It is important to distinguish carefully among language, common sense, and ideology. 

First, a definition of ideology: “the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in” (Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction [Minnesota UP, 1983],14.)

Language is never co-terminous with the ideologies it is capable of promoting, if for no other reason than that some of them contradict each other.  Common sense is often equated with ideology insofar as adhering to it seems to be a way of avoiding the task of thinking for oneself, the Enlightenment’s primary dictum (Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”). 

Common sense is invoked when Ludwig Wittgenstein promises to bring language “back” from its philosophical to its everyday use as a way of conducting “therapy” for anglo-american philosophy (he’s implying here that this field of philosophy is symptomatic).  Ernest Gellner (Words as Things) accuses Wittgenstein’s work of promoting “things as they are,” William Godwin’s definition of ideology (the main title of his novel Caleb Williams, first published in 1794), because Wittgenstein says that philosophy should intend to leave things as it finds them.  But the idea there is that, in trying to change the designations of words, philosophers remain in the grip of a grammar they don’t see.  If your goal is to leave things as they are, the task has to be trying to figure out how* they are.  Wittgenstein examines the common-sense meaning of words in order to find the locus of the “picture” that “held us captive” — i.e., the way that language creates a grammar of things, of what they can be and how they can interact, that, unplumbed, inhibits our thinking.  By examining how words typically work, Wittgenstein can see the assumptions about the being of things that philosophers have uncritically inherited from ordinary language.

* To me, this approach accomplishes the same release from a focus on reference as does Foucault’s when he says, don’t ask who wields power, but how it works (Michel Foucault, “On Power,” Politics, Philosophy, Culture, trans. Alan Sheridan [Routledge, 1988], 103). It reminds you that the word “power,” no less than the personification “Power,” is a “grammatical illusion,” not a really existing thing, and so sentences have to be used describing all the things that collectively constitute “power” when we speak about “it,” point to “it,” invoke “it” in any way.