Critical Theory_A Very Short Introduction
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Herbert Marcuse was his only real competitor as an intellectual influence on the New Left. Marcuse’s political history reaches back over his time with the Office of Strategic Services from 1941 until the 1950s, where he played an important and progressive role in shaping American policy toward Western Europe, to his participation as a young man in the Spartacus Revolt of 1918–19. His early essays sought to link historical materialism with “historicity,” or the phenomenological structures whereby social reality is experienced by the individual. Similar concerns informed Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932), which contributed to a growing Hegel renaissance in Europe, while Reason and Revolution (1941) offered a seminal interpretation of the great thinker’s relevance for critical theory. Marcuse also authored a number of stunning essays collections. Always cognizant of the utopian potential exhibited by art, yet still concerned with practical forms of resistance, Marcuse envisioned a break with the established order. Nevertheless, his speculative ventures were complemented by various sociological and political studies.
After joining the Institute for Social Research in 1933, Marcuse interrogated the liberal state, the connection between monopoly capitalism and fascism, and the degeneration of communism. His later work anticipated the role of the new social movements in response to the alienation of advanced industrial society. Optimistic concerning the prospects for change in 1968, he also envisioned the conservative reaction that followed. Concepts like the happy consciousness, repressive de-sublimation, and the great refusal were all popularized by him. His signature work, One-Dimensional Man (1964), virtually brought critical theory to the United States and, through its citations, introduced many young intellectuals to the Frankfurt School. Marcuse always saw himself as working within the tradition of historical materialism. But he was flexible in his approach and was a prophet of cultural transformation. Herbert Marcuse incarnated the radical political moment of critical theory for a generation of young radicals in the United States and much of the world.
Walter Benjamin was—by contrast—unknown in the United States until the preeminent political theorist Hannah Arendt published a portrait of him in the New Yorker and edited his sterling collection of essays, Illuminations (1969). Benjamin thereafter became celebrated as a unique thinker of brilliance and uncanny insight. Another anthology of his essays, Reflections (1986), strengthened that assessment. Benjamin’s writings range from his lovely autobiographical works One-Way Street (1928) and Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (1950), which appeared originally as a set of newspaper articles in the 1930s, to an abstruse study of the Baroque titled The Origins of German Tragic Drama (1928) and his unfinished Arcades Project (1982), which comprised a few thousand quotations and offered a veritable hall of mirrors for understanding modernity. With the new popularity accorded postmodernism and other forms of philosophical subjectivism in the United States during the late 1970s, Benjamin’s fame soon reached epic proportions: a library of secondary works has appeared, and almost every volume of his Selected Writings has become an academic bestseller.
Benjamin was another son from a wealthy Jewish family. Born in Berlin, he received his doctorate from the University of Bern in 1919. He then became an itinerant writer and never held a steady job. There is a sense in which Benjamin incarnated the Luftmensch—the impractical individual whose imagination has lifted him beyond the world. His work was marked by a preoccupation with the fungible character of language, the nature of memory, and the seemingly mundane experiences of everyday life like eating, storytelling, and book collecting. All of these, Benjamin believed, shed light on broader social trends. His explicitly political writings were uninspired and, as exemplified by the Moscow Diary of 1926–27, they offer little insight into the monumental events of his time. But it is a different matter when it comes to his studies on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, the Elective Affinities by J. W. von Goethe, or the novels of Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust. The same holds for Benjamin’s articles on architecture, photography, romanticism, and translation. His fascinating and provocative essays explore the aesthetic impact of modernity on individual experience and everyday life.
Influenced by both Gershom Scholem, his childhood friend who became a legendary scholar of Jewish mysticism, and the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin attempted to fuse a messianic outlook with what became a growing interest in historical materialism. Reacting against the fatalism of scientific socialism, contemptuous of its transformation of the classless society into an unattainable ideal, his concern was with reclaiming the metaphysical experience of reality and, ultimately, the unrealized utopian possibilities of history. That undertaking was plagued by an inability to articulate the barriers to liberation as well as the inconsistencies and mutually exclusive assumptions embedded in his general outlook. Yet there is little doubt that Walter Benjamin continues to inspire, frustrate, and educate especially young bohemian and radical intellectuals. His writings evoke exile in an age of “ruins,” and his tragic suicide in 1940, while attempting to flee the Nazi invasion of France, puts a particularly dramatic stamp on his life.
Walter Benjamin had only one student, Theodor W. Adorno, who embodied the interdisciplinary ideal of the Frankfurt School and the image of the European intellectual. He seemed to know everything—and better than anyone else. Also born into a bourgeois family, but with a Jewish father and an Italian mother, Adorno received his doctorate in 1924. A musicologist who had studied with the great composer Alban Berg, and who was deeply influenced by Arnold Schönberg, Adorno edited a music journal during the 1920s and 1930s, and he later advised Thomas Mann on the sections dealing with music theory in Doctor Faustus (1947). Interpretations of great composers like Ludwig von Beethoven, Richard Wagner, and Gustav Mahler followed along with the classic Philosophy of Modern Music (1949).
Adorno was also a sensitive critic of literature and poetry and, arguably, was the most dazzling philosophical mind of the age. Committed to the notion of a negative dialectic, deeply skeptical of all systems and traditional understandings of narrative, he was intent upon articulating the inherently flawed character of civilization while rejecting every attempt to identify the individual with the collectivity.
Adorno wove these themes into his own all-embracing philosophical narrative. But he was also engaged in empirical research. Adorno’s studies of radio and television, which illuminated the ideological impact of what most considered simple entertainment, complemented his work on the authoritarian and conformist tendencies of modern society. And he was a genuine master of the essay. His “On Popular Music” (1932) demonstrated the impact of the commodity form on the genre while his insightful and innovative interpretations of Beckett, Kafka, and Proust evinced his broader concern with a reflective understanding of experience.
Adorno sometimes dealt with political issues. But he was always fearful of mass movements. Negation assumed a value in its own right, and he identified resistance with securing the “non-identity” between the individual and society. Adorno’s influence on contemporary understandings of critical theory is without parallel. No thinker better exemplifies its uncompromising commitment to the glimmer of freedom.
A word still needs to be said about Jürgen Habermas. This most exceptional student of Horkheimer and Adorno became the most prolific of all thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. His writings touch upon all facets of social life, including religion, and his essays extend from interpretations of the philosophical canon to commentaries on the issues of the day. If his early works made important contributions to critical theory, however, his intellectual path ultimately led him in new directions.
Growing up under Nazism, which other members of the Frankfurt School did not, left Habermas with a deep belief in the rule of law and liberal democracy. It also marked his concern with the manipulation of discourse and the importance of “undistorted communication.” These themes run through all his works. An important figure in the student movement of the 1960s, though never engaged
with any of its extremist factions, his early writings offer critical meditations on historical materialism, institutional legitimacy, and the relation between theory and practice. The later writings of Habermas, by contrast, are increasingly enmeshed in analytic philosophy. They insist upon the need for grounding claims, formulating systemic arguments, and providing ontological characterizations of nature and science. The extent to which they break with critical theory is a matter of ongoing debate. Making that judgment, indeed, calls for examining the impulses animating the original enterprise.
Coda
The Frankfurt School was marked by a multiplicity in unity. Each member of its inner circle was different. Each had his particular interests and unique intellectual strengths and weaknesses. But they all shared a commitment to the same cluster of themes and concerns. No member of the inner circle ever identified freedom with any system, collectivity, or tradition—and all of them were skeptical about establishmentarian modes of thinking. All of them sought to deal with new problems by introducing new categories. Critical theory in their hands was marked by intellectual daring and an experimental quality. It was for them, in the first instance, always a matter of method. Horkheimer put it well when he wrote: “Critical theory in its concept formation and in all phases of its development very consciously makes its own that concern for the rational organization of human activity which its task is to illuminate and legitimate. For this theory is not concerned only with goals already imposed by existing ways of life, but with men and all their potentialities.”
Chapter 2
A matter of method
Critical theory was coined as a term only in 1937. The Frankfurt School was by then in exile in the United States. Fearing political ostracism in their new home, while seeking to secure the Institute, its members employed the term as a cover. Critical theory had, after all, arisen within the framework provided by Western Marxism. Communists like Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch—who had been involved with the Institute from its inception—were among its leading representatives. Ernst Bloch also fits prominently into this tradition. All of them were inspired by the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and the euphoria surrounding the European radical uprisings of 1918–1923.
Advocates of direct action by the working class, skeptical of parliamentary reformism, these activist intellectuals stressed the role of ideology in maintaining capitalism and the decisive character of class consciousness in overturning it. They highlighted the legacy of philosophical idealism for historical materialism as well as the link between Hegel and Marx. Western Marxists had no use for talk about textual orthodoxy or the fixed character of historical materialism. Lukács put the matter succinctly—and laid the basis for all future understandings of critical theory—in his great work, History and Class Consciousness (1923), when he wrote:
Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious “orthodox” Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation…. Orthodox Marxism does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the “belief” in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a “sacred” book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.
Lukács had been a preeminent figure of cultural modernism in Hungary prior to World War I. He soon became perhaps the most prominent intellectual of the communist movement. History and Class Consciousness was the seminal work of Western Marxism, and it inspired virtually every major thinker in the critical tradition. But it is easy to understand why Lukács, Korsch, and other Western Marxists were condemned at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in 1924. Their writings reflected the heroic years of the revolution: its workers councils, cultural experiments, and messianic hopes. They also undercut the certainty associated with scientific versions of socialism by sharply separating the inquiry into society from any inquiry into nature. In fact, Lukács liked to quote Giambatista Vico (1668–1744) that “the difference between history and nature is that man has created the one but not the other.” With its utopian vision, its critical attitude toward finished philosophical systems, and its insistence upon proletarian empowerment, Western Marxism was expressive of what Bloch termed “the underground history of the revolution.”
Human emancipation became its aim. The critical method was intent upon contesting “hegemony”—using the term made famous by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks (published posthumously in 1971)—in all its forms. Among the founding members of the Italian Communist Party, who would languish and then die in prison at the hands of Benito Mussolini, Gramsci was not a major influence on the Frankfurt School, but his work throws Western Marxism into sharp relief.
Fundamentally concerned with civil society, its non-economic institutions, and its guiding ideas, he stressed how the dominant culture produces habits of subservience on the part of the ruled. He maintained that a counter-hegemonic strategy was required to empower the working class and, through new civic institutions, strengthen its self-administrative capacities. Such a strategy called for organization not merely from above, or through some rigid vanguard party divorced from the masses, but rather through the practical work of organic intellectuals dialectically bound to the proletariat.
Western Marxists shared this basic outlook. All of them were activists. All of them interpreted historical materialism as a theory of practice that should prove less descriptive than proscriptive. Their point was to clarify the changing conditions and preconditions for transformative action. That standpoint made it illegitimate for Marxists to carry over ideas and categories from one period to the next in mechanical fashion. Or, to put the matter another way, they forced historical materialism to exhibit its historical character.
Karl Korsch made a significant contribution to this view in Marxism and Philosophy. Clearly the least known representative of Western Marxism, he interpreted ideology less as some reflex of the economy than as lived experience that would impact upon action. Empowerment of the exploited rested upon consciousness, education, and practical experience. Radicalized by the Russian Revolution, inspired by the spontaneous upsurge of soviets and workers’ councils, Korsch fostered a blueprint for radical economic democracy in his pamphlet What Is Socialization? (1919). He joined the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1920, assumed the post of minister of justice in Thuringia during the proletarian uprisings of 1923, and became an important influence upon organizationally homeless ultra-left intellectuals after he was purged from the Communist International in 1926.
The Materialist Conception of History (1929) was an attack upon all scientific understandings of Marxism, and Korsch never surrendered his belief in the need for proletarian empowerment. His last book, Karl Marx (1938), was a superb intellectual biography. Insisting that any idea can be interpreted for reactionary purposes, wishing to subject the communist revolutionary practices to its own ideals, Korsch highlighted the methodological importance of “historical specification.” He treated Marxism no differently than any other form of philosophy. Its character and employment at any given time were understood in terms of the organizational interests, constraints, and opportunities for action provided by the historical context. No longer could it serve as an official dogma or as an immutable system with transcendental claims. Marxism, too, was open to manipulation—and critique.
In the 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Horkheimer built upon these views. He considered the new outlook neither a finished logical system nor a set of fixed claims. Concerned with illuminating the neglected aspects of freedom, insistent upon the historically constituted character of reality, and already skeptical about the liberating mission of the proletariat, he conceived of critical theory as an alternative to the dominant philosophical paradigms. Other forms of thought were seen as affirmative of the existing order in spite of their self-proclaimed neutrality and objectivity. Insofar as they ignor
ed its historically constituted character and the possibility of an alternative (whether consciously or unconsciously), they were seen as justifying its workings.
Traditional theory was, therefore neither as neutral nor as reflective as its advocates tended to believe. Social interests were hidden within the philosophical discourse and, if only for this reason, the established approaches could not simply be dismissed out of hand. Immanent criticism was required to demonstrate how the premises of contending philosophical outlooks were tainted by the values of the existing order.
Horkheimer had already confronted two popular strains of mainstream philosophy in these terms with his seminal essay “Materialism and Metaphysics” (1933). Materialism in the form of positivism and its offshoots was condemned for dismissing subjectivity and ethical concerns while analyzing society through categories and criteria derived from the natural sciences. Metaphysics was, by contrast, castigated for ignoring the philosophical relevance of the material world and employing universal precepts to enable the individual—whether through what Kant termed “practical reason” or what Heidegger understood as phenomenology—to indulge in what are ultimately intuitive moral judgments.
These seemingly opposed philosophical outlooks were seen by Horkheimer as flip sides of the same coin. Each is mechanically defined by what it opposes. Yet they converge in their contemplative preoccupation with philosophical foundations, unalterable categories for interpreting reality, and fixed notions for verifying experience or truth claims. To be sure, scientific rationality was considered the more pernicious of the two by the Frankfurt School. Nevertheless, its members originally chastised them both for their blindness to critical reflection, history, and the utopian imagination.