This volume grew out of my experience putting together the materials for a seminar that I teach on the Frankfurt School. In preparing the syllabus for the first time, I saw that the pieces that I wanted students to read were scattered across a number of original texts and earlier collections. No single anthology was suitable. “These should all be together in one place,” I thought. When I realized that many of the works in question are now out of print, it no longer seemed just a matter of convenience and intellectual good sense that this should be so, but instead a kind of moral imperative, if only a small one. I quickly went from wondering why no one had ever published the kind of collection that I had in mind, to thinking that it was important that someone did, and that I would do my best to make it happen.
My hope is that this new anthology will serve several intellectual purposes. First, the philosophical concerns that I’ve tried to highlight—from reflections on the nature of reason, to assessments of the concepts of essence and truth, to critiques of positivist methodology—go to the heart of the project of critical theory as the principal members of the Frankfurt School themselves understood it. Critical theory was viewed by all three as a position whose proponents ought to be attentive not just to the relationship between social theory and the organization of society at large, but also to the underlying epistemological, ontological and methodological commitments implicit in any given bit of thought, including thought about social reality. Indeed, in an important sense, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse all took social theory to be applied philosophy—even if philosophy, in turn, is always a social-historical product that bears the marks of its material conditions of possibility. One reason to direct readers to these authors’ philosophical writing on epistemology, ontology, and method, therefore, is that understanding the Frankfurt School members’ views in these areas is, by their own standards, essential to understanding their social, cultural, and political-economic critiques. This is a point that may be under-appreciated by readers whose interests are not primarily philosophical.
Moreover, these authors’ philosophical and meta-philosophical insights are relevant to debates in contemporary philosophy. Anglo-analytic thinkers can sometimes be slow to appreciate the value of Hegelian-inflected philosophical argument. This tendency is exacerbated in the case of the Frankfurt School, whose members are apt to be assumed to be “mere” social theorists. But the Frankfurt School material bears directly upon current analytic work on topics such as social epistemology, social ontology, free will, realism, and causal explanation in the social sciences. That this is so may not be immediately apparent to professional philosophers who specialize in these areas. However, this fact itself can be seen to be a product of assumptions of precisely the type rendered explicit and addressed critically by Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. Thus philosophers too, and not just social theorists, may benefit from the thematic focus of this collection.
Finally, I have included relatively short reconstructions of each of the pieces, designed to make them as accessible as possible rhetorically. I have described the process of creating these blurbs as being akin to turning a three-dimensional Escher print into a set of propositions. Much is lost, necessarily. So be it. All three of these authors thought that reasoning, their own included, has an important role to play in the bringing about of better conditions. As a function, this stands in sharp contrast to that which their work has too often taken on in academic circles, which is to allow for the signaling, via the cultivated repetition of opaque language, that one is in the know. Ever since the translation into English of Adorno’s lectures from the late 1950s and early 1960s, English readers too have been able to see that even Adorno was entirely capable of stating his views in direct, transparent language. My hope is that providing readers with points of entry for each of the pieces will lead, in the end, to more rather than less sophisticated engagements with the material.