Abstract
The chapter first examines Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s well-known critique of authority and the family. One aspect of this groundbreaking work is its exclusive focus on men and boys. In the 1970s, Jessica Benjamin wrote two seminal essays critiquing this focus, showing how it resulted in the idealization of the bourgeois father and a punitive superego. This critique is part of the chapter’s study, before it moves on to Marcuse’s dialectical transformation of Freudian psychoanalysis into a ground of utopia. Arguably, there is no more important work in Marcuse’s oeuvre than Eros and Civilization. It represents the utopian spirit in critical theory at its strongest, a spirit, the author argues, that has been lost in the next generation of critical theorists, particularly in the early work of Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests.
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- 1.
Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason (London: Verso, 2013), a collection of essays written between 1949 and 1967, develops the critique further. The German version, Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft, published in 1967, is actually a translation of Eclipse of Reason. Eclipse of Reason was originally published in English in 1947.
- 2.
Collectively, Klein, Fairbairn, and Winnicott are known as object relations theorists. It is simpler, and more accurate, particularly in the case of Fairbairn and Winnicott, to call them relationship theorists, concerned with relationships, not drives, particularly our earliest relationships. For a good account of the transformation of psychoanalysis under object relations theory, see Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, by Greenberg and Mitchell (1983).
- 3.
The term “instinctual drives” translates the Freudian term “Trieb” (which is singular). Freud also uses the term “Instinkt.” When talking about the death drive, Freud (1930) always uses the word Trieb. Neither Trieb nor Instinkt should be considered a biological imperative for Freud. A drive is entirely psychic, a demand imposed by the organism upon the psyche to do work. How the psyche deals with its drives depends upon culture, socialization, and the family, among other forces. At issue for Marcuse is how a culture can be created in which Eros can take up the energy previously devoted to the Todestrieb.
- 4.
This is actually not correct. In Stone-Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins (1974) writes that many so-called primitive societies enjoy an enormous amount of leisure. They were the original affluent society, as their needs did not exceed what the world might provide with modest effort. Scarcity is as much a matter of desire as it is an absence of things.
- 5.
For example, says Honneth, see Adorno’s Minima Moralia, numbers 2, 72, 79, and 146.
- 6.
Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (2014), Honneth’s recent and powerful synthesis, can be read as an attempt to situate recognition in a modern world in which freedom is the preeminent value. The argument remains compatible with the utopian moment in Honneth’s work, but does not develop it.
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Alford, C.F. (2017). The Frankfurt School, Authority, and the Psychoanalysis of Utopia. 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_19
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