Imperial Japan there were the Samurai of the Shoguns. Islamisms, as expres-
sions of clerical fascism, promise to restore the early Caliphate, purify the
community (umma) and restore the greatness of the heroic knight who dies
a martyr. Such legacies of collective memory are reconstructed and reinter-
preted by various leaders who convince others, not themselves or their own
family members, to give their lives to the noble causes.
Conclusion
Marx, Weber and Freud-The Enduring Power of Theory
For Marx, alienation was a consequence of wage labor, commodified labor
power, understood as fostering the system of commodity exchange that stood
outside the person and refluxed back upon him/her, to act as an outside
power that rendered the person powerless, thwarted his/her selfhood, dehu-
manized him/her (estranged from species being) and condemned him/her
to live in a fragmented social world. His analysis has had a lasting impact
for the critical understanding of society. But Marx also showed how ideolo-
gies might assuage alienation in ways that served to reproduce the system
of class domination. His comments on religion noted how it expressed the
real pain and suffering of economic privation and alienation. But religion also
promised ameliorative hope, albeit for the proletariat, the “better life” was
to be found in the afterlife. While penned over 160 years ago, Marx’s insights
remain seminal. On the one hand religion, as an expression of material inter-
ests, spoken as ideology, sustained domination. But religion also stood as a
critique of domination and the articulation of hope as it promised to over-
come alienation, domination and exploitation.
For Weber, concerned with subjective meanings of social action rather than
objective functions of organized groups and/or classes, religion was a more
complex phenomenon; it offered explanations for the distribution of fortunes.
Further, it was not always the ruling class that shaped religion, certain crit-
ical strata, be they warriors, merchants or prebendaries were likely to have
an “elective affinity” for a particular kind of religion, and strongly embrace
it and, in turn, stamp the society in certain ways, especially insofar as reli-
gions fostered a certain “economic ethic”. As Weber then showed, urban arti-
sans in the Roman empire were the group most likely to embrace early
Christianity, a salvation religion that promised a better life in the next world
334 • Lauren Langman