The year after Mahoganny’s premiere, Max Horkheimer became director of the Institute for Social Research. Carl Grünberg had retired after suffering a stroke in January 1928 to be replaced by Friedrich Pollock. In 1931, Horkheimer replaced his friend, Pollock, who would go on to do much of the largely unsung, administrative work necessary to safeguard the finances and organisation of the Institute in its exile years. It was Pollock, for instance, who had used used his contacts in the International Labour Organisation to establish a branch of the Institute in Geneva, to which he and Horkheimer moved after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.
Horkheimer changed the direction of the Institute radically. No longer would it be, as it had been under Grünberg, essentially a Marxist research institute studying the history of socialism and the workers’ movement, still less one that took economics to be the key determinant in the fate of capitalism. To account for the failure of revolution in Germany and for the rise of fascism, it was necessary to reconfigure Marxism. ‘When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalist mode of production’, wrote Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production’,
this mode was in its infancy. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself.1
But capitalism was no longer in self-destruct mode: the rest of Benjamin’s essay was about a capitalist mode of production no longer in its infancy, but one that dominated the whole of society, and where one key front in the struggle between capitalism and socialism was art and culture.
Capitalism had become not just a mode of production but a system that, through mass culture and communication, technology and various forms of social control, masked the intensity of the exploitation of the proletariat. In 1931, capitalism seemed able to defer its abolition, perhaps even indefinitely. In such circumstances, Horkheimer argued, the Institute must consider not only the economic basis of society but its superstructure. It must develop a critique of the ideological control mechanisms that held capitalism in place. While Lukács, in his 1922 History and Class Consciousness, had insisted on the importance of proletarian consciousness for revolution, it seemed to Horkheimer that the chasm Lukács had identified between ascribed and actual consciousness could not be closed – at least not by the proletariat. ‘The members of the Frankfurt School grew to see themselves as the only revolutionary subject’, wrote Thomas Wheatland, ‘because only they had achieved a state of self-conscious reflection that transcended the reified world of the totally administered society.’2 It was as if the proletariat had been found wanting and so had to be replaced as revolutionary agent by critical theorists.
Adorno, at least, appreciated the paradox of being an ideology critic while defining ideology as socially necessary false consciousness. He knew that the Frankfurt School, like Brecht, was sitting on the bough even as they sawed through it. In Minima Moralia, he wrote of the critical theorist’s paradox:
By allowing themselves to still think at all vis-a-vis the naked reproduction of existence, they behave as the privileged; by leaving things in thought, they declare the nullity of their privilege … There is no exit from the entanglement. The only responsible option is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence, and as for the rest, to behave in private as modestly, inconspicuously and unpretentiously as required, not for reasons of good upbringing, but because of the shame that when one is in hell, there is still air to breathe.3
Under Horkheimer and Adorno, the Frankfurt School turned its attention to critical theory calibrated to understand the hell in which they lived. To do so, they had to move beyond the kind of Marxist theory that fetishised economics. In his inaugural lecture, ‘The Present Position of Social Philosophy and the Tasks Facing an Institute for Social Research’, Horkheimer said that the Institute must address the ‘question of the connection between the economic life of society, the psychological development of individuals and challenges in the realm of culture in the narrower sense (to which belong not only the so-called intellectual elements such as science, art and religion, but also law, customs, fashion, public opinion, sports, leisure activities, lifestyle, etc).’ Under Horkheimer, the Institute went interdisciplinary. It would, he said, ‘organise research projects stimulated by philosophical problems, in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians and psychologists were brought together in permanent collaboration’.4
The interdisciplinary trend was demonstrated by the new intellectuals who arrived at the Institute: Leo Löwenthal arrived as a literary scholar, Erich Fromm as an analytical social psychologist, Herbert Marcuse was hired as a political philosopher, and Theodor Adorno as a lecturer and writer on philosophy and music. Those thinkers on the fringes of the school – Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and Wilhelm Reich – encouraged the Institute to do things it would never have done under Grünberg’s leadership, such as to consider, for instance, not just the economic and political basis of fascism, but its psychopathology and its aestheticisation of politics.
The Frankfurt School therefore decided to remove the white gloves in which Marxist economist Henryk Grossman delivered his lectures and get its hands dirty. It would study horoscopes, movies, jazz, sexual repression, sadomasochism, the disgusting manifestations of unconscious sexual impulses, take critical notes at the trough of mass culture, and explore the shabby metaphysical foundations in the basements of rival philosophies. Horkheimer’s vision in his inaugural lecture was that philosophy should open up a synoptic, critical view of human life that empirical research and interdisciplinary work might fill in. Critical theory, Martin Jay argues, placed emphasis on the totality of dialectical mediations which had to be grasped in the process of analysing society.
Karl Korsch argued in Marxism and History that Marx’s successors had betrayed his vision. ‘Later Marxists’, wrote Korsch,
came to regard scientific socialism more and more as a set of purely scientific observations, without any immediate connection to the political or other practices of class struggle … A unified general theory of social revolution was changed into criticisms of the bourgeois economic order, of the bourgeois state, of the bourgeois state of education, of bourgeois religion, art, science and culture.5
Marxism, that is to say, had become subject to the prevailing division of labour and that undermined its critical power. In order to recover that critical power, the Frankfurt School needed to restore the totalising Marxist vision and become multidisciplinary. In doing so, incidentally, it served as a standing rebuke to the evolution of universities in the twentieth century. Universities were becoming latter-day towers of Babel, divided increasingly into specialist faculties populated by experts scarcely even speaking the same language.
Almost instantly, however, in a presentiment of the tensions that were to come in the Frankfurt School, Adorno went off message. A couple of weeks after Horkheimer’s inaugural address, he argued in his first lecture as Privatdozent that this commitment to interdisciplinarity was a waste of time. Although he was as sceptical as his director about the revolutionary potential of the workers’ movement in Germany, Adorno thought it futile to strive towards the goal of what Horkheimer called ‘a theory of the whole’ or the ‘totality of the real’, given that the social world had collapsed in ruins. Adorno’s inaugural lecture thus sounded like a raspberry to his boss’s vision of the Institute’s research programme.
But what was Adorno’s alternative vision? Although to come to a diagnosis of what had gone wrong in society required one to ‘construct keys to unlock reality’, he didn’t accept that philosophy ‘is capable’, as Horkheimer put it, ‘of giving particular studies animating impulses’. Instead, Adorno thought, philosophy risked becoming merely purely speculative unless individual disciplines (including presumably philosophy) were in what he called ‘dialectical communication’. He argued that thought alone would not enable one to grasp the whole of reality; indeed, he argued that reality itself was an enigma. But it’s not clear how one is to understand an enigma. Adorno developed a dialectical method of knowledge that many in his audience found obscure. He argued that ‘the function of riddle solving … is to illuminate the puzzle in a flash’. Here one thinks of Proust at the start of À la recherche du temps perdu, tasting the madeleine and in so doing bringing his whole childhood to life. Adorno, similarly, was envisaging an interpretative mind with an exact imagination because, as his biographer puts it, ‘the questions arising in response to the riddles are gradually surrounded by possible answers that propose tentative solutions’. Adorno’s theory of knowledge involved models of philosophical interpretations being brought into changing constellations whose truth content emerges in a flash, illuminating what had previously been thought. The truth emerges in evanescent flashes. Baffling, perhaps, but it was a theory of knowledge that set Adorno alongside Benjamin and Proust, and a model to which he would remain faithful.6
On the train home after Adorno’s lecture, Horkheimer was asked what he thought of what he’d heard. ‘His reaction to Adorno’s views was: what’s the point?’ reported Institute assistant Willy Strzelewicz.7 Horkheimer carried on regardless. In taking this multidisciplinary turn, he was self-consciously moving his Institute back to the Hegelian roots of Marxism, and away from the kind of scientific Marxism that took proletarian revolution to be inevitable according to iron laws of historical progress. In doing so, he was inspired by reading Marx’s recently released Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which had served to confirm what Lukács had written in 1922: yes, worker alienation could produce a revolutionary sense of class consciousness, but it could also produce worker disenchantment and resignation.
This new direction also gave the Frankfurt School the intellectual armoury to attack positivism, which Horkheimer took to be one of the intellectual evils of the age. The true materialism of Marx, he argued, was dialectical, which meant there was an ongoing interaction between subject and object. Everywhere he looked, Horkheimer saw dialectical processes in action. Instead of seeing a world of facts which it was the job of social theory to mirror (this is what he called the positivist illusion), he saw interplay. For instance, while some vulgar Marxists reductively derived superstructural phenomena such as culture and politics from the economic basis of society, Horkheimer argued for the crucial importance of mediation to any social theory that sought the transformation of society. In this he was following Lukács, who wrote: ‘Thus the category of mediation is a lever with which to overcome the mere immediacy of the social world.’ For Lukács the objects of the empirical world were to be understood in Hegelian terms as the objects of a totality, i.e. ‘as the objects of a total historical situation caught up in the process of historical change’.8 Politics and culture were not simply expressions of class interests or phenomena that could be read off from the socio-economic basis of a society. Rather, they were in multidimensional relations to the material substructure of society, reflecting and contradicting class interests, expressing and contracting that substructure. Think of Balzac: Engels praised this political reactionary of a novelist precisely because his novels portrayed the concrete reality of nineteenth-century France in all its contradictions. His novels didn’t just express the author’s class interests; indeed, one thing that made them valuable to the left is that they described how those interests were in self-contradiction.
But what did the term dialectic mean to the Frankfurt School? To understand this, we need to go back to Hegel. Hegel’s classic example of the dialectical process in The Phenomenology of Spirit is the relationship between master and slave. The master seems to have everything, the slave nothing; but the master does lack something – the fulfilment of his need for acknowledgment. The acknowledgment of the slave is not enough since the slave is merely a thing to the master, not an independent consciousness at all. Nor does the slave receive acknowledgment from the master because the former is a thing to the latter. But here’s the twist. The slave works, while the master receives the temporary pleasures of consumption. But in working, the slave shapes and fashions material objects and in the process becomes aware of his own consciousness, since he sees it as something objective, namely, as the fruit of his labours.
Clearly, this connects with the Marxist notion of man as essentially a producer, one who defines himself or rises to self-consciousness, even personal fulfilment, through meaningful work. For the slave, Hegel thought, labour, even at the direction of a slave master, makes him realise he has a mind of his own and means that the situation is not stable: its tensions generate a dialectical movement that leads to a higher synthesis. That synthesis leads to another dialectical tension, to another synthesis, and so on, at least in Hegel’s conception of history. Forty years after Hegel set out this dialectical process, Marx argued that if the object produced through labour is owned by another (be that other a slave-owner or a capitalist), the worker has lost his own objectified essence. Such is alienated labour.
Hegel took history to be an unfolding of such dialectical processes towards the self-knowledge of what he called the Absolute Spirit. Dispensing with Hegel’s mysticism and progressive developmental logic, Horkheimer took up the Hegelian dialectic and pitted it against what he considered to be the baleful, conservative influence of positivism. It was to be an abiding intellectual commitment of the Frankfurt School. Thirty years later, Marcuse would write in the 1960 Preface to his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory:
Dialectic thought … becomes negative in itself. Its function is to break down the self-assurance and self-contentment, to undermine the sinister confidence in the power and language of facts, to demonstrate that unfreedom is so much at the core of things that the development of their internal contradictions leads necessarily to qualitative change: the explosion and catastrophe of the established state of affairs.9
In his inaugural lecture, Horkheimer opposed positivism because it ‘sees only the particular, in the realm of society it sees only the individual and the relations between individuals; for positivism, everything is exhausted in mere facts’.10 Positivism, an approach to social theory devised in the nineteenth century by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held that society, like the physical world, operates according to laws. In philosophy, logical positivism holds that all we can reasonably claim to know is based on reports of sensory experience, along with logical and mathematical operations. Propositions not based on such reports or operations are metaphysical and hence nonsense, and even aesthetic or moral judgements, rightly understood, are not genuine judgements but more or less sophisticated grunts of approval or disapproval.
Such a philosophy was developed almost contemporaneously with the Frankfurt School. The so-called Vienna Circle of logical positivism, founded by Moritz Schlick in 1922, consisted of a group of philosophers and scientists who met until 1936 at the University of Vienna. Some former members of the Circle went into exile from Austria around the time of the Nazi Anschluss of 1938, and the Circle went on to greatly influence philosophy departments in Britain and the United States, in part because their intellectual trajectory (they took most of Hegel to be metaphysical and therefore nonsense) was more amenable to the Anglophone universities.
Horkheimer, for his part, argued that behind positivist social theory’s ostensible focus on neutral facts, behind the law’s apparent working through of formal procedures, beyond the apparently neutral operations of formal logic, there was another story: while positivists had once been progressive they now upheld the hellish status quo. For instance, Kant’s founding of his ethical system on the categorical imperative (the principle that one should ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law’), at the birth of the Enlightenment, had developed a disinterested, individualist morality that challenged the ancien régime’s droit de seigneur. Now though, Kantian ethics served to uphold the status quo by means of making bourgeois morality seem not just natural but eternal. Similarly, the German Rechststaat or rule of law was premised on judicial universality without relating the law’s political origins in the defence of private property, and it airbrushed its current function as upholder of the existing capitalist system and structures of ownership. This wide-ranging attack on positivism would become a lifelong preoccupation for Horkheimer and his colleagues, culminating in the Positivism Dispute that embroiled the Frankfurt School in the the 1960s.
Dialectical thinking, by contrast, dynamited this order. Where Hegel offered a vision of historical change consisting of dialectical movement, an endlessly shifting interplay of forces and constellations, the positivists – at least those whom Horkheimer characterised thus – suspended facts in aspic and falsely eternalised the status quo. In reality there was, for the Frankfurt School, no end to the eternal process of becoming, no cessation to the wheel of Ixion – Horkheimer had read enough Schopenhauer to realise that metaphysical truth. But the other impulse of positivism was, the Frankfurt School crucially believed, political: in reducing the world to hypostatised facts, positivism served to conceal an authoritarian, dominating social order. In his 1937 essay ‘The Latest Attack on Metaphysics’, Horkheimer argued that logical positivism ‘holds only to what is, to the guarantee of facts’ and thereby serves as a handmaiden to capitalism, since it tries to insulate the individual sciences from broader interpretation.11 This had long been Horkheimer’s contention: as early as his 1930 thesis The Origins of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History, he had connected the Renaissance view of science and technology to social and political domination.12
Throughout the 1930s Horkheimer honed this perspective, formulating it most clearly in his 1937 essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’.13 By traditional, Horkheimer meant those -isms the Frankfurt School disdained – positivism, behaviourism, empiricism and pragmatism. He even gave the traditional theorist a derisive name, the Savant, designating one who does not recognise that the economic (and thus currently capitalist) structure of society shapes scientific work. He attacked this figure of the Savant for their presumptuousness in imagining they had an objective stance before a world of facts: ‘bringing hypotheses to bear on facts is an activity that goes on, ultimately, not in the savant’s head but in industry’, he wrote. The Savant fails to realise that he or she is not a free-floating intellectual but a lackey of capitalism, complicit, albeit often unwittingly, in the suffering caused by its exploitative nature. Against traditional theory Horkeimer pitted critical theory: the latter, he thought, understood that no facet of social reality could be considered by the observer as final or complete in itself.
The Cartesian cogito (I think therefore I am) was an exemplar, for Horkheimer, of traditional theory’s missteps: it seemed fact-based, sensible, self-evident, but was anything but since it smuggled in all kinds of philosophical assumptions. It assumed, for instance, that there is something that can be called ‘I’ and that it endures in space and time. Worse, Descartes’ method took the subject out of any kind of social determination, rendering it a passive observer of reality, rather than one involved (ideally dialectically) in reality’s construction.
The return to Hegel and the dialectical method involved, for the Frankfurt School, an escape from the intellectual shackles of a scientific Marxism of the kind that one of its number, Henryk Grossman, endorsed but which other members, Horkheimer especially, thought inadequate to the modern era. Appropriating Hegel and the early, Hegelian Marx allowed them to think about alienation, consciousness, reification and how those factors thwarted revolution in late capitalist society. Doing so also pushed them to revive Hegel’s emphasis on reason. German idealists had distinguished between Vernunft (critical reason) and Verstand (instrumental reason), and the suggestion in both Kant and Hegel is that Vernunft goes beyond mere appearances to the reality beneath. Vernunft penetrates to the dialectical relations beneath, while Verstand, by contrast, involves structuring the phenomenal world according to common sense. Vernunft is concerned with ends, Verstand merely with means. For the Frankfurt School’s most Hegelian devotee, Herbert Marcuse, Verstand had become the tool of capitalism, Vernunft the means by which we challenge it.14
IN THIS HEGELIAN turn taken by the Frankfurt School, the appointment of Marcuse was key. It was Marcuse who realised and theorised, even before Adorno, the power of negative thinking. He contrasted such negative thinking, not just with positivism, but with a tradition of empiricist thought which he took to dominate the English-speaking world in which the Frankfurt School sought refuge after fleeing the Nazis. Empiricism naively accepted things as they are, bent the knee to the existing order of facts and values. Marcuse’s Hegelian notion was that critical reason realises the essence of entities. ‘Essence’ here is a technical philosophical term by which Marcuse meant the fully realised potentiality of an entity. If a society, for instance, lacked the freedom, material well-being and justice that would allow it to fulfil its potential, then the job of the critical theorist, applying his or her critical reason, was to condemn that society as a ‘bad form of reality, a realm of limitation and bondage’.15 Empiricism as a philosophical programme was unable to do this.
What is a little odd is that the Hegelian idealism that Marcuse took to be critical and revolutionary was originally the philosophy of a thinker who was an apologist for the status quo in Prussia. Meanwhile, it was the leading lights of empiricism who were in some respects social radicals. John Locke, for instance, contested the divine right of kings, while David Hume’s sceptical assessment of religious faith involved anything but accepting the existing social order. Intriguing too was the fact that empiricism thrived in Britain and America, the very countries where so many German exiles, such as Marcuse, sought refuge from Nazism. This fact made Marcuse’s attempt, in Reason and Revolution, to rescue Hegel from his unfair reputation in those countries as the progenitor of fascism, to put it mildly, interesting reading.
Marcuse was an expert in Hegel who contributed to the German idealist philosopher’s renaissance in Europe during the thirties – his post-doctoral thesis Hegel’s Ontology and Theory of Historicity was published in 1932. Equally importantly, he published one of the first studies of Marx’s rediscovered Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts which, as we have seen, reclaimed from obscurity a Hegelian early Marx for whom alienation, commodity fetishism and reification are important and the necessary collapse of capitalism is not yet proposed according to scientific laws. Marcuse came to the Institute, in part, because he knew that his job prospects were otherwise limited. ‘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 under the Nazi regime.’16 By the time he started work for the Institute, they had relocated to Geneva in order to elude the Nazi threat to their work and lives.
Marcuse had spent the 1920s studying with Heidegger and was profoundly influenced by his teacher’s critique of western philosophy and his attempt to reconfigure it in a world in which technological rationality was taking over everyday life, stripping individuals of freedom. But to develop a critique of this totally administered society he saw arising everywhere, Marcuse turned from Heidegger to Hegel. Heidegger, in any case became a member of the Nazi party in 1933, and so was ill-suited to serve as an intellectual mentor to a socialist thinker like Marcuse. Hegel was more promising. Marcuse took him not to be a conservative philosopher, but rather one who developed a critique of irrational forms of social life. Following Hegel, he took his intellectual role to involve, as Douglas Kellner put it, postulating ‘norms of criticism, based on rational potentials for human happiness and freedom, which are used to negate existing states of affairs that oppress individuals and restrict human freedom and well-being’.17
But what happens, Marcuse worried in a 1937 essay ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’, ‘if the development outlined by the theory does not occur? What if the forces that were to bring about the transformation are suppressed and appear to be defeated?’18 Very reasonable questions, given that the Frankfurt School was in that year exiled to the other side of the world, the forces of Nazism seemed unstoppable, and Soviet Marxism was in the process of degenerating into Stalinist show trials and gulags. Perhaps surprisingly, Marcuse did not retreat into pessimism.
DURING THE 1930s, though, some of Marcuse’s Frankfurt School colleagues lost faith in the power of critical thinking to transform society. Horkheimer, in particular, moved from hope to despair. At one point early in the decade he wrote, ‘it is the task of the critical theoretician to reduce the tension between his own insight and oppressed humanity in whose service he thinks’.19 The problem was that he couldn’t reduce that tension, and so couldn’t think in such a way as to serve oppressed humanity. By 1937, Horkheimer had come to the despairing thought that the ‘commodity economy’ might usher in a period of progress until, ‘after an enormous extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism’.20
What the worries of Horkheimer and Marcuse brought into question was the point of intellectuals like those of the Frankfurt School at a time when socialist revolution had stalled and fascism was on the march. In his Ideology and Utopia, Karl Mannheim, a sociologist working at the University of Frankfurt but not a member of the Insitute for Social Research, put forward the notion of the ‘free-floating intellectual’, arguing that a socially unattached intelligentsia was suited to providing a leadership role. His intellectual was the ‘watchman in what otherwise would be a pitch-black night’, aloof from the practical concerns of society and so capable of access to a broader perspective on life.21 Brecht and Benjamin opposed Mannheim’s vision, arguing that material interests decisively shaped the intelligentsia all the way down the line, not just in what, say, a social scientist chose to research but also in how they researched it. The intellectual was either propping up capitalism or detonating its foundations – there was no neutral observer’s position on this battlefield.
Earlier Marxists had already effectively exploded the idea that intellectuals were in a class of their own. In the 1920s, the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, for instance, distinguished between traditional intellectuals who tend to conceive of themselves as an autonomous group very much in the manner of Mannheim’s free-floating intellectuals, and organic intellectuals who are defined by their rootedness in a particular social group, giving them experiences which enable them to express the group’s collective will and fight for its interests. Henryk Grossman, when he was fighting on the streets for the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia, might well be taken as an exemplar of a Gramscian organic intellectual; it would be harder to find anyone else among the leading lights of the Frankfurt School who might be so described.
Mannheim was a Jew who in 1933 was ousted from his professorship and fled to Britain, where he was appointed as a sociology lecturer at the London School of Economics. Like his fellow Jewish intellectuals at the Institute for Social Research, Mannheim was blown away by a storm, like them hurled into exile. ‘The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed’, wrote Walter Benjamin in his ‘Theses in the Philosophy of History’, which he completed in the spring of 1940. ‘But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that he can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’22
Citing Benjamin’s famous words here may seem strange: Mannheim was a sociologist of knowledge not an angel of history, and the storm Benjamin writes about was not merely the Third Reich. Moreover, Mannheim was temperamentally different from Benjamin’s angel: he turned round and dared to look into the future, and imagined that it would contain a utopia. The power to change present conditions by means of imagining utopias was for him the driving force of history and essential for the well-being of society.
This, in a sense, was not very Jewish. Marxism, a political philosophy devised by a Jew, is notoriously bad at imagining the communist future for which the proletariat is ostensibly striving. Perhaps that failure in imagination, if that’s what it is, has ancient origins. ‘We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future’, wrote Benjamin a few pages on from his description of the angel. ‘The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment.’ Benjamin’s Marxism lent a new twist to the traditional Jewish rituals of mourning and the remembrance of ancestral suffering. That was not all his Marxism amounted to, though: ‘This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.’
For Mannheim, the task of the intellectual was to project into that homogeneous, empty time an inspiring hope, to imagine utopia and thereby take a step towards its realisation. The Frankfurt School, in sharp contrast, disdained that role and, during the 1930s and 1940s, turned away from any idea it may have earlier had about transforming society. Horkheimer and Adorno devoted themselves increasingly to the philosophical and cultural critique of western civilisation (which would express itself in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment) rather than imagining social transformation. Even Marcuse – when he wrote One-Dimensional Man, the critique of advanced industrial society that would make him the darling of the New Left in the 1960s – drew back from imagining utopia. ‘The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative.’ But pessimism isn’t the same thing as hopelessness. The last words of One-Dimensional Man are a quotation from Walter Benjamin: ‘It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.’23
THE OTHER key figure in the development of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s was Erich Fromm, a young psychoanalyst who had trained as a sociologist. Horkheimer appointed Fromm in part because he was attracted to his unified social theory which blended Freud’s account of psychosexual development and Marx’s insistence that economic and technological developments shaped the individual. Typical in this respect is Fromm’s 1930 essay ‘The Dogma of Christ’, which challenged the account of Theodore Reik, one of his teachers at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, who had produced a straightforward Freudian account whereby the dogma of the crucified Jesus was rooted in Oedipal hatred for the father.
In contrast, Fromm argued that this Oedipal conflict was also linked to the underlying economic situation: the lower classes turned Jesus into a revolutionary who could bring them justice. But then, Fromm noted, the counter-revolution in Christianity began – the rich and educated took over the Christian church, deferred the Day of Judgment almost indefinitely, and insisted that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, because it had already taken place, meant that the social transformation for which the downtrodden earlier Christian believers yearned was unnecessary. Fromm wrote: ‘The change in the economic situation and in the social composition of the Christian community altered the psychic attitude of the believers.’24 The downtrodden lost hope in the possibility of the social change they hoped Christ the Messiah would bring them. Instead, they turned their emotional aggression against themselves.
Fromm, whom Horkheimer promoted to a tenured post soon after the publication of this paper, went on to write other articles melding Marx and Freud in the early 1930s. In two papers on the criminal justice system, he argued that the state presented itself subconsciously as a father and therefore ruled through the fear of paternal punishment; he also contended that it had a class bias and that, by focusing on crime and punishment rather than tackling the oppressive social conditions that led some to commit crime, criminals became the scapegoats for society’s unfairness and economic inequality. The image of the punishing father was now projected into the authority of the state. Fromm even contended that the criminal justice system did not reduce the crime rate; rather, its function was to intensify oppression and crush opposition. These thoughts are echoed in our time by the American activist and professor Angela Davis, a one-time student of Marcuse. What she and other leftist intellectuals call the ‘prison-industrial complex’, a tawdry if tacit alliance between capitalism and a structurally racist state, results not in a reduction in the crime rate but in profits for business and a withdrawal of democratic rights for the US’s overwhelmingly black and hispanic inmates. She told me in 2014: ‘The massive over-incarceration of people of colour in general in the US leads to lack of access to democratic practices and liberties. Because prisoners are not able to vote, former prisoners in so many states are not able to vote, people are barred from jobs if they have a history of prison.’25 For Davis, the prison-industrial complex is not just a racist American money-making machine, but a means to criminalise, demonise and profit from the world’s most powerless people. Fromm, writing in 1931, had seen the criminal justice system of his native land in structurally similar terms.
The shotgun marriage between Freud and Marx over which Horkheimer and Fromm ostensibly officiated was scandalous to orthodox Marxists in general, and inimical to the Comintern in particular, while for orthodox Freudians the hopes Marxists placed in revolution for the transformation of society were delusive. For instance, in 1930 Freud published Civilisation and Its Discontents, pessimistically arguing that a non-repressive society was impossible. Untrammelled sexual gratification was incompatible with what civilisation and progress demanded, namely discipline and renunciation. Work, monogamous reproduction, moral rectitude and social restraint entailed the sacrifice of pleasure and repressing one’s uncivilised impulses. Only in 1955, when Marcuse wrote Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, would a Frankfurt scholar challenge this Freudian pessimism, without abandoning Freud’s insights or Marx’s faith in the attainability of an unrepressed communist society.
Fromm was less Freudian than the foregoing might suggest. For all that Horkheimer cultivated good relations with Freud, Fromm’s developing social psychology junked much of the Freudian orthodoxy to which other members of the Institute, in particular Horkheimer and Adorno, adhered. What appeared to be a melding of Freud and Marx – and one that was amenable to Horkheimer as he recast Marxism to account for subjective factors rather than relying solely on objective economic laws – was something stranger. Fromm wasn’t uniting Marx and Freud; rather, he was uniting Marx with his own developing psychosocial account of those subjective factors, one that outraged both Freudian orthodoxy and, increasingly, his colleagues at the Frankfurt School. Thus Fromm was doubly heretical. First, he dared to sully Marxism with psychoanalysis. Second, he challenged Freud’s view that that libidinal drives were all-important and that individual neuroses were rooted in early childhood experience. In a 1931 paper for the Institute’s journal called ‘The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology’, he wrote that the human instinctual apparatus (including the libidinal structure that was the focus of the Freudian account of psychosexual development) was ‘to a high degree modifiable; the economic conditions are the primary modifying factors’. Once modified by the economy these libidinal forces ‘cease, as it were, to be cement and instead become dynamite’. Libidinal forces and social forces were not set in stone, not eternal truths, but in a dialectical relationship.26
Consider, for instance, anal eroticism. In the Middle Ages, so Fromm argued in a 1931 paper called ‘Psychoanalytic Characterology’, people enjoyed the worldly pleasures to be derived from feast days, costumes, paintings, beautiful buildings and art.27 Then came the Reformation, Calvinism and capitalism. Pleasures in the here and now were increasingly deferred, or so Fromm argued, in favour of thrift, discipline, devotion to work and duty; kindness, sensuality, empathetic unconditional sharing became expendable, even socially questionable, traits.
It’s easy to parody Fromm’s historical account (you can almost imagine the people removing the bells from their boots and their fancy dress feast-day costumes, before entering the iron cage of capitalism, locking the door and obligingly presenting the key to their masters through the bars), but his point was that an anal social character, one who repressed their feelings, saved rather than spent, and denied themselves pleasure, was useful as a productive force to help sustain capitalism. At this stage in his intellectual development, Fromm wasn’t yet clear about the extent to which that valuable anal social character was an adaptation to the requirements of the capitalism, and the extent to which an underlying anal eroticism served as a productive force in the development of the capitalist economy. But what is clear is that he was moving away from the Freudian orthodoxy of libidinal drives whose sublimation provided the key to an individual’s psychic development, towards a notion of social character types that changed according to historical circumstance – and, also, changed historical circumstances.
Later in his intellectual distancing from Freud, Fromm argued that the socialisation of character began at infancy but was not so much rooted in instincts as in interpersonal relationships. By the time he came to write Escape from Freedom in 1941, he thought that instincts were shaped less by the sublimations Freud posited than by social conditions. Initially, Horkheimer took Fromm to be an intellectual ally in his shifting of Marxism from focusing on impersonal economic forces to a negative critique of the culture of modern monopoly capitalism. It was only later in the 1930s that Horkheimer and indeed Adorno would become queasy about Fromm’s anti-Freudianism. Earlier in the decade, though, Fromm was important to Horkheimer not only because he brought psychoanalysis into the Marxist academy, but also because he had trained as a sociologist. As a result, Horkheimer entrusted the young psychoanalyst with the task of investigating the attitudes of German workers since 1918 to work out whether they could be relied on to fight against Hitler.28
The idea for this originated from Felix Weil, who had written to the German Ministry of Science, Art and Education seeking to conduct an empirical investigation into the thoughts and conditions of German workers. Fromm’s work on the study actually began in 1929, when the hope was that the questionnaire-based survey would serve to answer positively the burning question as to whether German workers be counted on to resist the rise of Nazism. Much of the inspiration for the survey came from a similar study undertaken in 1912 by the sociologist Adolf Levenstein who, as a former industrial worker, suspected that monotonous industrial labour increases the psychological impoverishment of the workers’ sensibilities and capacity for autonomous action. Levenstein devised three psychological types for the workers surveyed – revolutionary, ambivalent and conservative-deferential. Fromm wanted to find out what correlations there were between these psychological types and their capacity for resisting fascism.
Fromm and his team of field staff sent out 3,300 questionnaires, mostly to workers. They consisted of 271 open-ended questions asking respondents for their views on such issues as the education of children, the likelihood of avoiding a new war, and the rationalisation of industry. By 1931 about 1,100 completed replies had been received. Fromm and his team carried on working on the results even when all hope was lost that the German workers would rise up and destroy fascism. Some 82 per cent of respondents associated themselves with the Social Democrats and the Communists, but only 15 per cent of them possessed the anti-authoritarian character or psychological type, while 25 per cent were either ambiguously or consistently authoritarian. Writing in the late 1930s after the Nazis had come to power, Fromm argued that the results demonstrated a ‘discrepancy between leftist conscious political opinions and the underlying personality structure; a discrepancy which may [have been] responsible for the [subsequent] collapse of the German workers’ parties’. For him, only 15 per cent of German workers had ‘the courage, readiness for sacrifice and spontaneity needed to rouse the less active and overcome the enemy’. He argued that better leadership from the two leftist parties could have provided stronger resistance to Hitler.29
Fromm’s study was never published by the Institute, although some of its findings appeared in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom. It was, rather confusingly, also plundered for the Institute’s huge study of authority and the family, which engaged all the leading Frankfurt scholars except Grossman and Adorno for much of the 1930s after their exile from Germany. In it, they reflected on what had happened to the institution of the family as capitalism mutated from the early form analysed by Marx and Engels into the monopoly form that confronted the Frankfurt School.
The question of whether the family was a site of resistance to the powers that be or a zone in which capitalist values could be instilled intrigued the Frankfurt School. For Hegel, the family was the society’s central ethical unit and a site of resistance against dehumanisation. For Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, the family was a tool of capitalist oppression, and needed to be abolished. ‘Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists’, wrote Marx and Engels wryly. But they were undaunted:
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain … But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.30
For the Frankfurt School, the bourgeois family hadn’t vanished, but its power in general and the authority of the father in particular was in free fall. It had been the key social institution mediating between material base and ideological superstructure but it was heading towards impotence – not for the revolutionary reasons that Marx and Engels had yearned to see realised, but because other institutions could socialise the populations of capitalist societies more effectively.
Horkheimer noted in an essay for Studies on Authority and Family that it was chiefly in the era of early capitalism (or bourgeois liberalism) that paternal power was at its height in the family. That made sense because in Hegelian terms the father was, thanks to his greater physical size and his role as economic provider, the rational head of the household. That paternal power had declined under monopoly capitalism, not to be replaced by what Fromm sought for – a concomitant rise in the traditional maternal ethic of warmth, acceptance and love. Not that Horkheimer was celebrating this transformation.
Rather, the leading members of the Frankfurt School chose solidarity with their parents at the moment of the latters’ greatest impotence. Adorno, in Minima Moralia, spoke of a ‘sad, shadowy transformation’ in his generation’s relationship with their parents.31 He was writing not just about the decline of the family under monopoly capitalism, but of something much more specific: what the Nazis in their shamelessness did to the parents of these German Jewish intellectuals. Adorno certainly tried to care for his parents when they, roughed up and financially ruined by the Nazis in Frankfurt, fled to join him in his American exile at the start of the 1940s. The Frankfurt School, spurred by Hitler, turned away from Marx’s contempt for the family towards a bitterly won Hegelian, post-Oedipal conception of that derided institution as a site of resistance to, and mutual consolation amid, what Adorno called the ‘rising collectivist order’ that the School took to be visible not just in Berlin and Moscow, but in Paris, London and New York.
What the Frankfurt scholars lamented was that as the family weakened alternative agents of socialisation took over its role; and those agents (meaning everything from the Nazi party to the culture industry) were instrumental in creating what Fromm would call the authoritarian personality. The social institutions of late capitalism manufactured such personalities like human equivalents of Model T Fords. They were identikit, fearful, passive, and unable to construct their own identities.
Fromm took the authoritarian personality, in the 1957 book of that name, to describe both ruler and ruled under this collectivist order. Both had this much in common, he wrote: ‘the inability to rely on one’s self, to be independent, to put it in other words: to endure freedom … He needs to feel a bond, which requires neither love nor reason – and he finds it in the symbiotic relationship, in feeling-one with others; not by reserving his own identity, but rather by fusing, by destroying his own identity.’ Fromm pitted the authoritarian personality against the mature personality which he described as one ‘who does not need to cling to others because he actively embraces and grasps the world, the people, and the things around him’.32
The active embrace of the world, the ability to rely on oneself and thereby endure freedom – these were precisely the character traits that were eliminated under the collectivist order the Frankfurt School saw rising all around them.