Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School (RLE Social Theory)

A Marxist Perspective

Phil Slater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000155884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

The term 'Frankfurt School' is used widely, but sometimes loosely, to describe both a group of intellectuals and a specific social theory. Focusing on the formative and most radical years of the Frankfurt School, during the 1930s, this study concentrates on the Frankfurt School's most original contributions made to the work on a 'critical theory of society' by the philosophers Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, the psychologist Erich Fromm, and the aesthetician Theodor W. Adorno.

Phil Slater traces the extent, and ultimate limits, of the Frankfurt School's professed relation to the Marxian critique of political economy. In considering the extent of the relation to revolutionary praxis, he discusses the socio-economic and political history of Weimar Germany in its descent into fascism, and considers the work of such people as Karl Korsch, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, which directs a great deal of critical light on the Frankfurt School.

While pinpointing the ultimate limitations of the Frankfurt School's frame of reference, Phil Slater also looks at the role their work played (largely against their wishes) in the emergence of the student anti-authoritarian movement in the 1960s. He shows that, in particular, the analysis of psychic and cultural manipulation was central to the young rebels' theoretical armour, but that even here, the lack of economic class analysis seriously restricts the critical edge of the Frankfurt School's theory. His conclusion is that the only way forward is to rescue the most radical roots of the Frankfurt School's work, and to recast these in the context of a practical theory of economic and political emancipation.

1 The historical background of the Frankfurt School

Section One: The pre-Horkheimer tradition of the Institute

1 The founding of the Institute

The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, the home of what later came to be known as the ‘Frankfurt School’, was founded in 1923 and officially opened in June of 1924.¹ The chief architects behind this creation of what was, in those days, a unique institute, were Felix Weil (born 1898), Friedrich Pollock (1894–1970), and Max Horkheimer, later Director of the Institute. These colleagues of the early 1920s showed a mutual interest in this ill-defined field, and Weil, together with his father, Hermann Weil (a big-business man), donated the necessary funds for establishing the relevant buildings and maintaining its paid staff.

In September 1922, Felix Weil produced a ‘Memorandum on the Creation of an Institute for Social Research’,² addressed to the Curator of Frankfurt University; in this document, which is the first evidence of a conception in the vein of what later became famous as the ‘Frankfurt School’, Weil centralised, as the proposed institute’s objective, ‘knowledge and understanding of social life in its totality’, from the economic base to the institutional and ideational superstructure. Weil’s examples of pressing problems (revolution, party-organisation, immiseration, etc.) made it clear that the concern was historical materialist,³ but Weil did not fail to stress that the Institute’s work would proceed ‘independently of party-political considerations’.⁴ As it turned out, the assurance was honoured: never, not even after Horkheimer’s appointment in 1930, did the Institute form organisational ties with any political party.

At the time of the Institute’s foundation, neither Weil, Horkheimer, nor Pollock qualified for a professorship, and since the statutes demanded that the Director of the Institute be a professor of the University of Frankfurt, the three young intellectuals had no chance of actually taking control of the new institution. However, Weil was in a position to promote an acceptable candidate, which he did before actually handing over the grant. But although Weil’s suggestion, Kurt Albert Gerlach, was acceptable to the University, Gerlach died suddenly, and a new candidate had to be found. Weil’s negotiations with Gustav Mayer came to nothing, largely because of ideological differences, and Weil turned to Carl Grünberg, the Austro-Marxist historian of international repute. Agreement was reached among all parties concerned,⁵ and Grünberg (1861–1940) became the Institute’s first Director, also assuming a Chair in Economics and Social Science at Frankfurt University, in late 1923.

2 Grünberg’s directorship

Grünberg’s inaugural lecture made the Institute’s sympathy with Marxism explicit. The Director avowed himself an opponent of the prevailing socio-economic order, and freely admitted that he belonged to the ‘adherents of Marxism’.⁶ He continued that this position would dictate the method, stressing that this was not to be a purely personal matter, but institutional policy: ‘the method taught as the key to solving our problems will be the Marxist method’.⁷ Basic differences in method and ideology, Grünberg went on, would not be tolerated among his team, since such differences led either to wishy-washy compromises or else to violent disruptions. By contrast, the Institute would apply a uniform method: Grünberg emphasises the point by the expression ‘dictatorship of the Director’.⁸

However, this hard line need not be taken too seriously. Weil has since explained that in looking over Grünberg’s draft for this lecture, he (that is, Weil) had added certain formulations so as to dispel any idea that Grünberg was a mere puppet.⁹ Weil’s claim can be accepted at face-value, particularly if one compares Grünberg’s interests and goals on the one hand, and the actual work of the Institute during his directorship, on the other: while the method employed in the Institute certainly was Marxist, as Grünberg had stated it would be, the interpretation of the Marxist method often went far beyond anything Grünberg himself envisaged. But this contention requires a detailed look at the latter’s inaugural lecture.

Grünberg’s lecture was certainly provocatively left-wing; he explicated his Marxism not only by referring to the famous thesis of base and superstructure, but, in addition, by paraphrasing the equally famous opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto:

And just as the historical materialist interpretation of history views all social phenomena as reflexes of economic life in its respective historical form, so that, in the last instance, ‘the production-process of material life determines the social’, political and intellectual life-processes,’ so also all history (apart from primitive history) reveals itself as a procession of class-struggles.¹⁰

However, like Weil, Grünberg did not neglect to stress that all reference to Marxism was to be understood ‘not in a party-political sense, but strictly in a scientific sense’.¹¹

But far more significant is the fact that much of Weil’s memorandum is, in Grünberg’s lecture, missing, or at least underemphasised. Whereas Weil had spoken of social life ‘in its totality’, Grünberg was preoccupied with the more tangible aspects of this totality: ‘above all, the study and presentation of the working-class movement’, and ‘the pursuit of basic socio-political questions’. Superstructural problems (ideology, even class-consciousness) are not listed with anything like the same clarity; instead, Grünberg merely concludes, in a vague manner, with the need for a ‘genetic illumination of social theories, both socialist and otherwise’.¹² Ideology-critique, which Weil had implicitly thematised, and which was to be the corner-stone of the Institute’s work under Horkheimer, had no great significance for Grünberg.

Although Grünberg did state that the production-process was the ultimate determinant of the ideational superstructure, he did not outline any need for a closer analysis of the complex mediations in this process. The lack of concern with the psychological dimension in particular marks a basic difference between Grünberg and Horkheimer, as will be shown below. Another crucial difference is the respective attitudes to philosophy; while Grünberg is correct to deny that historical materialism is a philosophy or metaphysic,¹³ he fails to specify the dialectical relation between philosophy and scientific socialism. Instead, he speaks, far too generally and far too abstractly, of a ‘fertilisation’ of the Institute’s work by philosophy, putting the role of this discipline on a par with the equally vague ‘relation’ to history and jurisprudence.¹⁴

Another qualifying feature of Grünberg’s ‘Marxism’ is his lack of emphasis on the theory-praxis nexus. His archival and chronicling work, together with his book reviews, do, it is true, ensure a certain topicality, but he does not acknowledge the need to relate actively to any critical social praxis. Grünberg repeats the assurance that his team will keep their distance from party politics: the Institute will abstain from all ‘day-to-day politics’. And any impact that the Institute might have ‘will be, in both form and extent, none other than that which scientific work as a whole exercises’.¹⁵ The Marxian notion of scientific socialism as a class-weapon of the proletariat plays no role in Grünberg’s of the intellectual’s task.

Yet, within the context of the lecture as a whole, Grünberg’s orthodox academic stance is quite logical: he speaks of the present-day transition from capitalism to socialism as a scientifically verifiable, and irrefutable ‘fact’.¹⁶ Given this premise, ‘Marxist’ science can indeed rest content with the task of clarifying and registering such ‘facts’, since this economistic mechanism ignores the very aspect of society which Grünberg earlier designated as the key to history: namely, class-struggle. Thus, while Grünberg’s ‘Marxism’ is not altogether lacking in coherence, neither is his overall position free of internal contradictions. Weil has since maintained¹⁷ that these questionable aspects of the first Director’s ‘Marxism’ were expedients of the Institute’s inauguration, ensuring academic recognition for it. Be that as it may, the fact remains that the Institute never fulfilled a conscious agitational role. The conception of the theory-praxis nexus was, under Horkheimer, raised to a far higher, more differentiated level; yet the Frankfurt School’s actual productions (with the exception of Marcuse’s work since the late 1960s) fell far behind their own conception. Critical social praxis was not a concretised constituent of their ‘critical theory of society’.

3 The Institute’s work in the 1920s

The work of the Institute under Grünberg’s directorship (which in the late 1920s, due to ill-health, was only nominal) shows, first, that Grünberg’s empirical interests did play an important role, but also, second, that much of the Institute’s work went beyond the Director’s theoretical horizon, and worked in the spirit of Weil’s earlier memorandum. In 1929, Weil produced another memorandum,¹⁸ this time outlining the Institute’s progress so far (and, thus, implicitly outlining the tradition that any new Director would have to satisfy). Six major departments of study were listed: first, historical materialism, and the philosophical basis of Marxism; second, theoretical political economy; third, problems of planned economy; fourth, the position of the proletariat; fifth, sociology; sixth, the history of social doctrines and parties. Most significant of all is the order: in first place stands the question of the relation of scientific socialism to philosophy, a question fundamental to the Frankfurt School’s critique of ideology.

The first of the Institute’s major publications was Henryk Grossmann’s The Law of Accumulation and Collapse in the Capitalist System,¹⁹ a good illustration of the high theoretical level that the Institute was capable of. Grossmann (1881–1950) argues that the Marxian critique of political economy cannot be taken for granted, but is, rather, a highly complex method which itself requires serious consideration if it is to be appropriated and continued. Grossmann stresses that Marx has recourse to the power of abstraction:

The object of analysis is the concrete, empirically given world of appearances. But this world is too complicated to be grasped directly. We can approach it only by stages. To this end, we make numerous simplifying presuppositions, so as to be able to recognise the object under analysis in its essential nature.²⁰

But these characteristics, achieved via a process of abstraction and simplification, are not to be taken as the definitive results of the Marxian analysis; rather they are a stage in the dialectical presentation of capitalist economy. As the presentation unfolds, each simplification is revised by an ongoing reference to the complexities of socioeconomic life; what was neglected is now brought into consideration, and in this way, Grossmann argues, the theory gradually comes to express that reality ‘adequately’.²¹

Grossmann’s concern over Marx’s method is due to the confusion surrounding the law of the falling rate of profit. Grossmann maintains that this confusion is the result precisely of a failure to distinguish the stage-by-stage method of presentation employed by Marx. Thus, Grossmann attempts to reveal not just the law itself, but also, and of necessity, the force of the law: what makes this law into a ‘law’ in the first place, and how does a ‘law’ operate? Marx, it may be recalled, outlined ‘The Law as such’, followed by ‘Counteracting Influences’, and then revealed the dialectical conflict of all the factors involved; this constitutes his ‘Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law’.²² Marx himself qualifies the ‘law’ as follows:

… the same influences ...