Frankfurt School

views updated

FRANKFURT SCHOOL.

FRANKFURT
EXILE
POSTWAR DISCOURSE
BIBLIOGRAPHY

The phrase Frankfurt School refers to an illustrious group of German-Jewish thinkers who came of age during the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic. Their number included Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and Friedrich Pollock. Later, they achieved a remarkable degree of intellectual renown in the United States, where they fled following Adolf Hitler's seizure of power.

FRANKFURT

The Frankfurt School's organizational base was the Institute for Social Research, which was established by Felix Weil in the liberal milieu of Frankfurt in 1923. The institute was originally conceived as an intellectual ally of the German working-class movement, whose 1918 through 1919 revolution had been brutally subdued by the reigning social democrats and their right-wing allies. The institute's charge was to undertake research on working-class politics in order to facilitate the eventual triumph of the "progressive social forces" that had been defeated in Weimar's early years. However, the Frankfurt School as it is known today was given its definitive shape under the directorship of Max Horkheimer, who succeeded Carl Grünberg in 1930.

Horkheimer articulated a new program in his inaugural address as director, "The Present State of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research." The new approach centered on the research methodology of "interdisciplinary materialism." By this term, Horkheimer sought to map an intellectual course that would navigate between two prevalent scholarly extremes: on one hand, philosophical speculation entirely ungrounded in fact and on the other hand narrow-minded social scientific fact-gathering uninformed by theoretical directives.

The institute's approach to social philosophy followed a course that had been charted by the Western Marxist revival of the 1920s. In 1923 Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy and Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness appeared. Both works vigorously rejected the determinist conception of Marxism purveyed by Soviet theoreticians. Lukács argued that Soviet Marxism's "objectivism" was incompatible with the notion of human freedom. Marxism, Lukács contended, was in essence a superior theory of human self-determination. However, it differed from earlier, bourgeois theories in stressing the "material" side of freedom: the component of social justice, without which freedom shrinks to a formal attribute relevant to the privileged classes alone. (In this vein, Horkheimer was fond of quoting the maxim, "Capitalism is inherently democratic; it forbids the right to sleep under bridges to millionaires and vagrants alike.") In many respects, Western Marxists like Lukács, Korsch, and the Frankfurt School foresaw the degeneration of Soviet Marxism into an oppressive and dogmatic "science of legitimation."

The collaborative research project that was meant to implement the Frankfurt School's interdisciplinary research program was Studies on Authority and the Family, in which Fromm's social psychology played a pivotal role. The study's thematic focus was the structural transformation of the bourgeois nuclear family, one of the institute's dominant concerns in the 1930s. But another aspect of the project highlighted the increasingly precarious status of Weimar democracy: the cultural transmission, via the family, of authoritarian patterns of socialization that undermined autonomy and bred obedience, thereby paving the way for dictatorship—a model that would soon cast its net across the Continent. During the 1950s, many of the concepts and research methods employed in the 1936 study were utilized in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), co-edited by Adorno and sponsored by the American Jewish Committee as part of its Studies in Prejudice series.

Hitler's seizure of power put an end to the Frankfurt School research program in its original incarnation: in March 1933, institute offices and property were confiscated by the Gestapo. Empirical research of the sort Horkheimer envisioned had become ideologically impossible in Germany. In 1934 the institute relocated to New York, where it established ties with Columbia University. Until 1940 its members continued to publish in German in order to preserve intellectual and cultural traditions that the Nazis sought to efface. Institute studies appeared in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, arepository of strikingly innovative work in philosophy, cultural criticism, and social theory.

EXILE

The institute focused on the economic, political, cultural, and psychological preconditions behind the rise of fascism. In his own programmatic contributions, such as the 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory," Horkheimer strove to articulate the theoretical foundations of critical theory, a term that had become a deliberate euphemism for reflexive, nondogmatic Marxism. Unlike orthodox Marxism, critical theory had shed all vestiges of economic determinism, remaining sensitive to the multifarious causalities of the total social process—political, legal, and cultural developments that possessed their own immanent logic. Unlike "traditional theory"—the conventional bourgeois disciplines that Horkheimer sought to integrate—critical theory rejected the positivist ethos that accepted bourgeois society at face value, in its sheer immediacy or givenness. By casting its lot with the downtrodden and oppressed, critical theory sought to inform processes of social emancipation—or, as Horkheimer phrased it, the "rational organization of society."

As prospects for emancipation receded with the triumph of fascism in Europe and "state capitalism" (the New Deal) in the United States, critical theory's approach became increasingly abstract and philosophical. In his essays from the late 1930s, Horkheimer began to rely on the ideals of "Philosophical Reason" as a transhistorical touchstone of humanity's emancipatory hopes. In Horkheimer's view, reason, by stressing the tension between the "real" and the "rational," brought to light the deficiencies of contemporary social life. By emphasizing the ways in which reality failed to measure up to the sublimity of reason's demands, philosophy preserved the idea of a radically different, utopian social order. Many of these themes were also central to Marcuse's important 1940 study of Hegel, Reason and Revolution.

Horkheimer presided over the institute's effective dissolution, apparently due to financial constraints, in 1941, at which point the Zeitschrift ceased to appear. He and Adorno relocated to Pacific Palisades, California, where they coauthored Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944–1947), an influential presentation of the Frankfurt School's philosophy of history. Here Adorno's influence clearly predominated, because the new outlook on reason was a highly critical one. The authors argued that the very process of human ratiocination—intellection itself—underwrote the modern totalitarian impulse. The most basic expression of domination, they argued, was the attempt to make the dissimilar similar by subjecting it to the abstract imperatives of logical thought.

Despite fascinating chapters on the Enlightenment, Homer's Odyssey, the Marquis de Sade, and anti-Semitism, their perspective seemed oblivious to some important and potentially devastating objections and counterarguments; the authors had abandoned the original methodological promise of interdisciplinary materialism in favor of a schematic philosophy of history. Horkheimer and Adorno concluded that the rise of totalitarianism had revealed the inner logic of the Western cultural development in toto. They never explored the converse possibility that fascism represented a last-ditch effort to overturn the ideas of the French Revolution, the rule of law and democratic republicanism.

One of the book's major innovations was its systematic treatment of the phenomenon of mass culture ("The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"). Similar misgivings about mass culture as a species of socially administered, ideological conformity would be voiced by American critics such as Dwight MacDonald, Clement Greenberg, and Irving Howe. Yet in this instance, too, one suspects that, despite the chapter's undeniable analytical brilliance, the authors indelicately grafted the experience of European totalitarianism onto the American situation. As a result, their analysis of the culture industry became monolithic: they readily assumed that mass culture, as a new form of ideological control, resulted in the "total integration" of American society. The distinctiveness of American political traditions—rule of law, republicanism, civil liberties—as a counterweight to culture industry conformity played no role in their account.

POSTWAR DISCOURSE

In 1950, Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Frankfurt to accept teaching positions. Other former institute members—Kirchheimer, Lowenthal, Marcuse, and Neumann (who died in 1953)—remained in the United States, where they enjoyed distinguished university careers. Although Horkheimer and Adorno's major philosophical works were only translated during the 1970s, the Frankfurt School's interpretive framework was introduced to an American public via a number of influential works by Herbert Marcuse. During the 1960s, reading books such as Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) served as an obligatory rite of passage for many members of the New Left. Marcuse's critique of the repressive nature of advanced industrial society, whose survival was predicated on rechanneling desire in accordance with the strictures of mass consumption (a process he famously characterized as "repressive desublimation") proved prophetic, for it anticipated the "libidinal politics" that a subsequent generation of student radicals would soon adopt.

Thus, whereas the Frankfurt School's critique of domination was first elaborated in the 1930s and 1940s, its doctrines were received under very different conditions. As a result of this unexpected confluence of German social thought and indigenous American radicalism, a generation of young American scholars (inspired in part by Martin Jay's pioneering history The Dialectical Imagination [1973]) sought to renew and adapt critical theory to the changed political and social realities of the post-1960s America, making the Frankfurt School framework an integral component of postwar American intellectual discourse.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Horkheimer and Adorno, for their parts, were extremely active in refashioning German politics. In his capacity as university rector, Horkheimer rubbed elbows with German political elites and had an important influence on postwar educational policy. The resurrected institute's new annual, Frankfurter Beiträge zu Soziologie, published influential studies of German occupational life that revealed a marked continuation of authoritarian character structure.

Adorno was an especially active participant in the reeducation process. He delivered a series of public lectures and radio addresses urging his fellow citizens to actively confront the German past rather than simply bury it. In the aftermath of Auschwitz, contrition and restitution became the twin preconditions for Germany's return to the fold of civilized nations. The Frankfurt School, with Adorno in the lead, stressed the imperatives of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or "Coming to terms with the past." For these reasons, in their study of the School's postwar influence Clemens Albrecht et al. credited it with establishing the intellectual and moral foundations of postwar Germany.

In "Education towards Maturity," Adorno praised the Kantian virtue of Mündigkeit, or autonomy. Thereby, he acknowledged that one of the key factors in Nazism's precipitous rise was a widespread dearth of Zivilcourage on the part of the German civil population. The traditional authoritarian state had excelled at producing quiescent and obedient subjects (Untertanen) rather than citizens. Only a far-reaching transformation in socialization patterns would remedy this debility and set Germany on the path to stable democratic government. Consequently, the Frankfurt School consciously downplayed its earlier hopes for radical social change—to the point where for many years Horkheimer categorically refused requests to republish books and articles from the 1930s and 1940s.

However, this change in political tone was apparently lost on postwar German youth. To the chagrin of Horkheimer et al., they found the Frankfurt School's more radical doctrines of the 1930s timely and congenial. Their impatience was, in many respects, understandable. After all, during the 1950s the Americans had sacrificed denazification to the ends of anticommunism. But this policy meant that there was a discomfiting continuity in personnel from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic.

The German SDS (Sozialistischer deutscher Studentenbund) saw itself as antifascist, and its goal was to oppose the authoritarian continuities in German politics. But this put it on an explosive collision course with the reincarnated Institute for Social Research, since one of the political lessons that Horkheimer and his colleagues had learned during the 1930s was that the Left's failure to rally around the values of liberal democracy had greatly facilitated Hitler's seizure of power—a scenario they were anxious to forestall in the postwar era. The inevitable political clash between the two groups came to pass in 1968, when Adorno felt compelled to summon the police to expel student radicals who had illegally occupied institute premises.

Jürgen Habermas, Adorno's assistant in Frankfurt during the 1950s, has continued to build on his mentor's legacy. Yet he has taken exception to the philosophy of history propounded in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he perceives as an exaggerated "inverted" teleology, in which linear decline supplants the positive teleology of progress. Unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas has been eager to stress the redeeming or positive features of political modernity: the values of civil society, the public sphere, the rule of law, human rights, and participatory democracy, all of which he perceives as an important bulwark against political authoritarianism.

At the same time, Habermas shares the Frankfurt School's critical verdict on "instrumental reason": like Adorno, he fears that the technocratic imperatives of economic management and state administration have taken precedence over human capacities for undistorted intersubjectivity—the ability to reach agreement through the beneficent capacities of mutual understanding. In The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), Habermas coined the phrase administrative colonization of the lifeworld to describe the process whereby the formal imperatives of economic and administrative rationality increasingly subsume informal modes of human interaction: friendship, intimacy, and principled political will-formation. Unlike his intellectual forebears, he has sought to reconcile critical theory's emancipatory thrust with contemporary developments in philosophy and the social sciences. Thus, his view of traditional theory is markedly less confrontational than was Horkheimer's. His theory of "universal pragmatics"—the "ideal speech situation" that constitutes the philosophical basis for the theory of communicative action—was developed via an encounter with the linguistic philosophies of J. L. Austin and John Searle.

Habermas's own work, which has had a profound and extensive impact on a variety of intellectual fields, is significant testimony to the continuing relevance of the Frankfurt School vision.