Examining rational choice theory on religion through the lens of Horkheimer
and Adorno’s criticism of positivism demonstrates that the explication of
human relations narrated in A Beautiful Mindamounts to what Hegel calls
the “beautiful soul,” who, “in order to preserve the purity of its heart,... flees
from contact with the actual world” (1977:400). The “beautiful soul” is a con-
sciousness that has withdrawn into itself, certain of its own validity, and
unwilling to let the objectivity of the outside world threaten its self-certainty.
The fictional male characters can walk out of the bar, confident in their new
insights, without actually pausing to talk to the women in order to verify
whether their assumptions about them are accurate.
In a manner of speaking, the notion of the “beautiful soul” serves to sum-
marize the methodological criticisms raised in this essay against rational
choice theory. By treating rationality and human desires as simple universal
axioms, Stark and Iannaccone neglect diversities of culture and preference,
and reduce reason to instrumental calculation. Ignoring the differences in and
between distinct religious communities and traditions, the rational choice
model proves to be based upon ideological presuppositions about human
nature and social action. External concrete differences between different reli-
gious traditions and social locations receive little to no attention in its sta-
tistical analyses. Furthermore, the society in which the object of their study
is found, particularly the dominant political economy of the United States,
is subjectively unquestioned. Existing social forms are naturalized, ignoring
the objectivity of what Adorno calls the broader social totality. For him, “the
characteristic difference between a sociology oriented towards the objective
structure and one guided merely by method” is that the former is not only
concerned “with the actions of its test subjects,” which is the sole focus of
positivist theory. What this approach neglects, he continues, is that “these
reactions, being something mediated, derivative and secondary, do not have
anything like the certainty ascribed to them” (2000a:85). This neglect of the
social structure behind the actions of individuals – the culture, ideology, class
system, and modes of production that serve to influence the behavioral pat-
terns constituting the social whole – results in an approach to the world that
resembles Hegel’s description of the beautiful soul:
Its particularity consists in the fact that the two moments constituting its
consciousness, the self and the in-itself, are held to be unequal in value
within it, a disparity in which they are so determined that the certainty of
itself is the essential being in face of the in-itself. (1977:401)172 • Christopher Craig Brittain