According to the normal account, the Reformation --> various wars of religion --> liberalism developed to stop people killing each other; and pretty much every ideology since the 1700s has been prompted by liberalism, either as a development of it or as a reaction against it.
Now, personally I have my issues with the normal account, for reasons I can get into if anybody's interested, but for the sake of argument, let's assume it's broadly accurate. How would political ideologies develop in a world where the Reformation never happened (say, because the Catholic Church did a better job cleaning up corruption in the decades before Luther)? For simplicity's sake, let's assume that technology develops at about the same pace ITTL as it does IOTL.
One obvious source of ideological difference would be economic policy. If the Catholic Church remains more influential, we might not see full-on communism become popular (since communism was condemned by the Church IOTL, and probably would be ITTL as well), although there'd still be plenty of scope for more free-market vs. social-democratic visions of society. Centralisation vs. localism debates have also existed in a lot of countries, and probably would ITTL as well. And then of course there's the matter of the Catholic Church itself and its relations with secular society. Even without a Reformation, increasing state capacity would probably lead various governments to try and exercise greater control over the Church in their countries, so you could see a series of long-running and potentially acrimonious debates between those who support Church independence and those who support greater secular control.
Now, personally I have my issues with the normal account, for reasons I can get into if anybody's interested, but for the sake of argument, let's assume it's broadly accurate. How would political ideologies develop in a world where the Reformation never happened (say, because the Catholic Church did a better job cleaning up corruption in the decades before Luther)? For simplicity's sake, let's assume that technology develops at about the same pace ITTL as it does IOTL.
One obvious source of ideological difference would be economic policy. If the Catholic Church remains more influential, we might not see full-on communism become popular (since communism was condemned by the Church IOTL, and probably would be ITTL as well), although there'd still be plenty of scope for more free-market vs. social-democratic visions of society. Centralisation vs. localism debates have also existed in a lot of countries, and probably would ITTL as well. And then of course there's the matter of the Catholic Church itself and its relations with secular society. Even without a Reformation, increasing state capacity would probably lead various governments to try and exercise greater control over the Church in their countries, so you could see a series of long-running and potentially acrimonious debates between those who support Church independence and those who support greater secular control.
