Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology



 Donald R. Kelley. The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

           Donald R. Kelley seeks to expose the roots of modern political ideology in examining the politicization of Protestantism and the emergence of an oppositional Catholic “party” during the sixteenth-century, French Reformation. In other words, he aims to “reconstruct the subjective side of the Reformation the experiences and consciousness of its actors and observers, and the intellectual expressions thereof (10).” To this end, Kelley moves outward from the private to the public sphere, examining the social contexts in which ideology was created, honed, transmitted and reified. After a brief introduction to Luther and his impact on the development of an inchoate Protestant ideology, Kelley follows the ideological germ from the family, to the congregation, to the academy to the legal and political fora, before wondering at it in full bloom, expressed through publicity and the construction of political parties. At last, he dissects it: its shape, its elements, and its decline.

 For Kelley, the emergence of a Protestant “party” can be marked by the 1534 affair of the placards. He argues that this affront by a “well-organized opposition movement” set the lines of battle: “an idealistic and even fanatical minority demanding a return to a purely spiritual commitment,…confronting a responsible but materialistic and authoritarian establishment with other values and priorities (16).”  From 1534, Protestantism became fractured (Lutheranism, Calvinism, Zwinglianism, Anabaptism), though in later sixteenth-century France, Calvinism emerged as the most cohesive sect with an international reach that met an increasingly organized Catholic opposition, whose program had been refashioned at the Council of Trent (1545-1563). According to Kelley, it was the intransigence of these theological positions vis-à-vis one another that laid the groundwork for the Wars of Religion which were, religious yes, but also, deeply political. The civil conflict between Catholics and Huguenots polarized both France and the international community of stakeholders (Spain, Switzerland, Germany, England and the papacy) and it was within this context, Kelley writes, “that evangelical religion and militant Catholicism were politicized (39).”

 Ideological development is then traced through a series of levels. The first is individual psychology (examined in its familial moorings), wherein one finds the “stirrings of consciousness, the settling of belief and the foundations of ideological commitment (43).”  Kelley then examines development on the congregational level, wherein the demand for active commitment and evangelism externalizes and collectivizes ideology. The academy, the third level of investigation, reinforced the religious experience. Their focus on the “arts of persuasion and disputation” as well as their international, heterogeneous populations, made universities “primary generators…[and] carriers of ideology (45).”  What follows then, is an examination of the fourth level, comprising the learned occupations, particularly lawyers, who carried ideology out of the university and into the world. Such professionals became significant ideological agents who, “through their work as hired advocates and professional ideologists…changed the substance as well as the style of partisan debate and tended to politicize as well as to secularize confessional conflict (45).”

 The final two levels of ideology mark its culmination. Print culture, the penultimate level, expanded exponentially in the sixteenth-century and its impact on the Reformation and the French ideological battle is immeasurable. Kelley writes that, “through the medium of print…matters of conscience were transformed into political issues by the act…of ‘publication’ (46).”  The spread of ideas and the socialization of those who held them (in religious, political and professional) collectives created corporate blocs which cut across class, manifesting ideology in the form of the political party, the last level of analysis. The formation of “parties” sees the end of the developmental trail that stretches from the lower levels of consciousness to institutional affiliation and public behaviors.

 Taking shape after 1572, the Huguenot program had become one of resistance in support of a vision of secular life that was distinct from that of their Catholic opposition. According to Kelley, this Protestant ideological creation comprised psychological, evangelical, corporate, feudal and civic elements that presaged the composition of modern ideological movements that likewise span multiple levels of development, shifting from private to public and individual to collective. In this, Kelley’s intellectual history becomes less a snapshot of the sixteenth-century in isolation and more a point of departure for historical continuity. While the search for “origins” is always a dangerous endeavor, there is certainly evidence, to Kelley’s credit, that Protestantism was, in fact, just that, a protest that took on both religious and secular hues as the sixteenth century progressed. And that, within this reimagining of the secular world, subtle as it may have been, were the germs—indeed, the prequalifications for—a kind of proto-revolutionism that would not see its full expression until 1789.