ABSTRACT
One school of thought maintained that the economic order had been thrown out of gear because the wage-level had been raised too high and fixed there. French historiography has been equally subject to political and social influences of an ideological nature; it has always been divided, the line of division being the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. The difference between socially determined thought and ideology is not as great as it appeared at first, once we overstep the borderline around a closed social circle. Social classes and religious communities are bearers of their own specific crystallizations of thought because they are supra-functional groupings. The dynamical relationship between ideology and socially determined thought can thus be seen to be potentially a double one. Theodor Geiger would like to replace our essential and sharp distinction between ideology and social determination by a merely relative and loose distinction between surface-ideologies and depth-ideologies.
