Critical Theorists and International Relations

Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams, Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415474665
• eBook ISBN: 9781134025794
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A wide range of critical theorists is used in the study of international politics, and until now there has been no text that gives concise and accessible introductions to these figures. Critical Theorists and International Relations provides a wide-ranging introduction to thirty-two important theorists whose work has been influential in thinking about global politics.

Each chapter is written by an expert with a detailed knowledge of the theorist concerned, representing a range of approaches under the rubric 'critical', including Marxism and post-Marxism, the Frankfurt School, hermeneutics, phenomenology, postcolonialism, feminism, queer theory, poststructuralism, pragmatism, scientific realism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis.

Key features of each chapter include:

• a clear and concise biography of the relevant thinker
• an introduction to their key writings and ideas
• a summary of the ways in which these ideas have influenced and are being used in international relations scholarship
• a list of suggestions for further reading

Written in engaging and accessible prose, Critical Theorists and International Relations is a unique and invaluable resource for undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars of international relations.

1
Theodor Adorno

Columba Peoples

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno’s work leaves a legacy of wide ranging analysis (on topics as diverse as anti-Semitism, psychoanalysis and jazz), an equally broad and sophisticated conceptual vocabulary (instrumental reason; negative dialectic; damaged life) and a range of reflections at once poignant and provocative: ‘Life has become the ideology of its own absence’ (Adorno 2005a: 190); ‘Enlightenment is totalitarian’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 6).

This chapter briefly illustrates the key themes of Adorno’s thinking and its potential relation to international relations. To do so it outlines how Adorno’s key ideas evolved and their relation to critical theory, the extent to which international relations figures in the writings of Adorno and, conversely, the extent to which Adorno has informed and might still inform the study of international relations.

Adorno and Critical Theory

In many ways it could be argued that Adorno’s intellectual development and his life story are inseparable. Adorno’s ‘damaged life’ (to paraphrase the subtitle of his 1951 work Minima Moralia) was marked by the events of war, catastrophic social change and exile, the effects of which can be traced even in some of his most abstract philosophical work. But it is also marked by rigorous intellectual engagement and debate with a variety of other key thinkers now conventionally associated with the Critical Theory tradition (see Jay 1996a).

Born Theodor Wiesengrund in Frankfurt am Main in 1903 (Adorno was his wife’s maiden name, adopted in the 1930s due to the Jewish origins of Wiesengrund (Jarvis 1998: 3)), Adorno had by the 1920s already established himself as a precociously gifted thinker. Under the influence of his mentor Siegfried Kracauer, the German sociologist and cultural critic, the young Adorno was already well versed in both Western philosophy – Hegel, Marx and, in particular, Kant – and in the work of contemporary theorists such as Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch and Max Weber (Wiggershaus 1986: 66–69). Adorno was thus immersed both in the tradition of German idealist thinking and contemporaneous debates in Marxist theory, exemplified at the time in the work of thinkers like Lukács and Bloch. This intellectual depth pervades all of Adorno’s work, which is rich in its allusions to both classical and modern philosophy, and his writings frequently presume a knowledge of both.

Adorno was not, however, directly concerned with philosophy during the 1920s, instead pouring himself into his first (and lasting) concern, music criticism and musicology (Wiggershaus 1986: 70; Adorno 2007). It was not until the 1930s, during the period that he came into contact with the group of thinkers that has since come to be known collectively as the Frankfurt School, that Adorno became known more for his engagement with philosophy and debates in social theory.

The term Frankfurt School, along with its defining characteristics and membership, is itself a source of much contention (Jay 1996b: 39). Often used interchangeably with the term Critical Theory (in the upper case), it is usually taken to refer to a brand of Western Marxist or Late Marxist thinking emanating from the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research, or IfS) first established in Frankfurt in 1923. Key thinkers usually listed under the Frankfurt School rubric include Adorno and his frequent intellectual collaborator Max Horkheimer as well as Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal and Freidrich Pollock. Other more loosely affiliated thinkers include Walter Benjamin, Franz Neumann, Otto Kircheimer and Eric Fromm (Held 2004: 14–15).

Although debates persist about the unity or otherwise of the Frankfurt School (Held 2004: 14; Jay 1996b: 39), broadly speaking this early or first generation Frankfurt School thinking, of which Adorno was an important part, is marked by a number of recurring concerns and features. These are worth sketching briefly in order to get a better sense of the evolution of Adorno’s own thinking. One is its self-consciously inter-disciplinary nature, as is illustrated by the fact that Adorno and his colleagues were in turn embedded within different intellectual backgrounds (Adorno in musicology, Horkheimer in sociology, Marcuse in philosophy, Benjamin in literary criticism, Fromm in psychoanalysis, and so on). Another is the shared grounding of its different constituent thinkers (albeit to varying extents) in a tradition of German idealist, and specifically, Marxist thought. The different intellectual and philosophical concerns of these thinkers, however, took them into terrain – art, mass culture, psychoanalysis, the family – that was generally unfamiliar in the orthodox Marxism of the time (Held 2004: 13–14). Indeed one of the overarching concerns that did bind the early Frankfurt School into a fluid whole was a shared sense of disillusionment not only with capitalist society but also with the Marxist orthodoxy of the time. Initially at least, the group that formed around the Institute for Social Research were concerned with accounting for what they perceived to be the abortive form of socialism manifest in Stalinist Russia and with explaining the conditions (such as the rise of fascism and authoritarianism) that seemed, against the predictions of orthodox Marxists, to have inhibited the onset of socialism in Germany and industrialised Western Europe more broadly.

Since the problematique of radical change was more complex than it was portrayed in orthodox Marxism, the goal of the IfS was to develop a more sophisticated form of analysis that, whilst upholding the Marxist commitment to radical social change and Marx’s analytic categories (Antonio 1981: 330–31), was also open to other philosophical strands (including Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) and contemporary theorists (such as Weber, Lukács and Freud). Theorising social change required a deeper understanding of society, and this in turn required a more varied theoretical palette. Hence the deliberately interdisciplinary character of the IfS, and, in part, the intellectual reason for Adorno’s association with the institute.

The driving intellectual force behind the institute during Adorno’s initial association was not, however, Adorno himself but Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer, who assumed the directorship of the IfS in 1930, established a programme of research that Adorno in part contributed to and which he in turn helped to shape and, arguably, later push in a different direction. In keeping with the themes outlined above, Horkheimer set out a programme for the institute which was aimed at a radical reinterpretation of the relationship between philosophy and practice, the social and natural sciences, and human beings and nature, which he hoped would combine into a programme of social research highlighting the possibilities for a radical transformation of society (Wiggershaus 1994: 36–40).

The task of Critical Theory, in Horkheimer’s view, was in large part to uncover and encourage those potentialities latent in society that could further this end (Horkheimer 1972). Horkheimer illustrated this task through a critique of what he termed Traditional Theory, a form of theory which he associated particularly with scientific positivism and those forms of social science that tried to imitate the objectivity of the natural sciences. For Horkheimer, such pretensions to objectivity were always based on an illusory assumption of the theorist’s detachment from the social world (or what Horkheimer terms as science’s ‘imaginary self-sufficiency’) (Horkheimer 1972: 242). Yet, Horkheimer argues, scientific activity is itself part of the social fabric and the system of capitalism as is manifest in, in particular, the relationship between science, technology and production.

Critical Theory, by contrast, challenges both the foundations of Traditional Theory and, in doing so, the social fabric with which it is inherently bound up. By challenging ‘bourgeois scientific thought’, critical thinking is therefore, for Horkheimer, a form of ‘transformative activity’ (Horkheimer 1972: 232). Initially Horkheimer believed that the work of the Institute in this direction could contribute to developing a degree of critical social consciousness latent in the masses (Held 2004: 38) and, in so doing, help to turn the means of production and technological development towards emancipatory rather than exploitative ends. ‘The future of humanity’, Horkheimer declared in his 1937 essay on ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, ‘depends on the existence today of the critical attitude’ (Horkheimer 1972: 242).

The entrenchment of Nazism in Germany in the late 1930s not only fractured Horkheimer’s optimism regarding the diffusion of the ‘critical attitude’ among the proletariat irreparably, it also fragmented the Institute. Its members were forced into exile due to their socialist leanings and, in the case of many members, their Jewish background (Adorno included, as his father was an assimilated Jew). Whilst many members of the IfS sought sanctuary in the US, Adorno initially found refuge in Oxford at Merton College in 1933. From there he continued to contribute to the journal of the exiled IfS (by now re-established at Columbia University, New York), primarily in the form of essays on music criticism (Jarvis 1998: 12). In one sense this seems distinctly distanced, not only geographically but also theoretically, from Horkheimer’s vision of Critical Theory. Yet Adorno, in his reflections on art and music, was already incorporating and honing a conceptual vocabulary integral both to his own thinking and Critical Theory more generally. Prime among these is the concept of immanent critique. Originally espoused by Horkheimer, who in turn drew on Hegel and Marx in this regard (Antonio 1981), the concept of immanent critique refers to the method of critiquing a concept, theory or situation by critically evaluating it on its own terms, highlighting the contradictions inherent within it. Rather than appealing to an external measure or Archimedean point therefore, the method of immanent critique is, by its very definition, immanent rather than transcendent: the critique comes from within, rather than without.

Though essentially faithful to this understanding, Adorno’s interpretation and application of immanent critique in his music criticism is less indebted to Hegel than is Horkheimer’s interpretation and ‘owes as much to Kant’s notion of “antinomies”’ – the idea that the use of reason can lead ultimately to the uncovering of contradictions, (Brunkhorst 1999: 36). However, Adorno does not simply follow Kant either, and engages in a critique of the Kantian notion of aesthetics (Adorno 1984). In opposition to Kantian idealism, which assumes beauty is experienced subjectively, Adorno maintains a qualified materialist account of aesthetic experience in which works of art hold a ‘truth content’ (a key term in Adorno’s thinking). For Adorno beauty, the experience of the truth content of an object, is neither simply experienced by the individual subject, nor is it simply an ‘objective’ truth: ‘Works of art, for Adorno, are not merely inert objects, valued or known by the subject; rather they have themselves a subjective moment because they are themselves cognitive, attempts to know’ (Jarvis 1998: 96). Thus there is a dialectical tension between subject and object that Adorno believes to be inherent to artwork itself (Held 2004: 202), and a degree of truth content that can be adduced via critical reflection. The same could be said, in Adorno’s view, of different philosophical perspectives, which would also be characterised by internal antagonisms and should be similarly subject to critical analysis, particularly in terms of the relation between material context and apparently abstract philosophies.

Thus whereas Horkheimer attempted the development of a critical perspective through an examination of the social functions of systems of thought, such as positivism, Adorno concentrated on ‘the way philosophy expresses the structure of society’ (Held 2004: 201, emphasis added). Though this led Adorno to concentrate more on detailed and dense technical analyses of particular philosophies, his metacritique of philosophy is broadly in keeping with the wider effort within Critical Theory to develop a ‘critical social consciousness’ (Adorno 1973: 323) parallel to Horkheimer’sefforts (Held 2004: 201).

On enlightenment as totalitarianism: Dialectic of enlightenment

The late 1930s also saw Adorno and Horkheimer moving closer together, both geographically and intellectually, when Adorno was invited to join the IfS in New York in 1937. Horkheimer’s earlier optimism regarding the prospects for radical social change had dissipated rapidly with the rise of Hitler and the events of World War II, as was exemplified by the more pessimistic tone of his 1947 work Eclipse of Reason (Horkheimer 2004). Adorno, it is fair to say, had never fully shared Horkheimer’s belief in the revolutionary potential of the working class. In 1939 he remarked to his close friend Walter Benjamin on Franco’s victory in Spain that ‘the same masses cheered the fascist conqueror who on the previous day still cheered the opposition’ (cited in Brunkhorst 1999: 40). Owing to the coalescence of their disillusionment in this regard, their shared critique of positivism (in which Adorno followed Horkheimer’s basic tenets) and their materialistically grounded critiques of philosophical idealism (Brunkhorst 1999: 36) – not to mention their close personal friendship – Adorno and Horkheimer had reached a point conducive to shared intellectual effort during their period in exile in the US. As Horkheimer later recalled of the time: ‘It would be difficult to say which of the ideas originated in his [Adorno’s] mind and which in my own; our philosophy is one’ (Horkheimer 2004: vi).

Their collaboration – which took place initially in New York and later in southern California – ultimately culminated in one of the seminal works in twentieth century philosophy, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997). Though born out of the immediate context of the rise of fascism and a rejection of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat as motor of social change, Dialectic of Enlightenment (which first appeared under the title Philosophical Fragments in 1944 and under its more commonly known title in 1947) locates these developments in a transhistorical narrative that runs right from the ancient Greeks up to the twentieth century. It is, as its original title suggests, a fragmentary work that eschews a straightforward narrative structure in favour of an essay style (as tends to be typical of much of Adorno’s writing in particular (Jarvis 1998: 137)). Running through it, though, is an over-arching argument that recasts the entire history of Western philosophy, inverts the assumption of human progress through the ages and, in the process, radically challenges assumptions of earlier Critical Theory (Wyn Jones 1999: 29).

The key object of Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis is ‘enlightenment’. As distinct from the common usage, the concept of ‘enlightenment’ has, for Adorno and Horkheimer, a very specific meaning that only partially relates to the likes of Descartes and Kant. Conventionally, in the recounting of Western political thought, enlightenment refers both to the historical period of the eighteenth century and to its concomitant advancement in knowledge and rational thought at the expense of old superstitions. Yet Adorno and Horkheimer instead seek to advance ‘two theses’ that seem entirely out of step with this interpretation: that ‘myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: xvi).

At the heart of Adorno and Horkheimer’s account is a conception of human beings’ struggle with nature. Human beings have perpetually been involved in an attempt to preserve themselves from elemental forces of nature and have, in the process, based their existence on an attempted domination of nature. The attainment of knowledge has consequently been prioritized as fundamental to self-preservation. Thus the process of ‘enlightenment’ is traceable even in ancient Greek and Hebrew scripts, where men battle against mythical elemental forces. ‘Myth is already enlightenment’ in the sense that myths are already attempts to classify and categorize, that is, they already have a ‘cognitive content’, as Adorno and Horkheimer attempt to illustrate in their analysis of the Odyssey (1997: 43–80).

Similarly, Adorno and Horkheimer engage in an effort of cultural criticism to show that, conversely, ‘enlightenment reverts to mythology’. Modernity, which privileges technological advancement and secular rationality (features which Max Weber had identified under the rubric of disenchantment), frequently incorporates appeals to mythical and transcendental ideals. Nazi ideology, for example, combines elements of the modern (an elevation of modern technology and industrialization) with the ancient and mythological (such as appeals to a mythological Aryan past). Adorno and Horkheimer argue more generally that the purportedly value-free instruments of modernity (such as scientific knowledge and modern technology) are routinely bound up with ideological systems, and that this is in the very character of modernity despite its pretensions to the contrary. The move towards sanitized and administered societies on a grand scale simply denies and suppresses the irrational, leading to greater eruptions of violence, as is illustrated ultimately in the death camps of Nazi Germany with their industrialized forms of mass killing (Adorno 2003a). Similarly Hollywood combines modern film technology and techniques with romanticism, simply replacing the irrational with what Adorno and Horkheimer view as infantile escapism, with the effect of creating docile and passive audiences on a mass scale (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 120–67; Adorno 2001). Culture, which could once allow an element of individual freedom and creativity, has through the mass diffusion of film and radio become a ‘Culture Industry’, complete with a ‘cult of celebrities (film stars) [that] has a built-in social mechanism to level down everyone who stands out in any way’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 236).

Both phenomena are, for Adorno and Horkheimer, perfectly in keeping with the general trajectory of enlightenment, where reason is ultimately at the service of domination (what Adorno and Horkheimer term ‘instrumental reason’). Knowledge of the natural and social worlds, and the technology and techniques developed from this, are used to control and exploit rather than emancipate, as is manifest in the system of capitalist production (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: xv). Technology in turn encourages the tendency to treat people as means (and thus a commodity) rather than ends. This is the essence of instrumental rationality, which has become rationality’s dominant form. Far from simply being a story of human progress, therefore, enlightenment is also a process of domination: an external domination of nature by human beings, an internal domination of human beings’ own nature, and domination of some human beings over others. ‘The fallen nature of man’, Adorno and Horkheimer surmise, ‘cannot be separated from social progress … progress becomes regression’ (1997: xiv–xv). This theme – that rationalization, mass production and the other frequently assumed emblems of progress actually lead to barbarism – is one that remains constant in Adorno’s work (Adorno 2003a: 19).

In some senses, Dialectic of Enlightenment remains faithful to previously espoused elements of Critical Theory. Within this seemingly pessimistic account of human progress there is still an element of immanent critique: reason, which is seen as a tool of enlightenment, is used to critique enlightenment itself and illustrate that ‘social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought’ but that enlightenment simultaneously contains the ‘seed’ of its own reversal (Adorno and Horkheimer: 1997: xiii). The ‘critique of enlightenment’ which is offered is ‘intended to pave the way for a positive notion of enlightenment which will release it from entanglement in blind domination’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: xvi).

In other respects, though, the collaboration of Adorno with Horkheimer is in stark contrast with the latter’s earlier optimism on the prospects for emancipatory societal change. This turn has been noted as particularly significant within strands of contemporary international relations theory and security studies that seek to revive and incorporate the concepts of emancipation and immanent critique (Wyn Jones 1999: 39–52; Rengger 2001: 95) as envisaged in earlier Critical Theory. This is not simply a product of Adorno’s influence on Horkheimer who, as indicated previously, was already moving in a similar direction (Horkheimer 2004). Post-Dialectic of Enlightenment, with the memory of mass attraction to fascism in Germany still fresh, both Adorno and Horkheimer generally kept their distance from grand political projects. Adorno, on his return to Germany in the 1950s (where he became director of the re-established IfS in Frankfurt in 1957) is often seen to have been aloof from movements for social and political change of the time, distancing himself from the German student movement in which his follower Jürgen Habermas was closely involved. Adorno defended this in terms of protecting his intellectual autonomy but, as Wiggershaus notes, this stance ‘did not exactly correspond to a concept of Critical Theory capable of reflecting on its social function that had been developed by Habermas and, earlier, by Horkheimer’ (Wiggershaus 1986: 621).

Adorno and international relations

Adorno’s lifetime was perforated by major international upheaval – two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Wall Street Crash, and the advent of the nuclear age to name but a few – and his writings are peppered by references to such events. Yet Adorno’s writings devote little time or space to accounting for these events explicitly, certainly not enough to amount to a theorization of the international that is immediately recognizable to scholars of mainstream international relations. As with his engagement with political issues more generally, Adorno’s engagement with international politics is circumscribed by his desire for autonomy. Though Adorno could afford detailed examination of the astrology column of the Los Angeles Times (Adorno, 2001), analyses of the he...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Theodor Adorno
• 2 Giorgio Agamben
• 3 Hannah Arendt
• 4 Alain Badiou
• 5 Jean Baudrillard
• 6 Simone de Beauvoir
• 7 Walter Benjamin
• 8 Roy Bhaskar
• 9 Pierre Bourdieu
• 10 Judith Butler
• 11 Gilles Deleuze
• 12 Jacques Derrida
• 13 Frantz Fanon
• 14 Michel Foucault
• 15 Sigmund Freud
• 16 Antonio Gramsci
• 17 Jürgen Habermas
• 18 G.W.F. Hegel
• 19 Martin Heidegger
• 20 Immanuel Kant
• 21 Julia Kristeva
• 22 Emmanuel Levinas
• 23 Karl Marx
• 24 Jean-Luc Nancy
• 25 Friedrich Nietzsche
• 26 Jacques Rancière
• 27 Richard Rorty
• 28 Edward Said
• 29 Carl Schmitt
• 30 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• 31 Paul Virilo
• 32 Slavoj Žižek
• Bibliography