ment in society or, conversely, become politically active to redeem society
from its narrowly conceived moral errs through its return to biblical teach-
ings. In all of these religious responses, however, the socio-economic causes
of civil society’s antagonisms and the horror they produce are never addressed
but continue to remain hidden behind an ideological veil of class interests
and power. This critique applies equally to the Rational Choice Theory of
religion, which equates the bourgeois, social Darwinistic principle of capi-
talist market economy with the substance of all religions, especially that of
Christianity. As Benjamin stated, this social Darwinistic, aristocratic princi-
ple of nature is not to be understood as only the extreme, barbaric norm of
fascism. This authoritarian principle is the norm of capitalism itself and of
its religious forms of legitimization.
Horkheimer and the other critical theorists had a completely different under-
standing of the meaning and purpose of religion from that of either its tra-
ditional or bourgeois interpretation. The critical theory of religion is expressive
of the liberational substance of religion that is rooted in the suffering, cries
and longing of the oppressed and “non-identical” (Adorno 1973) for that
which is socially and historically other than what is in the socio-historical
form of a more reconciled future society as well as for that which is “totally
Other.”
Revolution
The development of the critical theory of society and religion is a revolu-
tionary expression of both resistance and hope against the continuing his-
torical and now global expansion of the crisis of capitalist society. It was
because of the increasing post-World War I danger of the development of this
aristocratic principle in the form of National Socialism that led Horkheimer
to the study of Marx and the advocacy of the need for a Marxist revolution
as the means by which the totalitarianism from the right could be defeated.
As Horkheimer (1989:94) stated,
Disrespect for anything mortal that puffs itself up as a god is the religion
of those who cannot resist devoting their life to the preparation of some-
thing better, even in the Europe of the Iron Heel.However, unlike Marx, Horkheimer already knew that the subjectof this rev-
olution would not be the proletariat. The needed consciousness of their
exploitation and oppression, which was to produce the solidarity of the
The Notion of the Totally “Other” • 137