posits itself as absolute. Language in the emphatic sense, language which
wants to be truth, is chattering silence” (1978:178).
This tone in his later writing is unfortunate, for it distracts from the strong
emphasis throughout both his own writing and that of Adorno on the analy-
sis of concrete particular manifestations of social experience. As their work
increasingly focused on responding to the Holocaust and the challenges of
post-war reconstruction, along with the emerging domination of technology
and consumer advertising, Horkheimer and Adorno gradually set their inter-
est in empirical social research and the study of religion to one side. Given
the promise of their particular approach to an interdisciplinary social theory,
along with the limitations of rational choice theory demonstrated in this essay,
a return to the perspective they outline towards the study of religion will
bear considerable fruit.
In the face of rational choice theory’s rise to prominence in the study of
religion in the 1990s, the time is ripe for such a return to analysing religion
from an interdisciplinary perspective informed by the critical social theory
of Horkheimer and Adorno. As this essay has illustrated, the latent neo-con-
servative economic assumptions of Stark and Iannaccone, along with their
guiding premises about human individual and social action, are what shape
their treatments of religion. Rational choice theory reduces religion to a the-
ory of compensators that fails to account for why human beings require con-
solation in the first place. What is required, by contrast, is attention to the
complex particularity of distinct communities that shape and are shaped by
contemporary social and economic forces. A critical theory of religion chal-
lenges the slippage that leads from A Beautiful Mindto the “beautiful soul.”
As Adorno urged,
What is called for is not only the assimilation of the mathematized market
economy into sociology; economics, in its turn, is called upon to do pre-
cisely what it fails to do: to translate the economic laws back into congealed
human relationships. (2000a:143)From A Beautiful Mindto the Beautiful Soul • 177