Resistance
In 1970, Horkheimer stated that we do not yet live in a totally administered
society. Although the dominant social productive forces of globalizing capi-
talism, its increasingly administered national and international bureaucra-
cies, and its imperialistic military might have moved the world closer to its
realization, we today in the early 21st century can still say we do not yet live
in a totally administered society. However, as Horkheimer and the entire crit-
ical theory of society and religion acknowledge, the historical development
toward a totally administered society cannot be prevented or abstractly can-
celled. The critical theory does not offer any reprieve from this historical
development. It also, however, does not fall into nihilistic despair and resig-
nation nor positivistic conformity to this trend as does Rational Choice Theory.
The task of critical thought remains the remembrance, preservation, and crit-
ical furtherance in theory and praxis of human autonomy and solidarity in
resistance to the historical trend that leads to the totally administered world.
The urgent task remains of keeping alive the critical theological and mate-
rialistic notion of the totally Other than that which is ideologically justified
as the “real” world by the theory and science of positivism and its economic,
political, military and cultural system power brokers; a socially created world
weighed down by the gravity of facts that has the capability of killing the
human consciousness or spirit for anything other than what is. By means of
the critical notion of, and thus longing for, the totally Other than what is, the
possibility of revolutionary social change in a new historical direction of a
better, more communicatively and aesthetically rational, less antagonistic,
more humane and shalom-filled future society exists.
The Critical Theory of Religion
According to Horkheimer, religion has lost its social purpose of being an
actual force for social change in today’s world through its betrayal of any
critical, prophetic notion of transcendence and the longing for the totally
Other. Religion, particularly Christianity, has given up its prophetic and
Messianic critique of existence and has been sublimated into the reified social
function of ideologically legitimating the development of the capitalist soci-
ety toward its totally administered fulfillment. This also is the very substance
of the Rational Choice Theory of religion. In terms of the critical theory of
The Notion of the Totally “Other” • 149