The Abstract Negation of the “Other”
Although a broader and historical focus can be found in the later work of
Rodney Stark (2001), the Rational Choice Theory of religion has limited its
analysis of religion essentially to the development of Christianity in the United
States. From this myopic, undifferentiated, and I would say, dogmatically
positivistic analysis of a particular religion (Christianity) within an obvious
ethnocentric and dominant class-specific representation of a particular social
totality (the United States), this theory admittedly seeks to universalize the
application of its findings to all religion. The methodological parallels between
this and the U.S. led expansion of neo-liberal policy into third world or
“peripheral” countries, all in the altruistic name of globalizing “democracy,”
“freedom,” “free trade,” etc., is no accident. Both express the authoritarian
application of the bourgeois paradigm of the particular subject who abstractly
negates the distinctiveness of all socio-historical “others,” not even to men-
tion the totally “Other,” through an instrumental rationality and praxis that
serves the “subject’s” own interests by creating the objective natural and
social world in its own image. As Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) have shown,
the marginalization and denial, if not the destruction, of any and all “oth-
ers” is the essential task of the bourgeois Enlightenment and its positivistic
science. The resulting creation and systematically developed sociological and
psychological “identity principle” of such scientific enlightenment, however,
is nothing other than a modern form of mythology, fear, and continued hier-
archy of class domination.
Traditional and Critical Theory
In a 1937 article in which he compared what he called “traditional” or pos-
itivistic social theory to the critical theory of society, Horkheimer (1972:239)
expressed the extreme problematic of attempting to turn the critical theory
into a sociology. The critical theory of society and religion is a multi-disci-
pline, dialectical theory that cannot be reduced to one of its research disci-
plines nor to the traditional, positivistic methodology of bourgeois social
science. Thus, the difference between sociology and the critical theory of soci-
ety is the same fundamental difference that exists between the Rational Choice
Theory of religion and the Critical Theory of religion. Respectively, it is the
privileging difference between form and content, quantity and quality, “Being”
The Notion of the Totally “Other” • 127