The Frankfurt School and its Critics

The late Tom Bottomore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134451463
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Institute of Social Research, from which the Frankfurt School developed, was founded in the early years of the Weimar Republic. It survived the Nazi era in exile, to become an important centre of social theory in the postwar era. Early members of the school, such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, developed a form of Marxist theory known as Critical Theory, which became influential in the study of class, politics, culture and ideology. The work of more recent members, and in particular Habermas, has received wide attention throughout Europe and North America.
Tom Bottomore's study takes a new and controversial look at the contributions of the Frankfurt School to modern sociology, examining several issues not previously discussed elsewhere. He discusses the neglect of history and political economy by the critical theorists, and considers the relationship of the later Frankfurt School to the radical movements of the 1960s and the present time. His critical analysis makes the school's writers accessible, through an assessment of their work and an exploration of the relationship of Critical Theory to other forms of sociological thought, especially positivism and structuralism.

1
The Formation of the School

Horkheimer, in the address delivered on the occasion of his official installation as director of the Institute in January 1931, indicated clearly, while paying tribute to the work of his predecessor, that the Institute was about to take a new direction. ‘Social philosophy’ now emerged as its main preoccupation; not in the sense of a philosophical theory of value which would provide a superior insight into the meaning of social life, nor as some kind of synthesis of the results of the specialized social sciences, but rather as the source of important questions to be investigated by these sciences and as a framework in which ‘the universal would not be lost sight of’.[1] In subsequent essays of the 1930s Horkheimer developed his conception of the role of philosophy primarily through a criticism of modern positivism or empiricism (the terms are used interchangeably), and in particular that of the Vienna Circle. His argument in one important essay, ‘The latest attack on metaphysics’ (1937), proceeds on two levels. First, in a framework of ideas derived from the sociology of knowledge, he asserts the connection between a style of thought and the situation of a social group, though unlike Karl Mannheim, for example, he does not attempt to analyse the precise filiations between thought and socio-historical conditions. Thus, he simply claims that ‘neo-romantic metaphysics and radical positivism alike have their roots in the present sad state of the middle class’ (Critical Theory: Selected Essays, New York, Herder & Herder, 1972, p. 140), and again, ‘the entire system of modern empiricism belongs to the passing world of liberalism’ (ibid., p. 147).

At another level Horkheimer undertakes a criticism of positivism as a theory of knowledge or philosophy of science, especially in relation to the social sciences, on three main points: (i) that it treats active human beings as mere facts and objects within a scheme of mechanical determinism; (ii) that it conceives the world only as immediately given in experience, and makes no distinction between essence and appearance; and (iii) that it establishes an absolute distinction between fact and value, and hence separates knowledge from human interests. Horkheimer contrasts with positivism a ‘dialectical theory’, in which ‘individual facts always appear in a definite connection’, and which ‘seeks to reflect reality in its totality’. Furthermore, dialectical thought ‘integrates the empirical constituents into structures of experience which are important…for the historical interests with which dialectical thought is connected…. When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory…. Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking’ (ibid., pp. 161–2).[2]

Horkheimer pursued this argument in his best known essay of the 1930s, ‘Traditional and critical theory’ (1937), which should perhaps be regarded as the founding document, or charter, of the Frankfurt School. ‘Traditional theory’ is there interpreted as the implicit or explicit outlook of the modern natural sciences, expressed in modern philosophy as positivism/empiricism; and Horkheimer is above all concerned with the diffusion of this conception of theory in the ‘sciences of man and society [which] have attempted to follow the lead of the natural sciences’ (ibid., p. 190). The opposed kind of social thought, ‘critical theory’, rejects the procedure of determining objective facts with the aid of conceptual systems, from a purely external standpoint, and claims that ‘the facts, as they emerge from the work of society, are not extrinsic in the same degree as they are for the savant…critical thinking…is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built’ (pp. 209–210). But how, in that case, is critical thought related to experience? Is it anything more than ‘conceptual poetry’ or an ‘impotent expression of states of mind’? Marx and Engels had grounded their critical theory in the situation of the proletariat, which necessarily struggles for emancipation. But Horkeimer argues (like Lukács in History and Class Consciousness) that even this situation of the proletariat is ‘no guarantee of correct knowledge’, for ‘even to the proletariat the world superficially seems quite different than it really is’ (pp. 213– 14). He does not then draw the conclusion which Lukács, actively engaged in political life, drew—namely, that a revolutionary party must bring a correct class consciousness (i.e. correct knowledge) to the working class from outside—but there is nevertheless some similarity in their views, for insofar as any very definite conclusion at all can be derived from Horkheimer’s discussion it is that another external agent—the critical thinker, or critical school of thought— has the task of conveying such a consciousness to the working class.

Two aspects of Horkheimer’s original formulation of critical theory which will be more closely examined in Chapter 3, should be particularly noted at this stage: first, that his hesitant and somewhat sceptical evaluation of the role of the working class already gave an intimation of his later profound pessimism about the existence of any real emancipatory force in modern society; and second, that the political significance which he attributed to the work of critical intellectuals was a reversion to a pre-Marxian conception of the processes of social change, closely resembling the outlook of the Young Hegelians, or ‘critical critics’, of the late 1830s and early 1840s, which Marx had derided in The Holy Family.[3] Similar features, as we shall see, are to be found in the work of Herbert Marcuse, the other major contributor to the formation of critical theory in its early stages. In several essays of the 1930s, and especially in his book Reason and Revolution (1941), Marcuse also expounded a ‘dialectical social theory’ in opposition to a positivist social science, and made much the same points about the latter as Horkheimer had done, arguing that ‘positive philosophy tended to equate the study of society with the study of nature…. Social study was to be a science seeking social laws, the validity of which was to be analogous to that of physical laws. Social practice, especially the matter of changing the social system, was herewith throttled by the inexorable’ (op. cit., p. 343). Where he differed from Horkheimer was in basing the dialectical theory much more directly upon Hegel’s philosophy, which constitutes the core of his whole exposition; in transforming Marx’s thought more completely into a radical Hegelianism; and in confining his attention to the origins of positivist philosophy and social science in the first half of the nineteenth century (in the works of Comte, Stahl, and von Stein), while ignoring the modern forms of positivism and related philosophies of science as well as the modern social sciences.

Adorno’s contribution to the formation of a school of critical theory is much more ambiguous and obscure. Until 1938 his relations with the Institute were informal, and his principal interests lay in the field of culture (particularly music), psychoanalysis, and aesthetic theory (where he was profoundly influenced by Walter Benjamin).[4] The philosophical outlook which he developed during this time was not a ‘dialetical social theory’, but what he later called ‘negative dialectics’; that is, a criticism of all philosophical positions and social theories. This appears to be a form of relativism or scepticism, which denies the possibility of any absolute starting point (‘identity-principle’) or ultimate basis for human thought, though Adorno attempted to evade this outcome.[5] At all events his philosophical stance is very different from that of Horkheimer or Marcuse, both of whom tried to formulate a positive social theory on the basis of a Hegelian concept of ‘reason’. Adorno was also much more remote from Marxism than his colleagues. In his inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt, ‘The actuality of philosophy’ (1931), he expounded a view of philosophy which claimed to be both ‘dialectical’ and ‘materialist’, but as Buck-Morss comments ‘…it was not dialectical materialism in any orthodox sense…throughout his life he differed fundamentally from Marx in that his philosophy never included a theory of political action’.[6] Moreover, unlike Horkheimer and Marcuse, who only gradually abandoned their (qualified) belief in the revolutionary potential of the working class, Adorno seems never to have given any serious attention to Marx’s economic analysis or his theory of class, and he rejected entirely the idea of a theory of history, or ‘science of history’, which is one of the fundamental elements in Marx’s thought. From his early contact with Lukács’s writings Adorno retained only ‘the negative level of Ideologiekritik, the critique of bourgeois class consciousness’,[7] not the programme of political action founded upon a Hegelian-Marxist interpretation of history.

Indeed, cultural criticism was to be Adorno’s principal contribution to critical theory, as became apparent initially in the work which he wrote with Horkheimer, published as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).[8] The principal theme of the book, formulated in the introduction, is the ‘self-destruction of the Enlightenment’—that is, of reason conceived as a negative, critical treatment of the facts— through the ‘false clarity’ achieved in scientific thought and the positivist philosophy of science. This modern, scientific consciousness is held to be the main source of the cultural decline as a result of which humanity ‘instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’. Hence, in the first part of the book the criticism of positivism is pursued, and this is now linked with a criticism of science and technology that foreshadows the later treatment of them as ‘ideologies’ which make possible and help to constitute new forms of domination. The contrast with scientific thought is provided by art, which ‘as an expression of totality…lays claim to the dignity of the absolute’ (op. cit., p. 19). The second major essay in the book is devoted to a subject which became one of the chief preoccupations of the Frankfurt School, namely the ‘culture industry’, or ‘enlightenment as mass deception’. The argument deployed here is not that of Marx, according to which ‘the ruling ideas in every age are the ideas of the ruling class’ and modern technology might be regarded as having increased the effectiveness with which these ideas are implanted in society at large (a hypothesis to be tested by empirical studies), but rather that technology and a technological consciousness have themselves produced a new phenomenon in the shape of a uniform and debased ‘mass culture’ which aborts and silences criticism. Adornos’ conception of this mass culture was a striking contrast with the view of Benjamin, whose work had profoundly influenced his aesthetic theory at an earlier stage; for Benjamin considered that ‘mechanical reproduction’ had revolutionary implications inasmuch as it tended to destroy the elitist ‘aura’ of art and led to a ‘tremendous shattering of tradition’. The root of the disagreement between Adorno and Benjamin which developed in the 1930s was political, as Buck-Morss has shown,[9] for under Brecht’s influence Benjamin ‘expressed solidarity with the working class (and with the Communist Party) by affirming the concept of a collective revolutionary subject’, a concept which Adorno, then and later, rejected entirely.

The overriding concern of the Frankfurt School with cultural phenomena—that is, with the manifestations and products of human consciousness—also involved a particular interest in the individual as a centre of thought and action, and in psychology, especially in the form of psychoanalysis. Horkheimer, according to Jay, derived from his early studies of Kant a ‘sensitivity to the importance of individuality, as a value never to be submerged entirely under the demands of the totality’, and he ‘gave qualified praise to the emphasis upon the individual in the work of both Dilthey and Nietzsche’.[10] More generally, Horkheimer was sympathetic to some aspects of Lebensphilosophie, as it was called in Germany, a form of what became widely known later as existentialism, which was taking shape at this time notably in the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, with an equally strong emphasis on the individual. There is also a marked affinity with the earlier preoccupation of Max Weber with the fate of the individual in modern capitalist society;[11] but it is not apparent that Horkheimer or other members of the school paid any detailed attention to Weber’s work before the 1960s, though they were undoubtedly influenced by it.[12]

Horkheimer also argued, in an essay on history and psychology published in the first issue of the Institute’s journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, that individual psychology was of great importance for the understanding of history,[13] and in the same issue another essay, by Erich Fromm.[14] set out to establish a relation between psychoanalysis and Marxism by extending Freud’s explanations in terms of the history of the individual to include the class location of the family and the histor...