Critical theory was conceived within the intellectual crucible of Marxism. But its leading representatives were from the start dismissive of economic determinism, the stage theory of history, and any fatalistic belief in the “inevitable” triumph of socialism. They were concerned less with what Marx called the economic “base” than the political and cultural “superstructure” of society. Their Marxism was of a different variety. They highlighted its critical method over its systematic claims, its concern with alienation and reification, its complicated relationship with the ideals of the Enlightenment, its utopian moment, its emphasis upon the role of ideology, and its commitment to resist the deformation of the individual. This complex of themes constitutes the core of critical theory as it was conceived by the leading figures of “Western Marxism”: Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács. These two thinkers provided the framework for the critical project that later became identified with the Institute for Social Research—or “the Frankfurt School.”
Its principal members included Theodor W. Adorno, notable for his consummate knowledge of music and philosophy, who began his collaboration with the Institute in 1928, but did not become an official member until ten years later; Erich Fromm, a gifted psychologist, who started his nine-year collaboration in 1930; Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher with wide-ranging talents, who joined in 1933; Walter Benjamin, the most creative of these thinkers, who never officially was a member at all; and Jürgen Habermas, who became its leading philosopher in the aftermath of 1968 and surely the most prolific thinker associated with the Institute. Its guiding light, however, was Max Horkheimer. He brought together these extraordinary intellectuals in order to construct the interdisciplinary basis for a critical theory of society.
The Frankfurt School initially believed that its intellectual work would aid the practical prospects for revolutionary action by the proletariat. As the 1930s wore on, however, the revolution degenerated in the Soviet Union, and its prospects in Europe faded. Fascism had audaciously entered political life, and the humane hopes originally associated with modernity appeared increasingly naïve. The Frankfurt School registered this historical shift by subjecting long-standing leftist beliefs in the inherently progressive character of science and technology, popular education, and mass politics to withering interrogation.
The Enlightenment and Marxism were confronted from the standpoint of their unrealized ideals as the Frankfurt School refashioned the historical dialectic through insights gleaned from Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, and the modernist heritage. Critical theory began the process of reclaiming forgotten utopian images and neglected ideals of resistance under circumstances in which the possibility for realizing them seemingly no longer existed. The result was a new form of “negative dialectics” whose popularity has only grown among contemporary academics.
The Frankfurt School had always considered establishmentarian philosophies as obstacles to bringing about a liberated society. Its members condemned the preoccupation with absolute foundations, analytic categories, and fixed criteria for verifying truth claims. They saw two main culprits: phenomenology, with its set ontological claims about how individuals experience existence, and positivism, with its demand that society be analyzed according to the criteria of the natural sciences. Both were attacked for treating society in a-historical terms and eliminating genuine subjectivity. Critical theory was intended as an alternative. It was fueled by a transformative intent and a particular concern with the culture of modern life.
Alienation and reification are the two ideas most commonly associated with critical theory. The former is usually identified with the psychological effects of exploitation and the division of labor, and the latter with how people are treated instrumentally, as “things,” through concepts that have been ripped from their historical context. Pioneering studies of alienation and reification had already been undertaken by Western Marxists during the 1920s, but the Frankfurt School provided a unique sense of how these complex categories impacted upon individuals in advanced industrial society.
They investigated the ways in which thinking was being reduced to mechanical notions of what is operative and profitable, ethical reflection was tending to vanish, and aesthetic enjoyment was becoming more standardized. Critical theorists noted with alarm how interpreting modern society was becoming ever more difficult. Alienation and reification were thus analyzed in terms of how they imperiled the exercise of subjectivity, robbed the world of meaning and purpose, and turned the individual into a cog in the machine.
Auschwitz was seen as incarnating the most radical implications of alienation and reification. It was the watershed event that shattered optimistic assumptions about progress even more radically than the Lisbon earthquake did during the eighteenth century. With images of the Nazi concentration camps still fresh, Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed, new reports emerging about the Soviet Gulag, and McCarthyism on the rise in the United States, it appeared to the Frankfurt School as if Western civilization had generated not human development but an unparalleled barbarism. They knew that something more was required from radical thought than the usual stale critique of capitalism.
A bureaucratically administered mass society was apparently integrating all forms of resistance, obliterating genuine individuality, and generating personality structures with authoritarian predilections. Conformity was undermining autonomy. If capitalist development is connected with standardization and reification, then progress actually constitutes a form of regression. Illusions associated with the Enlightenment, uncritically accepted on the Left, thus required reexamination and modernity itself invited critique.
All members of the Frankfurt School agreed on the need for increased education to counteract authoritarian trends. But it remained unclear how effective such education might prove to be in a totally administered society. A new “culture industry”—arguably the most famous concept associated with critical theory—was constantly striving to lower the lowest common denominator in order to maximize sales. Authentic individual experience and class consciousness were being threatened by the consumerism of advanced capitalism. All this led Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse to claim that the extent to which a work becomes popular—regardless of its political message—is the extent to which its radical impulse will be integrated into the system. These thinkers became champions of an experimental modernist art and, in the charged climate of the postwar period, an “Aesopian” form of convoluted writing that shielded their radical beliefs. Nevertheless, the esoteric and indirect style of critical theory only increased its appeal among radical intellectuals involved in the uprisings of the 1960s.
Critical theory always had an anticipatory character. Its advocates projected the transformation of everyday life and individual experience. The Frankfurt School not only contested establishmentarian views of history, but projected a radical alternative. European radicals applied its ideas to reconfiguring the family, sexuality, and education. They sought to bring about a new utopian sensibility devoid of cruelty and competition. But the Frankfurt School split over the movements connected with the 1960s. Adorno and Horkheimer were skeptical. They questioned the counter-culture and the assault on tradition, the sporadic violence and the anti-intellectualism, as well as the comfort radical activists supposedly gave to the enemies of democracy. They identified the mass movements of the 1960s with those of the interwar period, and they associated utopian thinking with totalitarianism.
1. Radical intellectuals among the student movement of the 1960s were deeply influenced by critical theory and the Frankfurt School.
Genuine resistance now seemed to call for highlighting the negative moment within the critical tradition. Especially Adorno argued that the point was no longer one of merely refusing to identify freedom with any system, or collectivity, but rather of conceptualizing the “non-identity” (and heightening the tension) between the individual and society. Concern with organized resistance and institutional polit
ics fell by the wayside in favor of an aesthetic-philosophical form of critique or, in the case of Horkheimer, a quasi-religious “longing for the totally other.” The Frankfurt School still employed the method inherited from Hegel and Marx. Its most politically conservative members still viewed subjectivity as enmeshed within what it resisted: the commodity form, mass culture, and the bureaucratic society. But they cast new suspicions on universal claims, philosophical foundations, and the fixed narrative.
“Negative dialectics” anticipated many concerns associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism. So much so, in fact, that they are now often treated as expressions of critical theory. Deconstructive or poststructuralist approaches invaded the most prestigious journals and disciplines ranging from anthropology and film to religion, linguistics, and political science. They generated new insights on race and gender as well as the postcolonial world. In the process, however, critical theory lost its ability to offer an integrated critique of society, conceptualize a meaningful politics, and project new ideals of liberation. Textual exegesis, cultural preoccupations, and metaphysical disputations increasingly turned critical theory into a victim of its own success. The result has been an enduring identity crisis.
Critical theorists today must look backward in order to move forward. The Frankfurt School has enriched our understanding of the family, sexual repression, pedagogy, genocide, entertainment, literary analysis, and a host of other issues. But the critical tradition also has something to teach about the imbalances of power that mark the economy, the state, the public sphere, law, and global life. Even those thinkers who were most critical of the Enlightenment offer important grounds for a reasoned defense of it. The same holds true for liberalism and socialism. Clarifying conditions of oppression, opening avenues of resistance, and refashioning liberating ideals is still the province of critical theory. New political perspectives are required to accentuate the transformative prospects for change within a new global society. It is now a matter of subjecting the established forms of critical theory to the critical method. And that is as it should be. Only in this way is it possible to remain true to the original spirit of the critical enterprise.
Chapter 1
The Frankfurt School
The Institute for Social Research was founded in 1923. Growing out of a Marxist study group, which sought to deal with the practical problems facing the labor movement in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, this first Marxist think tank was funded by Hermann Weil. He was an enlightened businessman, who made his fortune on the grain market in Argentina. The money was given at the urging of his son, Felix, who considered himself a “salon Bolshevik.”
Felix Weil’s close friends included Kurt Albert Gerlach. A social democrat and an economist, he would have become the first director of the Institute. Unfortunately, however, Gerlach died of diabetes. Carl Grünberg thus took over instead. He founded the first official publication of the Institute, the Archive for the History of Socialism and the Labor Movement, which published a number of significant works including Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (1923). Grünberg was joined by Henryk Grossmann, Friedrich Pollock, Fritz Sternberg, and Karl August Wittfogel. All of them were communists. They were still nostalgic for the democratic workers’ councils of 1918–1921, and they envisioned a German Soviet Republic. Their intellectual efforts offer a rich variety of views on capitalist breakdown, the new role of the state, and imperialism. But this group would fade into the background, and the general orientation of the Institute would change in 1930. That was the year in which Max Horkheimer brought together the new inner circle for what would become known as the Frankfurt School.
2. Three leading figures of the Frankfurt School: Max Horkheimer (left), Theodor W. Adorno (right), and Jürgen Habermas (rear). This is the only photo of them together.
The inner circle
Horkheimer was born near Stuttgart into the family of a wealthy Jewish businessman. His early school years were undistinguished, and he left high school to work as an apprentice in his father’s textile factory. In 1911, however, he made the acquaintance of Friedrich Pollock, who introduced him to philosophy and the social sciences, and who remained a life-long friend. Horkheimer finished high school after World War I. He flirted with communism, studied a variety of subjects at the University of Frankfurt, and ultimately wrote a dissertation on Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790).
Horkheimer published very little prior to assuming his position as director. That changed following the triumph of Hitler in 1933 when he was busily attempting to relocate the Institute from Frankfurt first to Geneva, then to Paris, and finally to Columbia University in New York City. His essays of the 1930s concentrated on distinguishing critical theory from its philosophical competitors and demonstrating how liberal capitalism had betrayed its original promise by creating the psychological, racial, and political foundations of totalitarianism. Other works dealing with mass culture, instrumental rationality, and the authoritarian state paved the way for Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Horkheimer’s thinking surely changed over the years. Nevertheless, he always retained his preoccupation with the impact of suffering and the liberating possibilities of individual experience.
Horkheimer also remained a champion of interdisciplinary research. Under his leadership, the Frankfurt School attempted to bridge the gap between normative theory and empirical work. His inaugural lecture of 1930 stressed that goal and, even while in exile, Horkheimer edited a multivolume interdisciplinary research project, Studies in Prejudice, for the American Jewish Committee. It included Rehearsal for Destruction (1949) by Paul Massing, which brilliantly analyzed the social origins of anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany; Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1950) by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Gutermann; and the classic The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Theodor W. Adorno and a host of researchers.
Horkheimer’s radicalism was inflamed by the Russian Revolution and the German Spartacus Revolt of 1919. But Stalin’s purges and the emergence of a terror apparatus took their toll. Horkheimer ultimately broke not just with communism but with Marxism as well. His politics had shifted to the Right even before he brought the Institute back to Germany and served as Rector of the University of Frankfurt from 1951 to 1953. Horkheimer wound up opposing the anti-imperialist struggle in Algeria, supporting the Vietnam War, and denouncing the revolts associated with 1968.
At this point, his concern with the negation of misery took a new turn. Looking back to the Old Testament, which prohibited depicting the divine, he came to believe that preserving the idea of resistance was now possible only through the all encompassing negation of reality and the longing for emancipation. The sacred—or, better, the otherworldly—became the vantage point for confronting the profane. He took the critique of Enlightenment to its farthest extreme. Friends noted a growing flirtation with Catholicism. All links between theory and practice were sundered. Critical theory was already imperiled when Max Horkheimer died at the age of seventy-eight.
Erich Fromm was one of Horkheimer’s closest friends from the early days. Fromm’s specialty was psychology, but he was also deeply versed in theological matters. In fact, the psychoanalytic institute in Berlin that he established with his first wife, Frieda Reichmann, was dubbed the “Torah-peutikum.” Fromm was a prolific writer and intellectually daring: he was among the very first to link the thought of Sigmund Freud with that of Marx. Today, however, Fromm is not taken very seriously. He is usually remembered for what his more academic critics considered “how to” books like The Art of Loving (1956)—that offered a responsible alternative to the way love is presented by mass culture; “feel good” works like The Heart of Man (1964)—that provided a counterweight to cynical assaults on Western culture; and supposedly superficial studies about international affairs like May Man Prevail (1961)—that sensibly called for the elimination of nuclear weapons and a tempering of the cold war spirit. Fromm’s Escape from Free
dom (1941) is remembered for its penetrating analysis of totalitarianism. His grant inquiry into The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), however, has been unjustly forgotten.
Fromm grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family; he was instructed as a child by learned rabbis like Nehemiah Nobel and especially Salman Baruch Rabinkow. His dissertation was The Jewish Law: Toward a Sociology of the Jewish Diaspora (1922), and his earliest works treated religious themes: The Sabbath (1927) and, with a Marxian twist, The Dogma of Christ (1930). His interest in the psychological appeal and ethical impulse provided by religion never fully disappeared, in spite of the atheism he adopted during the 1920s, and he struck a popular chord with his humanistic reinterpretation of the Old Testament in You Shall be as Gods (1967). Fromm’s attempt to develop a “materialist psychology” reflected the original commitment of critical theory to an all-embracing social transformation. Emphasis upon the practical character of psychoanalysis, its connection with resisting repression and fostering humanistic values, would mark his career.
Fromm helped found the Mexican Psychoanalytic Association in 1962, and he became one of the most influential figures in the development of psychoanalysis in Latin America. A staunch opponent of the Vietnam War and American imperialism, a supporter of countless progressive causes, Fromm advocated a non-bureaucratic and participatory form of “communitarian socialism.” He was also unquestionably the finest stylist and the most lucid writer produced by the Frankfurt School. Fromm finally broke with the Institute in 1940. Other members of the inner circle clearly envied his popularity, though there were legitimate political and philosophical disagreements with him as well. By the end of his life, he had little to do with any of his former associates at the Institute. As much as any member of the Frankfurt School, however, Erich Fromm remained true to the concrete moment, the humanistic spirit, and the transformative purpose of critical theory.
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