In January 1931, Horkheimer takes charge of the Institute. The following year, the first issues of Archives for the History of socialism and the Workers’ Movement (the future Journal of Social Science311 ) see the light of day. They include articles by Herbert Marcuse,312 Walter Benjamin,313 Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno,314 Erich Fromm,315 Friedrich Pollock, Leo Löwenthal,316 and Henryk Grossmann,317 all of whom come from the Jewish-German middle or great bourgeoisie. Hermann Weil, a German-Argentine trader, provides the necessary funding.
The school is thus launched. Other Marxist mavericks gravitate towards it: Lukács, Wilhelm Reich, Karl Korsch, and Wolfgang Abendroth.318
The year is 1933. Hitler rises to power: the journal is prohibited and the Institute shut down. The members of the Frankfurt School take the path of exile.
Having become an international society, the Institute initially moves to Geneva and then to the Ecole normale supérieure319 of Paris. Its journal is taken over by Félix-Alcan editions, but events soon escalate. From 1934 onwards, the School emigrates to the US, where the foundations are already laid for its arrival. The Institute spends the war at the University of Columbia.
The victory of the Allies puts an end to this diaspora. Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Adorno (1903–1969), the group’s most prominent representatives, return to Germany in 1949. As for Marcuse and Fromm, they remain in the US, where they follow a path of their own. Born in 1898, Walter Benjamin takes his own life in 1940, somewhere along the Spanish border, after trying some hashish in 1938 (while in Marseille).
That is when the School’s influence peaks. In post-1945 Germany, it is in relation to the Frankfurt School that most thought currents define themselves.
1975 is upon us. Horkheimer passed away two years earlier and Marcuse is the only founding member of the Institute still alive. Born in 1929, Jürgen Habermas, Adorno’s former assistant, has succeeded him. In France, several books are translated in quick succession. At Payot, Mr Miguel Abensour, the head of the ‘Political Critique’ collection, announces the publication of essays by Horkheimer (Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History), Adorno (Negative Dialectics), Ernst Bloch (Natural Law and Human Dignity), and Habermas (Theory and Practice — The Problem of Legitimation in Advanced Capitalism).
The works of the Frankfurt School are concerned with the most diverse domains, but what one encounters in them is, above all, a reflection on reason.
For Horkheimer (The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944; Eclipse of Reason, 1947), the entire history of human thought can be summarised as a struggle between ‘vital myths’ and reason, with the latter striving to organise the world in accordance with the principles of liberty and progress (as propagated by the Aufklärung): totalitarianism sprouts up whenever myths take precedence over reason. And yet Horkheimer states that even reason itself can become totalitarian; it can ‘fall ill’.
The Scientific-Technological Complex
Connected under current circumstances to calculating thought and ‘self-preservation’, reason can become an instrument in the service of domination. The reason of state and scientific reason are both ‘paranoid’ forms of reason. When implemented, the positive is transformed into the negative, meaning that reason ‘betrays’ and serves the purposes of the irrational, which, in clear terms, means the purposes of nature and life.
If Nazism turned out to be possible and if, as written by Wilhelm Reich in one of his famous texts, ‘the masses desired fascism’, it is because it managed to ‘restrain’ reason and subjugated it to vital instinct. Habermas writes:
What makes fascism totalitarian is the fact that it seeks to put at the service of domination the rebellion of a nature oppressed by this very domination.
Having thus been ‘instrumentalised’, reason plays an opposite role to the one assigned to it by the ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘turns into mythology’.
Based on this, the School’s theoreticians believe that they can identify new forms of totalitarianism. Their criticism of scientific reason in particular leads them to denounce the consumerist society and (to use Marcuse’s phrase) ‘the identification of the reality principle with the performance principle’.
Marx had only perceived social and economic exploitation as a source of alienation; the Frankfurt School ventures further than that. Taking an opposite stance to the opinion that a totalitarian society is necessarily ‘dictatorial’, it strives to demonstrate that liberal society exudes a form of alienation that is even more fearsome. The criticism of alienation is thus extended to include all anthropological sectors, in the hope of obtaining a more satisfactory theory of historical movement.
Horkheimer states that the rationalised world ‘eliminates’ the individual through the very fact of proposing material opulence to him. Indeed, the latter fosters inner alienations. It is ‘repressive’, perhaps even ‘over-repressive’, because it is not only accepted but also desired (at a level where traditional repression generates a resistance leading towards revolt).
After 1945, the School begins to target the power of the Kulturindustrie more specifically, accusing the media of being responsible for the conditioning of minds. Adorno declares that the radio and the cinema are essentially ‘fascistic’ (they bestow upon fascism its form, ‘just as the printing press did for the Reformation’). He specifies that if the worst comes to the worst, an all-penetrating speech does not need to have any content: its ‘content’ is entirely embodied by the fact that it reaches the heart of every home (such a theory is also advocated by Marshall McLuhan320 in The Medium is the Massage, Pauvert, 1968). Marcuse goes on to add that the very fact of giving everyone their own voice is totalitarian, because any indiscriminately afforded freedom is unjust and, additionally, a source of indifference.
Denouncing the ‘scientific-technological complex’, Jürgen Habermas writes:
It is science and technology that have now assumed the function of granting domination its legitimations.
On his part, Adorno affirms that the language of ‘authenticity’ is the last ‘asylum of the Nazi ideology’. As for Horkheimer, he emphasises the fact that the activities conducted by ideologists, just like those of researchers, relate directly to the interests of the ruling class. Thomism,321 for instance, helped the Church incorporate the period’s scientific progress and thus perpetuate its power by seizing the opportunity to replace Platonic speculation with Aristotelian categories better suited to contemporary science. This theory (which heralds the contemporary criticism of science) will be developed by Jürgen Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests, a book which focuses on the existing ties between the state of societies and the shape and content of epistemology.
Reinforcing the accusation of ‘potential fascism’, Adorno widens its scope to encompass virtually all institutions: every hierarchy is founded upon ‘arrogance’ and ‘submission’; the family is a ‘factory of reactionary ideology’, a father a ‘superior being that a child is masochistically compelled to identify with’, etc. Erich Fromm also condemns patriarchy and praises the sense of ‘liberty and equality characterising the matriarchal structure’.
A ‘Just Conscience’
During the 1960s, Habermas finds himself at the centre of an epistemological polemic in which he would stand particularly against Arnold Gehlen322 and Popper’s323 German disciples. Countering Gehlen, according to whom institutions are rigorously necessary for man to be able to construct himself in his own specificity, Habermas advocates the necessarily ‘repressive’ and ‘alienating’ character of any and every institution.
From this perspective, the proletariat no longer constitutes a privileged class but is alienated — just as ‘bosses’ and technocrats are — by the belief that social problems will be resolved through an overabundance of goods. Horkheimer writes:
Its revolutionary will has invested itself into an activity in which one accommodates to the reality of things!
By the same token, social criticism reverts to what it was like during the
‘Enlightenment’ period: a bourgeois theory, as acknowledged by Habermas in Theory and Practice.
To be honest, the ‘Frankfurtists’ do not reject Marx’s teachings; they only reproach him for allowing his teachings to degenerate into vulgar economism. The theory of growing pauperisation, observes Horkheimer, has become ‘obsolete’. One must therefore graft a ‘science of just conscience’ onto orthodox Marxism. This is precisely what Ernst Bloch324 strives to do when reproaching Marxist bureaucracy for having forgotten that socialism was a theology before becoming political economy.
In three of his books, namely The Spirit of Utopia (1918); Thomas Münzer as a Theologian of Revolution (1921: Julliard, 1964 and UGE/10–18, 1975), in which he praises the 14th-century leader of the Anabaptist sect that preached the advent of a strictly communistic egalitarian millennium; and The Principle of Hope (1954–57, three volumes), Bloch lists the messianic myths that could revive Marxism’s ‘theological foundation’. Resorting to ‘utopian energy’, he even envisages a new sort of prophetism and writes:
One must contemplate the path of socialism as stretching not only from utopia to science but also from science to utopia.
Having become the head of the Karl Marx Institute of Leipzig after the war, Ernst Bloch would be excluded from the Communist Party in 1961 before taking up a post at the University of Tübingen.
Since their return from exile, the members of the School have been haunted by one single obsession: how does one define a system that could never become complicit in the established order?
Horkheimer and Adorno respond: by rendering speech so ‘mobile’ that it becomes intangible. This is what they label ‘negative thought’. According to Adorno, the latter consists in seeking in every aspect of things its implied limits and self-negation. This negative aspect is as important as the positive one: its comprehension reinstates the possibility of a genuine dialectic.
Non-Work
Adorno’s criticism of Wagner (Essay on Wagner, Gallimard, 1966) thus erects the negative viewpoint of the critic into an absolute principle (a principle of utter truthfulness), by contrasting it ideologically with the artist’s ‘affirmative’ point of view. The latter is declared to be founded upon and by trickery as a result of its false claim to be the product of the spirit itself. Following the discovery of the realities of class struggle, art can no longer, and should no longer, according to Adorno, have a clear conscience. Aware of itself being no more than a ‘sham’, it must deny itself as part of a non-work that reveals, in an immediate fashion, that it is but a ‘fabricated product’ born of human alienation, while continuing to denounce itself and awaiting the day when the abolishment of class struggle shall trigger the abolition of the very conditions in which the existence of that work of art was rendered possible.
One thus realises that the ‘dialectical reason’ advocated by the Frankfurt School is one that never ceases to deny. It seeks the contrary, then the contrary’s contrary, then the contrary of all: what it secretes is an ‘eternal no’. Within this system, awareness itself becomes negation — the negation of all the mediations that intervene between the individual and the ‘whole’. Such thought, whose sole aim is to ‘critically’ dissect the real using an incessant kind of pilpul, could never be constructive. It does, however, possess an immense power of subversion.
It also goes hand in hand with a complete sort of pessimism marked by the twofold imprint of Freud and Kafka325 and rooted in the conviction that the entire world is in the hands of the ‘enemy’; that every society is inevitably repressive (Walter Benjamin writes that ‘there is not a single cultural document that does not simultaneously document barbarism’); and that negativism is indeed the only means available to man that could allow him to play his cards right.
Hence their staging of the non-tragic, which, on the level of praxis, suddenly inverts itself either into sheer messianism or an evasion of reality, depending on the case.
Being at the very heart of institutions, the state finds itself particularly targeted. ‘The state is the devil’ — these are the exact words written by Ernst Bloch, who denounces its ‘harsh and impious materiality’, so much so that Mr Jean-Marie Vincent326 perceives the Frankfurt School as ‘the announcement of a new phase of Marxism, of a new settling of accounts with the old reason of state’.
Logically, this doctrine leads to a desperate aspiration for the end of history, for our species’ reintegration into nature, for a time when all tensions shall subside, all alienations vanish and man reclaim the fullness of his metaphysical being. In a striking passage taken from his essay on Thomas Münzer,327 Ernst Bloch writes:
We have sufficiently experienced the world’s history and witnessed a sufficient and even excessive number of forms, cities, works, phantasmagorias, and obstacles born of culture. At present, it turns out to be impossible for the Kingdom not to come.
This kingdom is one where ‘Marxism and the dream of the unconditional shall ultimately’ unite, ‘advancing at the same pace and incorporated into the very same plan of action’.
In 1968, Horkheimer condemned the violent character of the students’ protests (whose aspirations he otherwise approved of), fearing that it would result in a new kind of totalitarianism. As explained by Adorno, the students were stricken with the same ‘weakness of the self’ that the masses had fallen prey to when surrendering to fascism: their anti-authoritarianism could, at any moment, be overwhelmed by an infatuation with authority.
Such an attitude is very revealing indeed.
Progress, an Ideology of Reaction
In response to Marx’s affirmation that critical analysis must, as stated in his Theses on Feuerbach, be followed by a specific action of transformation, the Frankfurt School proposes that theory ‘emancipate itself’ from practice. Remaining logical throughout, its representatives have always stayed warily away from action, all to the great discontentment of a certain part of the extreme Left, whose members reproached the Frankfurt school for its ‘contempt for involvement’.
This last trait suffices to demonstrate both the strength and the weakness of the School. Dissolving all thought in a social sort of relation and reducing all sociology to ‘ideology’, it represents a much more efficient type of criticism of the modern world than orthodox Marxism. However, owing to its excessive fear of being ‘taken over’, its hypercriticism, and its mental febrility, it condemns itself to powerlessness: to assert that all power is a source of corruption is to forever renounce the exercise of power. Destined to remain in ‘perpetual motion’ and embrace constant criticism without ever proposing anything, it automatically leads to failure.
As remarked by Mr Jean-Michel Palmier,328 this fact has been acknowledged by Horkheimer himself (who, at a later point in life, freed himself of his obsessions by practically returning to Judaism) when he wrote that ‘democracy does not exist anywhere’ and that progress has become the ‘ideology of reaction’.
From the perspective of dialectical thought, the dialectic itself is to be overcome. Only then will one witness the end of contradictions. Yet if the world is only comprised of contradictions, how could a ‘just’ state of affairs ever be real? That is the very core of the issue.
‘Critical theory’ offers one of the most accomplished examples of a doctrine exclusively focused on the negative. It demonstrates the sterilising power (and, ultimately, the power of death) that pervades an intellect which is only driven towards criticism and gradually reaches a point where it targets everything with denial and dissolution.
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L’Ecole de Francfort,329 an essay by Pierre V. Zima. Ed. Universitaires, 193 pages.
La théorie critique de l’Ecole de Francfort,330 an essay by Jean-Marie Vincent. Galilée, 154 pages.
Traditional and Critical Theory, an essay by Max Horkheimer. Gallimard, 315 pages.
Eclipse of Reason, an essay by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Gallimard, 282 pages.
Technology and Science as Ideology, an essay by Jür
gen Habermas. Gallimard, 212 pages.
Knowledge and Human Interests, an essay by Jürgen Habermas. Gallimard, 386 pages.
Adorno: art, idéologie et théorie de l’art,331 an essay by Marc Jimenez. UGE/10–18, 192 pages.
Ernst Bloch, utopie et espérance,332 an essay by Laënnec Hurbon. Cerf, 148 pages.
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Herbert Marcuse
Between 1963 and the events of May 1968, édition de Minuit sold 300 copies of Eros and Civilisation. With his white hair, thin lips and cigar, the author, seventy-eight-year-old Herbert Marcuse, was virtually unknown at the time. Along with Soviet Marxism, Eros and Civilisation was his only book to have been published in French. Since then, dissenters have turned him into one of their thought leaders. From 1868 to 1973, nine of his books were translated, some of which had actually been written thirty or forty years earlier.
Herbert Marcuse deserved, in all honesty, neither such excessive indifference nor such excessive fame.
According to his biographers — Alasdair MacIntyre, a forty-seven-year-old professor at the University of Brandeis, as well as André Nicolas, André Vergez and Jean-Michel Palmier — ‘Marcuse, who was born into an old Jewish family in 1898, found his way into our global consciousness in May 1968’. In actual fact, he found his way into the German Social-Democratic Party in 1917 and then Karl Liebknecht’s333 and Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary movement in 1919. Being a former student of Husserl and Heidegger, he then published a thesis on Hegel.
In 1933, the advent of National Socialism compels him to escape to Paris. There, he meets the members of the Frankfurt School, to whom he has very close ties. For several months, he collaborates with them on the Journal of Social Science before departing to the United States.
A few years later, in 1936, he publishes a series of Studies on Authority and the Family in cooperation with Adorno. In the end, he takes up a teaching position at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis and San Diego University. Towards the end of the 1950s, he publishes Eros and Civilisation (1955) and Soviet Marxism (1958), followed by One-Dimensional Man (1964) and A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965).
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