Christopher Craig Brittain
From A Beautiful Mind to the Beautiful Soul:
Rational Choice, Religion, and the Critical Theory
of Adorno & Horkheimer
The philosophers of the Enlightenment attacked
religion in the name of reason; in the end what
they killed was not the church but metaphysics
and the objective concept of reason itself, the
source of power of their efforts (Horkheimer
1974:17–18).
Religion is on sale, as it were. It is cheaply mar-
keted in order to provide one more so-called irra-
tional stimulus among many others by which
the members of a calculating society are calcu-
latingly made to forget the calculation under
which they suffer (Adorno 1992:294).
These statements by Max Horkheimer and Theodor
W. Adorno illuminate the extent to which they probe
the depths of Marx’s claim that “the criticism of reli-
gion is the premise of all criticism” (Marx and Engels
1978:53). Marx’s thesis remained at the core of the
critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer, although
they were not as convinced as he was that the crit-
icism of religion was complete. For even when the a
prioriassumptions of dogmatic theology are set aside,
and the basis of Marx’s “irreligious criticism” – that
human beings make religion – is assumed, religious
discourse remains a powerful social and political
force in contemporary society. Furthermore, in Adorno
and Horkheimer ’s analysis and criticism of positivism,
