Lecture 8: The Dialectic Of Enlightenment (Cont) & Habermas and His Prdecessors

4.           In this perspective, the process of humanity’s separation from nature and the latter’s subordination as a mere object of appropriation signifies both a distortion of human cognitive interests exclusively towards domination and a repression of the natural in man. This is the paradox of the civilisatory process. In this development, the supposed goal— a fully civilised humanity—becomes a mere means and is distorted and brutalised by the instrument—reason—that is supposedly the means of liberation. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the tragic mistake is the identification of the subject with a distorted rational faculty of mere calculation and the dissolution of all phenomena into the quantitative calculus of this faculty. “Identity thinking” reduces everything alien to its own categories and thereby eliminates all otherness and difference. A qualitatively different world is transformed into one homogenous with the categories of reason. The human attempt to preserve itself through increasingly knowledge requires an ascetic suspension of appetites and the elimination of the other, of the non-identical. Latent in this idea of self –preservation is the idea of the subjectivity as a unified ratio. Increasing knowledge is identified with unified rationality in terms of increasing coherence, systematisation and logic. By this means, knowledge becomes autonomous, exclusively identified with a single faculty but increasingly detached from the interests and other needs of the corporeal, natural subject. The result is that the development of civilisation is a history not of liberation but of increasingly domination of self, nature and others.

5.           The first social expression of this inversion of ends and means is the primitive division of labour. The categories of logic arose as ideal expressions of the original social relations of domination. The order and hierarchy of concepts reflect the primitive social hierarchy. These ideal categories serve as instruments of man’s attempt to report, order and explain the surrounding environment in the interests of his own self-preservation. While these categories were only a means, they preserved and exemplified the irrational structure of domination. When thinking is understood as mere self-identification, it is reduced to emptiness and formalism. A specific mode of thought has been reified in just the same way that the bourgeois commodity form expresses the permanent quest for equivalence. All aspects of the external world outside the subject and nature within are reduced to the thinking activity and terms of the subject, which becomes blind to its own particularity and constructed character. It also marginalised the other more reflective dimension of rationality. For abstract rationality, the qualitative uniqueness of each particular phenomenon and situation is rendered imperceptible and inexpressible. Abstract rationality treats every unique historical situation as a repetition of what has already occurred. The single and unique is obliterated by subordination to the lawfulness that allows them to be subsumed by rational thought. This ideal of lawfulness is a perpetuation of the ancient myth of eternal recurrence, which naturalises the present as an eternal order.

6.           The radical meaning of this analysis is revealed in the equation of the whole civilisatory process with the concept of enlightenment. Here the concept of enlightenment is understood not as the antithesis of myth but as a perpetuation of the innermost logic of the latter. On this view, myth is originally nothing but the first version of enlightenment. It is product of the human need to subordinate nature to its own categories of regularity, order and explanation.  Myth is the first instalment a process of evolving enlightenment in which every worldview will have to submit itself to more sophisticated cultural interpretations of rationality. On this reading, myth is a form of enlightenment that cannot withstand its own ongoing enhancement. The program of enlightenment is thus the ongoing destruction of the rational pretensions of all previous forms of social explanation-magic, myth, and religion. However, this program of critical destruction of the past forms of rational explanation is ultimately nihilistic. It eventually annihilates precisely those concepts, on which the Enlightenment had based itself and for which it had struggled. These values--truth, reason, freedom and justice—also eventually succumb to the new more rigorous standards of contemporary scientific analysis. Under critical analysis these values are revealed as illusions, as myths, which can now be demoted to the level of magic. Whereas the enlightenment believed reason to be an anthropological constant and truth “correspondence” to an existing objective structure of the world, contemporary analysis empties out the idea of a “rational faculty” to reveal nothing but a variable cultural construct without substantive content, the product of a contingent and idiosyncratic historical odyssey, whereas “truth” is merely a property of sentences with no direct purchase on the world; freedom and justice are value concepts that have no legitimate place in a scientific worldview. This is the dialectic of enlightenment. Each new form of enlightenment destroys its predecessor and discards it as just another myth. However, the most modern variant of enlightenment--scientific positivism-- attempts to exempt itself from the fate of all its predecessors. On its view scientific method is immune from this fate of perpetual self-critique. As the most recent philosophical reading of the method of science positivism bases itself on “facts’ but is unwilling to enquire into the ground or the basis of those facts. In methodologically excluding such questions, it ignores its own historical pre-conditions and eternalises the existing social world as the eternal or natural substratum of all experience. This invests existing social power with the same absolute status that was once claimed by the old metaphysical truths. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the desire to avoid critical examination is symptomatic of the ideological limitation and weakness of positivism. It signifies that this most scientific version of enlightenment has its own metaphysical bias. This denial of self-reflectivity is, for Horkheimer and Adorno, the perpetuation of myth. To absolutise the contemporary version of reason and to equate it with the adoption of quantitative, mathematical procedures is to convert means into ends and to lose sight of a rationality that is anything more than mere calculation.

7.           What is the real purpose of this critique of civilisation as a process of constant critical enlightenments? On one level, this was ideology critique. The authors critique the modern faith in progress and especially its failure to relativise its own claim to rationality. But, on another level, it does not stop at mere ideology critique. Here is the attempt to diagnose what the authors consider to be a new modern form of domination, characterised by new degrees of alienation, depersonalisation and administrative repression. Here the authors offer a crucial departure from the critical theory formulated by Horkheimer in the 1930’s. They depict a society no longer in crisis and no longer generating its own immanent forces of resistance. This society had overcome the threatened economic collapse by political, administrative cultural means. The “totally administered society”, a society where economic, political and cultural power and authority have been fused into a unified system, had been able to expunge all historical subjectivity surplus to the requirements of maintaining profitable, capitalist reproduction. Here again we have the paradoxical inversion of means and ends. Historical subjectivity, supposedly the highest achievement of the process of civilisation, is negated in favour of the functional requirements of the totally administered society.

9.         With the control and manipulation of even the major social bearer of resistance to bourgeois society, with the pacification of the working class through incremental improvements in living standards and a stupefying mass culture, all critical momentum is lost and critique survives only in the exceptional isolated individual who have not surrendered their critical faculties to the illusion of a integrated, rational organization. This gloomy picture of a totally administered society typified by an underlying conformity and absence of social resistance has often led to the authors being accused of cultural aristocratism and pessimism. Certainly Dialectic of Enlightenment does almost invite misinterpretation. While Horkheimer and Adorno censure all philosophy of history, they simultaneously seem to construct one of their own, only theirs’ is in reverse.  Rather than viewing history as a progressive process, they construct a grand narrative of disasters, from “the sling shot to the atom bomb” as Adorno was to characterise it later, with the contemporary victory of an especially sophisticated instrumental rationality and overly refined domination of containment. But this is not the simple inconsistency it might at first appear. At various points, the authors do speak about missed historical opportunities for emancipation. However, these opportunities were bungled and the fully administered society seems devised to kill subjective resistance before it can even emerge. The ambiguity in Horkheimer and Adorno’s position make it hard to divine just where they stand. They consciously employ extreme formulations and striking contradictory images to redouble critical energies and to illuminate what they perceive to be the real truth behind the appearance of progress. Deprived of a concrete social bearer of critique, these authors make a strategic withdrawal to philosophy and even art. Horkheimer withdraws from running the Institute after its return to Germany and becomes more politically conservative.  The later Adorno will resort to a more aesthetic mode of argumentation and relying less on the categories and coherence of philosophical theory, which, according to him, has now become contaminated by instrumental reason and the logic of domination. While the later Adorno as Head of the Institute was heavily engaged in a range of projects, overseeing empirical studies and becoming a major public intellectual, he did not fundamentally re-evaluate his essentially negative view of modernity even while he realised that the liberal democracy being created in Germany was not identical to the other totalitarian forms. 

Habermas (1929- ) and his Predecessors.

1.  Today Habermas is Germany’s most internationally recognised philosopher. He was born with a cleft pallet and this left him with a speech impediment that, on his own account, made him especially sensitive to the predicament of the marginalised and outsider. He was born in Dusseldorf and came from a politically conformist, middle class family; his father was a minor bureaucrat. He grew up in the period of National Socialism and reckoning with this past has also been a decisive determinant of his theoretical and public life. Much of his work has concerned the question of democratisation and the establishment of a liberal democratic society in Germany. After the war he had a typical education in a largely unreconstructed Germany university system at Göttingen, Zurich and Bonn. His first publication was a critique of Heidegger after he republished his 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics in 1953 without retracting the passage where he spoke of “the inner truth and greatness of the Nazis movement” other than to note that this “greatness” had denoted “the encounter between global technology and modern man”. Up to this point Habermas said he had been living in Heidegger’s philosophy so this insight into Heidegger’s Nazis commitments was a great shock. His critique came to the attention of Adorno who offered a position as his assistant in 1956.

2. So from his earliest work Habermas has always been a very engaged leftist intellectual. He has always been willing to enter public debates in Germany over contemporary political and cultural issues like educational reform in the fifties, the political role of student protest in the sixties, the historians dispute in the eighties and the resurgence of anti-foreign neo-Fascism in the wake of German reunification, the Iraq War and the resulting Euro-American Foreign policy disputes and more recently, the fate of the EU where he has been a major critic of Merkel’s austerity policy in relation to Greece and the other debtor nations. Much of his participation in public discussion was concerned with efforts to ensure the embedding of a post war healthy liberal democratic society and its further democratisation. This stance as an engaged public intellectual is very much in conformity with his understanding of critical theory as a practically motivated cultural self-reflection. He believed that the earlier generation of the Frankfurt School after their return to Germany had retreated too far into a traditional philosophical mode of speculation and detached themselves from a practical engagement with the contradictions of post-war German society. Ironically, he was promoted to Horkheimer's chair at Frankfurt in the early sixties despite the fact that Horkheimer has considered him too radical. From this time, he became the most prominent of the second generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. Towards the end of the sixties at the height of the Student Movement he moved from the University of Frankfurt to head the Max Planck Research Institute at Starnberg before returning to Frankfurt in the early eighties as the Professor of Sociology and Philosophy. He remained there until retirement in the mid 90’s but has continued to write and teach in the United States. Amongst his many awards, in 2004 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize for his lifetime contribution to scholarship and public debate.

3. Habermas’ version of critical theory emerges from a careful critique of what he takes to be the shortcomings of his theoretical predecessors. But most characteristic of his thinking is the effort to preserve what he thinks is valuable in the tradition from which he emerged and a boundless capacity to reach beyond it to other sources/traditions for theoretical inspiration. We can see clear examples of both of these tendencies when we consider the fundamental theoretical resources that go into his critical theory. In this respect I will briefly look at his critique of Marx, Horkheimer and Adorno and his appropriation of the public sphere from the liberal democratic tradition.

4. Habermas’ critique of Marx permeates the early and middle phase of his work from Theory and Praxis (1963), Towards a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism (1976) (in English) Communication and the Evolution of Society and Theory of Communicative Interaction Vol 1(1981). Habermas critiques the Marxian understanding of history and its underlying paradigm of work. As we have seen, Marx had conceived history as an emancipatory process of human self-constitution through labour. Social labour acts as a constant revolutionising force enhancing productive forces and creating an accumulating reservoir of new capacities, needs, skills and aspirations; it therefore functions as the decisive learning process whereby human subjects simultaneously renew and transform their material conditions in such a way as to open up ever-new possibilities. Work served Marx as a model for conceiving the self-constitution of the species and as the fundamental dimension in which human progress accrues.

5. Habermas raises a whole range of empirical objections to Marx's optimistic historical scenario. Chief amongst these are flaws in his account the dynamics of 19th century capitalism. Marx views the laws of motion of capitalist society as a closed system in which the superstructures were always dependent upon the immanent movement of the economy. But this inherent tendency was eventually nullified by the political struggle of the workers and the increasing intervention of the state. In the 20th century the balance turned from economics to politics. At the same time, science begins to play the role of the leading productive force. The development of large-scale industry that welds together research, science and technology into an interlocking system rendered inoperative the conditions, which had underpinned the Marxian labour theory of value. Science and research become an independent source of value overshadowing the labour power of the immediate producers. The spectacular explosion in the productivity of labour allowed capital to accommodate rising wages and increase the rate of surplus value. As a result, they were able to both ward of political challenge and decreasing profitability. Furthermore, Marx had believed that the advanced industrial organization of workers would bring about an aggressive form of class consciousness. However, massive structural changes also brought with it persuasive disqualification and deskilling. Higher living standards were offset by workers polarisation and the expected evolution of the working class as a unified conscious, historical subject never eventuated.

6. Habermas also points to basic theoretical problems in Marx's emancipatory account of history. Marx had simply equated the development of the productive forces with the workers cause of social emancipation. Habermas argued that this simple identification involved a confusion of two historical dialectics or rationalising processes, each of which had its own tempo, trajectory and logic. The first was the rationalisation of purposive-rational action. This concerned all those learning processes concerned with the growing mastery of nature and instrumental control. These need to be distinguished from another form of rationalisation at the level of communicative interaction. Habermas views this later form of rationalisation as another form of learning process that takes place on the level of social interaction, consensual regulation and moral insight. Rationalisation in the domain of communication removes restrictions on self-reflection and domination free communication and enhances the possibilities of socio-political emancipation. Marx's mistake had been to identify the progress in this domain most clearly manifest in the revolutionary bourgeois political institutions with the expansion of the productive forces.

 

Critical Theory Lecture 7: Horkheimer and the Frankfürt School

1. Horkheimer’s critical theory was formulated against the evaporation of the revolutionary hopes that had inspired Lukacs. He sees the economic collapse into world-wide depression, the rise of European Fascism and the failure of the socialist revolutionary parties as crucial moments in the determination of the further trajectory of critical theory. Horkheimer articulates the most radical explanation of the problem confronting radical politics. Already at an early stage he argued in a collection of aphorisms entitled Dawn and Decline Notes 1926-1931 that post-First World War economic and political developments had fractured the unity of the working class and decisively impaired its capacity for revolutionary praxis. This judgement was reinforced by early studies in 1929 conducted by Eric Fromm that revealed the strong authoritarian bias in the typical personality structures of the working class. This diagnosis drastically distinguishes Horkheimer from Lukacs. The latter has understood Marxist theory as the self-consciousness of the proletariat, which he, in turn, identified with the Communist Party. Horkheimer contests precisely this key idea of the unity of theory and praxis.

2. Horkheimer maintains that in the twenties a fundamental split has emerged in the working class dividing it into two distinct groups: the employed and the unemployed. The employed have relative security and a real stake in bourgeois society. They therefore were reluctant to endanger their own still tenuous position. These workers were organised, educated but lacked the essential motivation for revolutionary politics. The chronic unemployed, on the other hand, lived in conditions of utter hopelessness. They had an objective interest in radical social change but lacked the organization, education and class consciousness to press their demands with a theoretical understanding of the fundamental causes of their misery. This split signified a clear divorce between radical motivation and the capacities and qualities to actualise the revolution. At the same time, this split also impaired the proletariat’s ability to resist Fascism.

3. Horkheimer maintains that this sociological division of the working class is reflected politically in the organisational fragmentation between the reformist Social Democratic Party and a dogmatic, revolutionary German Communist Party dedicated to social revolution. The present strategies of these two parties were blocking the practical unification of the working class. He was especially critical of the Social Democrats; they represented the interests of the employed workers, appreciated the complexities of the real world but had become integrated into bourgeois politics and lost the will to radical change. In their acquiescence to bourgeois culture, they had abandoned revolutionary theory. In the early thirties, Horkheimer is more sympathetic to the Communist Party. They typically won the allegiance of the chronic unemployed. While they maintained a revolutionary stance, this was based more on blind conviction and the appeal to canonised texts than by realistic political analysis. While Horkheimer castigated the Social Democrats for their acceptance of reified social conditions, he was equally unwilling to condone the Communist’s dogmatic avoidance of contemporary empirical knowledge. This left the Communists isolated from the masses and with only restricted influence. Such unshakable conviction in revolution led to the passive acceptance of a worsening situation with only a vain hope that deteriorating circumstances would somehow generate a messianic change. The mutual critique and polemics between the parties merely divided the proletariat and condemned it to political impotence.

4. Horkheimer’s prognosis of this impasse was for a long educational process that would draw the two parts of the working class together. Naturally, this implies a fundamental change in the meaning and role of critical theory. It is interesting that Horkheimer concludes the inaugural lecture but stating that the guiding impulse of the institute would be the ‘inexhaustible will to unswervingly serve the truth’ BP&SS, p.14. It might seem strange that somebody who was so politically committed should see the task of the institute in such traditional terms. However, this is misleading. Horkheimer clearly does not view the quest for truth as requiring merely the desire for knowledge and academic detachment:

…the truth is advanced because the human beings who possess it stand by it unbendingly, apply it and carry it through, act according to it, and bring it to power against resistance…The process of cognition includes real historical will and action just as much as it does learning from experience and intellectual comprehension. The latter cannot progress without the former. BP&SS, p.193

Horkheimer goes on to maintain that critical theory is neither deeply rooted like totalitarian propaganda nor detached like the liberal intelligentsia. In this historical context, it must remain independent in relation to contemporary left politics. Because both existing working class parties had some justice, only by remaining detached could critical theory hope to have some influence and effect on both the Communists and the Social Democrats. Horkheimer’s strategy is to uphold an important role for theory in conditions of radical split in the workers movement. Horkheimer does not revoke the Marxian idea of the unity of theory and praxis. However, he also maintained that there was no pre-established harmony between the two. Critical theory is, for him, an aspect of the movement to change society. Materialism is not a doctrine about the ultimate structure of being but a practical theory principally concerned with changing definite social relations:

In the materialist conception…The intervention of reason in the processes whereby knowledge and its object are constituted…does not take place therefore in a purely intellectual world, but co-incides with the struggle for certain real ways of life. (Postscript, P245)

But Horkheimer does want to reinterpret the character of the theory/praxis unity. Rather than Lukacs’ simple identification of the theory with the historical agents consciousness, he wants to provide theory with a relative independence; this means that the theory/praxis unity is reconstituted as a dynamic unity of conflict between party activists, theorists and the masses. Horkheimer views the task of the critical theoretician to ‘reduce the tension’ between his own insight and that of oppressed humanity’ (CTp.221) but this mediation is not equated with renouncing independence. As he puts it, “mind is liberal’ but it also cannot cut loose from society. Horkheimer repudiates the detachment from all classes that is an essential mark of the intelligentsia and traditionally a sign of its superiority. In crisis times like those of the late 30’s this formalist understanding of mind was a distorting indulgence that could not be afforded. Horkheimer asserts that in such times truth may seek refuge in small groups of admirable men (CT p. 237) but that such truth can still play a decisive role at critical moments (CT p. 241). Of course, we can say that the 1930’s were a very difficult time for the leftist intellectual and there were no easy options. Horkheimer had to emigrate from Germany and only narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo.  Of the options available, Horkheimer probably chose the best when one compares his intellectual fate to that of Lukacs.  But of course there were also costs. The immediate problem that emerges with even this degree of disengagement from the workers was to distance theory from immediate politics. Horkheimer and Adorno retreated into philosophy. The insulation of their theory from those it aspired to communicate with may have been inevitable in the difficult historical conditions of these years. During the 30’s Horkheimer was clearly convinced that Marxist theory had been confirmed by developments in bourgeois society (On the Problem of Truth, p.198), that the conditions for a truly rational society were already at hand and that, despite certain setbacks in practice the theorist was entitled to hold obstinately to the basic structure of the theory (Truth, p.200).

5. For Horkheimer, the need to revise the concept of critical theory is not confined to his analysis of the divided working class politics of the early 1930’s. More fundamentally, the crisis in critical theory is related to a more general crisis of bourgeois culture that he interpreted, first of all, as a crisis of scientific rationality. For him, science is a social practice with a social function; it is socially conditioned in its direction and scope. The object of science, scientific interests as well as scientific method all change in history. Science is also a real factor in social change as a productive force but it can also be ideological. However, this is not to say that evaluation of the social utility of science is the same as the evaluation of its truth. Although he wants to argue that science is a historically conditioned activity, he still wants to make a claim for its truth-value:

…only that theory is true which can grasp the historical process so deeply that it is possible to develop from it the closest approximation to the structure and tendency of social life in the various spheres of culture. It too is no exception to the rule that it is conditioned like every thought and every intellectual content, but the circumstance that it corresponds to a specific social class and is tied up with the horizon and the interests of certain social groups does not in any way change the fact that it is also valid for the others who deny and suppress its truth and must nevertheless experience it for themselves. BPSS, p. 194

 For Horkheimer, the crisis of science has two levels (a) The utilisation of science—the orthodox contradiction between productive forces and relations of production (b) In respect to truth—there is both a legitimation crisis and an organisational crisis. Concentrating on the legitimation crisis, he argues there is a growing scepticism in regard to scientific rationality. This is the outcome, however, of the internal crisis of science. In this early phase, he believed that physics had overcome its crisis in the last decades through a shift from the classical paradigm to relativity theory and indeterminancy. In regard to the social theory, Horkheimer argues that contemporary scientific rationality is abstract, ahistorical and individual. Positivism asserts both a pure facticity—a realm of unambiguous facts and a clear distinction between facts and norms, facts and values.  Phenomena are viewed in abstraction and the totality of historical movement, or immanent historical dynamics is methodologically ignored. Science cannot justify its own procedures and methods. Science does not reflect on the social problem of its own value choices and research direction. In regard to social science, Horkheimer maintains that science has lost its social relevance and philosophical irrationalism has arisen to challenge it. The new metaphysics from Nietzsche to Heidegger abandons the idea of truth, of saying something true about reality in favour of viewing all the great philosophical systems of the past as mere expressions of psychological or cultural needs. Horkheimer’s position is that both orthodox science and the new metaphysics have completely justified critiques of one another. The result, however, is the mass suspicion of contemporary scientific knowledge and a complete fracture and narrowing of what knowledge and rationality should be.

6. The interpretation of the crisis of the organization of science is less elaborated but its outlines are fairly clear.  (a) Research becomes arbitrarily specialised in unrelated ways. Each discipline treats its field as a separate reality and its conceptualisation is completely fetishised without ensuring that this is well founded (economics, psychology). (b) Research is increasingly funded and directed by corporate interests, which are largely able to define the direction of research and the uses made of it.

7. Horkheimer views his own critical theory as a response to the crisis of contemporary scientific rationality as well as what he refers to as an existential judgment on the whole bourgeois society. It reveals the shortcomings of both bourgeois science and the new metaphysics and also allows some understanding of the cognitive obstacles to working class consciousness, as at least part of an explanation of its capitulation to contemporary authoritarian state capitalism. Clearly what is most striking in this analysis is the topic itself. That Horkheimer offers a critique of bourgeois rationality already demonstrate a shift from the issues—primarily economic and political that had formerly occupied Marxists.  Traditionally, Marxists had concentrated on contradictions within the economic reproduction of bourgeois society and viewed culture merely as a superstructural phenomenon. But Horkheimer inverts these priorities to focus on the crisis of science and rationality.

Dialectic of Enlightenment

1.         Although Horkheimer’s first version of critical theory articulated a new more independent role for theory itself, mediating between the masses and the party avante guard, this concept could not be sustained after the victory of Fascism, the collapse of working class resistance in Europe and in the face of doubts that soon emerged about the character of the socialist society emerging in the Soviet Union. The posited addressee of the theory had been defeated, the posited unity of theory and praxis was broken, and the theory’s reception is now reduced to those few isolated survivors who, like themselves, had managed to find a way into emigration. We have already seen that Horkheimer’s version of critical theory shifts the emphasis to culture and focuses its attack on the crisis of scientific rationality as a whole. However, despite this emphasis, Horkheimer was still initially committed to a Marxist theory of historical progress. By the 1940’s when Horkheimer and his colleagues had to emigrate to the US to save themselves from Fascism and then began to understand the magnitude of the crimes against the Jews and other denationalised peoples as well as the horrific destructive potential of the new atomic weapons, the concept of progress itself will become the aim of an explicit critical assault. The underlying idea here, it that the critique of commodity reification which was the object Marxist critical political economy did not delve sufficiently deeply to capture the real source of the crisis. In this respect, Horkheimer was influenced by his increasing closeness to Theodor W Adorno, who, in this respect, had been heavily influenced by his friend Walter Benjamin. Unfortunately in this course we do not have the time to consider his or Adorno’s early ideas independently. However, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote together, was viewed by both as ‘a single philosophy’ that expresses both a more critical attitude to the very idea of historical progress and the need for critical theory to become even more precious about its own independence.

2.          The Dialectic of Enlightenment was Adorno and Horkheimer’s response to the historical catastrophe of Fascism and its accompanying historical reversals. This entails not only developments in Soviet Russian under Stalin but also the direction of Roosevelt’s New Deal US, where the new regulative role of state control was combined with the beginning of a consumer culture as the United States took over from Britain as the greatest economic power in the world. These developments seemed to foreshadow the further incorporate the worker into a totally administered society. Whereas traditionally Marxists had argued for an objective notion of historical progress, even while they spoke about its uneven or alienated character, Adorno and Horkheimer now subjected the idea of progress to a fundamental critique. If the totality of bourgeois society no longer immanently generates those social forces aspiring to a new social arrangement, then the progressive character both of the society and of history as a whole is put in question. Furthermore, the critique of progress is now intimately bound up with an exposure of the totalitarian tendencies of the modern social form, which appeared to have attained a new level of complete administration and manipulation. 

3.         Dialectic of Enlightenment is an all-encompassing cultural critique that turns its attention to Western civilisation as a whole. If this civilisation fails to achieve the real social improvement of which it was objectively capable, then perhaps the fault lies not merely in its contemporary form but deeper in the very project of civilisation itself. The idea of Enlightenment as rational progress is declared a myth with the myth of progress being set against the reality of its own concrete irrational history. The analysis works through binding together allegedly antithetical conceptual pair like progress/regress, enlightenment/myth, reason/barbarism, science/myth to reveal the fault lines that expose the ideology of progress to the critical truth underlying it.

4.  The central thesis is an analysis and critique of the idea of reason as enlightenment. Even Lukacs had assumed that the human relation to nature unfolded in history as an emancipatory dynamic of humanisation and growing human mastery over nature. In this narrative, reification is a specific but only temporary configuration of alienation in which the commodity form has assumed the appearance of an independent and autonomous world of social and economic relations operating according to its independent laws and values. Yet, for him, this is a contradictory development insofar as it is also the bearer of the objective forces in the shape of class struggle that will eliminate the commodity as the principal form of socio-economic organisation. Horkheimer and Adorno now broaden the concept of reification into the new concept of instrumental reason. Commodification plays a crucial role in the universalisation of domination because it exemplifies a mode of identity thinking that increasing permeates the whole of bourgeois society. The disastrous weakness of this thinking is that it works in terms of quantitative equivalence and thus expunges all marks of quality, difference and self-reflexivity. However, in this new configuration commodity fetishism is only one configuration of the much more encompassing process of instrumentalisation that begins with the original division of labour and the quest for self-preservation though the mastery of nature. Rather than an index of the process of historical self-humanisation, instrumental reason exemplifies the increasing civilisatory need for domination, sublimation and repression. In other words, the increasing mastery of nature has been gained a the cost of increasing control of inner nature, the disciplining and self deprivation of the domination of others; the corollary of a more rationalised nature is the more sophisticated and complete contemporary shape of societal domination. Our authors here postulate a clear nexus between the development of civilisatory rationality and various forms or domination both barbaric and subtle: as violent as a Gestapo interrogation and as gentle as the latest popular crooner.

Critical Theory Lecture 5: (cont) Theory and Praxis and Socialism in the Second Version of Critical Theory & Lecture 6: Background To the Frankfurt School

Theory and Praxis and Socialism in the Second Version of Critical Theory

14. In discussing the E and P Manuscripts it was pointed out that Marx lacked a practical strategy for the working class. He nominates it as the class that bears all the burdens of society without enjoying any of its advantages. The alienation experienced by the proletariat gives it the practical motive to overthrow bourgeois society and abolish class rule. But it is unclear from this scenario how this transformation of the proletariat is to come about. How is a pauperised, uneducated mass of deprived workers to become self-conscious revolutionary subjects?

15. The change in Marx's views on this question - the growing concreteness of his conception of the working class and of his notion of socialism is nowhere as dramatic as the other theoretical changes I have returned to in this second version of critical theory. At various points in the German Ideology Marx simply repeats the view of the proletariat I have outlined from the Paris Manuscripts. However by the time of the Poverty of Philosophy Marx has begun to re-evaluate the role of workers combinations or trade unions in such a way as to construct a long-range strategy towards workers revolution. In short, the trade unions initiate the process of transforming the workers from a class in itself into a class for itself. From atomisation, disunity, competition and lack of knowledge of their own situation, trade union activity results in collective organization, unity and growing conscious recognition of its own position. Unions cannot alter the iron law of wages that keep the workers at a subsistence level. However, the common experience of struggle raises their consciousness against the whole capitalist system. At this time, Marx believed that the workers derived no economic gain from union organization. But he argued that from the perspective of a growing political self-consciousness, the unions were indispensable in the necessary process of the workers self-education. Trade unions express the fact that in the capitalist society the worker is not tied to any set of given relations. This divorce of the worker from his/her trade, which had formerly determined his/her social position and life possibilities, constitutes a liberating moment in capitalist production. The worker is formally free from his/her productive activity and union organization and agitation expresses the fluid framework of this arrangement.

16. In keeping with this new developing practical realism in respect to strategy, Marx's concept of socialism is also slowly modified. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx appears to reject the earlier view that socialism involved a realised identity or unification between the individual and society. Socialism now signifies an institutional structure in which the material needs of the population will be provided for on the model of a factory. In this new conception, planning appears to play a major role:

"Society as a whole has this in common with the interior of a workshop, that it too has its division of labour. If one took as a model the division of labour in a modern workshop, in order to apply it to the whole society, the society best organised for the production of wealth would undoubtedly be that which had a single chief employer, distributing tasks to the different members of the community according to a previously fixed rule. But this is by no means the case. "(Vol 6, p184).

Although society is divided into small productive units, all economic decisions are to be made by the general will of the associated producers. Use will be determined not by necessary labour costs but by social need. This emphasis on planning is naturally tied to a radical reinterpretation of the idea of a division of labour. Despite other formulations, Marx retains division of labour but argues workers develop many-sided abilities and are confronted with work simplified by technology. 

Lecture 6: Background to the Frankfurt School

1. Before we leave the Marxian version of critical theory, I want to say a few more words about the direction of Marx’s own theoretical development and specifically of the shape of his later critical theory. I have argued that although his thought went through a number of phases, a conception of critical theory remains constant. We have seen that the concept of critique originally pertains to the idea of a judgment made in relation to the resolution of a crisis. Marx’s gives this idea his own distinctive formulation with the idea of an immanent critical theory. Against Hegel and the Young Hegelians he wants a theory that repudiates the roles both of speculative reflection on history or that of mere critical consciousness. When he speaks of immanence, what he implies is not only that thought see itself as an expression of historical dynamism, but that this thought is an active combatant in the great social struggle of his time: class struggle. Thus Marx views his own theory as the enlightened consciousness of one of the major social forces in this struggle. The truth of the theory in not simply a function of its cognitive insights into the structural dynamics of bourgeois society but also of its communicative capacity to transform the agents of this historical struggle and therefore contribute to the transformation the society.

2. We have seen that in the first two versions of critical theory Marx makes real advances in concretising this conception of immanent critique. One index of this is methodological advance away from philosophical critique towards what he calls the science of history. Marx builds the critical, normative dimension of his perspective on history into the conceptual heart of his theory. Last time we saw how the concepts of ‘forces of production’ and ‘relations of production’ carry Marx’s critical intentions right in the structural core of his understanding of the social reproduction of the bourgeois social totality. We do not have the time to follow the further evolution of this process of concretisation in the later Marx. However, I do want to at least point the direction in which this process leads. Already in arguing that there are various versions of critical theory as Marx proceeds, I maintained one measure of these was his changing methodology. And I especially stressed the relation between critical-cognitive aspects, between philosophical and economic elements. In the later versions of critical theory, Marx’s further efforts at concretising his conception will focus on the category of the commodity as the secret key to the dynamics of bourgeois society. Marx goes on to build his immanent critical perspective into his analysis of the commodity. For him, commodification is the key to understanding the peculiar alienation of bourgeois society. At the heart of this phenomenon is the commodification of labour. The special characteristics of labour power as a commodity allows an exchange of equivalents (wages for labour) that still provides the capitalist with a surplus that can be the basis for profitability, for the realisation of capital: this is his theory of surplus value. In his analysis of the dynamics of the world of commodities, the normative dimension of Marx’s critique of bourgeois society is internalised within an immanent analysis of the commodity form itself in terms of the distinction between “use value” and “exchange value”. Marx’s later presentations of the critique of political economy are essentially alternative attempts to present this immanent critical perspective.

3. I now what to move forward almost one hundred years to consider the theoretical work that introduced the concept of critical theory into the vocabulary of contemporary philosophy. As I’ve already mentioned, this recovery was the work of Max Horkheimer, who in 1931 was installed as the Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and the Director of the Frankfurt based Institute for Social Research. Horkheimer’s main works are a series of essays written in the 1930’s for the institute journal (published in English in two collections: Critical Theory and Between Philosophy and Social Science, his joint most famous work with Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment and two post war collections: The Eclipse of Reason and The Critique of Instrumental Reason. But before saying something about these works, the Institute and its programme under Horkheimer, I want to briefly say a few words about the fate of Marxism and critical theory in the intervening years.

4. Marx died in 1883. His major work Capital was never completed and its was left to Engels to publish the manuscripts for the incomplete Vols 2 and 3. At this point Marx was relatively unknown with only a few adherents within the vanguard of working class organizations in Europe. Despite Marx’s own identification of his theory as the enlightened consciousness of the working and his conviction that immanent critique has to grasp the masses, he had only occasionally been able to effect anything like the unification of theory and praxis in the direct sense. For the most part, the émigré Marx had devoted himself to the development of his critique of political economy believing that the times were not yet ripe to recommence the direct revolutionary activities with which both he and Engels had been engaged up to 1848. So at the time of his death, although his theories had a few staunch advocates in Germany, France and Russia, they had little mass support amongst the workers.

5. All this begins to change soon after. The lapsing of Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist legislation in 1890 and the establishment of the Second Workingman’s Internationale in 1889 coincided with the growing influence of Marxist ideas within the working class movement. Although this influence remained uneven, it was, nevertheless, spectacular. In Germany the Social Democrats, at least nominally a Marxist party, by the First World War has become the dominant oppositional party in the Reichstag. Despite differences between national organizations, there were significant Marxist parties in most Western European societies committed to Socialism and there was also an impressive appearance of international working class unity through the Second International. It is well known that this appearance of unity did not survive the outbreak of the First World War. The majority of socialists were swept up by patriotism and the German Social Democrats eventually voted for war credits. This led to a split between the minority Sparticists and the majority who went on to form the first Weimar government after the First World War.

6. On the theoretical level, the period of the Second International saw the popularisation of Marxist theory. Under the auspices of Engels, who survived until 1895, Marx’s ideas were widely propagated and became the basis of an alternative working class culture, especially in Germany. But this popularisation was also accompanied by a certain vulgarisation. Its point of departure was Engel’s view of Marx as the “Darwin of human history”. The theorists of the Second International, the main one being Karl Kautsky, understood Marx’s theories on the model of the natural sciences. According to this view, Marx had discovered the laws of social development and especially the laws of the evolution of bourgeois society towards socialist society. This reading is usually deemed “positivist”, “mechanist” or “evolutionary”. The former because the emphasis fell on scientific method as an entirely new and superior way of understanding that reduced social reality to “facts” and denied cognitive value to value judgements, “mechanist” because social-economic laws were viewed on the contemporary model of the natural sciences as mechanical systems with connotations of necessity and inevitability and “evolutionary” because the development towards socialism was viewed as a slow, gradual process operating according to its own autonomous laws. For socialists this interpretation of Marx was reassuring after many years of marginalisation. Socialism was viewed as the historical goal of an evolutionary process that was proceeding according to automatic, socio-economic laws. Socialists could be optimistic in the knowledge that they possessed a scientific account of their own society that predicted the evitable triumph of their own cause. As a result of this interpretation, the leaders of the Second International played down the practical question of preparing for the ultimate goal of workers revolution. As this outcome was ensured by economic laws and followed the inexorable rise of the Social Democrats as a parliamentary force, such preparation took a back seat to the day to day strengthening and organization of the existing party. While such historical optimism today seems naïve, to Kautsky and Bebel it seemed no less plausible than the rapid political rise of Social Democracy they had witnessed with their own eyes.

7. The failure of the German Social Democrats to oppose rearmament helped to precipitate the First World War and the disastrous social and economic consequences that ensued. However, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 and the revolutionary risings in Hungary and Germany at the end of the war were reasons for optimism and forced Marxists in the post-war period to reassess Second International Marxism. Not surprisingly, thinkers like Lukacs who had participated in the Hungarian revolution felt that it was the Marxism espoused by the Second International that was largely responsible for the socialist parties’ failure to take full advantage of the crisis of capitalism registered by the war. For Lukacs, contemporaries were witnesses to the final crisis of European capitalism. This bourgeois society had revealed itself to be totally bankrupt. The bloody imperialist war and its catastrophic socio-economic aftermath of social dislocation, and unemployment seemed to confirm this diagnosis. Even the failure the Communist revolutionary putsches were viewed by many radicals as only temporary lulls in an ongoing revolutionary historical wave. Against this messianism, Lukacs maintained that the orthodox Marxist faith in the inevitability of revolution had engendered a debilitating complacency in the Communist movement. Socialist revolution would not result “automatically” through the agency of impersonal economic laws. Instead, Marxist theory had to stress the role of human praxis, ideological struggle and class consciousness in effectively marshalling the workers towards a revolutionary commitment.

The Frankfurt School

8. At this point we can insert the Frankfurt School into this historical narrative. This School had begun as a research Institute-The Institute for Social Research in 1923. Although affiliated to the University of Frankfurt, it was an independent research centre funded by the radical son of a wealthy merchant—Felix J Weil—who was interested in supporting the development of critical, leftist thought. Initially headed Carl Grünberg and concerned with the working class movement and its history, he was succeeded by Max Horkheimer who became head in 1931. Both Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Adorno (1903-1969), who came to prominence later but who was to eventually head the Institute in the 1950’s, came from well- to- do Jewish middle class families. Horkheimer had been interested in radical politics since the end of the war and Adorno was much influenced by the early cultural critique of Lukacs. In his inaugural lecture ‘The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute of Social Research’ Horkheimer defines social philosophy as ‘the philosophical interpretation of the vicissitudes of human fate… not of mere individuals…but as members of a community. It is thus concerned with phenomena that can only be understood in the context of human social life: with the state, law, economy, religion—in short with the entire material and intellectual culture of humanity’ (BP&SS p1). He goes on to outline the Institute’s basic commitment to interdisciplinary research that expressed the group’s dissatisfaction with the narrow specialisation characteristic of the contemporary German university. The basic idea behind Horkheimer’s project was to marry sophisticated theoretical work in a number of disciplines with major empirical studies of various aspects of contemporary society. In providing a rationale for this approach, Horkheimer argues that while the social sciences are capable of objective judgement, they ‘have nothing to say about the degree of reality or about the value of these phenomena. Such issues are matters for social philosophy.’ (BP&SSp.8) by which he means Marx’s critical theory. Therefore, what is required is that philosophy, which is orientated to the essential and general, provide particular studies with their animating impulses while, at the same time, remaining sufficiently open to be influenced and changed by these concrete studies’ BP&SS p.9. This achieves a continuous dialectical penetration that overcomes the dual tendency of philosophy to think that it can announce its wide ranging conclusions without concern for empirical control and of the empirical sciences to get bogged down in chaotic and minute specialist studies (BP&SS, p.9) without any sense of the whole. Horkheimer here seems to both take on board Max Weber’s strictures about the need to specialisation owing to ‘the volume of material’ and the multiplication of specialised auxiliary sciences BP&SS, p.10 while, at the same time, reiterating that these sciences themselves require guidance from a general diagnosis of the epoch supplied by social theory.

The contradictions, which arise when parts of the theory are taken as independent entities, are thus not due to errors or to the neglect of clear definitions. They are due to the fact that the theory has a historically changing object, which, however, remains identical amid all the changes. The theory is not a storehouse of hypotheses on the course of particular events in society. It constructs a developing picture of society as a whole, an existential judgement with a historical dimension (CT, 239).

9. Apart from Horkheimer who was the Director and formulated the basic programme and tenor of the new critical theory, the other major contributors to the Institute and its journal: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschuung, were Frederick Pollock (economist), Leo Lowenthal (literary critic), Eric Fromm (psycho-analysis), Franz Neumann (political theorist), Adorno (musicologist& philosophy), Herbert Marcuse (Philosophy), Walter Benjamin (literary critic& philosophy). The idea was that the combination of a variety of talents from different disciplines would allow the Institute to cover a wide area and attempt a truly comprehensive analysis of the specific character of contemporary bourgeois society.