Abstract
In 1932, as the Nazis came to power, the situation in Freiburg became precarious for Marcuse. As he remembers it: ‘Because of the political situation I desperately wanted to join the Institute. At the end of 1932 it was perfectly clear that I would never be able to qualify for a professorship (mich habilitieren können) under the Nazi regime’.1 Consequently, Marcuse corresponded with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, asking if he could work with them. They invited him for an interview, and the Institute appointed him to a position.2 This was fortunate, for in 1933 Heidegger joined the Nazi party and began making speeches for them.3 Husserl had sent the Kurator of Frankfurt University, Kurt Riezler, a letter of support, and the Institute considered petitioning the University to accept Marcuse’s Hegel ‘Habilitation-Dissertation’ — which was already published as a book — so that he could be appointed a university professor. In fact, however, Marcuse never actually worked with the Institute in Frankfurt, since they, anticipating fascist suppression, had set up a branch office in Geneva, to which Marcuse was assigned.4 Henceforth, despite later philosophical and political differences, Marcuse would strongly identify with what is now often called the ‘Frankfurt School’, and would make important contributions to their projects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes and References
Marcuse, ‘Theory and Politics’, p. 126. Although Barry Katz claims that, ‘To the best of Marcuse’s knowledge, Heidegger never read the Habilitationschrift on Hegel’s Ontology’ (Praxis and Poiesis’, New German Critique, no. 18 (Fall 1979) p. 16), Jürgen Habermas told me that Marcuse had told him that Heidegger had rejected his dissertation, but was never clear about why Heidegger had rejected it (conversation with Habermas, Starnberg, Germany, December 1980).
Conversation with Leo Lowenthal, April 1978 and Marcuse, December 1978; see also, ‘Theory and Politics’, p. 126f.
See Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (Freiburg-im-Breslau: Korn, 1933).
For texts of other speeches by Heidegger and documents pertaining to his activity with the Nazis, see Guido Schneeberger, ed., Nachlese zu Heidegger, Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Denken (Bern: Buchdruckerei AG Suhr, 1962); some of this material has been translated in German Existentialism. See note 54 in Chapter 2 for a list of books and articles on Heidegger and Nazism. According to Katz, Marcuse found Heidegger’s entry into the Nazi Party ‘a great shock’ (Praxis and Poiesis’, p. 16). Henry Pachter, who was a student in Freiburg at the time, said that it would be strange if Marcuse found Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism surprising because: (1) Nazi students filled Heidegger’s classes and enthusiastically clamoured around him; (2) Heidegger’s wife was an outspoken member of the party and supporter of national socialism; (3) at the Davon debate with Ernst Cassier in 1929, Nazi students supported Heidegger and shouted down Cassier with slogans and insults; and (4) Heidegger’s life-style and thinking were sympathetic to fascist völkisch ideology: he wore Bavarian peasant clothes and affected peasant manners; he spent as much time as possible in his mountain retreat in Todtnauberg; and he was becoming increasingly nationalistic and political in the 1930s (conversation with Henry Pachter, New York, June 1980). Jürgen Habermas concurred in this analysis (discussion in Starnberg, December 1980).
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1973) p. 28. Compare Marcuse, ‘Theory and Politics’, pp. 126ff, which provides more information on Marcuse’s entry into the Institute. He reports that he was especially impressed by the Institute’s critical study of Marxism, political analysis of fascism, and serious reflections on psychoanalysis (p. 126). Marcuse would, of course, make important contributions in all these areas. On the history of the Institute, see Jay’s pioneering study; my critical review ‘The Frankfurt School Revisited’, New German Critique, 4 (Winter 1975) pp. 131–52, which disputes some of Jay’s interpretations;
Helmut Dubiel, Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978)
Kellner and Roderick, ‘Recent Literature on Critical Theory’, New German Critique 23 (Spring-Summer 1981) pp. 141–70.
See T. W. Adorno, Kierkegaard (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 1974; reprint of 1933 text) and Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972) which contains a revised version of the text Adorno was working on in the 1930s that criticized phenomenology. Adorno’s critiques of Heidegger were eventually published in Jargon of Authenticity and Negative Dialectics. For some of Horkheimer’s criticisms of Heidegger, see ‘Zum Rationalismusstreit in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie’, in Kritische Theorie I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968) pp. 134ff.
Morton Schoolman’s claim that Marcuse continued to develop a historicist ontology as a foundation for critical theory is mistaken, for he fails to see the changes in Marcuse’s work with the Institute for Social Research. See his ‘Introduction to Marcuse’, pp. 3ff. Schoolman does not realize that Marcuse’s post-1934 work, at least until the 1950s, assumed that the Marxian critique of political economy and historical materialism provided the foundation for critical theory. Consequently, Marcuse abandoned his earlier search for an ontological foundation — although ontological themes continue to reappear in his work during this period. However, in his post-Second World War work, when Marcuse began to doubt aspects of the Marxian theory, he returned to search for an ontological foundation for his theory, as we shall see in Chapter 6.
Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, pp. 24ff.
Ibid., Helmut Dubiel, in Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung, stresses the central role that Horkheimer played as Director, although Marcuse himself claims that Dubiel unduly exaggerates Horkheimer’s role and influence. See ‘Theory and Politics’, pp. 128ff.
Alfred Schmidt, Zur Idee der kritischen Theorie (München: Hanser, 1974) pp. 37ff.
Ibid., p. 41.
Ibid., p. 42. The first statement cited by Marx is found in the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy and the latter in the Introduction to Capital.
On the Institute’s project of merging philosophy and the social sciences in an interdisciplinary social theory, see Max Horkheimer, ‘Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie mid die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung’, Sozialphilosophische Studien (Frankfurt: Fisher, 1972); discussed in my New German Critique review of Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, and in Dubiel, Wissenschaftsorganisation.
Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy.
The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (hereafter ZfS) was reprinted in 1970 by Kösel Press with a foreword by Alfred Schmidt (reprinted in Zur Idee) and was republished again in an inexpensive paperback edition by Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag in 1980 with an introduction by Jürgen Habermas, translated in Telos, 45 (Fall 1980) pp. 114–21.
Horkheimer, ‘Vorwort’, ZfS, vol. 1, no. 1 (1932) p. 1.
Ibid., pp. 1–111.
This theoretical project will be the subject of section 4.2.
Most of the essays that will be discussed in this chapter are translated in Negations (hereafter referred to as N) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). Page references will be to this edition, although occasionally I shall modify the translations.
For discussion of the Institute’s critique of fascism, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, and the texts in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen, 1978), especially pp. 3–162.
On the capitalist roots of fascism, see Franz Neumann, Behemoth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940).
On the Institute’s studies of family and authority, see the Institute for Social Research, ed. Max Horkheimer, Autorität und Familie (Paris: Alcan, 1936)
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970).
Marcuse, ‘Theory and Politics’, p. 128. For Hitler’s speech, see My New Order, (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941) pp. 93ff.
This is, in fact, the orthodox Marxian line advocated by the Comintern, where George Dimitrov at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International stated that ‘fascism is the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital’, in The United Front (San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, 1975). I shall argue that Marcuse takes a rather orthodox Marxian line on most crucial issues throughout the 1930s. For an analysis of the differences between monopoly capitalism and the earlier competitive capitalism, see Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review, 1965).
To avoid confusion, I should note that the essay was written in 1934 and that the term ‘existentialism’ here loosely refers to some of the philosophical tendencies of Heidegger and his followers. But by extending the term from its philosophical to a political form (N, p. 31) Marcuse uses it as a label for characterizing a broad spectrum of writers; thus not all of the positions stated refer to Heidegger’s philosophy. Indeed, some of the positions analysed are at odds with Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and the ‘existentialism’ of people like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Jaspers, and refer more specifically to the doctrines of Carl Schmitt and a group of Nazi ideologues whom Marcuse cites. Marcuse attempts to justify his procedure in note 68 of his essay: ‘The possible reproach that we are playing off philosophical against political existentialism has been refuted by philosophical existentialism itself, which, as Heidegger’s most recent publications show, has politicized itself. The original opposition is thus cancelled’ (N, p. 274). Such an undifferentiated critique of Heidegger, however, fails to analyse the complicated relations between Heidegger’s philosophy and Nazism, and simply brushes Heidegger with guilt by association with Nazi ideologues. Although there are passages in Heidegger’s infamous 1933 address, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität, where Heidegger supports Nazism and claims that ‘earthy and bloody forces’ are the real forces of history (N, p. 35), Heidegger’s ‘irrationalism’ and ‘activism’ are of a quite different sort than national socialism. Thus, whereas there are continuities between Heidegger and fascism, there are also differences which Marcuse’s discussion fails to distinguish. See the sources in Chapter 2, note 54, which debate the complicated issue of the relation of Heidegger’s philosophy to fascism.
Marcuse is probably referring here to Heidegger’s assumption of the Rectorship of the University of Freiburg in 1933, and his speeches using his ontological-existentialist terminology in support of the Nazis. See Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger, for the documents.
See my discussion in Chapter 2 of the sharp criticisms of Heidegger’s philosophy that Marcuse develops in his early writings, and my discussion in Chapter 3, where I depict the philosophical differences between Marcuse’s work and Heidegger, even when they were working together. Hence, whereas there is clearly a sharpened critique of Heidegger in his work with the Institute, this is grounded to some extent in his pre-Institute work; consequently, one should see both the continuities and discontinuities between Marcuse’s pre-and post-1934 work.
One might compare Marcuse’s position here with that of Adorno, who from the beginning was concerned to attack idealist and subjectivist philosophies, of which existentialism and phenomenology were prime targets. See the works cited in note 5 of this chapter. In general, Adorno takes a far more critical approach to bourgeois philosophy than Marcuse and Horkheimer. See Breuer, Die Krisis der Revolutionstheorie, pp. 130ff and 264ff, and Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, who provides a fine discussion of the differences between Adorno’s and Marcuse-Horkheimer’s 1930s versions of critical theory, rooted in Adorno’s early association with Walter Benjamin and development of his own well defined philosophical project by 1930, before he came to work with the Institute.
Marcuse, ‘Philosophie des Scheiterns: Karl Jaspers Werk’, Unterhaltungsblatt der Vossichen Zeitung (14 December 1933; reprinted in an anthology Karl Jaspers in der Diskussion (München: Piper, 1973); (hereafter, ‘Jaspers’ — page references to the Karl Jaspers anthology). Marcuse wrote this review essay for a Swiss newspaper while working at the Institute branch in Geneva, but before his close collaboration with Horkheimer. Hence it should not be considered part of his Institute work, although it is revealing of his attitude towards existentialism at the time, distinguishing between a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ version.
Marcuse, ‘Jaspers’, p. 125. In effect, Jaspers is proposing a rejection of Heidegger’s philosophical enterprise directed towards the Question of Being, suggesting that Heidegger is a traditional metaphysican and is not really an ‘existential’ philosopher at all.
Ibid., p. 126. Jaspers’s concept of selfhood and freedom is remarkably similar to the concepts operative in Marcuse’s essay ‘On the Philosophical Concept of Labour’, compare pp. 30ff. See also Heidegger’s On the Essence of Reason (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) for a similar notion of absolute freedom. There is a certain pathos in the fact that all these doctrines of absolute freedom of the self appeared in Germany precisely when freedom was being so strictly curtailed.
Marcuse, ‘Jaspers’, p. 126. It is interesting that Marcuse was never impressed by Jaspers’s call for a theory of communication as a fundamental mode of self-development — a theme central to German existentialism. Compare here Habermas, who would later develop a communication-oriented critical theory of society. See Human Knowledge and Interests, and many of Habermas’s post-1970s works.
Marcuse, ‘Jaspers’, pp.127ff.
Ibid., p. 130. Marcuse’s attraction to the ethical elements of existentialism suggests a deep ethical impulse at the origins of his thought which would constantly reappear in his later work but is never fully developed to the extent to which his anthropological and aesthetic interests were. Concerning Jaspers: although some of his programme is suggestive and his concepts are provocative, unfortunately his prose is incredibly dull and cumbersome; hence his writings do not really fulfil the promise of his enterprise. Marcuse, in fact, is remarkably uncritical of Jaspers. Compare Stephen Eric Bronner’s critique of Jaspers in Authenticity and Potentiality: A Marxian Inquiry into the Role of the Subject (PhD dissertation, Political Science, the University of California, Berkeley, 1975). Jaspers’s major work, which Marcuse was reviewing, has been translated into English, although it is virtually unreadable. See Karl Jaspers, Philosophy (in three volumes) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).
Marcuse, ‘Jaspers’, pp. 130–1. This essay is the last one, to my knowledge, in which ‘historicity’ plays a major role; hence I believe that the passage cited represents Marcuse’s break with the existentialist concept of historicity — a critique that reappears in the essay on liberalism and fascism (N, pp. 32f).
It is curious that elements of the universalism, naturalism and existentialism which Marcuse criticizes in the essay on fascism (N, pp. 5ff) would reappear in his own later work, although, of course, in a different form.
In his earlier work, Marcuse rarely, if ever, had anything particularly positive to say about Kant or rationalism. See, for instance, the critical references to Kant in his article criticizing Max Adler’s Kantian-Marxism, ‘Transzendentaler Marxismus?’.
I think Marcuse is using Kant here against Heidegger and fascism. Heidegger taught many courses on Kant during the period in which Marcuse studied in Freiburg and seemed to be one of Heidegger’s favourite philosophers. Hence, jabbing his former teacher with a philosophical needle, Marcuse cited Kant against Heidegger’s current positions, which could quite rightly be seen as a betrayal of Kant’s rationalist heritage. See Heidegger’s 1929 book on Kant, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969).
The concept of reason would play a central role in the philosophical enterprises of Marcuse and his colleagues. During the 1930s they tended to contrast the substantive and critical concept of reason in Hegel and Marx with various forms of irrationalism and positivism (see, for example, Reason and Revolution). Later, they would sharpen their critiques of ‘reason’, taking the forms of a critique of instrumental reason in Adorno and Horkheimer (see Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason) and an attempt by Marcuse to develop an overcoming of repressive reason through a synthesis of reason and passion, resulting in a ‘libidinal rationality’, and ‘rationality of gratification’ (see Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, which will be discussed in Chapter 6).
Marcuse’s remarks here apply most directly to German idealistromanticist culture. He cites Spengler as expressing the otherworldliness of the ‘soul-culture’: ‘“The word ‘soul’ gives the higher man a feeling of his inner existence, separated from all that is real or has evolved, a very definite feeling of the most secret and genuine potentialities of his life, his destiny, his history. In the early stages of the languages of all cultures, the word ‘soul’ is a sign that encompasses everything that is not world”’ (Spengler, N, p. 108).
Institute for Social Research, Studien über Autorität und Familie.
Marcuse, ‘A Study on Authority’, in SCP, pp. 49–156.
Marcuse, ‘Authority and the Family in German Sociology to 1933’, in Autorität und Familie, p. 738.
Ibid., p. 738.
Ibid., p. 739.
Ibid., p. 740.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 749.
Max Horkheimer, ‘Authority and the Family’, in Critical Theory, pp. 127 and 128. For a critique of Horkheimer’s analysis, see Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Seabury, 1978) pp. 53ff. Poster fails to note Marcuse’s article on sociologies of the family, claiming that ‘Marcuse’s contribution to Studies on Authority and the Family was an intellectual history of the idea of authority’ (p. 58).
Horkheimer, ‘Authority and the Family’, p. 98.
Conversation with Marcuse, March 1978.
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1970) p. 30.
Ibid., p. 32.
Ibid., chapters 7–13.
Fromm, Escape from Freedom. Fromm was more optimistic than other Institute members that the trends towards fascism could be reversed through the creation of more ‘productive’ and ‘loving’ personalities. Marcuse claimed that the Institute criticized Escape from Freedom ‘very severely’ (conversation with Habermas and others, ‘Theory and Politics’, p. 127). The bitter debate between Fromm and Marcuse will be discussed in Chapter 6. On Fromm’s relationships with the Institute, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination.
Fromm, Escape from Freedom.
See my discussions of ideology, popular culture and the ideological apparatus in ‘Ideology, Marxism, and Advanced Capitalism’, Socialist Review, 42 (November-December 1978) pp. 37–66, and ‘TV, Ideology, and Emancipatory Popular Culture’, Socialist Review, 45 (May–June 1979) pp. 13–54.
On the fascist public sphere, see Reinhard Kuehnl, ‘Problems of a Theory of German Fascism’, New German Critique, 4 (Winter 1975) pp. 26–50; the articles in New German Critique, 11 (Spring 1977) pp. 3–150;
Rainer Stollmann, ‘Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art’, New German Critique, 14 (Spring 1978) pp. 41–60.
On the fascists’ use of radio see the provocative discussion by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media (New York: Signet, 1964),
for a discussion of fascist theatre, see Henning Eichberg, ‘The Nazi Thingspiel’, New German Critique, 11 (Spring 1977).
On fascism as a cultural synthesis see the articles in New German Critique, 11 (Spring 1977). The following analysis is much indebted to material published in New German Critique.
See Anson Rabinbach, ‘Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and Fascism’, New German Critique, 11, and Ernst Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and Dialectics’, New German Critique, 11.
Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962).
Wilhelm Reich, Mass Psychology, and ‘What is Class Consciousness’, in Sex-Pol, ed. Lee Baxandall (New York: Vintage, 1972).
See the articles on the fascist public sphere, cited in note 55.
See the articles in The Frankfurt School Reader, and the discussion in Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, chapter 5.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968).
Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, New German Critique, 5 (Spring 1975).
Marcuse, Negations, pp. ix-x.
Max Horkheimer, ‘Die Juden und Europa’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, VIII, 1/1 (1939) p. 115. This essay was one of the last overtly Marxist essays that Horkheimer wrote and was excluded from publication in the two volumes of his collected essays from the period Kritische Theorie, ed. Alfred Schmidt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969).
Neumann, Behemoth, and Pollock, ‘State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations’, Studies in Philosophy and the Social Sciences, IX, 2 (1941)
‘Is National Socialism a New Order’, Studies in Philosophy and the Social Sciences, IX, 3 (1941). There is debate over whether Marcuse sided with Neumann or Pollock. Jay claims that ‘Marcuse, who was personally much closer to Neumann, adopted a position nearer to Neumann’s in Reason and Revolution, where he wrote, “The most powerful industrial groups tended to assume direct political control in order to organize monopolistic production, to destroy the socialist opposition, and to resume imperialist expansion!”’, quoted in Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 155. Slater, however, claims: ‘Marcuse too seems to have sided, implicitly, with Pollock; in his last contribution to the Zeitschrift, he wrote: “The Third Reich is indeed a form of ‘technocracy’. The technical considerations of imperialistic efficiency and rationality supersede the traditional standards of profitability and general welfare!”’, Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School, p. 21. These quotes indicate that Marcuse consistently took neither Neumann’s nor Pollack’s position, although he was certainly personally closer to Neumann.
See H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977) p. 174. Helmut Dubiel and Alfons Söllner claim that Marcuse’s position ‘mediated’ between the Neumann and Pollock camps.
See ‘Die Nationalsozialismusforschung des Instituts für Sozialforschung’, the introduction to their anthology of Institute writings on National Socialism, Wirtschaft, Recht und Staat in Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1981) pp. 7–32. They claim that Marcuse’s analysis of ‘technological rationality’ in ‘Some Social Implications of Technology’ (Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol.9, no.3, 1941, pp. 414–39) provides a theory of the new technocratic features of national socialism — shared by other advanced industrial societies — but that Marcuse sees ‘technological rationality’ rooted in the development of the capitalist economy and thus implicitly defends the ‘primacy of the economic’ advocated by Neumann. In this way, Marcuse can, with Pollock, claim that national socialism is a new order with a technocratic state apparatus, but with Neumann can continue to stress its role in stabilizing and reproducing capitalism. Moreover, Dubiel and Söllner claim that the high level of abstraction in Marcuse’s analysis allows him to ‘transcend’ the alternatives of state versus monopoly capitalism. There is a parallel here with Marcuse’s theory of advanced industrial society, which is anticipated in this essay (see my discussion in 8.1).
As Helmut Dubiel points out, in the early 1930s the Institute used the code words ‘materialism’ and ‘materialist’, or ‘economic theory of society’, to describe their Marxian programme, while only around 1936–7 did they adopt the term ‘critical theory’. Dubiel’s book Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung is valuable in documenting and analysing the shifts in the Institute for Social Research’s work from (1) an early ‘materialist’ stage (1930–1936/7) to (2) a ‘critical theory’ stage (1937–40) and (3) a later ‘critique of instrumental reason’ stage, where they transform ‘critical theory’ and distance themselves from Marxism. I would suggest, however, that Marcuse’s work in this period resists these shifts and is quite coherent and unified from his entry into the Institute in late 1932 to his departure for government service in 1942 (see the discussion in 4.3).
‘Critical theory’ in the 1930s was a relatively unified and collective project, while after the 1940s Adorno and Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm, Neumann and others developed quite different social theories and had quite different political orientations. See Dubiel, Wissenschaftsorganisation, on the 1930s critical theory programme. An adequate comparative analysis of the different versions of post-1940s critical theory has yet to be published, although there is some material in David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
See especially Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditionelle und kritische Theorie’. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, VI/2 (1937) and the articles by Horkheimer and Marcuse on the theme ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’ in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, VI/3 (1937). Horkheimer’s 1930s essays are collected in Kritische Theorie, two volumes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968) and Marcuse’s are found in Negations. Horkheimer analyses the concept of critical theory and the programme of interdisciplinary research and differentiates it from traditional social theory. See my discussion in ‘Frankfurt School Revisited’, and Dubiel, Wissenschaftsorganisation.
See Negations, and Stefan Breuer’s provocative discussion of Marcuse’s 1930s essays in Die Krise der Revolutionstheorie, pp. 118ff.
See Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’ (N, pp. 134–58) for an example of the sort of careful ideological analysis that I am suggesting characterizes Marcuse’s work in this period.
Marcuse. ‘The Concept of Essence’; the essay first appeared in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, V/1 (1936). See also ‘The Struggle against Liberalism in Totalitarianism’, where Marcuse discusses the ‘unbridgeable abyss’ between Kant’s rationalism and defence of human rights and the philosophy of Heidegger, which ‘turns traitor to the great philosophy that it formerly celebrated as the culmination of Western thought’ (N, pp. 40–2). Compare my article ‘Ideology, Marxism, and Advanced Capitalism’, where I argue that the historical trajectory of ideology in the modern era has tended to take the form of degeneration from once rational-emancipatory programmes of social reconstruction (ideology-as-ism) to apologetic rationalizations and idealizations of the existing society (ideology-as-hegemony).
Marcuse claims that this was the function of Max Scheler’s notion of a ‘material eidetics’ (N, pp. 61ff.) which is related to fascist submission to authority and irrationalism (see note 40. N, p. 277).
Compare Horkheimer, who from his first major work, Anfängen der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), distinguishes between apologetic-ideological and progressive-utopian moments in bourgeois culture and generally sees more progressive elements in the philosophies of Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer than in later philosophies such as existentialism, positivism, pragmatism, etc., which he interprets as the collapse and betrayal of earlier ideals.
In a sense, Marcuse’s shift towards defending the progressive bourgeois heritage against fascism reflects the turn in the Comintern and Social Democracy towards a ‘united front’. Thus, during the 1930s, not only is Marcuse’s theory close in certain respects to the dominant Marxian orthodoxy, but so are his politics. For further discussion, see 4.1.2 and 4.3.
See my discussion of Marcuse’s earlier concept of philosophy in 3.1.
In ‘The Concept of Essence’, Marcuse translates the traditional concept of essence into Marxian terms and argues that what is essential in the theory of society is the system of production which produces the totality of social relations and facts (N, p. 70).
The essay ‘On Hedonism’ first appeared in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, VII/1 (1938) and is important both as a defence of critical theory’s commitment to bodily gratification and as an anticipation of Marcuse’s later incorporation of Freudian elements into his anthropology; it is reprinted in Negations.
Marcuse writes: ‘industrial society has differentiated and intensified the objective world in such a manner that only an extremely differentiated and intensified sensuality can respond adequately to it. Modern technology contains all the means necessary to extract from things and bodies their mobility, beauty and softness in order to bring them closer and make them available. Both the wants corresponding to these potentialities and the sensual organs through which they can be assimilated have been developed. What man can perceive, feel and do in the midst of advanced civilization correspond to the newly openedup wealth of the world. But only those groups with the greatest purchasing power can take advantage of the expanded capacities and their gratification’ (N, p. 184). Marcuse will later argue for a ‘new technology’ (see One-Dimensional Man, chapter 9, discussed in 10.2), whereas here he shares the Marxian belief that the development of technology itself will lead to a dramatic increase in human well-being. After the critiques of ‘instrumental reason’ and ‘science and technology as domination’ by the Institute in the 1940s, Marcuse concluded that only a ‘new technology’ could realize technologies’ emancipatory potential because the structure and organization of current technologies served as instruments of domination.
Marcuse provides some examples of what he means by false needs and pseudo-happiness: ‘Pleasure in the abasement of another as well as self-abasement under a stronger will, pleasure in the manifold surrogates for sexuality, in meaningless sacrifices, in the heroism of war are false pleasures because the drives and needs that fulfil themselves in them make men less free, blinder, and more wretched than they have to be. They are the drives and needs of individuals who were raised in an antagonistic society’ (N, p. 194). I shall discuss the concept of false needs later in my analysis of One-Dimensional Man, in which Marcuse makes the concept a crucial aspect of his critique of contemporary society (8.2.1).
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness.
See Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, and my discussion in ‘Frankfurt School Revisited’.
In his intellectual biography qua interview/conversation, Leo Lowenthal tells of a lunch at the Tip-Toe Inn in New York around 1937, where he, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Wittfogel were discussing the current political situation and Horkheimer ventured the remark that it wouldn’t be surprising if Hitler and Stalin signed a pact. Lowenthal recounts that Wittfogel jumped up from the table, angrily threw down his napkin, cursed, and left the restaurant in a great rage. Lowenthal says that this incident reflects the heated debates over the Soviet Union in the Institute during the 1930s and the increasingly critical stance of many of the Institute members. See Leo Lowenthal, Mitmachen wollte ich nie. Ein autobiographisches Gespräch mit Helmut Dubiel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980) pp. 86–7. The discussion of fascism in this book sheds light on the debate over fascism within the Institute (pp. 101ff, passim).
See T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury, 1972) and Horkheimer’s essays, ‘The End of Reason’) reprinted in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader and ‘Authoritarian State’, translated in Telos, 15 (Spring 1973). On the shifts in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s 1940s critical theory from the earlier Institute project, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination; Kellner, Karl Korsch: and Dubiel, Wissenschaftsorganisation.
Horkheimer went furthest in abandoning Marxism, see Kellner, Karl Korsch. Marcuse told Phil Slater in 1974 that he felt that Horkheimer’s last interviews and articles were ‘beneath criticism’ and talked of Horkheimer’s ‘betrayal of critical theory’ and ‘theoretical collapse’, while Jurgen Habermas described the late Horkheimer’s work to me in similarly bitter terms, denouncing him as an ‘outright reactionary’ in his later years. See Phil Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) pp.89 and 165; conversation with Jürgen Habermas, November 1976, Austin, Texas.
On Trotsky’s orthodoxy, see Peter Beilharz, ‘Trotsky’s Marxism — Permanent Involution?’, in Telos, 39 (Spring 1979) pp. 137–52.
Throughout the following chapters, I shall discuss Marcuse’s relationship to Marxism, attempting to discern which elements of the Marxian theory he attempted to affirm, or reconstruct, and which elements he criticized or rejected. My interpretation of the depth and orthodoxy of Marcuse’s commitment to Marxism at the time is supported by Karl Korsch, who had precisely this impression when he visited the Institute in New York in 1938. After characterizing other members of the Institute in a letter to Paul Mattick, Korsch writes: ‘Marcuse is a sort of orthodox Marxist who might even still be a Stalinist, and is bureaucratically authoritarian in matters of bourgeois philosophy and Marxism (which today have become one and the same). Theoretically, he has somewhat more character and solidity than the others, whose greater “freedom” consists only in a greater fluctuation and uncertainty’, quoted in Kellner, Karl Korsch, p. 284. Korsch’s letters provide some fascinating insights into the activities, politics and personalities in the Institute during their American exile. See the selection, edited and annotated by Michael Buckmiller, in Marxistische Revolutionstheorien, ed. Claudio Pozzoli (Frankfurt, Fisher, 1974), especially pp. 182ff, which I review in Telos, 27 (Spring 1976) pp. 212ff.
Marcuse’s book reviews begin modestly with a short review of a book on ‘family politics’ in ZfS, II, 1, p.134. By the next issue he was writing most of the reviews for the philosophy section and continued to contribute many book reviews to every issue up to 1941, when the Zeitschrift ceased publication. The broad range of topics he covered reveal Marcuse’s wide range of interests. Although most of Marcuse’s reviews are rather sparse summaries of the book’s contents, there is some interesting material that make his reviews a hitherto overlooked source of his ideas in the 1930s. I shall draw on his criticisms of logical positivism and (pragmatism) in his reviews in 5.2. A complete list of his book reviews in the Zeitschrift appears in the bibliography.
On the differences between Horkheimer-Marcuse’s and Adorno-Benjamin’s version of critical theory in the 1930s, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977) pp. 65–9.
On Adorno’s programme of the ‘liquidation of idealism’, see Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, pp. 111ff, passim.
See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Dubiel, Wissenschaftsorganisation, and Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics. The collaboration of Adorno and Horkheimer was facilitated by their living close to each other in California, whereas Marcuse, Lowenthal, Pollock and others had gone to Washington, DC to work in government agencies as part of the struggle against fascism.
Slater, Origin and Significance, pp. 89 and 165.
Conversation with Marcuse, 28 December 1978.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1984 Douglas Kellner
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kellner, D. (1984). Critical Theory and the Critique of Fascism. In: Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17583-3_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17583-3_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-36831-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-17583-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)