(2002:171) materialistic conception of religion giving expression to real, con-
crete human suffering and being a protest against it, of “religion [being] the
sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of
soulless conditions,” Horkheimer stated that religion was originally the expres-
sion through which suffering humanity gave voice to their cries and longing
for justice. The dangerous memory of Judaism’s foundational “Exodus” expe-
rience of God identifying covenantally with, and thereby freeing, the Hebrew
slaves from their exploitation and domination by their Egyptian masters to
become “God’s people” in the world, echoes through such materialistic analy-
sis. True and good religion possesses different norms than those of either
nature or society and thus becomes the voice of accusation against the injus-
tice experienced in life by countless generations of innocent victims.
At the very same time that Horkheimer was writing this article on religion
in exile in the United States, such cruel norms of nature were being forcibly
nationalized in Nazi Germany. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler (1971:65) named
these norms of nature and the society built on it under the title of “the aris-
tocratic principle of Nature.” Hitler ’s lauding of this dominational and cruel
principle of nature was the further developed rationalization for the bar-
barism of capitalist society. Hitler ’s “Principle” is the more modern version
of Machiavelli’s maxim that the “ends justify the means” and H. Spencer ’s
social Darwinistic conception of society in terms of the survival of the fittest,
which eternalizes the privilege of power and the strength of the one and/or
the few over the resulting oppressed masses. With striking and extremely
disturbing similarities to political and religious statements made in the U.S.
today, this law of nature was understood to be the will of God for which
Hitler would fight to defend against all its foes; against the “veritable devils”
and inhuman “monsters”whose contrary norms and organizations would
bring about the collapse of civilization and devastate the world; in other
words, against those who live by other, “unnatural”, non-capitalistic norms,
expressly Jews and Marxists (Hitler 1971:63–64).
Tabooed Principles
Already in his writings of the early 1920s Horkheimer (1978:27–28) identified
this dehumanizing and authoritarian norm developing in the post-World
War I German society in the form of the tabooed principles of the nation and
134 • Michael R. Ott