THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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though of course, — and this motif now becomes crucially important: ‘theology, philosophy, morality et cetera’, hence ideology, could also ‘enter into contradiction
with prevailing conditions’; there thus remains ideology which is not mere illusion, mere lies. It is the latter as false, particularly as exploited false consciousness of
prevailing practice, but not as the contradiction, finally cited by Marx, of theory with prevailing conditions. That is, as the expression of a contradiction into which the
prevailing social conditions have entered with the prevailing force of production, and above all vice versa. So possibly this is the place for that ideology in a very
different sense: not for an obscuring­justifying one, but for a revolutionary­contrasting one. It surfaces precisely in the change between class societies and all the more
so in the elimination of class society as a whole. This kind of ideology, with regard to its militant intention and for the most part its contents, is solely related as a
contrasting one to the social basis on which, i.e. against which it has arisen. It does not reflect and justify this basis, it conversely brings to consciousness the not yet fully
developed elements of the new society which have not yet achieved political breakthrough, and which have ripened in the womb of the old one. It accomplished this in
the past, because of the then still unrecognized driving forces of history, with various illusions, but never with any purposeful intention of obscuring. On the contrary, this
kind of ideology was produced on the basis of a thoroughly honest, revolutionary­progressive mandate, and even its illusion bears heroic­utopian features. And its
positive function is to activate the still by no means properly existing basis of the new society, freed from the ice, with the power of theory; otherwise the appearance of
this basis would be much more difficult, much more untidy. And therefore: this kind of ideology, that of the formerly revolutionary ‘contradiction with prevailing
conditions’, continues to remain alive with the fire and the goal­images of its contradiction, namely an anticipatory­humane one. Thus the ideology of the French
Revolution, minus illusions, minus the realm of the bourgeoisie idealized in them, carries on working in the space of progressive consciousness; thus especially the
ideology of the German Peasant War, minus its mythological components, has a goal­fire in it which non­obsoletely strikes into the revolutionary conscience, and
particularly also into the imagination of this conscience. And going on to leisure, the thus characterized, not easily satisfied ideology is not only the startling pike in a
possible fish­pond of leisure, but it prevents the latter from being a fish­pond at all, in other words: a happiness as bed of ease instead of as expedition and fullness of
life. The contradictions in socialist society,