In 1950 and 1951, Herbert Marcuse gave a series of lectures at the Washington School of Psychiatry. This was his return to philosophy and writing after a lengthy period working for the American government in its fight against Nazism. The lectures marked the moment that critical theory started to divide between Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic Frankfurt version and the more hopeful American mutations of Marcuse and Fromm, who both remained on the other side of the Atlantic.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality and the Group Experiment served as empirical justifications for their gloominess about the chances of realising the practical goal for critical theory – the radical transformation of society. Marcuse’s lectures proposed that such transformation was possible. He didn’t quite contradict the dismal diagnosis of Dialectic of Enlightenment that ‘mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’, but he did suggest something in these lectures that seemed beyond Horkheimer and Adorno’s philosophy – the subversive potential of sexual desire. The lectures formed the basis of Marcuse’s 1955 book Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud, dedicated to his first wife, the mathematician and statistician Sophie Wertheim, who died of cancer in 1951. In 1955, Marcuse married Inge Neumann. She was the widow of his friend Franz Neumann, who had died in a car crash in Switzerland in 1954. During this time Marcuse was teaching as a political philosopher, first at Columbia University, then at Harvard.
The subversive potential of sexual desire was not a new theme. In his 1938 essay ‘On Hedonism’, Marcuse had written:
The unpurified, unrationalised release of sexual relationships would be the strongest release of enjoyment as such and the total devaluation of labour for its own sake … The dreariness and injustice of work conditions would penetrate explosively the consciousness of individuals and make impossible their peaceful subordination to the social system of the bourgeois world.1
These ideas were a challenge to Freudian orthodoxy, as well as a rebuke to classical Marxism that never imagined sexual liberation could shake the social system of the bourgeois world. In Eros and Civilisation, though, Marcuse went further. He specifically took on one of Freud’s most bleak and pessimistic books, Civilisation and Its Discontents, and used its leading ideas to argue for the most liberating and hopeful conclusions. It was a resonant moment in which to address the possibilities of sexual liberation. Post-war America was preoccupied with sex. Alfred Kinsey had founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947, and became renowned for his two books Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953). In the late 1940s, too, the Austrian-born maverick Marxist psychoanalytical theorist Wilhelm Reich had become famous in America as a prophet of sexual liberation. ‘A sexual revolution is in progress’, he wrote in The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality, ‘and no power on earth will stop it.’2
During the 1930s, members of the Frankfurt School including Marcuse and Fromm had read Reich’s writings and, indeed, the school’s account of fascism was influenced by his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich had been exiled in the US since 1939 and during that time had developed his ‘orgone energy accumulator’, a wooden cupboard lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. Although Albert Einstein, who Reich invited to try out the accumulator, was sceptical about its inventor’s claim that it could improve the users’ ‘orgiastic potency’ and, thereby, their mental health, many leading male, postwar American writers – including Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac – hailed the benefits of going into Reich’s closet. Later William Burroughs wrote in a magazine article called ‘All the Accumulators I have Ever Owned’: ‘Your intrepid reporter, at age 37, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas.’ If women gained orgiastic potency from the machine, satirised by Woody Allen in the 1973 movie Sleeper as an orgasmatron, we didn’t get to hear about it.
By the mid 1950s, however, Reich, suffering from paranoid delusions that the world was under attack by UFOs, was being investigated by the Food and Drugs Administration for making fraudulent claims about the orgone energy accumulator. ‘If his claims for the orgone accumulator were no more than ridiculous quackery’, asks Christopher Turner, author of Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex, ‘as the FDA doctors suggested, and if he was just a paranoid schizophrenic, as one court psychiatrist concluded, why did the US government consider him such a danger?’3 One possible answer is that the sexual liberation proselytised for by a Marxist psychoanalyst might have seemed a clear and present red danger to an increasingly paranoid America at the height of the Cold War. Another is that Reich’s idea of sexual liberation was a threat to such cherished American values as the work ethic and monogamy. A third possibility is that a charlatan making money from a quack cure-all is intolerable in pretty much any polity.
Reich died of a heart attack in November 1957 in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, while serving a two-year jail sentence for breaking an injunction stopping him from hiring out or selling his machine. We don’t know if Herbert Marcuse stepped inside Reich’s accumulator, still less if he felt its benefits, but neither sounds likely. Marcuse, though he knew and had been influenced by Reich’s writings, was less genitally fixated than his fellow exile. In Eros and Civilisation, he wasn’t arguing for a greater quantity and quality of orgasms. Reich’s mistake, he argued, was to take ‘sexual liberation per se as a panacea for individual and social ills’: ‘The problem of sublimation is minimised; no essential distinction is made between repressive and non-repressive sublimation, and progress in freedom appears as a mere release of sexuality.’4
In his 1930 book Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud claimed that civilisation involves the subordination of happiness and sexual pleasure to work, monogamy and social restraint. He argued that social constraints are necessary for the flourishing of human society. Resources are scarce, so hard labour is required. The untrammelled indulgence of human biological and psychological needs, in accordance with what Freud called the pleasure principle, infringed on the freedom of others and so had to be curtailed by rules and discipline, or, as he called it, the reality principle. The Freudian narrative of how individuals repress and sublimate their needs goes like this. Initially, our instincts (what Freud called the id) drive us to seek pleasure and avoid pain. But during its development, as Marcuse notes, ‘the individual comes to the traumatic realisation that full and painless gratification of needs is impossible’. And so the reality principle (represented by the ego in the individual’s psyche) intervenes to instruct the individual on what is socially acceptable. In the process, the individual becomes not just pleasure-fixated but ‘a conscious, thinking subject, geared to a rationality imposed on him from the outside’.5
Freud thought these instincts were unchangeable. Marcuse, though, argued that if instincts can be repressed, they are not immutable; more importantly, that the kind of society in which an individual develops as a conscious thinking subject plays a role in shaping the instincts. Effectively, Marcuse was historicising Freud from a Marxist perspective, suggesting that the instincts that Freud hypostatised could change with the social system. This became clear when Marcuse made his key distinction between basic and surplus repression (precisely the distinction he thought Reich failed to make in his eulogies to the orgasm as the supreme good). The former is the sort of repression of the instincts necessary, wrote Marcuse, ‘for the perpetuation of the human race in civilisation’. But the latter, surplus repression, has the purpose of shaping the instincts in accordance with the ‘performance principle’ which, for Marcuse, was the prevailing form of the reality principle.
Marcuse’s idea was that the reality principle mutates into a new form under capitalism. He wrote in Eros and Civilisation:
The performance principle, which is that of an acquisitive and antagonistic society in the process of constant expansion, presupposes a long development during which domination has been increasingly rationalised: control over social labour now reproduces society on a large scale and under improving conditions … For the vast majority of the population, the scope and mode of satisfaction are determined by their own labour; but their labour is work for an apparatus which they do not control, which operates as an independent power to which individuals must submit if they want to live. And it becomes the more alien the more specialised the division of labour becomes. Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfil their own needs and faculties but work in alienation.6
Marcuse thus linked Freudian repression with Marxist alienation – the worker is manipulated in such a way that the restrictions on the libido seem to be rational laws which are then internalised. The unnatural – that our pre-established function is to produce commodities and profit for the capitalist – becomes natural to us, a second nature. Hence, the individual defines him or herself in conformity with the apparatus. Or, as Marcuse put it: ‘he desires what he is supposed to desire … Neither his desires nor his alteration of reality are henceforth his own: they are now “organised” by his society. And this “organisation” represses and transubstantiates his original instinctual needs.’7
Marcuse was writing in 1950s America in which, he thought, advertising, consumerism, mass culture and ideology integrated Americans into a peaceful subordination to the social system of the bourgeois world and made them desire things that they didn’t need. Although he was teaching at American universities, Marcuse maintained close links with his former colleagues Adorno and Horkheimer in Frankfurt, and in key respects, their critique of America is similar. For all three, the rugged individualism of US society that was pitted rhetorically against the collectivism of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War was a myth: Americans were infantilised, repressed pseudo-individuals. During 1952 and 1953, for instance, Adorno spent ten months in California analysing newspaper astrology columns, radio soap operas and the new medium of television, and what he had to say about them bore closely on what Marcuse wrote in Eros and Civilisation. Adorno found in all these forms of mass culture a symmetry with fascist propaganda: both mass culture and fascist propaganda, he argued, meet and manipulate the dependency needs of the pseudo-individual character, ‘promoting conventional, conformist and contented attitudes’.8
If you were an American, of course, this might have seemed incredibly patronising. Adorno, at least, praised astrology columnists for their ingenuity. Their readers weren’t utterly witless: they realised from their own lives that ‘everything does not run so smooth as the column seems to imply it does and that not everything takes care of itself’; rather, they experience life as making contradictory demands on them. In a manner similar to Nazi propagandists, ‘the column has to take up these contradictions themselves if it really wants to tie the readers to its own authority’. One way the astrology columnists did this was to recommend different activities for different times of day: AM is for work, reality and the ego principle, Adorno noted; PM is apparently for ‘the instinctual urges of the pleasure principle’. He also noted that the pleasures of the PM are rewards or compensations for the work of the AM. But the pleasures of the PM are only justified if they ultimately served the ‘ulterior purpose of success and self-promotion’.9 As a result, pleasure itself becomes a duty, a form of work: what looked like afternoon delight following a morning’s labours was really anything but. Eros bowed to Logos. Instead of a freed-up pleasure principle, this division served to extend the dictates of the reality principle over every aspect of life. What psychoanalysis calls bi-phasic behaviour is a symptom of compulsive neurosis, Adorno argued. Astrology columns seemed to offer their readers tools to deal with the contradictions of everyday life, but were really, he thought, making them compulsive neurotics who internalised those contradictions rather than confronting them.
Adorno took this compulsive neurotic division into AM and PM to be emblematic of American mass culture. Instead of confronting the contradictions of society, its citizens neurotically internalised them; by dividing days into work and pleasure, they became, not self-fulfilled, but self-alienated. What Adorno found in the American astrology columns, Marcuse took to be more generally true of American and indeed any advanced industrial society. His hope in Eros and Civilisation was for a radical transformation of those societies, for the pleasure principle to be liberated from the dictatorship of the performance principle, for humans to become re-eroticised – whole, fulfilled and free.
Freud had argued that this kind of transformation was impossible, that civilisations must trade freedom for security. The United States of the 1950s seemed to be a civilisation that had oscillated towards security and away from freedom, while rhetorically posturing otherwise. Richard Yates suggested that his novel Revolutionary Road, published in 1961 but set in 1955, was about an era that embodied ‘a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price’.10 America was terrified of communism and nuclear war; Nixon and McCarthy’s work on the House Un-American Activities Committee made men and women afraid to speak freely or act independently. The American society, or any other civilised society for that matter, that postured in the 1950s as free and affluent was, so Marcuse argued, straitjacketed by conformity.
The key point of Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents was that the ostensible progress of civilisation involved a repression from which there was no escape. Marcuse argued against such pessimism. In advanced industrial societies such as the United States, he claimed, the scarcity of resources that Freud had cited as one reason why the pleasure principle needed to be curtailed by the reality principle was no longer a concern. ‘The very progress of civilisation under the performance principle has attained a level of productivity at which the social demands upon instinctual energy to be spent in alienated labour could be considerably reduced’, he wrote.11 Freud’s point about scarcity may have had some validity in earlier times, he argued, but now ostensible scarcity functions ideologically to keep us working when some of that work is surplus to requirements, a surplus that supports the domination of worker by capitalist.
The ideological function of hard labour is arguably still with us. In a 2013 article called ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, the anarchist, anthropologist and Occupy movement activist David Graeber noted that, in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on fifteen-hour weeks. Graeber, like Marcuse, argued that in technological terms we are quite capable of reducing our working ours thus. And yet it didn’t happen. ‘Instead’, Graeber argued, ‘technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.’12 What Marcuse called ‘the dreariness and injustice of work conditions’ and workers’ ‘peaceful subordination to the social system of the bourgeois world’ is no less true today than it was sixty years ago.
But in Eros and Civilisation Marcuse wasn’t indicting bullshit jobs per se; rather he was arguing that increased productivity by means of alienated labour had eliminated the scarcity that required us to work hard. Our problem in advanced industrial societies then as now is not scarcity, but the absence of a fair and just distribution of resources. Marcuse’s optimistic vision is one in which the working day is shortened and everybody’s needs are met by improved distribution of goods and services and a better division of labour, such that, as a result, erotic energies are released. Releasing erotic energies in this way, Marcuse argued, would liberate us from the kind of genital fixation to which Wilhelm Reich had been prone. Freed from being a mere instrument of labour, the body could be resexualised. Marcuse suggested that for too long philosophy has treated ‘being’ as pure, abstract consciousness. Eros had been subdued by Logos. Capitalism, too, limited Eros, by constraining it under genital supremacy and by putting it to work in the service of monogamy and reproduction.
It’s not very clear, though, how sexual practices would change if Eros was liberated. Marcuse didn’t condemn, for example, coprophilia or homosexuality but argued that in the non-repressive civilisation he advocated they may take ‘other forms compatible with normality in high civilisation’.13
But invoking ‘normality’ is problematic: if there are sexual norms in Marcuse’s non-repressive world wouldn’t they stem the erotic energies that have just been unleashed? He was clearly not suggesting the establishment of a vice squad to police his non-repressive utopia, but presumably rather suggesting that in it sexual practices will evolve from what they are now. What forms they will take is difficult – for us, as repressed, alienated subjects under the yoke of monopoly capitalism – to imagine.
One casualty of the end of repressive civilisation and the release of libidinal energy, Marcuse tantalisingly suggested, would be that iconic institution of 1950s America, the nuclear family. ‘The body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed – an instrument of pleasure’, Marcuse wrote. ‘This change in the value and scope of libidinal relations would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organised, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family.’ Sex would no longer be ‘in the service of production’ but would have the ‘function of obtaining pleasure from zones of the body’.14 And that wouldn’t be the end of the matter: not just the whole body would be eroticised, but everything one did would be too – social relations, work and creating culture.
Even more intriguing was what Marcuse’s non-repressive civilisation meant for the notions of production and fulfilling labour discussed earlier. For Hegel, man realises his identity through production ‘translating itself from the night of possibility into the day of actuality’, and Marx too urged that fulfilling oneself as a human involves producing something. Erich Fromm also put forward the ideal of a ‘productive man’, a normative character who is alive to the extent he is ‘in the act of expressing his own specific human powers’. For Marcuse, however, this emphasis on production reinforced the capitalist work ethic and the performance principle. His argument showed how far critical theory had departed from Marxist orthodoxy: Marx was effectively cast as a philosopher who bought into capitalist ideology by eulogising self-fulfilment through labour, albeit non-alienated labour. But Fromm rather than Marx was the explicit target: Marcuse suggested that Fromm had smuggled capitalist values into his critique of the capitalist system – a point that he would later elaborate in a bitter dispute between the two men.
But Marcuse was not merely a hedonist arguing that we should play and not work. Rather, he was arguing that the division between work and play should be overcome. Following Schiller, he advocated play and art as emancipatory activities that could transform human beings and, in particular, change their relationship to labour. Instead of working, alienated, at jobs that diminish us spiritually and ruin us physically, he suggested that in a non-repressive society erotic energies would flow into sexual gratification, play and creative work. Marcuse took some of this utopian vision from the nineteenth-century French utopian socialist and pre-Marxist Charles Fourier, who sought a similar society to the one Marcuse dreamt of in Eros and Civilisation. Fourier sought, Marcuse wrote, ‘the creation of “luxury, or the pleasure of the five senses”; the formation of libidinal groups (of friendship and love); and the establishment of a harmonious order, organising these groups for work in accordance with the development of the individual’. The main drawback of Fourier’s utopia was that it was to be administered by a giant organisation that, Marcuse thought, would reproduce the repressive system it was designed to escape.15
None of this should be taken as suggesting, though, that Marcuse’s non-repressive libidinal revolution was something that could be achieved without work. Freud, after all, had defined Eros as striving to ‘form substance into ever greater unities, so that life may be prolonged and brought to higher development’.16 That sounds like work, and Marcuse recognised as much – freeing up the pleasure principle as he suggested alters what work is and, yet, it is nonetheless work.
The erotic aim of sustaining the entire body as a subject-object of pleasure calls for the continual revolution of the organism, the intensification of its receptivity, the growth of its sensuousness. The aim generates its own projects of realisation: the abolition of toil, the amelioration of the environment, the conquest of disease and decay, the creation of luxury. All these activities flow directly from the pleasure principle, and, at the same time they constitute work.17
What Marcuse described as continual revolution sounds like Sisyphean labour. But that labour, crucially, was not the alienated, repressive work that upheld the performance principle but more like the work of two other classical mythological figures Marcuse cited, Orpheus and Narcissus. Orpheus refuses repressive sexuality and seeks union with the object of his desire, while Narcissus has erotic impulses suffusing his entire personality. Strikingly too, for Marcuse, Narcissus is not separated from nature but part of it and he takes pleasure in seeing himself reflected in it. This part of Marcuse’s analysis clearly connected with Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the despoilation of nature in Dialectic of Enlightenment. For all three, any desirable transformation involved reuniting humans with nature rather than treating it, as it had been since Francis Bacon, as fit for nothing but domination. Orpheus and Narcissus were, for Marcuse, ‘images of the Great Refusal: refusal to accept separation from the libidinous object (or subject). The refusal aimed at liberation – at the reunion of what has become separated.’18 Eros has been sundered from Logos and subjugated by it; humanity has been divided from nature and dominated it. Arguably, the kinds of reunion Marcuse imagined involve labour, indeed the kind of self-actualising labour that Fromm described in his 1961 Marx’s Concept of Man.
Eros and Civilisation saw Marcuse reconceptualising Marxism. For him in 1955, the history of all hitherto existing societies was not simply, as it had been a century earlier for Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, the history of class struggles; it was also a fight over the repression of our instincts. Advanced industrial society is preventing us from reaching a non-repressive society ‘based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations’.19 But, unlike Horkheimer and Adorno’s philosophy, Marcuse’s was optimistic, arguing that a non-repressive society was possible and that ‘a new basic experience of being would change the human existence in its entirety’.
In Eros and Civilisation, Marcuse took Freud’s pessimistic vision of what civilisation entailed and used it to imagine precisely the possibility Freud discounted, a non-repressive civilisation. That sounds very much like neo-Freudian revisionism. And yet his book ended with an epilogue entitled ‘Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism’ in which he accused several prominent psychoanalysts of revising Freud’s work in such a way as to purge it of its critical implications. Among those in Marcuse’s crosshairs once more was Erich Fromm. Marcuse believed that Fromm and the other neo-Freudians had rejected some of Freud’s key insights such as his libidinal theory, the death instinct, the Oedipus complex, and the primal horde theory whereby in human pre-history a single dominant male was killed because of his sexual rights over women, generating a guilt that was passed down through human history.
Fromm – performing a Marxist critique of Freud not dissimilar to Marcuse’s own in Eros and Civilisation – doubted that Oedipal struggle was the eternal truth of father–son relations, but saw it as a struggle to which the conditions of capitalist society made them more prone. But Marcuse went further in accusing Fromm of revisionism. He argued that his former colleague had moved away from the instinctual basis of human personality, instead embracing a ‘positive thinking which leaves the negative where it is – predominant over human existence’. Marcuse claimed that Fromm’s distinctions between good and bad and productive and unproductive were taken from the very capitalist ideology he was ostensibly critiquing. Worse, he accused Fromm of bowing before the conformist slogan ‘accentuate the positive’.20
Is this fair on Fromm? Like Marcuse, Fromm had chosen to remain in his country of exile after the war. Indeed, of all the Frankfurt scholars, Fromm was the most comfortable in America – quicker to learn English (and latterly to write in that language with a greater ease and facility than not only his German colleagues but many native English speakers) and more ready to integrate into US society. Not that he was uncritical of that society: indeed, his exile writings were so critical that, initially, one would take him to be a natural ally of Marcuse. For instance, Fromm’s 1941 Fear of Freedom, while explicitly indicting totalitarian societies and how they appeal to a deep-seated craving to escape from the freedom of the modern world and return to the womb, also recognised that capitalist democracies offered another form of escape from freedom. In his 1955 book The Sane Society he suggested that, while early capitalism had produced the ‘hoarding character’ who hoards both possessions and feelings, a new character type had emerged under post-war capitalism: the ‘marketing character’ who ‘adapts to the market economy by becoming detached from authentic emotions, truth and conviction’ and for whom ‘everything is transformed into a commodity, not only things, but the person himself, his physical energy, his skills, his knowledge, his opinions, his feelings, even his smiles’.21 Such people are not able to care, ‘not because they are selfish, but because their relationship to each other and to themselves is so thin’.22 Against the marketing character, Fromm juxtaposed his ideal character type, the ‘productive character’, who loves and creates, and for whom being is more important than having. Productive characters like this are discouraged in the market economy. In fact they are a threat to its values.
So much of this seems to be consistent with Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation that it is hard to understand why Fromm was targeted in its epilogue. Given Fromm’s commitment to Marxism, it is not likely that he would have reduced psychoanalysis to a conformist psychology, and yet that is Marcuse’s accusation. The epilogue was slightly modified and submitted to the journal Dissent, where it was published in 1955 and triggered an acrimonious dispute that was acted out in the magazine’s pages over several issues. The roots of the conflict, however, go back to the 1930s when Fromm’s growing distaste for Freudian orthodoxy led to a clash between him and Adorno and Horkheimer that led to his dismissal from the Institute in 1939. At that time, Adorno and Horkheimer had agreed with Freud’s suggestion that there could be no harmony between the self and society. Instincts sought release, and society had to curtail that release in order to survive. Fromm, even in the 1930s, was suspicious of this Freudian orthodoxy: his concept of a social character involved external social structures shaping the inner self. But for Adorno and Horkheimer, and later Marcuse, this revision of Freud was socially conservative. Fromm had downgraded the importance Freud placed on early childhood sexual experiences and the unconscious, and Marcuse charged him with holding to an ‘idealist ethics’. He argued that Fromm’s call for human productivity, love and sanity suggested precisely what Freud had denied, that there could be harmony between self and society. Fromm’s revisionism defanged Freud, losing the critical edge of the latter’s radical social critique. Fromm’s ‘road to sanity’, Marcuse argued, represented palliatives for ‘a smoother functioning of the established society’. Fromm retorted that Marcuse, in denying the possibility of creative productivity, happiness and genuine love under capitalism was thinking undialectically, taking his pessimism to the point of nihilism. Fromm argued that there are limited potentialities for self-transformation under capitalism that could eventually realise what he called a socialist humanism.
Marcuse’s contention was that there is no such road to sanity. He reckoned Fromm’s suggestion was premised on the idea of an autonomous individual capable of eluding the dominating structures of society. But Freud’s point, echoed by critical theory, was that such a figure is a myth, invented in the nineteenth century under early capitalism and now an utter anachronism, a throwback to a pre-Freudian era. Invoking it now could only serve the interests of the dominating society Fromm was ostensibly out to excoriate. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer compared the individual to a local shop made obsolete by a supermarket. The individual is ‘the psychological corner shop’ which emerged from feudal restraints as ‘a dynamic cell of economic activity’. Freudian psychoanalysis ‘represented the internal “small business” which grew up … as a complex dynamic system of the conscious and unconscious, the id, ego and super-ego’. Freudian psychoanalysis, for these critical theorists if not for Fromm, was the theory of the human psyche proper to capitalism as it evolved in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, psychoanalysis claimed that the autonomous individual is a chimera. We are not free either of our biological instincts, nor can we escape determination and domination by the social order. ‘Decisions for men as active workers are taken by the hierarchy ranging from the trade associations to the national administration’, wrote Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘and in the private sphere by the system of mass culture which takes over the last inward impulses of individuals who are forced to consume what is offered to them’.23 The autonomous individual, the figure that Fromm needed to construct his road to sanity, was programatically denied by critical theory. Adorno wrote: ‘While they [the revisionists] unceasingly talk of the influence of society on the individual, they forget that not only the individual, but the category of individuality is a product of society.’24
The Dissent debate that marked Fromm’s anathematisation by critical theory was so bitter that it ended Marcuse and Fromm’s friendship. Years later Fromm saw Marcuse on a train and studiously ignored him. Wounding too for Fromm was the fact that the dispute was played out in the pages of a journal on whose editorial board he had served. Its editors, the New York Intellectuals Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, had become so disenchanted with their colleague and his views that they had no compunction about offending him by publishing Marcuse’s attack. They even allowed Marcuse to write a rebuttal to Fromm’s rebuttal. That may seem a minor issue, but it showed the extent to which the deck was stacked against him. The Dissent row was thus experienced by Fromm as a double stab in the back. His biographer suggests that the exchange damaged his quest for academic respectability, casting him in a marginalised role – an experience comparable to what he felt as a child in his parents’ home or what he had experienced when he was dismissed by the Institute in 1939.25 But if Fromm was damaged in academic circles by the dispute and became, as one critic put it, ‘the forgotten intellectual’,26 that chiefly shows how unimportant academic reputation was to his growing role as what we have learned to call a public intellectual. After the Dissent debacle, Fromm carried on regardless, writing books that argued for the kind of socialist humanism his former colleagues denied was possible. He nonetheless achieved remarkable successes with many of them.
Although he would spend most of his life after exile in 1933 to his death in 1980 living in the United States, in 1950 he took up a post at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City. He moved there for the benefit of his second wife Henny Gurland, whom he had married in 1944. She had been advised by her doctor to take trips to the radioactive springs near Mexico City to aid her recovery from high blood pressure, cardiac problems and depression. In September 1940, Gurland, a photographer, had been among the group of refugees including Walter Benjamin who fled on foot across the Pyrenees, and may have been the last person to see him alive before he, reportedly, took his own life. During several trips to Mexico, the climate and warm mineral waters soothed Henny’s pain and apparently eased her depression. For Fromm, Mexico seemed to be his last hope to restore his own happiness and hers. Yet in 1952 Henny died, possibly from heart failure, though more likely, as his biographer suggests, she committed suicide.
It’s difficult not to read Fromm’s most successful book, The Art of Loving, in the light of his Mexican years, the death of Henny and the misery it caused him. He wrote the book in part to counter the increasingly common notion that establishing a relationship does not require work. Love had been poisoned like everything else in commodity capitalism, reified and neutered of its otherwise deranging power. He wrote of the prevailing form of coupledom as an égoisme à deux, in which two self-centred people come together in marriage or partnership to escape loneliness, as though love were a full comprehensive insurance policy that could protect both parties from the vicissitudes of the real world of loss and disappointment. Neither egoist works, though, to arrive at what Fromm called a ‘central relationship’. He argued that the very language of love connived with this lie: ‘This attitude – that there is nothing easier than to love – has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.’27 In Marxist terms, society treated love as a commodity rather than realising it was an art that took time, skill and dedication to master. The beloved too became reified, an object serving instrumental purposes rather than a person.
All the five types of love Fromm identified in The Art of Loving were becoming similarly debased – brotherly love by the commodification of humans; motherly love by narcissism; self-love by selfishness; love of God by idolatry; and erotic love by the absence of tenderness. The death of the tenderness in erotic love, he charged, came from the refusal of personal responsibility, the insistence on entitlement and the tendency to look outward in demand rather than inward in obligation.
It scarcely needs saying that we have not, as a society, learned the art of loving. Indeed, one suggestion is that we have abolished love in favour of sex, since for us capitalists of anti-romance, love involves too much work, commitment and risk. As a result, Fromm’s book, six decades after its publication, reads like a challenge and a refreshing rebuke: in an age of disposable lovers, where calculated sexual pleasure has supplanted the unpredictability of love, where looking for love is like shopping and we demand from it what we have come to expect from our other purchases – novelty, variety, disposability. In his book Liquid Love, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that our society has failed to learn the lessons of Fromm’s book: ‘Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming – all such things sound the death knell to love. Eros won’t outlast duality. As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’28
IN MAY 1958, the twenty-eight-year-old Jürgen Habermas addressed a political protest in Frankfurt. The Federal Republic’s Bundestag had voted that March to allow German armed forces to be equipped with NATO’s atomic weapons. The Federal Republic’s army had only existed since 1955 and from its inception the question of whether it should have nuclear weapons was a vexed issue. A protest group called The Göttingen Eighteen, consisting of Germany’s leading atomic scientists, claimed that each one of the weapons being considered had the destructive power of a Hiroshima bomb, and declared that they had no place in Germany.
The question of whether the Frankfurt School should become involved in such matters was vexed. Adorno, for his part, seemed to suggest that silence was better than being misunderstood. He wrote: ‘It is difficult to even sign appeals with which one sympathises, because in their inevitable desire to have a political impact, they always contain an element of untruth … The absence of commitment is not necessarily a moral defect; it can also be moral because it means insisting on the autonomy of one’s own point of view.’29 The high value Adorno put on such autonomy and aloofness from political commitment sounds akin to the free-floating quality Mannheim ascribed to intellectuals in the early 1930s, but such qualities also became exasperating to those who sought to change society – not least Adorno’s own students during the university protests of the next decade, as we will see.
Adorno and his co-director Horkheimer weren’t devoid of political commitment when they felt like it. In 1956, for instance, they wrote to the German news magazine Der Spiegel to defend France and Britain’s military assault on Egypt which had been condemned by the United Nations. ‘No one even ventures to point out that these Arab robber states have been on the lookout for years for an opportunity to fall upon Israel and to slaughter the Jews who have found refuge there.’30 But for the most part, the two men remained aloof.
Neither shared the mounting distaste among some German intellectuals over the risks of a new German army, particularly one that had nuclear weapons. Indeed, they upset some younger members of the Institute by having no scruples about carrying out a study for the German Defence Ministry designed to find out how to select volunteers for the army on the basis of their democratic attitudes. Habermas feared that Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School’s director for a quarter of a century, in particular, had become too allied with the Federal Republic. ‘His public demeanour and his policy for the institute seemed to us to be almost the expression of an opportunist conformity which was at odds with the critical tradition which, after all, he embodied.’ Adorno and Horkheimer wrote to Marcuse explaining why they were more comfortable in West Germany than in East Germany where, as critics of society, ‘they would long since have been killed’. They went so far to argue that the freedom of thought they enjoyed in the west was paradisal.31
But what to do with that freedom? After he addressed the Frankfurt protest, Habermas wrote an article for a student magazine headlined ‘Unrest is the Citizen’s First Duty’, in which he invoked the words of his teacher Adorno that the task of contemporary philosophy ‘has its lifeblood in resistance’. Habermas’s article was a counterblast to a simultaneously published article by Franz Böhm, who was not only a Christian Democrat Bundestag member, but, counterintuitively, chairman of the board of the Institute’s Research Foundation.32 Böhm accused the protesters of rabble rousing against his party (the CDU) and of collaborating with dictators opposing the west, brutalising political discussion and preparing the way for a new form of Nazism. In short, Böhm was accusing protesters such as Habermas of left fascism, a decade before Habermas himself would accuse student protesters like Rudi Dutschke of the same. Habermas argued that the protests were against ‘the statesmen ruling in our name’ and called for a plebiscite on the army being equipped with nuclear weapons (a plebiscite that West Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled out later that year).33
But Habermas’s political activity rankled inside Café Max. It wasn’t just his speechifying and polemicising that worried Horkheimer, but also the political commitments expressed in his research papers for the Institute. In 1957, Habermas had written a paper entitled ‘On the Philosophical Debate over Marx and Marxism’. In it, he appeared to call for ‘the development of formal democracy into material democracy, of liberal democracy into social democracy’.34 But these were not Habermas’s orginal words, Horkheimer suspected. Indeed, Horkheimer was convinced that Habermas’s original call for revolution in the paper had been edited out by Adorno and replaced with the words quoted above to spare the Institute’s blushes. If so, that edited version was in line with the Institute’s long-term commitment to Aesopian language. But Horkheimer wasn’t placated: any reader could spot the call for revolution that remained. ‘How is a people which is being held in the shackles of bourgeois society by a liberal constitution to change the so-called political society for which, according to H. [Habermas], it is “more than ripe”, other than by violence?’ Horkheimer wrote in a letter to Adorno. ‘It is simply not possible to have admissions of this sort in the research report of an Institute that exists on the public funds of this shackling society.’35 Quite so: calls for violent revolution weren’t going to help the Institute get research contracts from the German Defence Ministry.
Horkheimer, in short, wanted Habermas out. And he managed to achieve his aim, even in the face of Adorno’s misgivings, with a clever pretext. Habermas was planning to write his postdoctoral thesis on changes in the bourgeois public sphere (which would become, when published in 1962, his influential book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society), but Horkheimer insisted that he first do another study that would have taken three years. Exasperated, Habermas resigned and went to finish his thesis at Marburg University under the Marxist jurist Wolfgang Abendroth.
What had irritated Horkheimer about Habermas’s writings was that his junior was criticising the political structure of the society on which the Institute depended for its financial survival. His work was too Marxist. Habermas had also written an introduction for an empirical sociological study called ‘Students and Politics’ aimed at investigating students’ political participation and attitudes to democracy. There he argued that German society was at a crossroads between an authoritarian welfare state and substantive democracy. For Habermas, the Federal Republic had accorded many fundamental rights to the West German people under its so-called Basic Law and had given them access to politics at the federal level by means of elections to the Bundestag. But, as Rolf Wiggershaus notes, the Bundestag had lost power to the executive, the bureaucracy and lobbying groups.36 Elections, then, seemed to confer democratic political power, but in fact made a mockery of it. ‘With the decline of open class antagonisms, the contradiction has taken a new form: it now appears in the depoliticisation of the masses with an increase in the politicisation of society’, wrote Habermas.37 This critique of liberal democracy as a sham, along with the coded call for revolution, was too much for Horkheimer. He decided that the Institute would not publish ‘Students and Politics’. When it was later published elsewhere, the Frankfurt School scarcely received a mention.
Café Marx was dead. Long live Café Max. What the role of the Frankfurt School and critical theory would be in the 1960s was less clear.