responses to historical and social changes. The research includes a detailed concept of ideology in Marx and shows its evolution in the theories of Max Weber, Louis Althusser, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt and Clifford Geertz, among other analyzes.  The slope of utopia are addressed throughout the text in novel interpretations of Renaissance and modern works from Thomas More to Fourier and other representative utopians of the nineteenth century. This work represents a decisive step towards a hermeneutics of society, anticipating the later positions Ricoeur in his theory of narrative and history