That Max Weber’s work would one day play an important role for the development of Critical Theory or for the Frankfurt School of Sociology was anything but a matter of course. And it was certainly not planned to from the outset. In his book, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein [History and Class Consciousness], published in 1923, Georg Lukács attempted to use Weber’s work for further developing a critical theory of society. He did so by trying to establish a clear close connection between Marxian analysis of commodities and Max Weber’s diagnosis of his age that bureaucratic rule was the fate of modern society. The reification [Verdinglichung] of consciousness and the increasing predomination of purposive rational action or a ‘formal’ rationality in the capitalist world, according to this understanding, are thus two sides of the same coin.1
Max Weber himself promoted this interpretation of the world wide process of modernization that had commenced in western Europe and North America because in his Vorbemerkung [preliminary remark] to the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie [Collected Articles on the Sociology of Religion] he wrote that he saw the particularity of Western culture in universal history as lying in a specific form of ‘rationalism’, the principle of which lay in formal rational organization and concomitant ‘calculability’. Accordingly, there are meaningful correspondences or ‘elective affinities’ between modern science, ‘modern’ capitalism and the modern legal-bureaucratic form of authority and the related type of highly specialized humans [Fachmenschentum].2 He furthermore believed he perceived a close historical relationship between the emergence of modern industrial capitalism and the mercantile economy policy of the absolute states of modern Europe. The alliance between the monarchy and the bourgeoisie was not only directed against the privileges of the aristocracy through the estates; it was also a platform on which politics and the economy were able to work together in promoting the modern market economy. In Weber’s eyes, it was nevertheless a historically precarious balance that could at any time give way to the predominance of the bureaucratic administration of a central power, whatever its form.3
When the staff of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research had to emigrate to the United States of America after the Nazis took power, in contrast to other German emigrants to the United States, they apparently did not carry Max Weber’s work in their luggage. It is true that there are traces of their reception of Weber that go back to the 1920s. However, these incipient attempts at establishing a well-founded position on Weber’s work were so sporadic that it is impossible to gain an overview of them retrospectively. Instead, we have evidence that the most important representatives of emerging Critical Theory had apparently spent the early years of their emigration doing things that were more important to them than studying Weber’s work at all thoroughly.
This attitude is characterized by the pertinent quote of Edward A. Shils, who later worked for Talcott Parsons and described the ‘Frankfurt gang’ 40 years after his personal experiences dealing with the group of German exiles as ‘a very mean lot’, or more precisely as
terribly edel, radical, cliquish, self-promoting. They were spreading their pernicious Kritische Philosophie, i.e. fancied up Marxism as well as they could. I used to go to their seminars at 429 West 117th Street. I never heard Max Weber mentioned there in the year 1937–8, and I cannot recall any of them writing about Weber. … Horkheimer had no interest in Weber, nor did Marcuse, nor Adorno, nor Pollock. Even Wittfogel, who was then one of them, and thus very close to communism, did not pay attention to Weber in his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas (1927). At least, I don’t think so.4
It is all the more astonishing that the ‘Frankfurt gang’ were to play a leading role at the Weber Conference organized in Heidelberg in 1964 by the German Society for Sociology on the occasion of the hundredth birthday of Max Weber. Herbert Marcuse read a paper on ‘industrialization and capitalism’ at the event, offering the assembled critical theoreticians a springboard which was later to be used inter alia by Jürgen Habermas, who was particularly attentive to Max Weber’s work when he elaborated his theory of communicative action.5 However, the present chapter is not primarily about Jürgen Habermas and his various intellectual conversions, but the importance of Max Weber’s work for Critical Theory, the development of which is closely related to the history of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. More precisely, I shall be looking at Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse’s readings of Weber’s work. First, I shall look at Horkheimer’s relationship to Weber. This is related both to his earlier sojourn in Frankfurt and his life in exile, and I shall also refer to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he wrote together with Adorno. Then I shall try to reconstruct Theodor W. Adorno’s reception of Weber. In doing so, I shall focus particularly on the lectures and seminars he held in Frankfurt following the Second World War. Finally, I shall dwell on the Sociologists’ Congress in Heidelberg in 1964, which was the apogee of Critical Theory’s attempts to deal with Max Weber’s work. Here, I shall focus on Herbert Marcuse’s ‘Industrialization and Capitalism’. Furthermore, I shall also make a brief comment in this context on Jürgen Habermas’ statement for discussion following Talcott Parsons’ lecture on ‘determination by value [Wertgebundenheit] and objectivity in the social sciences’, marking the beginning of his own studies of Max Weber’s work, which were to occupy him for several years.6
In the summer semester of 1926, Max Horkheimer held his lecture entitled ‘Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy’ followed by a colloquium. He subsequently revised the manuscript on which the lecture was based and prepared it for publication, which however only took place post-humously.7 In this lecture, he elaborated on the south-west German movement of Neo-Kantianism, as represented by Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. In particular, the ‘system of values’ elaborated by Rickert appeared to him to be too formalistic and inappropriate for creating a ‘Weltanschauungslehre’ – a new doctrine for a world view for the present age – as had been undertaken by Max Scheler and Karl Jaspers.8 However, Horkheimer did not see the reduction of philosophy to a purely ‘formal’ discipline as a disadvantage.
In particular, he regarded Max Weber’s methodological principles as worthy of discussion. This particularly concerned his thoughts on the ‘logical’ problems of the modern cultural and social sciences. In particular, Weber’s ‘humility with regards to all material questions of value’ appeared at the time to Horkheimer to be a great advantage. Horkheimer furthermore declared in this context that he would use the following colloquium to ‘explain at least the bare necessities on the philosophical position of this significant thinker’.9 We do not know whether this in fact took place and if so, in what form. This is particularly a pity inasmuch as Weber was later massively criticized by important representatives of Critical Theory for dispensing with a normative justification of value orientations. At any rate, here it becomes clear that Horkheimer was interested especially in Weber’s methodological position at the time.
In his inaugural address in Frankfurt in 1931, Horkheimer only mentioned Max Weber by name on one occasion. He was explaining how the modern sociology of knowledge founded by Vilfredo Pareto made a distinction between two different ‘concepts of reality’, thus undermining the claim for an ‘objectively valid truth’ made by the philosophy of history. It is true that Karl Mannheim, who had already taken over the chair for sociology at the University of Frankfurt from Franz Oppenheimer, was not mentioned by Horkheimer in his inaugural address. However, it is clear that Horkheimer was less concerned with Max Weber’s work than with Mannheim’s ‘relativism’ with regard to Weltanschauung.10
That Horkheimer was particularly interested in Max Weber’s methodology later on becomes clear in some of his writings during his asylum in the United States in which he spoke of Weber briefly. In his programmatic essay on ‘traditional and critical theory’ of 1937, in which he opposed the ideal of knowledge of the natural sciences, influenced by Newton’s mechanics, to Marx’s programme for criticizing political economy in the Hegelian tradition, he briefly alluded to Max Weber. He saw Weber as a representative of ‘deductive’ thinking which was usual in natural sciences and had been elevated by so-called ‘logical positivism’ to a norm for all the disciplines of the empirical sciences.11 In this essay, Horkheimer also briefly dealt with Weber’s position in the German debate on value judgements and decisively distanced himself from Weber’s abstinence in acknowledging the significance of practical value orientations for scientific knowledge. While anticipating the later ‘positivism debate’ in the sociology of the Federal Republic of Germany, Horkheimer drew a conclusion that called into question the ideal of objectivity of a ‘traditional’ understanding of science radically: ‘There is no theory of society, including generalising sociologists’, that does not include political interests, the truth of which should be decided on in tangible historical activity rather than in apparently neutral reflection void of acting and thinking’.12
In Eclipse of Reason, published in 1947, Horkheimer presented a more radical critique of Weber. This radicalization is closely linked to the Dialektik der Aufklärung, which he wrote together with Theodor W. Adorno and which also appeared in 1947. Here, Horkheimer made a fundamental conceptual distinction between ‘rationality’ [Rationalität] and ‘reason’ [Vernunft] which has repeatedly been used by various representatives of Critical Theory for founding their own position and is also the basis for Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action and his own critique of Weber. Max Weber’s work was increasingly accorded attention by various representatives of Critical Theory. For Weber’s emphasis on the uniqueness of Western rationalism in universal history appeared to them as too one-sided to be able to rise to the challenge of a critical theory of society oriented around the measuring rod of reason [Vernunft] since Hegel and Marx. The distinction Weber expressly emphasized between ‘purposive rationality’ and ‘value rationality’ disappeared into the background or remained unnoticed. Instead, Weber was accused by the principal representatives of Critical Theory of having a ‘one-dimensional’ understanding of ‘reason’ within the meaning of ‘purposive rational action’ that Weber allegedly claimed to dominate in universal history as well as of ‘formal’ rationality. However, Weber saw the particular position of purposive rational action in his methodological founding of a Sociology of Understanding as lying primarily in heuristic interpretation.13 And his own understanding of ‘rationality’ and ‘rationalization’ is far more nuanced than the usual perceptions of the chief representatives of Critical Theory.14
At any rate, when criticizing instrumental reason, Max Horkheimer did not quite overlook the fact that Weber himself emphasized the polysemy of the concept of ‘rationalism’. Only Horkheimer was primarily focussing on the difference between functional rationality on the one hand and substantial rationality on the other. In doing so, he referred to Weber’s distinction between formal and material rationality as used both in his ‘sociology of law’ and his ‘sociology of the economy’.15 The opposition between ‘functional rationality’ or instrumental reason on the one hand and ‘substantial rationality’ or substantial reason on the other increasingly replaced the distinction Horkheimer had made between ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ theory:
The difference between this connotation of reason and the objectivistic conception resembles to a certain degree the difference between functional and substantial rationality as these words are used in the Max Weber School. Max Weber, however, adhered so definitely to the subjectivistic trend that he did not conceive of any rationality – not even a ‘substantial’ one by which man can discriminate one end from another. If our drives, intentions, and finally our ultimate decisions must a priori be irrational, substantial reason becomes an agency merely of correlation and is therefore itself essentially ‘functional’. Although Weber’s own and his followers’ descriptions of the bureaucratization and monopolization of knowledge have illuminated much of the social aspect of the transition from objective to subjective reason (…), Max Weber’s pessimism with regard to the possibility of rational insight and action, as expressed in his philosophy (…), is itself a stepping-stone in the renunciation of philosophy and science as regards their aspiration of defining man’s goal.16
Although Max Weber had at this point at the latest been definitively dismissed by Horkheimer and Adorno as an arch positivist or a ‘positivist at heart’,17 over the following period his work served as a theoretical frame of reference for leading representatives of Critical Theory which they could work off with greater or lesser success.
This also applies to the Dialectic of Enlightenment written by Horkheimer and Adorno, whose dialectical understanding of ‘Enlightenment’ is also indebted to their readings of Max Weber. For Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s historical philosophical construction is closely related to Weber’s theory of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ drawn from Weber’s sociology of religion. Both the interpretation that ‘myth’ contains an aspect of ‘enlightenment’ and the interpretation that from a certain point ‘enlightenment’ turns back to ‘mythology’ are to be found in Max Weber, though using somewhat different concepts, even if Horkheimer and Adorno explicitly relate Weber’s expression ‘disenchantment of the world’ to the ‘programme of enlightenment’.18
It is no coincidence that Horkheimer and Adorno equate this ‘disenchantment of the world’ with the ‘eradication of animism’.19 For according to Weber, ‘magic’ takes on the place of ‘myth’. Magical formulae of controlling the world are for him the first ‘rational’ attempts of human beings to change the form of the world according to their specific needs and interests. They already contain an element of ‘calculability’ which is the point of departure for the process of ‘rationalization’ in universal history. With the emergence of the great ethical religions of salvation, this process is accompanied by a process of ‘intellectualization’, which in individual cultural areas led to the formation of various world sets.20 For Weber, the unique development of the Western world was so significant because it not only led to the breakthrough of industrial capitalism and a formal legal type of authority, but also because it contained a process of Selbstaufhebung [self-annulment] of ‘Western rationalism’. These ‘paradoxes of consequences’ had already been expressly emphasized both in Weber’s ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ of his essays on the economic ethics of world religions, Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen as in his lecture on ‘Science as a Vocation’. The only difference between Weber on the one hand and Horkheimer and Adorno on the other is that in this respect Weber wrote of the ‘return of the gods’ while the latter preferred the formulation that the enlightenment suddenly turned into ‘mythology’.21
The beginnings of Adorno’s reception of Weber have not yet been clarified in relevant secondary literature. However, there is a manuscript from Adorno from the year 1937 which has survived as a corrected galley-proof of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, though it was not published in it and thus is of no significance in the history of the reception but no doubt of significance in the history of the origins of Adorno’s work. The manuscript in question is Adorno’s essay ‘New Value Free Sociology’, which was published post-humously in 1986 in his Gesammelten Schriften and which he had written on the occasion of the publication of Karl Mannheim’s book, Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus in 1935. In this essay, Adorno constructs a ‘Weberian’ school, in which he places Karl Mannheim alongside Karl Jaspers and Ernst Troeltsch.22 Even if the essay is primarily devoted to the book by Karl Mannheim, it divulges the tenor which was to determine Adorno’s relationship to Max Weber.
Incidentally, this tenor resembles that expressed in Georg Lukács’ book, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft [The Destruction of Reason] published in 1954.23 Adorno also saw in the ethos of science espoused by Max Weber a stage of decadence of the bourgeois principle of reason. For Weber’s ‘claim to objectivity and rationality’ is restricted, according to Adorno, to a pure ‘attitude’ [Haltung] or to science as a ‘vocation’ [Beruf].24 In this respect, Adorno alluded to a ‘second positivism’ through which the ‘liberal intelligentsia’ withdrew from its original claims to a critique of knowledge [Erkenntniskritik] and a critique of society [Gesellschaftskritik] in a spirit of resignation, explicitly emphasizing the ‘regressive consequences of the Weberian following’.25 Even though he rejects making Weber’s work and Weber’s desideratum of a ‘value-free’ science immediately responsible for the alleged disappearance of the ‘bourgeois’ intelligentsia he was implacable in his judgement of Weber’s sociology of understanding [Verstehender Soziologie]:
What has been said against Mannheim also applies to Max Weber, the head of the school. The method he employs can only make the appearance of a balance of theory and fact in a situation in which the theory is of the same origin as its own facts: the ‘ideal types’ only apply to a reality which corresponds to such an extent to the classificatory concepts that the concepts can leave everything to self-correction so as to be sure of understanding society. This possibility, which was already an illusion in Weber, who by no coincidence continuously tried to confirm it in his constantly renewed logical approaches, is now in obvious decline.26
In the following period, Adorno continuously emphasized the alleged parallels he found between the ‘relativism’ espoused by Max Weber and that espoused by Karl Mannheim. This becomes apparent in his essay, ‘A Contribution to the Teaching of Ideologies’ [‘Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre’] which appeared in 1954. In substance, it is closely related to the seminar on ‘Max Weber’s scientific theoretical writings’ held by Adorno with Horkheimer in the summer semester of 1954 in Frankfurt am Main, of which some seminar proceedings [Seminarprotokolle] have survived.27 In this essay, Adorno only alludes to Weber’s work in passing, as it happens in his contrasting research on ideology with social theory, whereby Weber’s work is definitively placed in the context of ‘positivistic sociology’. For the latter
denied the existence or at least the possibility of knowing [Erkennbarkeit] a total structure of society and its relationship to the spirit or the mind [Geist] and required that no principle but only the ideal types subjugated to the research interest should guide unprejudiced enquiry into what was respectively primary and secondary.28
Adorno claims that Max Weber’s writings on the sociology of religion had paved the way for Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, because Weber had put forward a ‘sociological relativism’, contenting himself with proving ‘purely empirical relationships between society and the spirit or mind [Geist]’.29
In the seminar Adorno held with Horkheimer on Max Weber’s scientific methodology [Wissenschaftslehre] in 1954, new central leitmotifs of Adorno’s critique of Weber emerge, which he continued to develop later in his lectures on philosophical sociology and in the seminar he held in the winter semester of 1963–4 on Max Weber’s main sociological work, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. The central point was the conceptual form Weber advocated – ideal types – as well as the related issue of ‘understanding’ in sociology. Furthermore, the 1954 seminar also treated the desideratum defended by Weber of a ‘value free’ science, which was increasingly to become the centre of criticisms of Weber in Frankfurt. Because Max Weber reduced the problem of value to the theoretical ‘value relationship’ underlying scientific knowledge, the function of the knowing subject which was still constitutive in the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant is reduced to purely ‘subjective’ arbitrariness. Moreover, the question Kant raised as to the ‘object’ lost its sense, thereby transforming epistemology to a doctrine of scientific method [Methodenlehre], incapable of uncovering the veil of reification [Schleier der Verdinglichung].30 Because Weber also leaves value orientations to the field of subjective arbitrariness, the ‘danger’ arises ‘of leaving what is specific and unique to chance’.31 Moreover, Weber does not see that every subjective judgement contains an ‘objective structure’. His separation of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ is an arbitrary decision, even if his attempt to ‘emancipate the social sciences from missionary moralising’ was right.32 Even if in this context Adorno thinks he has found a ‘positive aspect’ of Weber’s thinking, and disqualifies his ‘epistemology’ as ‘hostile to theory’, he was prepared to acknowledge that what Weber had achieved as a researcher went further ‘than the concepts with which he thought; for instance, what he said about the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism or about bureaucracy was theory and was different from his epistemology’.33
Adorno’s ambivalent relationship to Weber’s work continued in the following sessions of his seminar. In this context, a minor controversy between Horkheimer and Adorno is of interest. The issue was the logical status of the ideal type used by Weber. Horkheimer put forward the position that Weber’s programme amounted to ‘making sociology superfluous and transforming it into history’. Adorno, by contrast, argued that Weber sought to translate ‘historical basic concepts’ into ‘formal sociology’, i.e. into ‘invariants’.34 While Horkheimer put forward his view that there was no ‘correct thinking’ without an ‘aspect of relativism’, thus coming surprisingly close to the position of Karl Mannheim in his sociology of knowledge, Adorno continued to insist, following Hegel, on the ‘substantiality’ or ‘objectivity’ of conceptual knowledge.35
In his lecture on ‘philosophy and sociology’ held in the summer semester of 1960 in Frankfurt, Adorno went into greater detail on his criticism of Max Weber. In doing so, he recommended his audience buy the separate print of Basic Concepts in Sociology [Soziologischen Grundbegriffe] that had just been published by Mohr Siebeck in Tübingen, so as to inform themselves ‘what we are talking about when we are talking about sociology’.36 Adorno’s homage to Max Weber’s work is to be found in a comparison with the foundation of modern sociology by Emile Durkheim. The concept of ‘understanding’ plays a central role. For Durkheim had recommended interpreting social facts as ‘things’, while Weber was of the opinion that all apparently ‘objective’ structures could be attributed to the ‘subjectively meant meaning’ which the individual social actors associated with their action. In this context, Adorno paid tribute to the accomplishments of the German tradition of Geisteswissenschaften in which since Wilhelm Dilthey’s work, ‘understanding’ had been elevated to the methodical foundation. In so doing, he appreciated Weber’s efforts at liberating the concept of ‘understanding’ from a narrower psychological interpretation, and by heuristically emphasizing ‘purposive rational action’, having placed what was really ‘socially’ interesting into the centre of modern sociology.37 For ‘rationality’ was, on the one hand, something that could be understood inasmuch as it could be understood with regard to action theory. On the other hand, this concept refers to an objective social context which could not be grasped by the ‘subjectively meant meaning’ of individuals and thus approached what Durkheim called ‘social facts’. Adorno saw this as proof that Durkheim’s position that society was something ‘incomprehensible’ included ‘an extraordinarily true aspect, because it takes account of the compulsive and “reified” character of society’.38
Within Adorno’s reception of Weber, the seminar he held on a ‘discussion of selected chapters of Max Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft’ in the winter semester of 1963–4 is of particular importance. This very well documented seminar took place in the context of Adorno’s personal preparation for the fifteenth German Sociologists’ Congress in Heidelberg in 1964, dedicated to Max Weber’s work during Adorno’s term of office as president of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie. The following subjects were concentrated on in this seminar for advanced students [Hauptseminar]:
The corresponding programme of the seminar shows to what extent Adorno’s grappling with Max Weber’s work had advanced, even if it is apparent that the seminar ignored the parts of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft devoted to the sociology of religion and the sociology of law.39 In this context, we can only look at a few aspects of Adorno’s appreciation of this monumental work. They do serve to clarify how important Max Weber had become for him in his conversation which allowed him to elaborate a timely critical theory of society.
With regard to the relationship between theory and methodology, Adorno again put forward his view that the historical and sociological analyses of Weber’s were more important than the methodological positions he advocated. Once again, Adorno’s discussion of Weber’s position was restricted to freedom from value judgements in the empirical scientific disciplines as well as his concomitant understanding of ‘theoretical value relation’, as developed by Weber in his essay on objectivity of 1904 following Heinrich Rickert. Adorno saw this as a renunciation of social theory to the benefit of a purely formal methodology, which because of the asserted ‘separation of fact and value judgement’ was bound to lead to a ‘positivistic interpretation’.40 Adorno acknowledges that Weber was right in emphasizing the importance of ‘cultural values’ underlying the quest for knowledge in selecting objects of research. Nonetheless, this conception was too ‘subjectivist’, as the concept of cultural value was ‘merely a descriptive category for what has normative character in a culture’.41 The ‘entirety of society’ was to be found in the prevailing normative ideas of an epoch.42 Weber had deliberately overlooked this, thus choosing to ignore the central role of ‘normativity’ in the methodological foundation of his sociology, although this was ‘to a great extent the investigation of forms of behaviour that made value judgments’.43 Thus, the ‘Kantian question of constitution’ is, according to Adorno, replaced by methodology and a radical philosophical quest for knowledge is abandoned.44
In contrast to his methodological views, the ideal types used by Max Weber in his historical analyses were, according to Adorno, of lasting value. This applies both to his typology of rule and to his ‘typology of cities’ underlying Weber’s investigations into universal history. At the same time, Adorno took a position against Weber’s purely typological treatment of the forms of rule, because such a purely typological treatment contradicted ‘their dialectical movement in history’ according to Adorno.45 It is true that in the case of ‘charismatic authority’, Weber had addressed a dynamic moment. But this ideal type in particular could ‘not be saved since it presents relationships and processes in reality as irrational which in fact to the contrary should be called very rational’.46 Adorno asserts that the tension between ‘rationality’ and ‘irrationality’ in such a form of concept formation becomes particularly obvious. Moreover, it runs the risk of being abused as an ideological concept by modern totalitarian mass movements assembling around a corresponding charismatic ‘leader’: ‘This danger is all the greater since this form of irrationality merges with positivist value freedom and thus contains no immunity to abuse. In contrast, one should promote a rational sociology, which like Freud in psychology is capable of leading everything irrational to a rational solution’.47
When discussing charismatic rule in the seminar, a reference in substance was made to the ideal type of ‘legal-bureaucratic rule’ also used by Weber, which was dealt with thoroughly in the following sessions. For Weber had brought the ‘charismatic leader’ in as a contrast to modern bureaucracy and seen in it the only possibility of preventing the bureaucratic rigidification of the Western world in the form of ‘Chinese petrification’ and a concomitant new ‘fellahin’. The implications of this construction of fundamental concepts for the theory of revolution were explicitly underlined by Adorno. Nevertheless, he saw in charismatic rule over an administrative apparatus the danger of promoting a ‘static’ understanding of revolution ‘inasmuch as despite individual changes society as a whole remains intact’.48 Typical for such a revolutionary procedure was thus, as in the Bolshevist transformation of Russia and its decline into a Stalinist rule by violence, the ‘switch-over from a propensity towards social critique to a propensity of apologias’.49 It was decisive for Adorno, whether one should ‘consider or objectify these phenomena as aspects [Momente]’.50 If one objectifies the phenomena, the concept formation would turn into reification [Verdinglichung] and not do justice to what Adorno, in the footsteps of Hegel, invokes as the ‘effort to define the concept’ [Anstrengung des Begriffs].
With regards to epistemology as the theory of science, figurative worlds separate Adorno’s understanding of ‘grasping’ [Begreifen] and the sociological categories developed by Max Weber for purely ‘heuristic’ purposes. Adorno enjoyed being coy with paradox formulations such as when he plays on the contrast between Emile Durkheim’s and Max Weber’s founding of modern sociology, claiming that the crux of the matter was in fact to understand what according to Durkheim ‘could not be understood’, namely ‘society’. This nevertheless should not make access to the insight he obtained through work that Weber’s work should be primarily understood as an intellectual ‘field of force’ [Kraftfeld] rather than purely as a ‘historic monument’.51
This was the best possible preparation for Adorno’s participation at the Sociologists’ Congress of 1964 in Heidelberg which took place during his tenure as president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie. At the event, he held no lecture apart from a brief talk during the official reception of participants at the Congress in the Königssaal in Heidelberg Castle. Nevertheless, while preparing the congress, Adorno ensured that two prominent Weber critics from the circles of the ‘Frankfurt School’ took the floor as speakers or participants in the discussion: namely Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas. Moreover, Max Horkheimer officially took over the moderation of the discussion, which took place immediately following Talcott Parsons’ lecture on ‘freedom from values [Wertfreiheit] and objectivity’.
Because the preparations and the related intrigues surrounding this sociological congress have long been worked through in the literature,52 in the present context we shall focus particularly on Herbert Marcuse’s lecture on ‘industrialization and capitalism’, which was at least significant with regard to its reception. Then I shall go into the statement Jürgen Habermas read following Talcott Parsons’ lecture on ‘freedom from values and objectivity’. Thereafter it was mostly Habermas who was to place the discourse on Weber in the Frankfurt School at a hardly surmountable level of abstraction and who, at least in this sense, has not had a ‘legitimate successor’.
Herbert Marcuse chose the topic of ‘industrialization and capitalism’ in consultation with Adorno. In the same year, Marcuse’s book, The One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society appeared, setting the theoretical frame of references for his critique of Weber in Heidelberg.53 But there is another book that might have inspired Marcuse’s lecture and which had been published ten years earlier by Aufbau-Verlag in Berlin, namely the monumental study of The Destruction of Reason by Georg Lukács. We cannot determine unequivocally to what extent Marcuse’s understanding of Weber had been influenced not just by Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, but also by this later work of Lukács’. The fact is that in his chapter on Weber in The Destruction of Reason, Lukács had broached all the subjects that were playing a central role in the reception and critique of Max Weber’s work in Critical Theory.54 At the centre of Marcuse’s paper at the Heidelberg Congress of 1964, we also find the full tension between ‘rationality’ and ‘irrationality’ that pervades throughout Weber’s work.
Here, Marcuse alludes to one phenomenon of ‘Western rationalism’, which Weber calls ‘formal rationality’ and the importance of which for a materialist theory of society is explicitly emphasized by Georg Lukács in his book Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein of 1923. Similarly to Lukács’ book on The Destruction of Reason, now the ‘irrational’ character of modern capitalism and its age is placed at the centre of analysis, but far more emphatically. In his lecture, Marcuse particularly addressed the following points:
In writing this, Marcuse had more acutely expressed many motives of the reception and critique of Weber which can also be found in Lukács, Horkheimer and Adorno, and can thus be regarded as characteristics of Critical Theory. When we compare the reception of Weber by Lukács, Horkheimer and Adorno, however, Herbert Marcuse’s paper in Heidelberg appears very poor. This is particularly due to the recurrent equation of ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’, which really makes no sense at all, at least with regard to Weber’s use of the language. For Weber used the word ‘reason’ as good as never. And Weber for good reason held no brief for counterfactual talk of ‘reasonable circumstances’ [vernünftigen Verhältnissen], which is to be found not just in Marcuse but also in other representatives of the ‘Frankfurt School’. It is to be assumed that he would have relegated such terminology to obscurantism or modern doctrines of Weltanschauung, since personal value judgements are always related to it, and Weber felt that such value judgements could not be generalized at least with regard to discourse.
But the legitimacy of value judgements is the crux not just of Marcuse’s critique of Weber, but also that of Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas. For they constantly insinuate that with the postulate of freedom from values in empirical and analytical sciences, Weber had opened the floodgates for ideological and political ‘irrationalism’, because he did not regard normative issues as ‘capable of being demonstrated as true’. When Marcuse uses the term, ‘reason’ in his paper in Heidelberg – a term that has to be read and construed in the context of Georg Lukács’ formula The Destruction of Reason in the age of European imperialism –he is implying that reason can indeed be founded on discourse. Jürgen Habermas later attempted to reformulate the critique of reason through timely philosophy by referring to the ‘linguistic turn’ achieved by modern philosophy of language. To what extent he had managed to do so continues to be debated today. At any rate, he spent decades trying to achieve this claim at a high intellectual level and in recent years has received many international prizes for doing so.
It is, however, impossible to say that Herbert Marcuse’s paper in Heidelberg in 1964 was a success. Instead, Marcuse implied that everyone knew what was meant by the concept, ‘reason’. Marcuse equated the notion of reason with the term Weber preferred, ‘Western rationalism’, though he regarded the modern form of bureaucratic rule as the ‘transition from theoretical to practical reason’, i.e. to the ‘historic form of reason’.64 However, in his Heidelberg paper, Marcuse did not succeed in demonstrating a convincing relationship between the ‘destruction of reason’ and the development of ‘formal rationality’ within the meaning of the principle of ‘calculability’ in the most varied fields of society. Or how else should we interpret formulations of his such as the ‘unfolding of capitalist rationality’ becomes the ‘irrationality of reason’?65 As we have pointed out, Georg Lukács had still written of the ‘destruction of reason’. This diagnosis was, however, directed towards a context of pure intellectual history. For when have ‘reasonable’ circumstances existed in the history of humanity?
However, in this context, Marcuse’s aim was not a narrative of a history of the fall, as is the case both of the Dialektik der Aufklärung and the Zerstörung der Vernunft, in which Weber’s diagnoses of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ or the ‘bureaucratic rigidifying’ of ‘liberal’ capitalism played a central role. Instead, by equating ‘formal rationality’ with ‘bourgeois’ or ‘capitalist reason’, Marcuse tried to bring a possible escape route into play which was closely oriented to Martin Heidegger’s critique of technology. Just as for Heidegger, he was looking for a new ‘project’ in the history of humanity in which the ‘technological a priori’ underlying modern science and technology as well as modern capitalism and bureaucracy would be suspended and replaced by a new and now mimetic way humans would treat ‘nature’.66
Four years later, Jürgen Habermas put this speculative philosophy of technology developed by Herbert Marcuse in its place on good grounds, and here made a relativizing presentation of Marcuse’s position as one of ‘technology and science as ideology’.67 His own statement which he read out in reference to the paper Talcott Parsons delivered at the 1964 Congress in Heidelberg was concerned with quite different questions. It is telling that at the time they were purely methodological, just as in the publications by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno of around the same time. At least at this point of time, Critical Theory had dispensed with a discussion of the contents of Max Weber’s work, although Marcuse had been the first of the proponents of Critical Theory to attempt very publicly to take Weber seriously as a social theoretician against his own ‘logical’ understanding of his methods.
Habermas’ central objection to Weber and Parsons concerned the methodological problem of ‘understanding’. Habermas argued that Weber’s sociological work was torn between the heuristic meaning of ‘understanding motivations’ of acting individuals on the one hand and ‘understanding’ objective social contexts of meaning on the other. However, Weber tried to withdraw the latter form of understanding from empirical analytical sciences through his postulate of freedom from values. However, these ‘objective’ references to meaning at the same time had an epistemological significance through the meaning Weber emphasized of ‘theoretical value references’ or ‘value ideas’, terms he had adopted from Heinrich Rickert. ‘Value structures’ and ‘motivation structures’ [Motivationsgefüge] in Weber’s thought were, however, completely divorced from one another and therefore not ‘mediated’ according to Habermas. However, the point was precisely to integrate the ‘contents of meaning that had been passed down’ into the analysis, as those contents served as the basic interests in the quest for knowledge of research in the cultural and social sciences.68
In doing so, Habermas had addressed a central point which is also expressed in the brief position taken by Max Horkheimer in Heidelberg in 1964. In this context, Horkheimer expressly stressed that his problem with Max Weber’s postulate of freedom from values in the empirical analytical sciences consisted in the fact that the postulate led to an abdication of philosophical knowledge.
According to Horkheimer, this resigned position is closely related to the ‘regression of liberalism’ seen around 1900 as well as to the increasing domination of ‘big business’ [der großen Konzerne].69 This is why only an adequate ‘theory of society’ would be able to avoid the reduction of modern sociology to a formal framework of sociological ‘basic concepts’ or ‘categories’.
Adorno also took up this thought in the speech he gave at the official reception of the participants at the fifteenth German Sociological Congress in Heidelberg Castle. But in contrast to Horkheimer, he expressly pointed to the relevance of Weber’s sociological studies for social theory, which he again divorced from Weber’s methodological premises. For Weber’s thesis of the increasing ‘solidification of bureaucratic rule’ had anticipated the trend to an ‘administered world’.70 However, this statement had to be read against the grain so as to prevent ‘sociology, throughout the world’ from having ‘the tendency to be transformed into social engineering [Sozialtechnik]’.71 Thus, much could still be learned from Weber’s sociological work, even though it should not be followed slavishly.
In this regard, Adorno offered a highly instructive point which was to occupy Jürgen Habermas to a vast extent in his own reception of Weber over the following years. For Adorno explicitly said,
It is clear that the concept of rationality would be the most important for Max Weber to move him beyond the relationship between the means and the end in which he had remained spellbound. Perhaps we should take on as the legacy of Max Weber: through unswervingly reflecting with one’s judgement to contribute a little to a reasonable arrangement of the world.72
Over the following period, Adorno showed reverence towards Max Weber’s work. In two Frankfurt lectures – ‘Philosophical elements of a theory of society’ of 1964 and ‘Introduction to sociology’ of 1968 – he went into Weber’s work in detail. He made reference to the 1964 Weber Congress in Heidelberg and explicitly mentioned Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, with whom he felt the greatest theoretical affinities.73 He praised Weber exuberantly as ‘one of not just the most knowledgeable but also intellectually most productive sociologists’ who ‘lived in the German tradition’ and in whose works ‘things are far more difficult than they would initially appear’.74 Although he continues to rank Weber among the ‘positivists’, Adorno took him increasingly more seriously with regard to social theory. Nonetheless, he asserted that one had to read Weber’s monumental work ‘against the grain’ in order to break open his ‘anti-theoretical standpoint’.75 He wrote that this was particularly true of Weber’s ideal types as concept formation, which according to Adorno ‘necessarily suddenly switches over to theory formation or cannot dispense with theory’.76
Once again, Adorno points out not Weber’s methodological understanding of his own work was decisive, but what he had in point of fact ‘done’ in his universal historical studies. For in those studies he worked with constructions of development history that could be understood as dialectical ‘laws of motion’ of society. This particularly applied to Weber’s typology of rule, the three types of legitimate authority of which Adorno sought to understand in a corresponding ‘dynamic’ sense.77 While doing so, he situated Weber’s work near the cyclical understanding of history of Oswalt Spengler, which according to Adorno is also expressed in Weber’s diagnosis of the emergence of a new ‘steel hard casing of submission’ [stahlhartes Gehäuse der Hörigkeit]. One thus might read Weber’s work as an ‘unconscious legate of the old cyclical theories of society’.78 But does this not also apply to the work Horkheimer and Adorno wrote together, Dialektik der Aufklärung?
1. Cf. Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein. Studien über marxistische Dialektik [1923], Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand 1968, p. 170 ff.; for Lukács’ reception of Weber, also see Klaus Maretzky, ‘Georg Lukács als Schüler Max Webers in “Geschicte und Klassenbewußtein”’, in: Georg Ahrweiler (ed.), Betr.: Lukács. Dialektik zwischen Idealismus und Proletariat, Köln: Pahl-Rugenstein 1978, pp. 164–89; Kurt Beiersdörfer, Max Weber und Georg Lukács. Über die Beziehung von Verstehender Soziologie und Westlichem Marxismus, Frankfurt am Main: Campus 1986; furthermore Rüdiger Dannemann, Das Prinzip der Verdinglich-ung. Studie zur Philosophie Georg Lukács, Frankfurt am Main: Sendler 1987, p. 83 ff.
2. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1920, pp. 1–16.
3. Cf. Max Weber, Abriß der universalen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Aus den nachgelassenen Vorlesungen edited by S. Hellmann and M. Palyi, 3rd ed., arranged by Johannes Winckelmann, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1958, p. 288 ff.
4. Edward Albert Shils, ‘Some Notes on Max Weber in America’, unpublished manuscript, University of Chicago, Edward-Shils-Papers, Box 46, p. 37 f. (quoted by Lawrence A. Scaff, Max Weber in America, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2011, p. 242).
5. On Habermas’ reception of Weber, see Michael Sukale, ‘Jürgen Habermas und Max Weber. Eine Studie über Wert und Rationalität’, in: Stefan Müller-Doohm (ed.), Das Interesse der Vernunft. Rückblicke auf das Werk von Jürgen Habermas seit ‘Erkenntnis und Interesse’, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2000, pp. 344–75.
6. On the following, also cf. Harald Hohmann, ‘Der Schatten Max Webers. Der Prozeß der gesellschaftlichen “Rationalisierung” in der Deutung der Kritischen Theorie’, in: Jahrbuch für Soziologiegeschichte 1995, Opladen: Leske + Budrich 1999, pp. 151–72; also see Johannes Weiß, ‘Max Weber und die Kritik der Kritischen Theorie’, in: Karl-Ludwig Ay and Knut Borchardt (eds.), Das Faszinosum Max Weber. Die Geschichte seiner Geltung, Konstanz: UVK 2006, pp. 301–11.
7. Cf. Max Horkheimer, ‘Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart’ [lecture from summer semester 1926], in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10: Nachgelassene Schriften 1914–1931, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1990, pp. 169–333.
8. Cf. Heinrich Rickert, ‘Vom System der Werte’, in: Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, Band 4 (1913), Heft 3, pp. 295–327; Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, Berlin: Springer 1919; also Max Scheler, Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre, 3 vols., Leipzig: Der Neue Geist Verlag 1923–4.
9. Horkheimer, ‘Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart’, p. 256.
10. Max Horkheimer, ‘Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung’ [1931], in: Horkheimer, Sozialphilosophische Studien. Aufsätze, Reden und Vorträge 1930–1972, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Athenäum 1972, p. 39.
11. Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditionelle und kritische Theorie’ [1937], in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4: Schriften 1936–1941, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1988, p. 167 f.; for a discussion of the meaning of logical positivism in the history of science, cf. Herbert Schnädelbach, Erfahrung, Begründung, Reflexion. Versuch über den Positivismus, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1971, especially p. 57 ff.
12. Horkheimer, ‘Traditionelle und kritische Theorie’, p. 196. On the positivism debate in west German sociology in the post-war period, cf. Theodor W. Adorno u.a., Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand 1969.
13. Cf. Max Weber, Gesamtausgabe, section 1, vol. 23: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Soziologie. Unvollendet [1919–1920], edited by Knut Borchardt, Edith Hanke and Wolfgang Schluchter, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2013, p. 152 f.
14. On Weber’s understanding of ‘Western rationalism’, cf. the relevant contributions in the anthology: Scott Lash and Sam Whimster (eds.), Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, London: Allen & Unwin 1987.
15. Cf. Max Weber, Gesamtausgabe, section 1, vols. 22–3: Recht, edited by Werner Gephart and Siegfried Hermes, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2010, pp. 304 f., 531, 563 and 672.; also cf. Weber, Gesam-tausgabe, section 1, vols. 22–4, pp. 251 f., 283 ff. and 628 f.
16. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, New York: The Continuum Publishing Corporation 1947, p. 6.
17. Ibid., p. 81.
18. Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1969, p. 9. Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s talk of the ‘administered world’ also has its origins in their reception of Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy (cf. ibid., p. ix). The chapter on ‘concept of enlightenment’, which was of central importance for Dialektik der Aufklärung, was apparently written by Horkheimer. On December 19, 1942 he wrote to Herbert Marcuse: ‘During the last few weeks I have devoted every minute to those pages on mythology and enlightenment which will probably be concluded this week. I am afraid it is the most difficult text I ever wrote. Apart from that it sounds somewhat negativistic and I am now trying to overcome this’ (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17: Briefwechsel 1941–1948, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1996, p. 390 f.). On this point, cf. Rolf Wiggershaus, Max Horkheimer. Begründer der ‘Frankfurter Schule’, Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag 2014, p. 90.
19. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, p. 11.
20. Cf. Max Weber, Gesamtausgabe, section 1, vol. 22: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. From the estate, edited by Hans G. Kippenberg in collaboration with Petra Schilm with the participation of Jutta Niemeier, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2001, pp. 121 f. and 290 ff.; also see Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze, vol. 1, p. 237 ff.
21. Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, p. 6: ‘Schon der Mythos ist Aufklärung, und: Aufklärung schlägt in Mythologie zurück’ [Myth is enlightenment and enlightenment switches back to mythology]. Max Weber, ‘Zwischenbetrachtung. Theorie der Stufen und Richtungen religiöser Weltablehnung’, in: Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze, vol. 1, p. 536 ff.; Max Weber, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’, in: Johannes Winckelmann (ed.), Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 6th ed., Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1985, p. 605: ‘Die alten vielen Götter, entzaubert und daher in Gestalt unpersönlicher Mächte, entsteigen ihren Gräbern, streben nach Gewalt über unser Leben und beginnen wieder ihren ewigen Kampf’ [The many old gods, disenchanted and thus in the form of impersonal powers, emerge from their graves, seek out power over our lives and again being their eternal struggle]. On this conspicuous parallel, see Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1981, vol. 1, p. 466.
22. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Neue wertfreie Soziologie’. On the occasion of the publication of Karl Mannheim’s ‘Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus’ [1937], in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20: Vermischte Schriften I, Frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer 1986, pp. 13–45. On this point, particularly cf. pp. 36 and 44, in which Adorno not only writes of a Weberian school, but also explicitly calls Weber the head of the school [Schulhaupt].
23. Cf. Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag 1954, p. 474 ff.
24. Adorno, ‘Neue wertfreie Soziologie, p. 13.
25. Ibid., p. 14 f.
26. Ibid., p. 44.
27. Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Hauptseminar ‘Max Webers wissenschaftlich-theoretische Schriften’, summer semester 1954, Archive Center of the University Library, Frankfurt, shelf mark XIII 168. Subsequently, Adorno had meticulous proceedings made of the discussions in his seminars so that we are relatively well informed of how he taught.
28. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre’ [1954], in: Soziologische Schriften I, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1972, p. 467.
29. Adorno, ‘Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre’, pp. 467 and 472.
30. Dieter Deininger, seminar proceedings, June 3, 1954, p. 3.
31. Deininger, seminar proceedings, p. 1.
32. Gerhard Beuter, seminar proceedings, June 24, 1954, p. 1.
33. Helmut Olles, seminar proceedings, July 1, 1954, p. 1.
34. Ibid., p. 5.
35. Ibid., pp. 3 and 6. The changes of Horkheimer’s view on this subject can be seen when we compare this to his inaugural lecture in Frankfurt in 1931. Then, he sought to surmount ‘relativism’ in world views.
36. Adorno, Nachgelassene Schriften, section IV, vol. 6: Philosophie und Soziologie [1960], edited by Dirk Braunstein, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2011, p. 17. Here, Adorno refers to Max Weber, Soziologische Grundbegriffe, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1960.
37. Ibid., pp. 95–7.
38. Ibid., p. 98 f. Adorno later did justice to the fact by distinguishing between the unintelligibility of society and reflection on society. The former is the reason for which we have to appeal to the concept in such way to break open the ‘reified’ character of social conditions through reflexion. The point is to understand the unintelligible and to deduce social circumstances ‘from circumstances between people’ (Theodor W. Adorno, article on Gesellschaft [1965], in: Soziologische Schriften I, op. cit., p. 12).
39. This emerges from the surviving documents for the seminar which can now be found preserved in the university archives of the Goethe University in Frankfurt (cf. Universitätsarchiv Frankfurt, Abt. 139, Nr. 12); also see Felicia Herrschaft, Soziologische Lehrveranstaltungen 1949–1973. Archivbestände der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main: private print, 2009, p. 13 [http://wiki.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/SOZFRA/index.php/Soziologische_Lehrveranstaltungen_von_1949-1973].
40. Manfred Bretz, seminar proceedings of November 12, 1963, p. 2.
41. Ibid., p. 1.
42. Ibid., p. 2.
43. Ibid., p. 2.
44. Ibid., p. 3.
45. Wolfgang Holler, seminar proceedings of December 3, 1963, p. 2.
46. Jens Janke, seminar proceedings of December 3, 1963, p. 1.
47. Ibid., p. 2.
48. Edgar Baltzer, seminar proceedings of December 16, 1963, p. 4.
49. Ibid.
50. Gerti Fey, seminar proceedings of January 14, 1964, p. 3.
51. Ibid., p. 6.
52. On this point, cf. Uta Gerhardt, ‘Die Rolle der Remigranten auf dem Heidelberger Soziologentag und die Interpretation des Werkes Webers’, in: Claus-Dieter Krohn and Axel Schildt (eds.), Zwischen den Stühlen? Remigranten und Remigration in der deutschen Medienöffentlichkeit der Nachkriegszeit, Hamburg: Hans Christians 2002, pp. 216–43; also Uta Gerhardt, ‘Der Heidelberger Soziologentag 1964 als Wendepunkt der Rezeptionsgeschichte Max Webers’, in: Zeitperspektiven. Studien zu Kultur und Gesellschaft, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner 2003, pp. 252–66.
53. Cf. Herbert Marcuse, Der eindimensionale Mensch. Studien zur Ideologie der fortgeschrittenen Industriegesellschaft, Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand 1970.
54. Cf. Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, pp. 474–89.
55. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus’, in: Otto Stammer (ed.), Max Weber und die Soziologie heute. Verhandlungen des 15. Deutschen Soziologentages, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1965, p. 161.
56. Cf. Max Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften, 4th ed., edited by Johannes Winckelmann, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1980, pp. 1–25.
57. Marcuse, ‘Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus’, p. 179.
58. Ibid., p. 179.
59. Ibid., p. 175; also see pp. 167 and 174.
60. Ibid., p. 164.
61. Ibid., p. 172.
62. Ibid., p. 166.
63. Ibid., p. 179.
64. Ibid., p. 163. Also see the pertinent study by Wolfgang Schluchter, Aspekte bürokratischer Herrschaft. Studien zur Interpretation der fortschreitenden Industriegesellschaft, München: List 1972, p. 236 ff.
65. Marcuse, ‘Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus’, p. 165. One can find similar formulations in a letter written from Marcuse to Horkheimer and dated July 18, 1947. Marcuse writes that ‘reason, which switches over to complete manipulation and rule, remains reason, so that the actual terror of the system lies in reasonableness rather than unreasonableness […]. The negative reasonableness becomes positive madness’ (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17: Briefwechsel 1941–1948). These thoughts were developed by Adorno in his Negative Dialektik two decades later. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1966.
66. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre, Pfullingen: Neske 1962. On Marcuse’s intellectual dependence on Heidegger’s existential ontology, see Stefan Breuer, Die Krise der Revolutionstheorie. Negative Vergesellschaftung und Arbeitsmetaphysik bei Herbert Marcuse, Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat 1977, particularly p. 96 ff.; on this point, see also the individual answers to the anthology: Jürgen Habermas (ed.) Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1968.
67. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968, p. 48.
68. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, discussion of freedom from values and objectivity in: Stammer, Max Weber und die Soziologie heute, p. 76.
69. Max Horkheimer, introduction to discussion of freedom from values and objectivity in: Stammer, Max Weber und die Soziologie heute, p. 66.
70. Theodor W. Adorno, speech on the occasion of the official reception in the Königssaal of Heidelberg Castle, in: Max Weber und die Soziologie heute, p. 100.
71. Ibid., p. 101.
72. Ibid., p. 102.
73. Theodor W. Adorno, Nachgelassene Schriften, section IV: lectures, vol. 12: Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, edited by Tobias ten Brink and Marc Phillip Nogueira, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2008, p. 124.
74. Ibid., pp. 175 and 201.
75. Ibid., p. 14.
76. Ibid., p. 23 f.
77. Ibid., pp. 18–21; also cf. Adorno, Einleitung in die Soziologie [1968], edited by Christoph Gödde, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2003, pp. 206–9.
78. Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, p. 22.