Mythopoeic dimensions of Marxism: With special reference to Antonio Gramsci

The purpose of the dissertation was to move beyond the question of the religious nature of Marxism to a more original and originating moment: the mythopoeic level wherein the lebenswelt is imaged.;Chapter One sought to redeem and re-appropriate the word "myth" by arguing from a phenomenological, Jungian and archetypal approach, that myth is kernel to how we speak and imagine our world. Beginning with a phenomenological description and historical overview, the chapter proceeded to a particularized and specialized discussion of Indo-European and Germanic mythemes in order to place the thought of Karl Marx within its proper, mythological milieu.;Chapter Two argued that the thought of Marx retained important mythic fragments which, when studied, illuminate his mythopoeic gifts. By juxtaposing Marx as mythoclast and mythopoet, the study concluded that he had rejected an Indo-European, tripartate ideology as reflected in Hegel and had, at the same time, retained certain features of that sociogony. Those features, transformed by his genius, resonated at what Alvin Gouldner labeled a "paleosymbolic" level or, what this dissertation preferred to call, a mythopoeic level.;Chapter Three analyzed the thought of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, as a way of observing the development of the mythopoeic dimensions in Marxism. Gramsci's theory of hegemony was argued to be a response to the anomalies within Marxist thought at the turn of the twentieth-century. Gramsci was seen to have sheared the epochal and mythic dimensions from historical materialism but, at the same time, to have retained the mythic drama in Marxism and called for a modern myth.;Chapter Four framed in a missiological praxis the discoveries of mythopoeic dimensions within Marx's thought and Gramsci's insights into the relationship of ideology and weltanschaung. Noted were the conditions of a post-modern world, the emerging norm of humanization and the missiology of Johannes Hoekendijk as anticipatory of the Christian-Marxist encounter.