The appeal of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory to a young leftist of the late 1960s was based on a paradox expressed in the practice of both critical theory and the leftist. On the one hand, modern capitalist society seemed able to co-opt protest by integrating it into the dynamics of competitive business, creating a demand for the newest, most advanced, and most risqué products (a trend that continues today as cultural rebellion has became the motor of consumer society). On the other hand, that society was characterized by a spirit of revolt against its “one-dimensional” reduction of all use-values to their economic exchange-value that devalued politics and consecrated the tenets of liberalism (a trend that continues in the form of the reaction against globalization). In this context, a legacy from the past called “critical theory” appeared as a kind of guideline that pointed beyond the poles of integration or nihilism. This was all the more persuasive because established theory in those days had forgotten its past; its pragmatism led it to fight the War on Poverty without looking beneath its surface manifestations to see the embedded roots that made the metaphor of war a disguise for political vanity. Critical theory, a politics of theory and an appeal to the history of theory rather than to real history, seemed to offer an alternative that the leftist could seize. This choice was based on a paradox that the young leftist did not see. Its premise was that modern and capitalist society is impervious to external interventions that seek to change it; theory was the only legitimate practice in such a situation, and politics then became the politics of theory. That meant that in making this choice the left would necessarily cut itself off from the popular base on which political success depended. Such was the price, and paradox, of radical politics.
Frankfurt School critical theory fit perfectly into this situation. It was radical in its very modesty. It sought to formulate the kind of immanent critique that Horkheimer and Marcuse had proposed as the alternative to the contemplative and static perspective of traditional theory.1 The goal was to demystify a reified or alienated society whose institutions are separated from the lived experience on which they nonetheless depend. This type of immanent critique assumed that theory had practical import when it could uncover and point to—and thus liberate by making self-aware—the emancipatory potential that is hidden or frozen in the external frame of a mindless machinery. Immanent critique in this sense was not far from the Enlightenment tradition typified by Kant’s imperative to “free oneself from a self-incurred immaturity.”2 But to be effective in the postwar climate, such a political critical theory would have had to pay as much attention to the logic of the political as the critical philosophers paid in 1937 to the logic of the concept. What kind of liberation could come from philosophical self-awareness? The basis of the turn to critical theory was the instinctive rejection (or even repulsion) of the actual political system. Liberation became an end in itself, and by a short-cut that would prove costly critical theory itself came to stand for or to replace politics. The politics of theory replaced the theory of politics. This gesture was justified by the famous aphorism that forms the first sentence of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics: “Philosophy, which once seemed overtaken, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed.”3 Today, the pendulum finally has swung so far that the politics of (critical) theory has become the aesthetics of postmodernism. The critical political project of the Frankfurt School has disappeared. Ironically, its moment too was missed.
By the 1980s, long after the new left was itself only an object of study if not a myth called “’68,” critical theory was defined in the university as the province of literary—or, more broadly, cultural—theory. This shift was not simply the result of campus politics or bureaucratic convenience (although these were also involved). The theoretical premises of the old Marxist critical theorists lent themselves to the transformation; co-optation was not imposed on them by malicious forces (such as their old enemy, the logic of capitalist reification). Their paradoxical but self-defined revolutionary politics was based on a desire to overcome politics, to avoid being contaminated by interest so that pure goals would not be realized by compromised means. The critical theorists advanced a politics based on the hatred of everyday politics, and their disdain for politics had good theoretical reasons. In its place, radical politics and aesthetics were treated as if they were identical; both were defined, without further ado, as critical because they represented goals that were distinct from quantitative and calculating interests of capitalist social relations: aesthetics and aesthetic politics were critical because they dealt with values, with quality and culture rather than the mechanics of civilization. If it is said that this attitude comes from German romanticism, the reply is that Marx too shared in that tradition. A contemporary analogy can be used to make the case for this identification of different domains. The critical aestheticism as politics resembles the claims of contemporary postmodernists: postmodernists are modernists who hate modernity, just as the old critical theorists were political thinkers who hated politics. This kinship appears most saliently in the literary style and especially the musical likes (and dislikes) of Adorno.4
But analogies are often excuses for oversimplification, and the history of the Frankfurt School presents a more complicated picture. It suggests either that the political project of the old Frankfurt School be revivified—or that it should at least be given a proper burial, under its own name. The same goes for the Marxism of which it considered itself the dialectical heir.5 But that leaves open the question of whether there is still a place for a critical theory today. What might such a theory look like? What would it do? The history of the Frankfurt School provides some useful paths for thinking about these questions.
Was the disappearance of the political dimension of critical theory necessary? There is no doubt that the intention of the founders was political; critical theory was an academic code name for Marxism.6 The interest of Rolf Wiggershaus’s fascinating history of the Frankfurt School is that it follows the founding intuition of the Marxist philosophers who sought to unify their passions under the title “critical theory” as they encountered a world whose advent they could not imagine: the America of exile and the painfully democratizing West Germany of the return, where the lessons of exile had to be brought into harmony with the need for the self-creation of a new generation (and a new left).7 The encounter draws out and makes explicit an ambiguity that increasingly took the form of a brittle paradox whose original dynamic tension gradually was lost as critical theory became a “school.” Wiggershaus cites the preface to Horkheimer’s early, highly personal volume, whose title is deliberately dual (Dämmerung [Dawn and decline], 1934): “This book is obsolete,” writes Horkheimer. But, he continues, “the ideas … may perhaps be of interest later.”8 Wiggershaus stays on the case, following both the ideas and the career of critical theory and the critical theorists’ Institute for Social Research. Horkheimer’s ideas did seem “of interest” to the student movement of the sixties, whose adoption of them, however, seemed to him a betrayal. The former critical Marxists now seemed opposed not just to radical but even to social-democratic politics.9 This shift has to be explained. What did the critical theorists mean by “politics,” and what makes this political theory “critical”?
With the return to Germany, Adorno came to play the dominant theoretical role while Horkheimer was busied with administrative integration of the old institute into the new West Germany. (This was no small task; Horkheimer’s contribution to the new Germany should not be underestimated, but it is not clear that this activity followed directly from his critical theory.) Compromises seemed necessary; funding came from sources that were at times part of the integrated opposition’s social forces and at other times directly from business interests within a stabilized postwar social-market economy. As opposed to the social scientific turn of the institute staff, Adorno’s increasing use of the essay form appealed to opinion beyond the lecture hall. This was not simply a question of style, nor was it a sign of revolt. Wiggershaus tries to show that “the essay was for [Adorno] the form of free thought.” But how did this free thought contribute to critical theory? Wiggershaus’s illustration of Adorno’s use of it is telling. “I consider,” writes Adorno, “the survival of Nazism within democracy as potentially more threatening than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.” What could this hyperbolic claim, by a principal author of The Authoritarian Personality—the pioneering study of the advent of fascism within democracy—mean in the new West Germany? Wiggershaus is charitable almost to a fault; he suggests that its lack of a determined referent points to the insufficiency of the original intuition that was at the foundation of critical theory. Essayistic insights based on “intuitive chance readings and his own experiences and associations” are “a utopia … which [Wiggershaus insists] must be translated into an empirical form of knowledge capable of making use of the successful discoveries of organized science in all their breadth while providing science with fresh horizons to produce more specific, and at the same time more cautious discoveries and applications.”10 The old critical theory showed signs of its age and could not read clearly the signs of the new.
With this observation of the shifting object of critical theory, Jürgen Habermas enters the picture. But one may wonder whether the picture was changed by this new presence, whom Wiggershaus presents in a chapter title as “a social theorist at the Institute at last, valued by Adorno but,” the title continues, “seen by Horkheimer as too left-wing.”11 “Left wing” turns out to mean, for Horkheimer, whatever threatened the continued existence and dignity of his institute. But Horkheimer’s personal whims (and ambitions) do not explain how and why critical theory lost its radical political roots. It is significant that Wiggershaus’s introduction of Habermas refers to the entry of a social theorist “at last” into the stable of critical theory. Was this a sign that the political string had been played out? The institute had been doing social science in the empirical studies that permitted it to keep its financial coffers full; now it seemed to recognize the need to turn to social theory. The shift was not made explicit, but its existence needs explanation. What did Adorno “value” in Habermas? Did the empirical studies point toward the need for a new theoretical framework in which the place of politics would be diminished?
Wiggershaus makes the reader aware of the idiosyncrasy of Horkheimer’s personal politics and of the lengths to which his function as chief bureaucrat and/or entrepreneur of the Institute for Social Research could take him—in power struggles over the direction of research, in choosing to support or reject research projects, or in compromising with the authorities in the restored West Germany. Horkheimer’s treatment of Herbert Marcuse during the exile years in the United States, for example, is shocking in its manipulations. While it is nice to know that theoretical heroes also have clay feet, such character traits are not simple quirks of personality or responses to the pettiness of office politics. Besides institute politics, the Frankfurters, particularly during their exile years, were concerned with the political world around them. Wiggershaus nicely restores to the institute’s history such truly political thinkers as Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer. Kirchheimer’s earlier attempt to make a critical use of Carl Schmitt’s criticism of parliamentary democracy in order to formulate politically a “left-Bolshevism” had led to an incisive debate with Neumann, who had been chief lawyer for the Social Democratic Party.12 But Wiggershaus doesn’t take the occasion to question how this debate reflects the clash between the utopian dimension of critical theory and its implications for actual politics. For example, he fails to follow up a (dissembling) letter in which Horkheimer explains to Marcuse that his decision to work on the anti-Semitism study (with Adorno) was only another way of pursuing the project (shared with Marcuse) of a critical theory of politics. Marcuse had proposed that the critical study of democracy might be an appropriate way to combine the analysis of social problems with the development of new questions of theory. Horkheimer replied simply that “for certain reasons [not explained further in the letter], we dismissed that possibility.”13 The biographer here concentrates on the politics of theory while leaving the reader to speculate about the nature of a critical theory of politics that in principle was the presupposition and goal of the shared research interests of the Frankfurt School.
The actual politics of critical theory was based first and foremost on the steadfast and steady insistence on the power of negativity. The faint optimism about the role of theory—as critical—in the passage cited earlier from the preface to Dämmerung had disappeared completely by the time of Horkheimer’s apocalyptic “Authoritarian State” of 1940, whose brutally pessimistic vision of a history that had produced two authoritarian states seemed to allow for no exit from the nightmare.14 From the initial refusal of a reified history of philosophy, to the critique of the totally administered society, to the critique of psychological forms of adaptation and denial, to Adorno’s essayist freedom, the slogan nicht-mitmachen was the imperative that protected the theory (and thus the theorists) from any possible conformity, while holding open the space that makes critique possible.
Admirable as the attitude may have been, this politics of the negative entailed theoretical and practical difficulties. Its presupposition and its political self-justification are the idea of a Reason that transcends the strategic and reified capitalist instrumental logic that devalues political projects by integrating them into a manipulable administered world from which there is no escape. Once again, the romantic roots of this presupposition are undeniable; it could also adopt a messianic religious coloration in, for example, Benjamin, Adorno, and (more surprising) Horkheimer himself. More important, this option for (uppercase) Reason, Romance, or Religion entails the sacrifice of (lowercase) politics. The imperative of negativity that founds critical theory devalues the merely empirical world, which can be “saved” only by an immanent dialectical (or mystical) method of critique that finds a Reason that underlies the reasons offered by empirical social science caught up in the quotidian world. The original paradox returns: saving the power of the negative implies that theory is itself a politics and that the politics of theory is all that remains for radical thought. This is the theoretical ground that underlies the pessimism that gripped the Frankfurters, and it may also be a partial explanation of their successors’ choice to pursue the politics of theory within the university.
The imperative of negativity has another consequence for the critical theory of politics: its protagonists become ipso facto part of a (self-declared and self-reproducing) elite defined by its self-proclaimed capacity to pierce beneath the surface of the administered world of reified relations. True to the Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism, the Frankfurters’ conception of the relation of theory and practice privileged the former even while appealing for the latter. But ironically (or paradoxically), the practice—or praxis—to which they appealed was in the end the practice of theory, the exercise of negativity, the utopian longing for Stendahl’s “promesse de bonheur” that Marcuse was fond of invoking. Again, the critical theory of politics and a certain vision of the aesthetic tend to be fused in a unity that destroys the ability of each to recognize its difference and the specific domain of legitimacy of its propositions. While the often-cited Hegelian claim that “all determination is negation” can be defended, it does not follow that all negation is determination. Just as the best can show itself the enemy of the better, so the promise of happiness that turns us away from the false allure of commodity culture can prove itself to be a false promise, a pious longing or self-satisfied self-denial.
It is no surprise that Adorno and Horkheimer never found themselves at home in American culture. But it is surprising that nowhere in their criticism of that all-purpose bogeyman called “America” do they make reference to that other aristocrat who formulated a critical theory of politics against the backdrop of the vulgar American practice of democracy (nor is Alexis de Tocqueville mentioned in the index to Wiggershaus’s book). Yet the Frankfurt-schooled reader of Democracy in America is struck by Tocqueville’s account of the “mediocrity” of Americans’ democratic passions, their pragmatic lust after the mere appearance of life, the manipulability that makes them now pacifist and self-seeking, now bellicose and roiling in idealistic rhetoric that carries them beyond themselves. Despite the similarity of their descriptions and of their critique, the Frenchman developed a critical theory of politics—of democratic politics—while the Germans’ theory gave rise only to a politics of critique.15 Why did critique replace politics? The question does not concern only the biography of the Frankfurt School; it defines also our postmodern world where critical theory has become literary criticism while politics disappears from the curriculum not only in the university. The fault does not lie with the Frankfurters, but their rigorous and consistent option for the negative, their refusal to mitmachen, makes the career of their developing critical theory a telling symptom of the temptations that accompany a certain style of theory that is still with us.
Horkheimer’s constant concern to constitute a school, a collective project that would express a shared vision, could and did lead to administrative nastiness, trickery, editorial manipulation, and worse (as noted above in regard to relations with Marcuse). But it did produce a unified product (even if, as Dubiel shows,16 it went through three distinctive phases before the return to Germany, and, as Wiggershaus demonstrates, it could retain its theoretical coherence on the return to Germany only by freezing theoretical developments and sponsoring the most bread-and-butter empirical research).17 The need to maintain a school entailed an option for theory even at the cost of ritualizing its critical function. This helps explain why Habermas was “too left-wing” for Horkheimer: he was a threat to the unity of the school not only because of his attempt to renew the Marxist theory that the founders thought they had outgrown but also because of his relations to the Social Democrats and even more because of his concern to dialogue with the rebellious youth movement, the SDS.18 The production and maintenance of a school of theory came at the price of rigidity, fixation, and exclusion of debate. Theory became its own politics; self-critique was too risky a venture for a school of theory, even when it defined itself as critical. Again, this turn cannot be attributed to some sort of character fault of Horkheimer or of the others. Some might attribute it to the bitter experience of Fascism or of the two totalitarianisms criticized by Horkheimer in 1940; others would look to the experience of U.S. exile, whose theoretical culmination in Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason applied the imperative of negativity to American pragmatism, but with the explicit proviso that “the author is not trying to suggest anything like a program of action. On the contrary, he believes that the modern propensity to translate every idea into action … is one of the symptoms of the present critical crisis.”19 Nonetheless, Wiggershaus’s history suggests the need to ask whether there was something in the initial project, in the basic critical intuition, that could explain this unexpected and unintended end.
The young leftist reader who encountered critical theory in the 1960s is shocked to read a history of the gleanings of daily life at an institution called the “Frankfurt School.” A rebel by nature, that reader wonders whether the creation of a school was worth the trouble it took? Were the results of that effort compatible with the intentions of its creators? The conclusions to which Wiggershaus is led suggest a positive answer insofar as the influence of the Frankfurters on both the analyses and the action of the student movement in West Germany contributed to the democratizing of a culture and society that had emerged from the experience of Fascism and war largely intact. Of course, many other factors contributed to this process, not the least of which were the developments of a modern capitalist and consumer culture and society. The fact that the school could maintain itself and continue to have influence has an explanation that goes deeper than just biographical description. It was presented in Adorno’s aphorism at the beginning of Negative Dialectics, which suggested that theory is critical and political because the moment of its realization has been missed. Once that assumption is made—and it is an assumption—then those who are disposed to be critical and political will unite around the negative politics of critical theory, which will not need the kind of office politics described by Wiggershaus to maintain its hold in the universities. The young leftist will remain caught unhappily between an all-consuming capitalist culture and a self-satisfied politics (or posture) of negativism.
The difficulty has its basis in the concept of critique itself. Its identification with the negative leaves aside the original Frankfurt School insight (that came from Hegel and Marx) into the need for immanent critique. That orientation seems to have disappeared gradually with the loss of faith in the project of human self-liberation that culminated in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). The door through which postmodernist cultural theory came to replace critical theory as political was opened. But the cultural “democratization” that followed their return to Germany had political implications that the Frankfurt School could not see. My earlier allusion to Tocqueville suggests that a critical theory of democracy would have to treat the autonomy of the political sphere as the moment of negativity that cannot be co-opted into the new global world in which (not only geopolitical) boundaries are increasingly porous. This is what makes possible the changes sought in culture and society: the political is always present within modern societies, just as early critical theory assumed Reason to be present if latent. This political explanation of critical negativity avoids the temptation that justified first the optimism and then the pessimism of the old critical theory that appealed to a Reason discovered by an immanent (cultural) critique. The temptation for critical theory is to transform the negativity of Reason into a foundation that, in principle, can become positive. That was just what Marx did when he explained that “reason has always existed, but not in a rational form.”20 Cultural critical theorists in the university combine Marx with the Frankfurt School in the affirmation that it is just these non-rational forms that become the positive expression of critical theory. The autonomy of politics is forgotten; immediacy and surface appearance are equated with democracy, which in this way loses its critical potential.
The paradox from which I began can now be restated, and the apparent similarity of the Frankfurt type of critical theory and its academic homonym disentangled. Radical political theorists who have no intuitive feel for politics and who implicitly express a kind of aristocratic disdain for it feel an obligation to be critical. It is not surprising that their critical practice takes the form of a politics of theory. But the politics of theory can be practiced according to different rules. The critical theory of democratic politics that is lacking today cannot be provided by the postmodernists’ happy frolicking on the surfaces, as if a democratic praxis were simply the spontaneity of men and women suddenly freed—how? by decree?—from the constraints of what Jean-François Lyotard denounces as the grands récits that tell the story of Humanity as it progresses from one preordained phase to another. Lyotard’s debt to The Dialectic of Enlightenment is obvious; his proposition aims also to negate Kant’s critique of “self-incurred immaturity.” But does the negation of the grands récits imply simply their replacement by the nonrational (which Lyotard calls a différand)? Postmodernism too is a politics of theory, but it cannot replace a critical theory of politics (as Marx reminded his contemporaries in 1843, when he insisted that “the weapon of the critique cannot replace the critique of the weapons”).
Postmodernism in its various forms is critical in the sense that it opposes another reality to the accepted social vision of what counts as real. But in doing that, it is a positive theory, not a critical theory. The opposition of one reality to another produces at best a criticism; it is not the kind of immanent critique that the original intuition of the Frankfurt School sought to actualize in its quarrel with modern capitalism and capitalist social and cultural modernity. The problem for such an immanent critique is that it apparently can be maintained only by the kind of heroic abnegation that the Frankfurters expressed in their nicht-mitmachen. But heroes tire, disciples falter, attitudes harden as the institute becomes a school, undertaking perhaps what sixties’ radicals began defining in the seventies as a “long march through the institutions” in the hope that in that way at least the essential would be preserved. But there is another way to save critical theory; ironically, it is one to which Marx alluded in a preparatory note to his doctoral dissertation when he suggested that, like Themistocles, the philosopher must know when it is time to found “a new Athens on the sea, on another element.”21 This “other element” that can permit critical theory to pursue its uneasy path at a distance from the illusory charm of aesthetic fancy and the sticky necessities of globalizing society is the sphere of the political, whose autonomy stands at just that point of immanent negative distance that a critical theory presupposes, needs, and must be able to maintain.