REVIEWS

THE GODS AT WAR

The Beginning of ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Refor-

mation, D. R. Kelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), xv +
351 pp.

Modern interest in ideology was stimulated by the publication in 1927 of

The German Ideology, eighty-one years after it had been completed by Marx
and Engels, and by the appearance soon afterwards of Karl Mannheims
Ideology and Uropia. In 1942 the literary critic Lionel Trilling depicted the
Second World War as a clash of ideologies:

In time of war. when two different cultures. or two extreme modifications of the
same culture. confront each other with force. this belief in the autonomy of
ideas becomes especially strong and therefore especially clear. What the
gods were to the ancients at war, ideas are to us.

In such conditions the kinds of ideology objectively defined by Mannheim

were subsumed by what seemed a struggle between good and evil, and after
the war, when ideological differences between the victors had turned victory
sour, disillusionment led Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell, Edward Shils and
others to discuss the end of ideology. In 1949 Trilling set the disenchanted
tone of the debate with a definition much in contrast with his earlier remarks:

Ideology is not the product of thought: it is the habit or ritual of showing respect
for certain formulas, to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional
safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequence in actuality
we have no clear understanding.

Trillings two judgments are particularly appropriate to the themes of Profes-

sor Kelleys new book. The first suggests his title, for he claims that the initial
campaign in Trillings modern war of the gods was fought in the sixteenth
century; the second suggests a preoccupation with the unconscious sources of
ideas in their social context, rather than with their clarity or coherence.
Kelley calls his book an experiment in history - intellectual history (p.
vii). It is a remarkable experiment, a blend of fact and imagination, logic and
unreason, theory and history. Its avowed purposes are to reconstruct
experience, to achieve relevance without anachronism, and to generalise in
terms of a temporal continuum uniting the sixteenth century with the twen-
tieth. The aim, we are told, is to seek patterns, not to identify causes; to
interpret rather than to explain. This is achieved by a flexible approach to the

325
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nature of ideology, which sometimes takes an objective existence as a

composite of rational and emotional mental states held collectively, and at
other times serves as a subjective method for the interpreter, a way of
relating the study of society, whether in terms of institutional or class struc-
ture or set of cultural forms, to particular human thought and testimony
(p. 3). The method is alleged to be more systematic than the rag-bag study of
menfulit~, and yet no less attuned to the irrational aspects of collective
convention and the individual unconscious. It is said to be directed at that
pivotal and almost inaccessible juncture between society and consciousness
(P. 4).
Like Montesquieu deploying his concept of lesprit gtntrul, Kelley refuses
to be bound by his own definitions. At least he makes clear what ideology is
not. It is not the abstract study of systems of ideas, appraised in terms of
internal coherence and external affiliations, with little regard for social con-
text and temporal setting. It is not the kind of Hegelian idealism that sees
historical process as rationally ordered by the dialectic within and the abso-
lute without, where the cunning of reason mocks human intentions. Nor is it
the materialist version in which, to quote The German ideology, the phan-
toms formed in the human brain are . sublimates of their material life
process. Ideology to Kelley is more than the study of false consciousness,
and more than a doctrinaire programme intended to produce radical change.
While he promises to include the emotional subconscious and irrational (p.
4), he disdains psychohistory. To him Freudian psychoanalysis is as mislead-
ing as Marxian class analysis, for the study of ideology must avoid the
gratuitous (and perhaps meretricious) application of theories derived from
other contexts (p. viii). This might suggest that Kelley has much in common
with the historicist methods of Quentin Skinner, but his method is very
different. It depends less upon rationalising a narrow political setting than
upon a kind of collective imagination to which linguistic tropes are as impor-
tant as logical categories. It employs synecdoche and metonymy: it is con-
cerned with the syntagmatic as well as with the paradigmatic.
While it is surely rash to celebrate the demise of modern ideology. it makes
good sense to locate its birth pangs in the civil wars associated with the
Reformation. The break up of the universal church and the emergence of the
nation state are familiar images, and Kelley sees medieval views of govern-
ment and society given new focus in the sixteenth century. Thus the French
religious wars are described as both the harvest time for medieval ideas and
the seed time for modern ideology (p. 307). The Protestant conscience is
assumed to play the major role in the transition. imprinting its form upon the
secular systems of ideas that succeeded it. As Comte saw the roots of meta-
physics in religion, so Kelley calls recent ideologies the ghosts of dead
religious enthusiasm. at least in terms of the patterns of propaganda (p. 745).
He explains the formal organisation of political and social theory through an
expanding series of impressionistic sketches. from the initial explosion of
religious protest through the effects of conversion and its formalisation upon
the family, the congregation. the university, the legal profession. the mode of
propaganda and the political party.
Reviews 327

The technique of providing narrative or descriptive tableaux at the head of

each chapter is reminiscent of the historiography of the French romantics in
the period of the Restoration. Kellcy used it in his biography of Francois
Hotman to provide a kind of formal backdrop to the personal experience of
his revolutionary hero. In this book the prefatory scenes are called apo-
logues or moral fables. and they are chosen to convey intuitive insights to
topics that are about to receive explicit analysis. To list them is to outline the
general structure of The Beginning of Ideology. The affair of the placards
(1534) introduces the chapter on the advent of religious confrontation; the
filial defection of Beza (154X) precedes an account of the psychology of
conversion within the family circle; the repression of the Protestant gathering
in the rue Saint-Jacques (1557) communicates the atmosphere in which the
evangelical spirit spread through martyrdom; defiance of Aristotelian scho-
lasticism by Peter Ramus (1543) leads to an account of dissent within the
universities and the shaping of intellectual structures there; criticism of judi-
cial persecution of Protestants by the judge, Anne du Bourg, in the presence
of king and purfemenl (1559) sets the scene for discussion of the role of the
lawyers in transmuting the sociology of conscience into formal political
thought; the burning of the scholar master-printer Etienne Dolet (1546)
prefaces a chapter on propaganda through the new medium of print; the
declaration of Conde as leader of the Huguenot forces of resistance (1562)
acts as prelude to the study of a new phenomenon, the revolutionary political
party; finally. Le Reveille-Marin (1573), one of the first Huguenot radical
responses to the massacre of St. Bartholomew. allows analysis of the rival
themes of popular and absolutist sovereignty and returns to the general
argument about the rise and fall of ideology.
The apologues run backwards or forwards in time, sometimes adding
analogies, sometimes feeding in loose biographical or other factual details,
but always recreating emotive attributes and representing a complex histor-
ical whole by an illustrative part. The technique is not as artless as Kelleys
reference to his method as soundings would imply. There is a Vichian
element here, working at the threshold of past consciousness and seeking to
convey the feel of intellectual conventions that defy fully rational exegesis.
Through the tropes of synecdoche and metonymy Vito tried to explain
the transition from primitive poetic consciousness to metaphysical
conceptualisation:

Metonymy of agent for act resulted from the fact that names for agents were
commoner than names for acts. Metonymy of subject for form and accident was
due to inability to abstract forms and qualities from subjects. Certainly
metonymy of cause for effect produced in each case a little fable.

Just so do the apologues. or little fables, function as Kelleys attempt to

convey his point of juncture between consciousness and society. The
historians method here is an analogue of Vitos account of the development
of the primitive mind.
Consciously or not. Kelley owes another debt to Vito. Vito was not
328 Reviews

satisfied with the belief that the why was encompassed by the how in
intellectual history. The why question was answered by providence, and
providence was of two kinds: a transcendent one for the chosen people, and
an immanent one for the gentiles. Equally, Kelley is not content to explain
how the birth of modern ideology occurred: he also wants to establish why,
and in doing so he utilises the distinction between the transcendent and the
immanent. The latter is represented by the Catholic doctrine of the mass and
the corrupting influence of the belief that Gods will is manifest in the
material history of His church. As Kelley sees it, the Protestant reaction
involves the pure acceptance of the transcendent and a rejection of the
material. This argument is a major theme in this artfully constructed book
(pp. 81, 150, 316, 324), and it is part of the explanation of the self-destructive
aspect of ideology.
In the first chapter the transformation of religious conscience into a formal
demand for change, challenging the structure of authority, is decribed as a
process of formation, deformation, reformation (p. 26). The shape of
Lutheranism as an idealist movement, lamenting the loss of purity and seek-
ing total reform, is the original dialectic of modern history. Ideology becomes
the secularisation and formalisation of transcendent ideals, and in the process
the doctrine of immanence returns. In a later passage, apologising for lapsing
into abstract generalisation, Kelley defines four steps in the growth of ideol-
ogy: identification, or rationalising a commitment in formal terms; legitim-
ation, or justifying it by claiming it as a tradition; publication, or propagating
the doctrine by printing and other means; and organisation, or enforcing the
emergent ideological programme through a political party (p. 327). Despite
the books concentration upon the period before 1572, it does not seem that
Huguenot political thinking becomes a programmatic ideology until after the
massacre of St. Bartholomew. At this point Kelley writes of the most subver-
sive and radical polemic of modern times (p. 281) and represents Bezas De
lure Adugis~rutuum as a considerable theory of revolution (p. 292).
Moreover, he detects a certain drift from an empirical and authoritarian
mode of persuasion to more rational modes of proof (p. 313). Eventually the
strains of partisan secular politics force ideology to become so flexible that it
loses the remnants of its idealist aura. This was the inevitable fate of the
Huguenot cause when it substituted a defence of the dynastic claims of its
leader, Henry of Navarre, for its revolutionary thrust. The argument does not
end here, however, for Kelley suggests, in terms similar to Mannheims
Ideology and Utopia, that when an age returns to pragmatic politics the
transcendent values that spawned one ideology remain, as it were. in the
margin of history, awaiting resurrection in the dawn of some new revolution-
ary consciousness.
Two main criticisms may be offered. First. despite the authors remarkable
erudition, there are far too many factual errors and misunderstandings of
detail. Second, it must be said that. if the French religious wars are the
seed-bed of modern ideology, they are so not merely because of the
Huguenots but equally (or even more) because of the French Catholic
League. Kelley discusses the League in a paragraph or two. and. Clearly. its
Reviews 329

particular blend of politics and religious enthusiasm does not fit the
interpretation he has derived from Protestant experience. Apart from the
reversal of the immanence/transcendence argument during the Leagues
period of dominance. there is need to account for the survival and transmu-
tation of its religious enthusiasm in the seventeenth century. Moreover, there
are many passages in the propaganda of both the League and its enemies, the
Politiques, to suggest that. in contrast with Huguenot experience, major
social conflicts were involved in the religious and political aspects. Those who
have recently studied the League describe its ideology as more truly revolu-
tionary in the modern sense. Nor has Politique propaganda been properly
appraised by Kelley in its ideological or anti-ideological contexts, although
Bodin and Gentillet are briefly discussed among sixteenth-century ideo-
logues, and there are remarks about Machiavellism, Montaigne and Politique
disillusionment in the section of the final chapter entitled The End of
Ideology.
This is a brilliant but erratic book. The insights it conveys through the
sympathetic imagination displayed in the early chapters more than
compensate for the heavy sociologising encountered in the concluding sec-
tions. In the epilogue all the cautious reservations stated at the outset vanish
in smoke. as the author endeavours to map out the historical process in
general(p. 337). It is an impressive performance. but one in which Montes-
quieu tends to get the upper hand of Vito. It is the mark of Kelleys
achievement that these are the names with which one prefers to associate
him, rather than those modern gurus revered by the historical sociologists
who, despite his promise to the contrary, make a covert entrance in his final
pages.
J. H. M. Salmon
Bryn Mawr College
Pennsylvania

NOTES

1. L. Trilling, The Liberul Imagination (London: Seeker and Warburg. 1951), p. 193.
The lecture in which Trilling offered this opinion was entitled The Sense of the
Past. and was delivered at Columbia University.
2. Ibid., p. 286. This lecture, given at the University of Rochester, was called The
Meaning of a Literary Idea. The passage is cited in The Harper Dictionary of
Modern Thought (New York, 1977). p. 298.
3. Marx and Engels. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, L. S. Feuer (ed.)
(London, 1969). p. 288.
4. See Theory in Historical Context, pp. 331-335 in this issue. and Kelleys own
review of Skinners Foundations of Modern Political Thought, The Journal of the
History of Ideas XL11 (1981). 263-73.
5. On this distinction, arguing that in history the order of the elements in narrative
conveys a better understanding than the logical relationship between analytic
concepts, see L. Gossman. Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography, History
and Theory 15(1976). 20. On the general priority of poetic images before rational
constructs see H. White. Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1973).
330 Reviews

6. The New Science of Giambattista Vito, trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (New
York: Doubleday, 1961), Vol. II. para 406, p. 89.
7. Dandelot is the brother of Coligny and Odet de Chatillon. not of Conde and
Antoine de Bourbon (p. 94); the social prestige of the college of royal secretaries is
much higher than the author supposes (p. 182); Barnabe Brisson was not hanged
by the Catholic League but by a group of radicals who challenged its leadership (p.
197); the phrase a number of anti-Catholic lawyers is not an accurate description
of the authors of the Satyre Mtnippke, among whom humanist poets were in the
majority (p. 247); the beginning of the fighting in the first religious war is antedated
by two months (p. 275); the meeting of Catherine de Medici and Alba at Bayonne
was not at the end of the royal courts tour of France, but halfway through
it - moreover, Albas mission to the Netherlands did not begin immediately after
the meeting, but two years later (p. 283); Catherine de Medici was the daughter,
not the granddaughter, of the man to whom Machiavelli dedicated The Prince (p.
295); La Boetie does not belong in the context of the post-massacre monarcho-
maths, although he was published then (p. 308); Henry of Navarre was not the
grandson of the Constable Charles de Bourbon, but a very distant cousin (p. 317).
8. E. Barnavi, Le Parti de Dieu: ttude sociale et politique des chefs de la Ligue
parisienne, 1585-1594 (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1980) and M. Yardeni, La Consci-
ence nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion 1559-1598 (Paris: Nauwe-
laerts, 1971).