Let's get Critical ... it's the Frankfurt School's favorite theory

By DAVID MYTON

The 14 years from 1919-1933 were profoundly traumatic for the people of the Weimar Republic. It was a period marked by revolution, street violence between rival political groups such as the populist Freikorps hyper-nationalists and the Communists, economic strife, sustained unemployment, rising anti-semitism, and the enduring dismay following Germany’s defeat in World War One. Meanwhile, a certain Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party were on their way to seizing power.

Despite all this, there were some optimists around. One of these was Felix J Weil, the son of a wealthy grain merchant, who in 1923 stumped up the money to fund a new Institute for Social Research, which would be affiliated with the University of Frankfurt. He appointed Carl Grunberg - a professor of political economy in Vienna and editor of a journal devoted to the history of socialism and the labour movement - as the first director.

Thus was born what would become the Frankfurt School. Much of its scholarly output would reveal a latent pessimism concerning the future: that it might resemble the traumatic present.

Grunberg was a Marxist (and Germany’s first Kathedermarxist or academic Marxist) who considered Marxism to be both Weltanschauung and a research method. In his inaugural address to the Institute in 1924, Grunberg said he understood Marxism to be a social science, maintaining that “the materialist conception of history neither is, nor aims to be a philosophical system ... its object is not abstractions, but the given concrete world in its process of development and change”. (Tom Bottomore, The Frankfurt School, Ellis Horwwod, London, 1984, p12)

In this early phase the Institute’s research focused less on theoretical questions and more on empirical studies such as Wittfogel’s examination of Asiatic modes of production (Economy and Society in China, published in 1931); and Friedrich Pollock’s inquiry into the Soviet Union’s transition from a market to a planned economy (Experiments in Economic Planning in the Soviet Union, 1917-1927) published in 1929; while Henryk Grossman published The Law of Accumulation and Collapse in the Capitalist System (1929). (Bottomore, ibid.)

But the world outside of the Institute hadn’t gone away. In January 1933 the National Socialists Workers Party (the Nazis) won enough votes at the election to force President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor.

On March 23 1933, the Reichstag instituted a new “Enabling Act” which allowed Hitler alone to pass new laws for a period of four years. Under a process known as Gleichschaltung the Nazis targeted any group or individuals they didn’t like - Jews, trade unions, intellectuals, pacifists, left-wingers - for removal from any public office. They publicly burned books of which they disapproved. By July, Hitler and the Nazis were in sole control of Germany. And that was not good news.

Left-wing intellectuals responded to the new circumstances by reappraising their understanding of Marxist theory and practice, known collectively as Western Marxism - much of it derived from the philosophy of Hegel. And the USSR which, after the 1917 Revolution and the Tsar’s overthrow by the Bolsheviks (led by Vladimir Lenin) and the resulting civil war, seemed to be something much less than a workers’ paradise.

Horkheimer and the passage to exile

Meanwhile, Grunberg had quit as the Institute’s director after suffering a stroke. In his place stepped the philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer - and his first big task was to oversee the Institute’s passage into exile. Germany was no place to be if you were a Jewish intellectual (or any kind of Jew). It was time to move overseas, to safety.

In a short and solemn essay Horkheimer wrote around this time, published in a collection entitled Dammerung (pdf) he expressed some of his concerns:

“The more threadbare ideologies are, the crueller the means by which they are protected. The degree of effort and terror with which the swaying gods are defended, shows the extent to which the dusk [Dammerung] has set in. In Europe the understanding of the masses has increased with big industry, so that the sacred goods have to be protected … Whoever defends [these goods] has already made his career: in addition to … systematically induced stupification, the threat of economic ruin, social disgrace, prison and death prevent this [new] understanding from violating the highest conceptual means of domination. The imperialism of big European states does not have to envy the stakes of the Middle Ages; its symbols are protected by more subtle apparatus and more terrible armed guards than the saints of the Church of the Middle Ages …” (cited in David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory. Horkheimer to Habermas, University of California Press, 1980, p45)

In 1935, after a short stay in Geneva, the Institute moved to New York City and affiliated with Columbia University. Its journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal of Social Research), was relaunched as Studies in Philosophy and Social Science.

In 1941, Horkheimer moved to Pacific Palisades outside Los Angeles followed by some of his Institute colleagues including Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno - all three destined to be “big names” as word of their work spread outside the hitherto cloistered world of academe. They would return to Frankfurt in and around 1950.

Horkheimer outlines his agenda

In the early 1930s, Horkheimer began to outline his agenda for the Frankfurt School around what he termed “Social Philosophy”, declaring that “the entire system of modern empiricism belongs to the passing world of liberalism”.

The then intellectual focus on Positivism as a theory of knowledge or philosophy of science “treats human beings as mere facts and objects”: this was “mechanical determinism” which established “an absolute distinction between fact and value” and hence “separated knowledge from human interests”. (Horkheimer, Selected Essays, 1972, cited in Bottomore, op cit, p16)

However, in his preferred “dialectical theory” individual facts always appeared in a definite connection and sought “to reflect reality in its totality”. Such dialectical thought integrated “the empirical constituents into structures of experience which are important” so that when “an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organises given facts and shapes them into a theory … Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking.” (ibid)

Horkheimer argued that competitive liberal capitalism was in decline, but big, organised industry was on the rise. Class consciousness among “the masses” was growing but he was not optimistic that there would be a move to full socialism.

Multitudes of “subtle apparatuses” (such as education and mass media) and “direct institutions of force” (eg, the police and military) were working to annihilate such hopes. The “night of humanity” was threatening. (Bottomore, ibid)

(The German sociologist Max Weber identified this pervasive pessimism as Entzauberung – “disenchantment” - in which older, traditional elements of knowledge such as theology and metaphysics were slowly being pushed into the realm of the superstitious, the mystical, or the simply irrational.)

Hitherto, Marxism had mostly been understood as a science that had discovered the laws of society in which history “was viewed as the linear progressive unfolding of successive socio-economic formations propelled by internal contradictions in the prevailing mode of production … The Russian Revolution made Scientific Marxism the official ideology of Communist parties in Europe and the United States”. (Steven Seidman, Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era (2nd ed), Blackwell, Oxford, 1998, p183)

Marx’s ambiguous intellectual legacy

In turn, many academic social scientists were drawn to Marxist theory because of this strong influence on Europe’s revolutionary movement. By the postwar years, Marxism provided the major language of social criticism across the continent. However …

“… Marx left an ambiguous intellectual legacy … a body of work rife with tensions and contradictions. To the extent that Marx embraced mechanistic social imagery and aimed to uncover the laws of history and society, he endorsed a strong scientific vision. Yet Marx framed his work as social critique of society and social science … These ambiguities in Marx’s social ideas were perpetuated by his heirs.” (Seidman, ibid)

Central to the allure of Marxism was the notion of dialectical materialism, a concept Marx had borrowed (and then adapted in Das Capital) from the German philosopher Georg Hegel:

Marx wrote …“My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of 'the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea'. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”

(For more on the Enlightenment and Hegel see my previous post on the History of History)

By the 1930s, drawing on the political sociology of Max Weber and Georg Simmel, some academics ...

“sought to broaden Marxism by connecting its political economic approach to an understanding of culture and politics … they aimed to fashion Marxism into a critical social theory that could grasp the movement of Western industrial societies and its potential for revolutionary change”. (Seidman, p184)

At the forefront of this move were “a group of extraordinary academics - philosophers, sociologists, historians” from the Frankfurt School at the forefront of which were its chief intellectual leaders, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Their analyses would be guided by something they called “Critical Theory” - devised as an alternative to both scientific Marxism and orthodox social science.

Understand society, then change it

Crucially, Critical Theory has dual aims: first, to understand modern society, and secondly, to change it:

“Repudiating the dogma of value neutrality, the Frankfurt School analysed the major sites of conflict and social crisis for the purpose of advocating political activity. Critical Theory was to be a new type of human study: it would unite philosophy’s concern with synthetic analysis and the empiricism of the social sciences, animated by the moral intention of making theory into a force for human emancipation,” writes Seidman (pp184-185 op cit)

Political and social crises in Germany plus the nightmare of Stalinism in the Soviet Union had provoked “social pessimism” within the Frankfurt School:

“Social hope passed into social pessimism for the critical theorists. The Marxist dream of the coming new age of freedom came crashing down as a nightmare of social barbarism and mass terror … In the face of social barbarism, the Frankfurt School’s only social hope was to keep alive the already enfeebled philosophical and aesthetic traditions of critical reason.” (Seidman, ibid)

Critical Theory would help them to understand and to change society. It would be central to Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno's groundbreaking analysis in their Dialectic Of Enlightenment, published in 1944.

Adorno: social theorist, classical musician

As well as being a philosopher and social theorist, Adorno was a classically-trained musician and music theorist. After teaching for two years at the University of Frankfurt, in 1934 he moved to England to lecture at Oxford University. In 1938 he went to the US where he taught at Princeton before moving to the University of California at Berkeley as coordinator of a research project on Social Discrimination.

Adorno didn't have much time for Marx; indeed “he seems never to have given any serious attention to Marx’s economic analysis or his theory of class, and he rejected entirely the idea of a theory of history, or ‘science of history’, which is one of the fundamental elements in Marx’s thought … cultural criticism was to be Adorno’s principal contribution to critical theory”. (Bottomore, p18)

A major theme of this work is the “self-destruction of the Enlightenment” in which “instrumental reason” emphasises control and efficiency over human values. This modern, scientific consciousness is held to be the main source of cultural decline as a result of which humanity - instead of entering a truly human condition - sinks “into a new kind of barbarism”. (cited in Bottomore, pp18-19)

Instrumental reason, then, sees people as mere implements, not autonomous humans. The practical and technical are prioritised while ethical considerations are ignored.

For Adorno, artistic culture “did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but it always simultaneously raised a protest against petrified relations under which they lived”. Art lost its significance if it tried to create specific political or didactic effects: “art should compel rather than demand a change of attitude”. (Adorno, ‘Commitment’ cited in David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory. Horkheimer to Habermas, University of California Press, 1980, pp83-84)

Sinking into a new kind of barbarism

Writing between 1942-1944, Horkheimer and Adorno - employing a blend of sociology, philosophy and cultural criticism - set out to answer the question - Why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism - in the context of the unfolding disaster of World War Two and its associated horrors.

In the words of historian Zoltan Tar, ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ “means the self-destruction of the Enlightenment”… and that the course of “irresistible progress is irresistible regression”. (The Frankfurt School. The Critical Theories Of Max Horkheimer And Theodor W Adorno, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1977, pp80-81)

Horkheimer and Adorno are puzzled by the readiness of the masses of the technological age “to fall under the sway of any despotism” …

“... Under these circumstances, not only scientific work but even the meaning of science must be questioned. Thought has become a commodity and language merely an instrument for its advertisement. External and internal mechanisms of censorship prevent any attempted resistance against this course of events. Even the honest reformer, by conforming to the rules of the game, is only strengthening the power of the existing order which he intends to break.” ibid, p82)

Increasing economic growth - the precondition for a better society - “supplies the techniques of repression for those who have them at their disposal … the individual is reduced to nothingness in the face of immense economic powers”. (ibid)

In the dialectical process, they say, Enlightenment rationality - designed to dispel superstition and to liberate the masses - instead introduced new ways of control and domination. Instrumental reason, with its emphasis on efficiency and control over human values, reduced individuals to extensions of machinery “in a process of dehumanisation and domination of nature and human beings”:

… “Technology became the medium of total reification in capitalist society, and the Nazis’ diabolical use of it made the Frankfurt theorists conclude that terror and civilisation are inseparable … ‘It is impossible to abolish the terror and retain civilisation …the goal is not the conservation of the past but the redemption of the hopes of the past’.” (Tar, ibid, p83)

Introducing the Culture Industry

Horkheimer and Adorno introduce the notion of “the culture industry” (including mass media) - which emerges when the “dialectic of enlightenment enters the phase of mass deception” and so “... the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production”. Technology and “technological consciousness” have themselves produced a new phenomenon in the shape of a uniform and debased “mass culture” which aborts and silences criticism. (Bottomore, op cit, p21)

The Dialectic of Enlightenment examines ideas around the interplay of culture, instrumental reason, rationality, and power - and indeed on the Enlightenment itself - which “highlight the contradictions and dangers inherent in modern society”.

It thus provided a framework for future analysis by Frankfurt School scholars (and others) as they sought to apply the developing Critical Theory to their critiques of contemporary society.

I will examine some of these in another essay I intend to write in the next month or so.

References

Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Urizen Books, New York, 1978

Tom Bottomore, The Frankfurt School, Ellis Horwood/Tavistock Publications,London, 1984 David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory. Horkheimer to Habermas, University of California Press, 1980

Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950, Boston, Little, Brown & Co, 1973

Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Oxford University Press, 1978

Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction To The Thought Of Theodor W Adorno, Macmillan, London, 1978

Steven Seidman, Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era (2nd ed), Blackwell, Oxford, 1998

Zoltan Tar, The Frankfurt School. The Critical Theories Of Max Horkheimer And Theodor W Adorno, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1977

John B Thompson, Ideology And Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication, Polity Press, Oxford, 1990