share this affirmative religion and this conformity, to the point of betrayal.
To the contrary, the critical theory of religion emphasizes critical, prophetic
religion in antagonistic civil society.
E. Perfect Justice
According to Horkheimer ’s programmatic 1935 essay, “Thoughts on Religion,”
in spite of all positivism and fascism, the productive kind of criticism of the
status quo, which had found its expression once in earlier times in the form
of a religious belief in a heavenly Judge and a Last Judgment, becomes a
struggle for more rational forms of societal life (Horkheimer 1988b; Habermas
1986). But just, so Horkheimer argued, as reason after Kant, could not avoid
falling back into shattered, but nonetheless recurring illusions, so too, ever
since the transition from religious longing for God to conscious social praxis,
there continued to exist another illusion, which could be exposed but not
entirely banished: it was the image of perfect justice.
No Compensation
From its very start in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, the critical
theory was a new form of historical materialism, which integrated into itself
most intensively and extensively Freudian psychoanalysis (Horkheimer 1988b;
Fromm 1992; 1980; Marcuse 1962). Horkheimer and the other critical theo-
rists concretely negated, i.e., criticized, the works of both Marx and Freud,
because they had fallen victim to the dialectic of enlightenment, but also res-
cued them and preserved them and elevated them and fulfilled them in their
own critical theory of individual, family, civil society, political state and cul-
ture (Horkheimer 1985a; 1988b; Horkheimer and Adorno 1969). Thus, for
Horkheimer, the urge to transcend the merely conceptual and impotent revolts
against the reality of traditional and modern antagonistic civil society was
part of man, as he had been molded by his history. What, according to
Horkheimer, distinguished the progressive type of man from the retrogres-
sive one, was not the refusal of the idea of perfect justice, but rather the
knowledge of the limits set to its fulfillment. Erich Fromm – likewise com-
bining Marx and Freud – had from the very start of the critical theory in the
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research spoken of the revolutionary or demo-
cratic and the authoritarian or fascist personality type (Horkheimer 1988b).
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