[Although considerable liberties have been taken in translating the text of The Hidden God], M. Goldmann is himself responsible for some of the resulting obscurities, since his terminological usage wobbles dangerously between neo-Kantianism, Marxism and 'religious atheism', so that he is able, in one and the same breath, to disclaim any theological attachments and yet to describe both 'tragic' and 'dialectical' forms of thought as 'philosophies of incarnation'. (p. 322)

[Goldmann] regards Pascal and Racine as the key figures in the politico-theological crisis which convulsed mid-17th-century France: a crisis involving (a) the disintegration of the traditional social order, (b) the dissolution of the Thomist worldview, and (c) certain mundane conflicts between the Court and the social stratum to which Pascal and Racine belonged…. His treatment of this admittedly very complex theme probably struck his French readers in 1955 as a particularly enlightening example of the Marxian approach to the...