Abstract
The long tradition of association that exists in Belgium between socialism and lay humanism is proving increasingly anachronistic, to such an extent that one has to wonder what the reasons might be for maintaining it, reasons that might be decidedly different from those that spontaneously come to mind. The hypothesis formulated by the author of this article is that it is at one and the same time an ideological screen for concealing the crisis in socialist thinking and a political submission of the Belgian Socialist Party to Freemasonry which is seen as a para-political society. This submission is severely hampering the party's future, in so far as it is linked to the fate of socialism in the purely instrumental form of rationality. This, in the ideological world, positions it on the margins of the arguments that it would need for conducting a real critique of a social organization pledged to the economic concept of the market.