Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss, eds. The Early Frankfurt School and Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. x + 263 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-3557-1.
Reviewed for H-German by Emily J. Levine, History Department, Stanford University.
Dialectics of Enlightenment
This volume is the outcome of a growing academic interest in the relationship between religion and Enlightenment broadly conceived. Just as recent works have rewritten religion back into the Enlightenment narrative so, too, this volume reminds us that critical theory was not entirely hostile to religion as was once thought.[1] As Kohlenbach and Geuss explain in their introduction, critical theory was first introduced to the West in the postwar period by the neo-Marxist student movement of the 1960s. Attracted to critical theory because of its claim to link social theory and political practice, the student movement nonetheless simply ignored or suppressed any anti-liberal features of the philosophy that did not fit their own philosophy. This attitude extended to any affinities between critical theory and religious traditions. If the Left adopted a secularized form of critical theory for its political purposes, then the theological camp, for its part, exaggerated the existential concerns of critical theory as justification for its own arguments against the privatization of religion and failed to “realise that for Critical Theory religion represented first and foremost a _problem_, even on those rare occasions when it seemed to be presented as a solution” (emphasis in original, p. 2). Read the rest of this entry »
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