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Douglas Hedley, The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School. By Rudolf J. Siebert. Pp. xvi + 722. Lanham, MD and London: The Scarecrow Press, 2001. isbn 0 8108 4140 1. Paper £64.60, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 56, Issue 2, October 2005, Pages 812–814, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/fli240
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In early nineteenth-century Berlin Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Schleiermacher held their lectures in the Humbolt university. The speculative Lutheran Swabian and the pious Reformed Pommeranian duelled over the relationship between faith and reason, while the lugubrious Hanseatic Schopenhauer developed his deeply anti-Christian world of Will and Representation. And in a sense, these battles continued into the twentieth century. The impact of Schleiermacher upon both the Barthians and the Liberal Protestants needs no mention. Hegel's influence can be felt in many of the specific legacies of his nineteenth-century pupils such as Bauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Baur, but also in the parameters and agenda of twentieth-century thinkers. The consideration of topics such as non-identity (Adorno) exhibits the extent to which they are in the thrall of Hegel's legacy. One need only consider that Paul Tillich, so shaped by Bohemian Berlin of the post-First World War period, was Adorno's supervisor in Frankfurt to see a natural link between the nineteenth-century idealistic tradition of Berlin and the Marxisant Frankfurt school. Yet Adorno's pessimism and aesthetics of redemption bear the mark of Schopenhauer rather than Schelling or Hegel.
