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This essay is concerned with the religious and theological dimension of Max Horkheimer's, Theodor W. Adorno's, and Walter Benjamin's and other theorists' critical theory of society. It aims at a new critical theory of religion, which would go beyond the religious and theological concerns of the critical theory of society. The essay concentrates on the way, in which the critical theorists of the first and second generation dealt with the modern dichotomy between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, revelation and enlightenment, religious faith and autonomous reason, church and state. The critical theorists have left behind the idealistic attempt to reconcile the modern dichotomy of the religious and the secular: e.g., that of Leibnitz, Hegel, Goethe, or Beethoven. The essay focuses on the critical theorists' materialistic attempt — not to reconcile faith and knowledge, that is not possible at this point in history — but at least to prevent the modern contradiction between monotheism and enlightenment to be closed prematurely either fundamentalistically or scientistically and positivistically. Adorno and Benjamin have initiated an inverse theology, which presupposes a. that religion has indeed contributed to the humanization of mankind, and b.that the secularization process cannot be stopped. The inverse theology allows semantic and semiotic materials and potentials to migrate from the depth of the mythos into the secular discourse among the expert cultures — sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy — and through it into communicative and political action, in order thus to prevent the further rebarbarization of the Western civilization. The inverse theology is a test in so far as that semantic or semiotic material, which cannot be translated into the profane discourse of expert cultures, cannot be rescued and will be lost. One central semantic element, which Adorno and Horkheimer intended to rescue, was the longing for the totally Other than the slaughterbench, holocaust — altar and Golgatha of history. In this longing for the entirely Other is concretely superseded, i.e., criticized, but also preserved and elevated and fulfilled, what once in the world — religions and — philosophies had been called: Eternity, Beauty, Heaven, God, Infinite, Transcendence, Being, Idea, Absolute, Unconditional. The critical theorists transform once certain religious dogmas into longings. The longing for the totally Other has been the fundamental motive and motivation of the critical theorists, which gave them manifestly or latently energy for almost a whole century, and which allowed them to survive two world wars, and fascism, and emigration, and to make it possible for them on one hand not to regress into mythology, and on the other hand not to fall victim to positivism as the metaphysics of what is the case.

The theories of Cornelius Castoriadis stand out as an example of social criticism against the neoconservative tendencies of the times. Castoriadis's work is in origin Marxist self-criticism that seeks to determine what light Stalinism casts retrospectively on Marx's theories. He contrasts the tendency to council democracy in Marx's thought with a postulated mechanical logic of social development that denies human creativity. He bases this idea on a broad concept of praxis that he sees Marx as having narrowed excessively. Following his debate with Marxism, he entered a period of debate with the contemporary social sciences & of preoccupation with psychoanalysis. His critique is ultimately based on a new ontology that denies the logic of identity & seeks to use it to question itself. This logic, he argues, reduces the concept of time to that of space, seeing reality as a structure of predetermined entities rather than as an emergent process capable of new creation. Language & the individual psyche are in his view the two spheres where creativity manifests itself, giving hope for the construction of a new socialism through the transformation of imagination into reality. W. H. Stoddard

Charles Pigden's 1995 article "Popper Revisited, or What is Wrong with Conspiracy Theories?" stimulated what is today a fertile sub-field of philosophical enquiry into conspiracy theories. In his article, Pigden identifies Karl Popper as the originator of the philosophical argument that it is naïve to believe in any conspiracy theory. But Popper was not criticizing belief in conspiracy theories at all, as Pigden defined them or as they have usually come to be understood since about the 1960s. Pigden has therefore fundamentally and anachronistically misinterpreted Popper. The object of Popper's criticism was, rather, the inadequate approach to social science that is limited to the discovery of human intentions, including conspiracies, in particular the will of Great Men. Popper's critique of the conspiracy theory of society was correct and should be rehabilitated. Pigden is correct only insofar as he concludes that we should not dismiss conspiracy theories without critical evaluation, a proposition with which Popper would likely have wholeheartedly agreed.

This second volume of Marcuse's collected papers includes unpublished manuscripts from the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as Beyond One-Dimensional Man, Cultural Revolution and The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy, as well as a rich collection of letters. It shows Marcuse at his most radical, focusing on his critical theory of contemporary society, his analyses of technology, capitalism, the fate of the individual, and prospects for social change in contemporary society

(First published in Initial. Zeitschrift fur Politik & Gesellschaft, 1990, 1, 1.) The former East German model of socialism, which relied on an almost patriarchal power to control social, political, economic, & often scientific problems, now must be reevaluated to include the subjective elements as a determining force. The roles of historical determinism, unquestioning belief in the law-like regularities of Marxist/Leninist socialism, & the Marxist conception of science are all examined in evaluating the dilemma facing the formerly socialist state. A new theory of socialism eliminates the problematic of historical determinism; ie, social processes are neither causal nor predictable. This new theory will coalesce international contributions from non-Marxists & bourgeois social scientists alike. 11 References. J. Sadler