ABSTRACT
This is an essay. It is an attempt to set out a marxist means of investigating ideology and in particular religion as ideology. It starts with a criticism of certain sociological theories of religion, claiming that, because they take individual subjectivity as axiomatic, these are theories of what one might call a philosophy of subjective idealism. This is followed by a formulation of a way of studying the social formation of subjectivity, using marxist theories of ideology. The second part of the essay is such a study, the investigation of religious ideology in late imperial China.
