Abstract
In 1937, when Max Horkheimer tied critical theory to skepticism about the assumption that working-class consciousness would transcend reification and achieve revolutionary clarity, the working class itself was still a modest presence on the world stage. Now, that class is vastly larger and more diverse. Wage-paid labor has become the norm everywhere, not just or primarily in the Euro-Atlantic realm. Yet today, few of Horkheimer’s heirs occupy themselves with questions of class and social transformation. Why? Clues, this chapter argues, can be found in the early history of critical theory, which was divided on this question from the start. Working-class subjectivity appeared, from the standpoint of Horkheimer, to combine authority fetishism with commodity fetishism, and the mission of theory was redefined as critique, by means of inquiry anchored in research, with class and consciousness as focal themes. The early critical theorists, however, were unable to sustain this dialectic. Ultimately, this chapter argues, their rejection of blind optimism yielded to an equally blinkered pessimism, which vitiates most forms of “critique” today.
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Notes
- 1.
Emphasis mine. Here and elsewhere I often modify established translations. And, throughout, I use the phrases “proletariat” and “working class” interchangeably, as per Marx’s original usage, to denote the class of workers who live by the sale of labor power for wages. Proletarian labor can be industrial or agricultural, manual or mental; the class criterion is what matters, namely, whether this labor occurs under the direction of a capitalist who appropriates whatever surplus is produced. I first wrote about this at length in Smith (1974).
- 2.
“After many centuries of development, the capitalist mode of production still constitutes only a fragment of total world production. Even in the small continent of Europe, where it now chiefly prevails, it has not succeeded in dominating entire branches of production, such as peasant agriculture …” (Luxemburg [1913] 1951: 358).
- 3.
The SPD expressed this hope in July 1914, saying that “if the determined will for peace of the German, of the international proletariat … should not be able to prevent world war, then at least it must be the last war, it must be the Götterdämmerung of capitalism” (cited in Luxemburg [1916] 1971: 332).
- 4.
A thousand Bavarian communards were summarily executed after they were convicted by a military tribunal.
- 5.
For many years I have tried to locate Leviné’s thesis (1909?), most recently in Heidelberg; but it seems to have vanished.
- 6.
“Obviously,” Grossmann wrote, “… both sides of the process, the objective and the subjective elements, mutually influence one another … My theory of collapse does not aim at the exclusion of … active intervention [by the proletariat], but rather wants to show when and under what conditions” such intervention can succeed (Grossmann [1931] 1969: 88, cited in Marramao 1975: 64).
- 7.
“The fundamental tendencies of Marxian economic theory,” Marcuse wrote, “are best expounded by Henryk Grossmann …” (1941: 296).
- 8.
“The revolution requires the maturity of many forces, but the greatest among them is the subjective force, namely, the revolutionary class itself. The realization of freedom and reason require the free rationality of those who achieve it” (1941: 319).
- 9.
Maß und Wert, which was billed as a “bimonthly of free German culture,” appeared from September 1937 until October 1940. Editorially sponsored by Thomas Mann and Konrad Falke, the journal featured a stellar roster of contributors, including Bloch, Broch, Brod, Döblin, Hesse, Garcia Lorca, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Musil, Silone, and Sartre.
- 10.
Benjamin half-quotes and half-paraphrases this passage. The underlined passages, below, are the lines he quotes directly: “The intellectual, who finds his satisfaction in proclaiming with reverent admiration the creative strength of the proletariat, in exalting and adapting to it, fails to see that by this evasion of theoretical effort (from which he is spared by his own passive-mindedness, which could have driven him into temporary opposition to the masses), the masses are made needlessly blind and weak.”
- 11.
Rather remarkably, considering the vast literature on the Frankfurt School, the concept of critical theory, and this essay in particular, few scholars have cited this passage. Google searches for variants of the key phrase “satisfied to proclaim with reverent admiration the creative strength of the proletariat” turn up, besides the texts cited here, just a few items: four of my own publications (1992b, 2006a, 2011, 2015); books by Helmut Dubiel (1985) and Charles Reitz (2000); an article by Ross Posnock (1992); and an online post. German-language searches turn up even fewer items, of which the most notable is an essay by Julia Christ (2007). A good summary, which quotes key phrases, appears in H. Stuart Hughes (1975: 146–148).
- 12.
This is not a perfectly apt comparison, since, in the passage cited by Lowenthal, Benjamin is actually discussing figures like Céline whose concern is bohemian, lumpenproletarian life. Céline illuminates, Benjamin says, but does not contextualize “the sadness and sterility of a life in which the distinctions between workday and holiday, sex and love, war and peace, town and country, have been obliterated” ([1934] 1999: 752). For figures like Céline, in lieu of the “humanistic anarchism” of the previous century, “a new emancipation beckons,” the “freedom” of life “between the classes – that is to say, the freedom of the Lumpenproletariat. The intellectual mimics the external appearance of proletarian existence without being even remotely connected to the working class” (753).
- 13.
“Once this essay actually appears,” Horkheimer wrote (2007: 131–32), “we will have won a small victory over the silence-tactics of some emigrant wraiths. I thank you for your collaboration.”
- 14.
The published translation of this passage renders “reformistische” as “reform.” That minimizes the partisan character of Horkheimer’s point, which is expressly aimed at the SPD, of which Eduard Fuchs was an early and veteran member. See the original letter in Horkheimer (1995: 411).
- 15.
Fuchs, who was a Social Democratic elder statesman when Benjamin’s essay appeared, was a passionate, iconoclastic collector and advocate of satirical caricatures and erotic, playful art. He was, Benjamin notes, an early supporter of the critical caricatures and brutal montages (respectively) of the radical Weimar artists George Grosz and John Heartfield. When Fuchs was tried for obscenity in the early 1930s, Horkheimer was among those who deposed in his favor.
- 16.
Benjamin says this teleology of inexorable progress sprang originally from the “democratic pathos” of the revolution of July 1830. The spread of suffrage was “the world chronometer” that marked the approach of the millennium. Later, “this optimism produced strange fancies. One … was the illusion that ‘all intellectual workers, including people with great material and social advantages, had to be considered proletarians’.” Here Benjamin cites A. Max (1894–95: 652), perhaps unaware that “Max” was actually the eminent Austrian socialist Max Adler, writing pseudonymously.
- 17.
In July 1937, Horkheimer wrote to Grossmann, who the year before had proposed a special issue of the Zeitschrift to honor of the 70th anniversary of Capital, Vol. 1: “I have finished an essay on the concept of theory, which is actually an anniversary essay” (See Wiggershaus 1994: 186).
- 18.
I am currently preparing an English-language edition of Marx’s unpublished manuscript on the anti-Chinese movement in San Francisco, which comments on a very intelligent article by Henry George (1880). Marx’s reflections on the divisions between Irish and English, white and African-American workers are well presented by Anderson (2010).
- 19.
Remarkably, I have not yet found a single text that cites both passages. A series of experimental online searches, in several languages, for sentences from these two passages (e.g., two of the most decisively opposed passages, “Die Organisation des ausgebildeten kapitalistischen Produktionsprozesses bricht jeden Widerstand” and “Die Stunde des kapitalistischen Privat eigenthums schlägt”) turned up nothing at all, save for a few links to Capital itself.
- 20.
The third German edition of Capital Vol. 1 in 1883 replaces “concentration” with “centralization.”
- 21.
The standard English translations render Marx’s word Hulle as “integument” rather than as “shell.” The French edition (1872a) renders this “envelope.”
- 22.
“Sie wird gesprengt.” The standard English translations give this sentence a multisyllabic resonance: “The integument is burst asunder.”
- 23.
The translation here is emended in the light of the French edition of 1872 as well as the second German edition. Marx participated in the translation of the French edition, which gives it an authoritative status.
- 24.
Lazarsfeld’s socialist roots ran deep. As a youth he had lived with the family of German SPD leader Rudolf Hilferding, the author of Finance Capital ([1910] 1981). Later, Lazarsfeld pursued his study of unemployment in Marienthal (Lazarsfeld et al. [1933] 1971) at the suggestion of Otto Bauer, the principal leader of Austrian social democracy.
- 25.
- 26.
In 1922, Fromm received a Heidelberg doctorate for a sociology thesis ([1922] 1989) supervised by Max Weber’s brother Alfred Weber.
- 27.
Fromm is ignored by most Frankfurt School historians, many of whom accept Marcuse’s dilettantish criticisms (1955). In fact, Fromm was central to the Institute in its formative years, and he remains vital to critical theory, which was always more sociological—far less exclusively culture–critical and aesthetic–philosophical—than historians have generally thought (see, e.g., Horkheimer 1952). “Setting this record straight would be a much appreciated work of historical research,” as Rainer Funk rightly observes (1982: 296–97).
- 28.
For details on Weber’s research on class and consciousness, see Smith (1998).
- 29.
Michels was citing a stenographic report of Weber’s October 2 speech at the Magdeburg Congress of the Verein für Sozialpolitik in 1907. Weber repeated this sentiment in “Politics as a Vocation,” stating that, after the SDP’s radical leader August Bebel died, “Trade-union officials, party secretaries, and journalists came to the top. The instincts of officialdom dominated the party – a highly respectable officialdom, of rare respectability …” ([1919] 1946: 112). Compare the view expressed by Alexandra Kollontai, leader of the Workers Opposition in the Bolshevik Party after the revolution: “The passivity of the proletariat at this critical moment can surprise only those who know the German workers’ movement from the imposing figures of its annual reports, its ‘workers palaces’ and its growing number of representatives in local government and in parliament. For those who were familiar with the everyday life of the German movement the silence and passivity of the broad masses does not come as a surprise” ([1915] 1977: 99–100).
- 30.
Michels does not cite Levenstein, though he had probably heard of Die Arbeiterfrage from Weber, to whom he dedicated Political Parties. Kelly (1987: 10) calls Levenstein’s book “one of the pioneering works of modern sociological research.”
- 31.
Other key collaborators included Anna Hartoch, Herta Herzog, Karl Landauer, Ernest Manheim and Ernst Schachtel.
- 32.
- 33.
At times, later in his career, Fromm downplayed Levenstein’s influence, but this judgment is belied by the Weimar manuscript itself. Oberschall saw the connection on the basis of Autorität und Familie alone, saying “The Levenstein questionnaire … exerted an indirect influence upon a line of development which has come to be one of the main areas of empirical research and theory in social psychology” (1965: 132). Bonss is even more definite, saying (1984: 24) that Levenstein’s influence is so evident that Fromm’s work “can in some respects be described as a second edition” of Die Arbeiterfrage. What Fromm knew about Weber’s role is unclear, but Weiss avowed herself an heir to Weber’s tradition (1932: 193f.) and Horkheimer praised his “trailblazing work” on religion and remarked that the Verein’s “several surveys … have contributed to the development of empirical sociological research methods” (1952: 34).
- 34.
Besides Levenstein, Fromm cites Hendrik de Man, Siegfried Kracauer, and several others.
- 35.
Janet Afary and Roger Friedland of the University of California at Santa Barbara include items drawn from Fromm’s survey in a major ongoing study of attitudes towards “Love, Marriage and Religion” in Egypt, Iran, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United States. See: http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/lmr/home.
- 36.
The figures in this paragraph are adapted from Table 3.31 in Fromm ([1937] 1984: 149). I excluded subjects who did not respond to the question.
- 37.
Eisenstein and Pudovkin were the most commonly cited Russian filmmakers.
- 38.
Social Democrats, living up to their Weimar image, were evenly divided in their preference for commercial and leftwing fare.
- 39.
In Smith (1998), I mistakenly credited this phrase to Zinoviev, who had, in fact, called Karl Korsch a “petty bourgeois gone mad” in the mid-1920s. Zinoviev was then a central leader of the Comintern and Korsch was an “ultra-left” who, in 1923, had attended the Institute of Social Research’s founding event.
- 40.
Fromm’s sample was otherwise not very representative. Fewer than 9% of his respondents were women, just 6% were under 21, and even fewer—3%—were over 60. (The average age was 31.) Most of Fromm’s respondents came from urban centers between Frankfurt and Berlin. Fifty-seven percent were avowed atheists, 25% were Protestants, 11% Catholics and 7% held “other” views.
- 41.
Notably absent from this list is any reference to anti-Semitism or ethnocentrism, two of the key categories in The Authoritarian Personality. Neither Fromm nor Horkheimer, it seems, had any real inkling at this point that German anti-Semitism would prove to be a profound phenomenon.
- 42.
Interpreting the word “ambivalent” here is complicated by the fact that Fromm deployed the concept both in the ordinary dictionary sense—with reference to mixed feelings—and, at times, in the Freudian sense, where it becomes tantamount to authoritarianism per se. For Freud, “ambivalence” is unconscious love and hatred for the patriarch which becomes avowed love, for the father-figure, and hatred displaced to those who are viewed as enemies. In his lead essay in Studien über Autorität und Familie (1936a), which he completed on the eve of his final phase of work on the Weimar study, Fromm elaborated a subtle and powerful amplification of the specifically psychoanalytic notion of ambivalence; in the Weimar study, he confined himself mainly to an empirical documentation of the many ways in which respondents scored in the mid-range of his various scales. Those in the middle were Ambivalenter in this empirical sense.
- 43.
Neumann, before joining the Institut in 1937, was himself a leading Social Democrat, for which he was later remorseful. As he wrote to a friend in 1954, “I believe in collective guilt … I saw with my own eyes how deceitful the German Social Democratic Party was in the months from July 1932 to May 1933 (and not only then) and I said nothing. I saw how cowardly the union bosses were – and I continued serving them. I saw how twofaced the intellectuals were – and I remained silent” (cf. Söllner 1981–82: 171–72).
- 44.
See note 42 for details on the use of the word “ambivalent” in this study.
- 45.
Ongoing research with my colleague Eric Hanley and our collaborators (Robert McWilliams, Shane Willson, and Daniel Alvord) indicates that the US public is currently slightly to the democratic side of the midpoint with respect to the two leading measures of authoritarianism, Altemeyer’s “Right Wing Authoritarianism” (RWA scale) and the “Social Dominance Orientation” (SDO, scale) which was pioneered by Felicia Pratto and Jim Sidanius (see Altemeyer 1996; Sidanius and Pratto 2001). Our data on this subject come from 2013 iteration of the American National Election Study, which included short reliable RWA scale and the SDO, scales which Hanley and I had distilled, with invaluable help from McWilliams, from an earlier, proprietary national study by the Libertarian Party (which we thank for their permission to explore and report these data; see Smith et al. 2011). Our initial ANES findings, with respect to anti-Black prejudice and homophobia, have been reported at the annual meetings of the International Society for Political Psychology (Smith and Hanley 2014; Smith et al. 2015), and will appear in print before long.
- 46.
That principle applies to working people in nearly every occupational category. The exception to this rule, which emerges from an analysis of Erik Wright’s important international research on class structure and class consciousness (for which I crafted several items), appears to be engineers, and others for whom high educational status is discrepant with low workplace authority. I first reported this finding, with Kit Gunn, in “Dilbert the Barbarian” at the 1998 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. See also Smith and Gunn (1999).
- 47.
So called by Adorno’s senior co-author on The Authoritarian Personality, Nevitt Sanford. “Dr. Adorno brought many ideas of a Frommian sort to us … I think it is fair to say … that most of the basic ideas about the structure of authoritarianism were actually put forward by Fromm in Escape from Freedom …” (1980: 55). Else Frenkel-Brunswik, another co-author, made the same point, saying that Fromm’s “outstanding” work “was of great influence on our work on the authoritarian personality” (1954: 226, n. 2). Fromm is, not coincidentally, the most frequently cited author in The Authoritarian Personality (Smith 1988: 156).
- 48.
See Smith (2016b) for a discussion of Margaret Thatcher’s famed “There is no alternative” slogan, in the context of a critique of the fatalistic “realism” that undermined Syriza’s opposition to austerity policies in Greece in 2015. “We have been naught, we shall be all” is a line from The Internationale.
- 49.
Even their best insight—recognizing that authoritarianism is a “syndrome” of submissiveness and aggressiveness—is compromised by the analytic priority they gave to the ideal-typical extremes, where high aggressiveness (toward enemies) meets high submissiveness (toward authorities), and vice versa. The empirically more widespread phenomenon—syndromic middleness—remained outside their conceptual framework.
- 50.
Benjamin says, after citing Horkheimer on intellectuals, that the Institute’s studies “converge” in the critique of bourgeois consciousness, and that, on this subject, Fromm is preeminent. After his lengthy intermezzo on Fromm he adds that Horkheimer’s “Egoism” essay “puts Fromm’s theories to the test.” So Horkheimer is painted as a derivative figure. Adorno’s “Über Jazz,” which appeared alongside “Egoism,” is also depicted as a Fromm-like text in which the author “studies jazz as a social symptom-complex” ([1938] 2002: 312). In Müller-Doohm’s words (2005: 201), Adorno posited “the jazz fan’s authority fixation, an idea that was connected … with Erich Fromm’s psychoanalytical interpretation of authoritarianism in the bourgeois family.” Cf. Wiggershaus (1994: 245).
- 51.
“Forced” is not too strong a term here. Horkheimer and Pollock unilaterally breached Fromm’s lifetime contract with the Institute, without cause, and paid a settlement out of court when he threatened to sue. When, a few months later, Fromm needed $500 to get his mother away from Nazi expansion, they declined to help him.
- 52.
Interestingly, Horkheimer makes this point as the summa theoretica of a careless critique of Weber’s Science as a Vocation ([1917] 1922: 549–550). Horkheimer begins by restating his original point: “The theoretician whose business is to hasten developments which will lead to a society without injustice can find himself in opposition to views prevailing even among the proletariat, as we said above. If such a conflict were not possible, there would be no need of a theory; those who need it would come upon it without help” (1937: 274–275). But he then proceeds to misread Weber’s solemn and, above all, antiauthoritarian warning against academic prophecy as a repudiation of engaged theory.
In fact, Weber favored engagement as well as theory. He advocated having “the courage to clarify one’s own ultimate standpoint” ([1917] 1946: 155). Since “the ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable … it is necessary to make a decisive choice” (Ibid.: 152). “And if you remain faithful to yourself, you will necessarily come to certain final conclusions that subjectively make sense” (Ibid.: 151). On this ground, it is perfectly legitimate for any academic who “feels called up to intervene in the struggles of world views and party opinions” to campaign “in the market place, in the press, in meetings, in associations, wherever he wishes.” (Ibid.: 150). But Weber asked academics to resist the impulse to prophesy or propagandize from the dais. The teacher, he said, can offer students the tools to form and judge their own convictions—but that is pursued most effectively “the more conscientiously he avoids the desire to personally impose upon or suggest to the audience his own stand” (Ibid.: 152). It is, he writes, “somewhat too convenient to demonstrate one’s courage in taking a stand where the audience and possible opponents are condemned to silence” (Ibid.: 150).
- 53.
When Benjamin submitted his essay to Maß und Wert, he received a wary response from the editor, Ferdinand Lion, who objected to what struck him as the “communist aspects” of the Institute’s projects. Horkheimer advised Benjamin to feign surprise at the charge and to reassure Lion that the Institute was, in fact, a thoroughly respectable academic body. See Eiland and Jennings (2014: 593).
- 54.
This point was the crux of Lenin’s argument in the first definitive Bolshevik tract, What is to be done? ([1902] 1970).
- 55.
See below, Adorno’s letter to Benjamin (2.7.37).
- 56.
In a letter to Pollock from Paris in late 1935, Horkheimer explained that, despite “disturbing aspects” of Adorno’s character and mentality, “it seems to me a matter of necessity for me to collaborate with him,” because, aside from Marcuse, he could envision no one else as a collaborator on his own philosophical projects. Cited by Wiggershaus (1994: 159).
- 57.
This article—which, like many of Fromm’s papers from the 1930s, remains untranslated—is entitled “Die gesellschaftliche Bedingheit der psychoanalytischen Therapie”—that is, “Psycho-analytic Therapy and Its Social Basis.”
- 58.
As late as the mid-1950s, Adorno proposed to Horkheimer (1956: 66) that they collaborate on a revised Communist Manifesto that would be “strictly Leninist.” Adorno adds that he found Lenin through music, and that, epistemologically, he preferred Lenin to Marx.
- 59.
Karl Landauer, who trained Fromm in the 1920s, also wrote to Horkheimer in protest at this point (March 10, 1936): “Freud is certainly not the strict father that Fromm sees in him. Not only does he bear with heretics, he even directly provokes heresy, and he is constantly seeking to test how waterproof the apparently proven really is. For my part I have gotten to know a different person from the one Fromm describes” (cited by Plänkers: 478, in Plänkers et al. 1996). As it happens, Fromm’s fellow “anti-Pope,” Reich, had been expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association just two years earlier.
- 60.
Benjamin, Adorno said, betrays in this way “some of the qualities of a Wandervogel gone mad” (Ibid.: 132). The tone of this remark—which seems to indict not only Benjamin but the countercultural youth movement of the interwar years—appears to anticipate some of the harsh things Adorno would later say about the counterculture of the 1960s.
- 61.
“To a certain extent,” Adorno tells his friend, “I must charge your essay with [that] form of romanticism.”
- 62.
He dismisses the idea that “an intimate acquaintance with Chaplin’s films” can transform “a reactionary … into a member of the avant-garde”; “for I cannot count Kracauer’s favorite director, even after Modern Times, as an avant-garde artist.” “One need only have heard the laughter of the audience at the film to know what is actually happening.” All ibid.
- 63.
This matters, because Lukács, despite the genuine brilliance of History and Class Consciousness, was an unreliable guide to Marx. He decorated his text with citations from Capital, but his grasp of Marx was hazy and often misleading. His signature theme, reification (Verdinglichung)—which was generally also the Frankfurt School’s shorthand for alienation and commodification—derives from Capital but distorts Marx’s point. Marx paired “reification” (of social relations) with “personification” (of commodities) as one core aspect of commodity fetishism. Lukács lifted Verdinglichung from this matrix and made it a virtually stand-alone concept.
- 64.
One year later, in his small book eulogizing Lenin, Lukács credited the proletariat “hitherto” only with “unconscious actions, vague ideology and confused feelings.” “The party therefore must have … sufficient theoretical clarity and firmness to stay on the right course despite all the hesitations of the masses, even at the risk of temporary isolation” ([1924] 1970: 35, italics mine).
- 65.
This essay, “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization,” was written in September 1922, just months before the Institut für Sozialforschung was founded, with Lukács among the founders, in 1923.
- 66.
Engels is Marx’s co-author, but all of the pertinent sections that I cite here appear in sections written exclusively by Marx. The passage above continues as follows: “Property and absence of property have received metaphysical consecration as Critical speculative antitheses. That is why only the hand of Critical Criticism can touch them without committing a sacrilege. Capitalists and workers must not interfere in their mutual relationship.”
- 67.
Marx alludes here to a passage in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1907: 337; cf. 1931: 540–41) in which Hegel dissects the tense, language-mediated relationship of “self-consciousness” to the state and wealth. Hegel posits a situation in which the self, reduced “by service” to bare existence, experiences “disunited” (Zerissenheit) self-consciousness. At the same time that the divided self feels overwhelmed by outside forces, self-consciousness engages in a “rebellion that repudiates its own repudiation” (Verworfenheit verwerfende Empörung). Avineri notes a parallel passage in Hegel’s early lectures in which the term Empörung appears in a similar context: “This inequality of wealth and poverty [turns] into the utmost disunity of the will, an inner indignation (Empörung) and hatred” ([1805–06] 1967: 232–33, cited by Avineri 1974: 97). He points out that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ([1821] 1991: § 244) also echoes this passage, saying that “poverty does not make men into rabble (Pöbel); a rabble is created only where there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation (Empörung) against the rich, against society, against the state, etc.” (Ibid.: 97, n. 44). For details on the latter point, see Ruda (2011).
- 68.
Empörung is usually translated as “revolt” or “indignation,” but neither term is quite right. Better is “rebellion,” which, unlike revolt, implies an underlying rebelliousness—that is, revolt fueled by indignation.
- 69.
Bauer specifies the qualities of the mass that render it antagonistic to truth: “The spirit knows where to seek out its only enemy, in mass self-delusion (Selbstäuschungen) and sterility (Kern-lösigkeit).” Marx objects, citing the revolution of 1789, that the revolution ultimately foundered not because the “masses” were deluded or sterile but because they were not “all-embracing”—they were too “exclusive, limited,” and bourgeois to radically negate the negation of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
- 70.
Unlike Hegel’s enfeebled Spirit, whose power is evident only in Phantasie, after the fact, the Critical Spirit “consciously plays the role of the world-spirit in opposition to the rest of humanity”; the Critical Critics thus enter into a “dramatic relationship” with today’s masses; they make history “intentionally, and after mature reflection.” (Ibid.)
- 71.
Critical Criticism, Marx says, “is here called Theory for a change” (Ibid.: 153).
- 72.
Guiszot, Royer-Collard and other doctrinaires, tried to harmonize the restored Bourbon monarchy with moderate liberalism; their slogan was to “nationalize the monarchy and royalize France.”
- 73.
“Les grands ne nous paraissent grands / Que parceque nous sommes à genoux – Levons nous!”
- 74.
Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution intelligently expounds some key elements of Marx’s critique of political economy, though unsteadily. Largely neglecting Marx’s pivotal critique of value as abstract labor, which Marx called the Springpunkt of his theory, Marcuse elaborates an apocalyptic call for the “abolition of labor” which does not spring from or reflect Marx’s mature theory.
- 75.
Adorno adds that he hopes, and believes, that Benjamin will appreciate the jazz essay as much as Horkheimer does (Ibid.: 126).
- 76.
At this stage Adorno appears to have known little more about technical Marxism than a few phrases, borrowed largely from Lukács. Under the influence of Alfred Sohn-Rethel he showed some interest in Capital, but I see no evidence that he ever acquired expertise. The same applies to his knowledge of Freudianism. Adorno’s few writings on matters psychoanalytic affect an authoritative and orthodox tone, but they are often highly unsubtle (see, e.g., his dismissive critique of Karen Horney [1952] 1972, in which he says that castration fear has more affect on character formation in capitalist society than the experience of competition). Even by strict psychoanalytic criteria, this is plainly not an either/or choice, since the effects of competition would certainly figure among the shaping influences of the superego.
- 77.
That, obliquely, is what Adorno intimates here; and later, swayed by Pollock’s conclusion that state capitalism can avert crisis forever, he echoed that conclusion directly, saying, in polemical opposition to Marxian forecasts of the collapse of capitalism, that capitalism would collapse only ad calendas Graecas—that is, the day after the end of time. On this see Smith (2016a).
- 78.
The goal, for satire in the spirit of critical theory, would be to dispel the fairy tale of the proletariat’s new clothes. “For the satirist, the nakedness with which he confronts his fellow citizen in a mirror is sufficient.” (Ibid.)
- 79.
See Smith (2016c).
- 80.
Horkheimer’s portrait of these doctrines includes unambiguously humanistic elements (“raising living standards for the common man,” reconstituting society so that “the results of human activity no longer appear as the uncontrollable forces of destiny, as the unforeseeable will of the gods, or the no less capricious vacillations of the business cycle”) mixed with oblique objections to collectivism and inevitabilism.
- 81.
- 82.
Worrell (2009: 632) summarizes concisely. Nearly 40% of the interview subjects harbored at least some negative sentiments towards Jews while remaining, consciously, pro-tolerance—including 19.1% who “felt something should be done” about allegedly disproportionate Jewish wealth or power and 19.3% who were “emotionally inconsistent.” Another 10.8% were predominantly tolerant but still occasionally voiced negative opinions of Jews.
- 83.
The Institute’s schizophrenia may have been as much political as personal in origin. Commentators seldom stress the significance of the Institute’s strongly communist leanings in the 1930s, despite many avowals by, for example, Lowenthal (1987, passim). This is relevant because, just two years before Horkheimer assumed the directorship, the Sixth Comintern Congress declared Social Democracy, and reformism in general, to be “social fascism”—and, as such an enemy, not an ally, in the struggle against fascism per se. In 1935, at the Seventh Congress, the Comintern swung to the other extreme, declaring that the struggle against fascism superseded the struggle against capitalism and that communists should form “Popular Fronts” with any ally, however antisocialist or bourgeois, who would join in the fight against war and fascism. These two policies, plainly, are antithetical—sectarian and “ultra-left” on the one hand and “opportunist” on the other. That antithesis could easily provoke a kind of intellectual schizophrenia among those who felt torn between uncompromising antireformism and the wish to accommodate potential allies of every kind, from unions to reformist parties. The apparent “radicalism” of Adorno’s rejectionist rhetoric, from “Über Jazz” to The Dialectic of Enlightenment, often seems specifically ultra-left in flavor, even when his substantive argument is sharply opposed to leftist and humanist activism. His participation in The Authoritarian Personality project, meanwhile, and his support for democratic education, brings him to the Popular Front end of the spectrum—where opposition to fascism is by far the main objective.
- 84.
- 85.
For space reasons, and since Fromm, after the late 1930s, is not usually regarded as a critical theorist, I will leave details about his further development aside. But it is safe to say that, save for a few relatively minor lapses (the semi-behaviorist concept of “automaton conformity” in Escape from Freedom [1941], wishful thinking about the reconstitution of adult character in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness [1973]), Fromm remained true to his agenda of psychodynamic study of social character, with the understanding that character is forged in the family in the context of class dynamics. And many of his later concepts (narcissism, necrophilia) are brilliant additions to that approach.
- 86.
- 87.
See Smith (2009).
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Smith, D.N. (2017). Theory and Class Consciousness. In: Thompson, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_18
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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Online ISBN: 978-1-137-55801-5
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