Ideology and the Protestant Principle

Abstract

ith the publication of the English translation of Paul Tillich's major work on socialism, Die sozialistische Entscheidung (1972), more attention is now being paid to that period of Tillich's career and writing when one of his chief preoccupations was the elaboration of a religious variety of socialism. The relation between his socialist theorizing and his developing theology is sometimes hard to plot. But in considering some themes from his socialism, one can see an enlarging of basic theological insights at work. One such theme of particular interest is the concept of ideology. Ideology is an elusive concept to grasp in the thought of Karl Marx, not least because it is nowhere treated systematically and in the later works like Capital seems almost to disappear from view. Futhermore, the meaning of ideology in socialist thought owes much to later Marxists like Lenin, Lukacs, and Gramsci and to modern commentators like Althusser and Goldmann. The picture is also complicated by the influence of such non-Marxist thinkers as Karl Mannheim and the general influence of German historicism. Thus a cluster of interpretative problems arises. Tillich himself seems to have been aware of some of these