The Early Frankfurt School and Religion

Also by Margarete Kohlenbach

DAS ENDE DER VOLLKOMMENHEIT: Zum Verstndnis von
Thomas Bernhards Korrektur
WALTER BENJAMIN: Self-Reference and Religiosity
Also by Raymond Geuss
THE IDEA OF A CRITICAL THEORY
HISTORY AND ILLUSION IN POLITICS
MORALITY, CULTURE, AND HISTORY
PUBLIC GOODS, PRIVATE GOODS
POLITIK UND GLCK
OUTSIDE ETHICS

The Early Frankfurt

School and Religion
Edited by

Margarete Kohlenbach
and

Raymond Geuss

Editorial matter, selection, introduction Margarete Kohlenbach and

Raymond Geuss 2005
Chapter 2 Raymond Geuss 2005
Chapter 4 Margarete Kohlenbach 2005
Remaining chapters Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2005
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-3557-1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The early Frankfurt School and religion/edited by Margarete Kohlenbach and
Raymond Geuss.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Religion Philosophy History 20th century. 2. Sociology
Philosophy History 20th century. 3. Critical theory. 4. Frankfurt school
of sociology. 5. Institut fr Sozialforschung (Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
I. Kohlenbach, Margarete. II. Geuss, Raymond.
BL51.E27 2004
200.7043dc22
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05

2004048940

Contents
Acknowledgements

vii

Abbreviations and Translations

viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Introduction: The Frankfurt School and the Problem

of Religion
Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss

Part I

Students, Theologians, Critical Theorists

1 Max Horkheimers Supposed Religious Conversion:

A Semantic Analysis
Pascal Eitler
2 On the Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions
Raymond Geuss

Part II

15
29

Constructions of Religious Experience

3 Emerging Orders: The Contemporary Relevance of

Religion and Teaching in Walter Benjamins
Early Thought
Pierfrancesco Fiorato

45

4 Religion, Experience, Politics: On Erich Unger and

Walter Benjamin
Margarete Kohlenbach

64

5 Allegory, Metonymy and Creatureliness: Walter

Benjamin and the Religious Roots of Modern Art
Barnaba Maj

85

Part III

Legal Philosophy and Jewish Tradition

6 Law and Religion in Early Critical Theory

Chris Thornhill
v

103

vi

Contents

7 Jewish Law and Tradition in the Early Work of

Erich Fromm
David Groiser

128

8 Critical Theory and the New Thinking:

A Preliminary Approach
Howard Caygill

145

Part IV Dialectic of Enlightenment Reconsidered

9 Does Dialectic of Enlightenment Rest on
Religious Foundations?
Rdiger Bittner
10 Secularisation, Myth, Anti-Semitism: Adorno
and Horkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment
and Cassirers Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
Grard Raulet

157

171

Notes

190

Bibliography

218

Index

234

Acknowledgements
This book is the result of a working conference held at the Centre for
Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld in
September 2003. The editors thank the Centre for its generous financial
support, and for the professional and friendly assistance they received
both before and during the conference.
Thanks are also due to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach) and
the Max Horkheimer Archiv (Frankfurt/M.) for opening their collections
to several contributors to this volume, and to Esther J. Ehrman
( Jerusalem) for granting us permission to quote from unpublished
sources in Erich Ungers estate.
The University of Sussex and the University of Sassari supported the
completion of this book by shouldering most of the translation costs. We
are particularly grateful to Ladislaus Lb (Brighton) for the great skill and
care with which he undertook the translation into English of three of the
ten chapters, and for his general advice and bibliographical support.
Our discussions at Bielefeld benefited a great deal from contributions
by participants other than the authors assembled here. We thank especially Martin Bauer of the Hamburg Institute of Social Research and
Michael Gormann-Thelen (Hanover) of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Society. We are also grateful to Wolfgang Braungart, Jrgen Frese and
Michael Wolff of Bielefeld University, and to Martin Bonacker (Hamburg), Martina Herrmann (Dortmund), Joachim Koch (Bad Oeynhausen), Christoph Lienkamp (Bremen), Timo Ogrzal (Hamburg), Johannes
Sabel (Wipperfurth), Ingo Stucke (Bielefeld) and Andreas Seiverth
(Frankfurt/M.).

vii

Abbreviations and Translations

Primary and secondary sources are first cited by their complete title,
then frequently with a characteristic abbreviation. Except for translations acknowledged in the bibliography or the notes, all quotations
from non-English sources were translated either by the authors or, in the
case of Chapters 1, 3 and 10, by the translator Ladislaus Lb.
The following abbreviations are used throughout the volume:
AB
Cor

DA
DE

GB
MHGS
SW
TWAGS
WBGS

Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel

19281940, ed. Henri Lonitz, Frankfurt/M. 1994.
Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin
19101940, eds Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno, trans.
Manfred R. Jacobson, Evelyn M. Jacobson, Chicago 1994.
Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklrung:
Philosophische Fragmente, Frankfurt/M. 1977.
Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans.
Edmund Jephcott, Stanford 2002.
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, eds Christoph Gdde,
Henri Lonitz, 6 vols, Frankfurt/M. 19952000.
Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, eds Alfred Schmidt,
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, 19 vols, Frankfurt/M. 198596.
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, eds Michael W. Jennings
et al., 4 vols, Cambridge (Mass.) 19962003.
Adorno, Theodor W., Gesammelte Schriften, eds Rolf Tiedemann
et al., 20 vols, Frankfurt/M. 197086.
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds Rolf Tiedemann
et al., 7 vols, Frankfurt/M. 197489.

viii

Notes on the Contributors

Rdiger Bittner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld.
He is the author of What Reason Demands (1989), Doing Things for
Reasons (2001), and the editor of Nietzsches Writings from the Late
Notebooks (2003).
Howard Caygill is Professor of Cultural History at Goldsmiths College,
University of London. He is the author of Art of Judgement (1989), A Kant
Dictionary (1996), Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998), and
Levinas and the Political (2002).
Pascal Eitler works as a historian at the Research Centre The Political
as a Space of Communication at the University of Bielefeld. He is
completing a doctoral thesis on the relationship between politics and
religion in West German society during the 1960s and 1970s.
Pierfrancesco Fiorato is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University
of Sassari. He is the author of Geschichtliche Ewigkeit: Ursprung und
Zeitlichkeit in der Philosophie Hermann Cohens (1993) and has widely
published on neo-Kantianism and German-Jewish thought in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is also the Italian editor and
translator of several of Hermann Cohens works.
Raymond Geuss is Reader in Philosophy at the University of
Cambridge. His main publications comprise The Idea of a Critical Theory:
Habermas and the Frankfurt School (1981), Morality, Culture, and History
(1999), History and Illusion in Politics (2001), and Public Goods, Private
Goods (2001). In 2005 his Politik und Glck will be published, and a
collection of his essays entitled Outside Ethics is soon to appear.
David Groiser is Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford and
Fellow of Brasenose College. He works on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury German intellectual history and literature, with a particular
focus on the German-Jewish tradition. His Tradition and Revelation in the
Works of Franz Rosenzweig will soon be published. He is also the editor
of the forthcoming volume II of the Martin Buber Werkausgabe, Mythos
und Mystik: Frhe Schriften 19001928.
Margarete Kohlenbach is Reader in German at the University of Sussex.
She is the author of Das Ende der Vollkommenheit: Zum Verstndnis von
ix

Notes on the Contributors

Thomas Bernhards Korrektur (1986) and Walter Benjamin: Self-Reference

and Religiosity (2002). She works on German Romanticism and twentiethcentury German literature and culture.
Barnaba Maj is Professor of Philosophy of History at the University of
Bologna. He is the author of Walter Benjamin: sul concetto della storia
(1994), Lunit di senso della storia nellorizonte contemporaneo (2000), and
Heimat: La cultura tedesca contemporanea (2001). He is also co-editor of
Walter Benjamin tra critica romantica e critica del romanticismo (2000).
Grard Raulet is Professor of German Intellectual History at the
Universit Paris-Sorbonne. Between 1982 and 1999 he was Director of
the Research Programme Weimar Culture at the Maison des Sciences de
lHomme; since 1999 he has been Director of the Research Programme
Contemporary Political Philosophy at the CNRS. His main publications
include Natur und Ornament (1987), Herbert Marcuse (1992) and Le
caractre destructeur: Esthtique, thologie et politique chez Walter Benjamin
(1997).
Chris Thornhill is Reader in German at Kings College, London. He is
the author of Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus (1996), Political Theory in
Modern Germany (2000), Karl Jaspers (2002), and co-author of Niklas
Luhmanns Theory of Politics and Law (2003).