Critical Theory

by Stephen Eric Bronner

  Alienation and reification thus increasingly become understood as psychological and philosophical problems that in the first instance require psychological and philosophical solutions. In Knowledge and Human Interest (1971), for example, Jürgen Habermas posited an “ideal speech situation” predicated on “undistorted communication.” The ideal becomes concrete in the psychoanalytic encounter where both the analyst and the client, unimpeded by external or material interests, are intent on finding the true source of any given neurosis or pathology. A “generalizable interest” thereby emerges that is lacking in traditional forms of philosophy like positivism and phenomenology.

  Critique is now given a positive foundation. Its confrontation with the manipulation of discourse is undertaken from an “emancipatory” basis. This has certain practical implications. Mutual understanding among activists becomes paramount, and each must prove self-critical of his or her goals and tactics. In principle, after all, undistorted communication underpins all forms of deliberative democracy. Older concerns with the historical constitution of reality can now also be treated as technical problems. Habermas made his position clear: “in the power of self-reflection, knowledge and interest are one.” Questions of argumentation and definition, however, quickly arise for this innovative psychological-philosophical approach. Is the ideal speech situation merely a methodological point of departure for social action or is it rather a fixed philosophical category with its own rules? Is it a matter of understanding undistorted communication in terms of a critical theory of society or as the foundation for a new variant of language philosophy with its own rules? Habermas made the “linguistic turn.”

  Critical theory thus took its first steps into the arena of analytic philosophy. Theory of Communicative Action (1981), another classic work by Habermas, admittedly still warns of the dangers posed by instrumental rationality and the institutional forces of late capitalism to the life world of the individual. Communicative action with its linguistic rules, insulated from history, becomes the vehicle for resistance. But the motivation for engaging in it is another matter entirely. Without reference to the production process, or political organization, new concerns with recognition and identity become primary. Demands of this sort, however, often conflict. Axel Honneth the protégé of Habermas, sought to deal with such conflicts emanating from alienation and reification by highlighting the ability of individuals to “care.”

  Empathy takes center stage insofar as caring involves recognizing the other and constraining the more crass forms of egotism. Alienation and reification are now framed as philosophical and experiential problems in need of a philosophically grounded experiential response. Ethical norms become, once again, severed from the realities of political life. Institutional imbalances of power, structured conflicts of group interest, and the imperatives of capitalist accumulation fade from view. Specifying the constraints on caring and the like, or the appropriate forms of action for dealing with alienation and reification, became matters of secondary interest. The debilitating implications for generating any meaningful notion of solidarity—and resistance—are self-evident.

  To be fair, however, most members of the Frankfurt School’s inner circle believed that prescribing remedies for alienation and reification (from within the existing system) was useless at best or a compromise of principle at worst. Pessimism became pervasive among the inner circle once the proletariat lost its revolutionary standing. In “Philosophy and Critical Theory” (1937) Marcuse already noted that the dialectic of Hegel and Marx, which rested on the prospect of realizing the realm of freedom, had been stunted and that radical change was no longer on the agenda.

  The iron cage of bureaucracy was seemingly bringing about the “end of the individual.” This was the vision depicted by Horkheimer in The Eclipse of Reason (1940). Capitalism had ceased generating its gravediggers, and totalitarianism was infecting both ends of the political spectrum: Horkheimer stated bluntly that “the extremes meet.” Traditional assumptions about socialism and historical progress were therefore in need of revision. A new framework was required to deal with the integrative power of the bureaucratic society, the impotence of organized opposition, the regressive character of progress, and the need—above all else—to cultivate autonomy. If revolution can no longer be identified with liberation, then resistance must change its character. This would ultimately involve confronting civilization, progress, and enlightenment.

  Looking backward

  Critical theorists saw in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts a new emphasis upon ending the repression associated with the “pre-history” of humanity. Socialism would now be identified with how people were treated rather than a fixed set of institutions and policies. The young Marx seemed to exhibit utopian inclinations along with the vision of a new man freed from egotism, cruelty, and alienation. The revolution against capitalism now turned into something intent upon transforming the human condition. Critics suggested that it was now impossible to envision what revolutionary success might entail. Understanding revolutionary failure, however, was rendered easier. The newly discovered writings of the young Marx played an important role in challenging a gray and drab understanding of socialism.

  Erich Fromm’s edition of Marx’s Concept of Man (1961) became wildly popular, and it inspired a generation of American radicals. Even before that, however, Fromm was preoccupied with the phenomenon of alienation. His various writings on religion and psychology make that clear. Capitalism was to be opposed not simply because it was materially exploitative, but because its system of impersonal market forces called upon individuals to treat one another as potential competitors and means to an end. The issue for him was not merely the mechanized society over which humanity has lost control, but the inner passivity and mental dullness that it fostered. His critical social psychology was thus predicated on articulating and affirming anti-capitalist values and progressive possibilities for individual development. Here is the basis for what would become an overriding attempt to recast socialism as a form of humanism while downplaying narrow class concerns and revolution.

  Henry Pachter once told me, however, that his first reaction in 1932 upon reading the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts was: “This is the end of Marxism.” He was a socialist activist, a political historian, and also loosely connected with the Frankfurt School. Today a statement like Pachter’s sounds strange. But it made sense in the context of the 1930s. Marxism was still understood as an all-embracing philosophical system with scientific foundations and teleological guarantees. An aura hung over the communist movement, and social democracy still seemed to incarnate the only genuine opposition to political dictatorship and social injustice. Both the socialist and the communist movements were less intent upon utopia than nationalizing major industries and regulating the market, substituting a (democratic or authoritarian) dictatorship of the proletariat for the rule of the bourgeoisie, and introducing a new secular ideology presumably based on technological and scientific progress.

  The more traditional outlook was far less dramatic than what the new approach offered with its assault on alienation and reification. But there is something enviable in its clarity of purpose and its privileging of politics. There is no need for nostalgia. Its philosophical and political aims were modest only in comparison with the exotic disquisitions and utopian exaggerations that were to follow.

  Chapter 4

  Enlightened illusions

  Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment was perhaps the first great critical encounter with modernity undertaken from the Left. It first appeared in a private printing for the Institute with the title Philosophical Fragments in 1944. When it was finally published with Querido Verlag in 1947, however, the original title had been turned into the subtitle. The focus had become more precise. Initially that didn’t help matters: it sold only about two thousand copies. Today, however, Dialectic of Enlightenment is recognized as landmark of modern philosophy and, arguably, the signature wor
k of critical theory. Two very different intellectual temperaments find expression in this book. Its text exhibits complex tensions and various interpretations are possible. Nevertheless, certain features are indisputable.

  This work investigates how scientific (or instrumental) rationality expels freedom from the historical process and enables reification to penetrate every aspect of society. Even art turns into just another commodity and loses its critical character. Conformism is now treated by the dialectical discourse as something more than a merely bohemian concern. Metaphysics is, moreover, given an innovative and radical twist. Horkheimer and Adorno respond to the “totally administered society” with a systematic assault on systematic thinking or, better, an anti-narrative that itself becomes a narrative. Their book also provides a sophisticated attempt to employ thinkers outside the enlightenment tradition in order better to understand its limitations. It insists not merely that the price of progress is too high but that barbarism is embedded within civilization and that the Enlightenment has betrayed its most sacred promise: autonomy.

  The illusion of progress

  Dialectic of Enlightenment was loyal to the imperative of the young Marx that to be genuinely radical is to go to the “root” of a problem. Historically, both in theory and practice, Leftists had basically identified with the Enlightenment project. Even the young Marx, who harbored more than a touch of romanticism, insisted that the proletariat must take its goals from the revolutionary bourgeoisie and that it has none of its own to realize. His critique of liberal republicanism was predicated on the impossibility of actualizing its enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity within the parameters of the capitalist state.

  With the triumph of fascism, the degeneration of communism, and the integration of social democracy, these ideals were seen as having lost their cachet and, as a consequence, this kind of political critique as having lost its appeal. Auschwitz had punctured the aura associated with progress and modernity. Old-fashioned criteria for making judgments, constructing narratives, and understanding reality thus become anachronistic. The postmodern appears avant la lettre. Enlightenment and modernity find their fulfillment in a concentration camp universe run by an unaccountable bureaucracy, fueled by an instrumental rationality run amok, and expressed in the unleashing of an unimaginable rage.

  Dialectic of Enlightenment included fragments of a sensational last chapter “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” added in 1947. Prejudice is interpreted there as having its own dynamic and a logic resistant to rational argumentation. Anti-Semitism is viewed as an expression of humanity’s “second nature” with anthropological roots. Horkheimer and Adorno insist that there has always been something “different” about the Jews. If modernity is increasingly and repressively standardizing individuality, then the encounter with difference and autonomy will logically generate a resentment born of unconscious envy. Such resentment marks the anti-Semite. Nazi hatred of the Jew fulfills the presentiments of the past even as it produces a “turning point in history.”

  Capitalism also fits into the picture. Anti-Semitism is not reduced to some prefabricated economic interest. But it is linked to the commodity form through which people are no longer seen as ends unto themselves. They are rather treated as factors of production within a bureaucratic production process. Reification is, meanwhile, undermining the capacity of individuals to exercise moral judgment. Autonomy was being eroded long before the first concentration camp was constructed. The other was always in danger. The Jew was always identified with the sphere of circulation and as the harbinger of capitalism. Not merely capitalism requires interrogation, therefore, but civilization itself. Thus, the critical theory of society takes an anthropological form in which resistance relies upon an increasingly imperiled subjectivity.

  Dialectic of Enlightenment insisted that civilization itself was implicated in the assault on subjectivity. Homer’s Odyssey already depicts the willingness of its main character to surrender his identity and his name in order to survive. Instrumental reason and the erosion of subjectivity, alienation, are thereby intrinsically bound together. The linkage between them is merely crystallized during the historical epoch popularly known as the Enlightenment. The term thus receives a dual meaning in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is identified with both a historically specific scientific theory of knowledge that contested religious dogma in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, more broadly, an anthropological struggle with error and superstition that arose from the beginnings of civilization. The key to the book is the way in which the historical critique of the Enlightenment is turned into the lever for an anthropological interrogation of progress. This, indeed, is what made it so provocative and controversial.

  Objective and value free, operational and testable, scientific reason was initially employed to destroy traditional superstitions and prejudices in order to foster an open discourse, experimentation, and tolerance. Progressive thinkers living in a religious universe were primarily concerned with protecting scientific inquiry from the intrusions of theologians. Having begun with an assault on religious dogmatism, however, instrumental rationality turned its power against all nonscientific precepts and normative claims. These included ethical values associated with the Enlightenment (like moral autonomy and the exercise of conscience) that had inspired scientific experimentation in the first place. Just to this extent, however, the critical character of reason diminished: ever more surely it became, as David Hume had predicted, a “slave of the passions.”

  Dialectic of Enlightenment supplements Hegel and Marx with insights drawn from Nietzsche, Freud, and Max Weber. Its authors invert the traditional narrative identifying technological development with progress. They instead connect the growing dominance of instrumental rationality with the totally administered society. The new outlook projects a new form of resistance that calls for heightening the “non-identity” between subject and object—or, less philosophically, the individual and society. Insofar as the whole is false, and progress is an illusion, the only critical option lies in developing what would later become known as a negative dialectic. Only in this way might critique confront the illusions attendant upon Enlightenment.

  Science had always been treated as value free and neutral regarding ideological claims. Like the commodity form and bureaucracy, however, it has an interest in expanding its dominion. Scientific rationality thus blends easily with the imperatives of capitalism and the bureaucratic state. Capitalism, bureaucracy, and science—all expressions of instrumental rationality—constitute the real core of Enlightenment. They turn nature into an object of use, progress into alienation, and freedom into control. Autonomy is a nuisance and critique is a threat. Enlightenment may be associated with such ideals. But its real goal is standardization and control. In the name of liberation, its advocates wound up fostering a rationality of technical domination. The irrational beliefs that the Enlightenment originally sought to destroy thus reappeared as its own products.

  Humanity pays for an increase in power over nature with the loss of subjectivity. Blind to the domination in which it was engaged, equally blind to the reaction it was nurturing, Enlightenment humanism was incapable of understanding that in its “innermost recesses there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a fascist, turns the world into a prison.” Such is the real (if unacknowledged) legacy of the Enlightenment. It extends from Kant over the Marquis de Sade to Nietzsche. Where Kant created an epistemological barricade to protect science from the intrusion of metaphysics and religion, and Sade took the instrumental treatment of individuals to the extreme, Nietzsche ultimately rendered reason and conscience subordinate to the will to power.

  Dialectic of Enlightenment does not claim that individuals have simply been turned into robots. What occurs instead is a perversion of autonomy. Individuals are seen as increasingly incapable of making anything other than technical or emotional judgments. (Here, it should be noted, the early critique of vulgar materialism and intuitive metaphysics
comes into play.) Exercising conscience and imagining the free society become ever more difficult and, if only for this reason, the appeal of totalitarianism grows. A sociological and philosophical explanation—if not a justification—emerges for those who claimed that they were “just following orders.” Old-fashioned political forms of resistance are no longer viable: where reification defines progress, critical theory is indeed left in the position of tossing bottles with messages of liberation into the flood of barbarism.

  Freedom was betrayed by the Russian revolution, and liberalism compromised the promise of a liberal society. Instrumental rationality saw to that—irrevocably. Philosophical idealism had initially been predicated on the idea of a universal subject lacking all empirical determinants: it was the referent that individuals should use in making ethical decisions. Liberalism employed universal principles for its rule of law and its view on rights. But that is precisely the problem. From the willing surrender of individuality in the name of instrumental needs to the denial of class claims in the name of an abstract humanity to the final assault on metaphysical abstraction itself—all become logical steps within a single logic. Progress is not what the good bourgeois has always said it was: the growth of moral conscience and the improvement of humanity. Quite the opposite: autonomy and ethical norms get obliterated. Actual progress is a movement from the bow and arrow, as Adorno later liked to say, to the atom bomb.

  Enlightenment political thought is seen by Horkheimer and Adorno as having bought into the illusion of progress—at great cost. Western Marxists had never been enthralled with liberal republicanism, and in 1933, following the triumph of Adolf Hitler, the Frankfurt School felt the same way. Even Marcuse, perhaps the most politically savvy of its inner circle, noted in 1934 that a deep affinity existed between liberalism and totalitarianism not merely in terms of their commitment to private property but in their political views.