You Have Already Been Introduced to Marxism, Through a Lecture on Marx S Own Thought In

You have already been introduced to Marxism, through a lecture on Marx’s own thought in the context of the nineteenth century. Today I’m going to examine one of the major developments of Marxist analysis in the twentieth century, in the form of the enquiries conducted by members of what came to be known as the ‘Frankfurt School’. This refers to a tradition of German critical thought which emerged in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, and came to be enormously influential in certain sectors of academic and critical thinking after the Second World War. The major text within this tradition was The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, which was published in 1944 in New York. Through this, I will try to suggest the historical and philosophical dilemmas confronted by this branch of Marxist critical theory, and I will do this mainly through an analysis of selected quotes from your reading for this week. But I’ll come to that in the second part of the lecture. Before I get there, I’d like to take a bit of time to sketch in the historical context we need to understand in order to grasp Adorno and Horkheimer’s project.

Let’s begin with the fact that the intellectuals associated with the Institute of Social Research (Institut von Sozialforschung), set up in 1923, which later came to be known as the Frankfurt School, were mostly German Marxist intellectuals deeply shaped by the recent experience of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. As you know, the October Revolution in 1917 was conceived of as the first step in a Europe-wide revolutionary conquest of power: this, indeed, was a key part of the rationale behind the Bolshevik take-over in October. Germany, for various reasons, was expected to be the storm-centre of the European revolution. Bear in mind that at a time when European powers were locked in a deeply self-destructive world war of unprecedented dimensions, this was not an unrealistic expectation. But the revolutionary upsurge which did take place in Germany was violently suppressed and defeated [Slide 1 and 2: Images of workers, Rosa Luxemburg]. Its major leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were assassinated in the brutal struggles which led eventually to the establishment of the Weimar Republic. As Germany settled down into a shortlived period of liberal democracy, the socialist revolution was increasingly confined to the East. European, and especially German, Marxist intellectuals therefore faced an apparently clear political choice. Either they could commit themselves to the insecurities of a Communist Party which increasingly was coming under the sway of Moscow, or they could effectively give up on revolution in the near future, and work with more moderate socialists within the increasingly shaky structures of the liberal German republic. The intellectuals I will speak about today took what they considered a third option – they withdrew from, or refused to join, direct political engagement, and concentrated on the development of Marxist thought. This marked a new departure: previously, Marxist theory itself had mainly been a product of labour and socialist movements, and had, since Marx, chiefly discussed the possibilities of socialist change and revolutionary politics. Now, the production of Marxist theory itself began to move into what we might broadly consider the ‘academy’ – not so much in the sense of the university, as in the sense of scholarly circles, independently funded research institutes, and the world of academic journals and publications. Simultaneously, the scope of Marxist research broadened: no longer focused primarily on questions of revolution and political change, Marxists began to undertake sociological, psychoanalytic, historical, philosophical and aesthetic studies with greater intensity.

No single institution embodied this shift more starkly than the Frankfurt School. German Marxists felt the need to set up an independent institute for two chief reasons. First, the orthodoxy of ‘official’ Marxism was bolstered by the Bolshevik Revolution, and independent Marxists not necessarily wedded to the Soviet cause found little support as the 1920s wore on from that quarter. Towards the end of the 1920s, with the rise of Stalin, the Soviet Union began to clamp down on academic freedom and research, and the effects were felt by many Marxists who held independent opinions about the Russian Revolution, or about the subjects on which Stalin laid down a dictatorial intellectual line. Second, and more immediately, Marxist research was not a safe subject to pursue within the German academic establishment: universities discriminated systematically against left-wing scholarship and teaching. There was no room, for instance, for left-wing subjects like histories of the German working class. The German academic establishment was also conservative in intellectual terms: it frowned upon more imaginative, cross-disciplinary forms of research, and kept disciplines like history, sociology and philosophy rigidly demarcated. Yet Marxist inquiry required precisely such cross-disciplinary fertilization. So it was that in 1923, Felix Weil, a young Marxist from a wealthy family, used some of the money from his father’s fortune in the grain trade to establish an independent institute in Frankfurt. [Slide 3: image of Weil] The first director of the Institute was Carl Gruenberg [Slide 4: photograph of Gruenberg], a rare instance of a Marxist with a tenured professorial job, at Frankfurt University. Gruenberg was a historian of the labour movement, and an orthodox Marxist who kept the Frankfurt School distant from theoretical innovations till 1930, when he stepped down.

He was replaced by Max Horkheimer [Slide 5: Horkheimer], who played a major role in shifting the direction of intellectual inquiry at the Institute. At a purely scholarly level, Horkheimer disliked the massive tomes which characterized German scholarship at the time. He preferred conciseness and brevity. Scholars at the Institute tended to write essays, sometimes long ones which stretched into modest-sized books. Before publication, they were collectively discussed and critiqued by other members of the Institute: thus, publications by members were conceived of as collaborative undertakings. Horkheimer also established a journal, the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, or the Journal of Social Research. [Slide 6: Journal] Horkheimer made two major changes in the organization of scholarship at the Institute. First, he insisted on a social science which was critically aware of its own role in the world, rather than seeking a pure form of truth independent of social and historical context. Second, he insisted on interdisciplinarity. The Frankfurt School thus included philosophers, cultural critics, sociologists and psychoanalysts who tried to develop arguments which integrated these different disciplines. From your reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment for this week, you will already have noticed how difficult it is to slot it into a disciplinary category.

Horkheimer was critical of the stultification of Marxist thought in Germany, which he felt had come out of an over-direct link with political work and agitation. So, in the first place, he refused to confine the membership of the Frankfurt School to card-carrying Marxists alone. In the 1930s and beyond, the Frankfurt School would become genuinely cross-disciplinary, and while the development of Marxist thought would remain a priority, there was a conscious attempt to try and accomplish this without introducing sectarian quarrels into scholarship. So along with a strong core of Marxist intellectuals, the Frankfurt School also included intellectuals of broadly left-wing persuasion who were not Marxist, such as the great cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer, or Marxist in an extremely unorthodox fashion, such as Walter Benjamin, one of the major cultural critics and philosophers of the twentieth century. Horkheimer was also critical of developments in the Soviet Union, along with many fellow-Marxists. In the early 1930s, they maintained a studied silence about the Soviet Union, in contrast to the outpouring of enthusiasm in other Marxist circles. In the late 1930s, in the context of Stalin’s show trials and executions of thousands of Communists, some European Marxists, including those associated with the Frankfurt School, would adopt a more openly critical posture. Horkheimer and his close associate Adorno were among those Marxist intellectuals for whom the experience of the Soviet Union meant a painful realization that Marxist optimism about the shape of the future was ill-founded.

More immediately than the distortions of socialism in Soviet Russia, however, the Frankfurt School, under Horkheimer’s directorship, had to face fateful events in Germany. The rise of the Nazis made the presence of a Marxist institute in Germany untenable, as democrats, socialists and communists alike were forced to flee from their country, and often from Europe itself. For members of the Frankfurt School, whether Marxist or non-Marxist, the problem was made more intense by the heavy presence of Jewish intellectuals at the institute. Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin – who are remembered today as the three leading figures of this intellectual movement, were all Jewish. Horkheimer was quick to realize the dangers in the early 1930s for a left-wing institute, and the Frankfurt School was relocated to the United States. So the thinkers associated with it all also experienced exile from their own country, and this feature marked their thought in a decisive way: it was felt as a loss, but also offered them new, and arguably deeper, perspectives both on German and American society.

Before I go on to talk about Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, let me briefly introduce you to some of the figures associated with the Frankfurt School. I have already talked about Horkheimer. So here’s Adorno [Slide 7: Adorno]. Adorno was born in 1903 to a Jewish wine merchant named Wiesengrund, and a German singer with the maiden surname of Adorno, which he later adopted as his own. His principal interests from an early age were music and art, and he would in due course become one of the most noted aesthetic thinkers of the twentieth century, with a powerful analysis of musical and artistic forms. His work is perhaps best described as a distinctive mix of aesthetics, sociology and a self-critical Hegelian Marxism. He joined the Frankfurt School in 1928 as a philosopher, and came to work closely with Horkheimer. Another very influential figure was Herbert Marcuse [Slide 8: Marcuse], who joined the Institute in 1932. Marcuse had been active both in the Social Democratic Party and revolutionary movement in Berlin during the war. He had been politically radicalized during military service, and the officers’ corps he belonged to participated in the Communist uprising in Berlin. Marcuse quit the Social Democratic Party, which he saw as having betrayed the working class by plunging it into war, and studied philosophy under the tutelage of Martin Heidegger. This has to be one of the more tragic intellectual partnerships of the twentieth century: Heidegger, acclaimed by many as one of the greatest philosophers of the age, went on to ally actively with the Nazis, and participate in the expulsion of Jewish intellectuals. Marcuse migrated to Geneva and then the United States, joining US Government service during World War II. In the 1960s, Marcuse would for a while become perhaps the most popular and influential intellectual in the Western world, as student radicals in the 1960s were inspired by his critique of contemporary capitalism.

I should also mention perhaps the most intriguing and tragic figure of Walter Benjamin [Slide 9: Benjamin]. Benjamin was a maverick philosopher and cultural theorist who combined Marxism with a deep interest in arcane forms of Jewish theology, and deployed concepts from both Marxism and messianic Judaism to examine contemporary mass culture, forms of consciousness, and the movement of history. He committed suicide while trying to flee from the Nazis in 1940. His work was considered too unorthodox for him to receive anything but a small occasional stipend from the Frankfurt School while he lived, though posthumously he became enormously influential in the fields of aesthetics, cultural theory and philosophy.

So with this historical background in place, let me now turn to Dialectic of Enlightenment. This was first published in 1947, and comprised collaborative work done chiefly by Adorno and Horkheimer in their American exile during and immediately after the Second World War. There are two things you’ll notice almost immediately about the text, no matter how obscure and elusive it seems. First, you will have noticed the deep note of historical pessimism in the text – this was in stark contrast to the official Marxism promoted by the Soviet Union and Communist movements, which essentially held on to faith in historical progress in the direction of the future socialist society. Adorno and Horkheimer were the major representatives of an alternative and opposed trend on the intellectual Left: a deeply tragic and pessimistic view of modern life. The second thing you will have noticed is the attention paid to culture, and the relative absence of any of the classic concepts and methods of historical materialism. Adorno and Horkheimer were as insistent as other Marxists that culture be related to society – but they felt this could not be accomplished simply by identifying the economic bases and contexts of history and culture. Rather, they conceived of the culture of wartime and postwar European society as a symptom of the malaise of liberal capitalism. In order to do this, however, they needed to grapple with a capitalism – and a modernity – for which classical Marxism had not really laid the coordinates of study. The attention paid to mass society – the society of consumers whose individuality is stripped from them by market forces and capitalist ideology – and mass culture – the replacement of older forms of cultural expression by radio, popular music, advertising, cinema and so on – is a major feature of this work. As such, Adorno and Horkheimer were laying the basis of a new and broader critique of Western capitalist civilization, conceived of in terms which were no longer primarily socio-economic.

The third thing you will have noticed, of course, is how very difficult Dialectic of Enlightenment is as a text. I sympathize fully if this is what you felt: it is a challenging and at many points a frustrating text. But it is of profound importance for understanding the directions taken not only by Marxism, but also by social analysis in general after the Second World War. So let me lay out the problem as starkly as possible: Adorno and Horkheimer were writing in a historical moment in Europe which had been shaped by two world wars, the deaths of tens of millions of people in the biggest orgy of death the world had ever known, the rise of Nazism, and what they saw as the reversal of the Russian Revolution’s initial promise of liberation into Stalinism. Liberal society, as it had been understood, was clearly dead. Now it is important to stress this point. Today, we are used to a more comforting notion of twentieth century history: historians and opinion-makers in the Western world, for several decades, have restored a certain liberal teleology of progress, based on the social experience of a small part of the western world. It appears, from these accounts, that Nazism and Stalinism were terrible threats to the liberal project of the Enlightenment, with its values of freedom, equality and progress, which were eventually defeated. They are seen as aberrations. Writing in 1947, Adorno and Horkheimer were denied the comfort of this vision: it might also be said that they were spared its smugness. In a sense, what they were saying was – what if it is not the case that totalitarian regimes were an aberration from the main line of modern Western history? What if, on the contrary, they reveal a profound truth about the historical trajectory of the modern West? Here is how they present the problem:

In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.

The context of these lines is not hard to see: Auschwitz, the World Wars, Stalinism, to name just three instances. How could this be? How could European civilization, which had advertised its progressive virtues to the rest of the world – and to itself – for over a century, have come to this point of totalitarian rule on the one hand and global destruction on the other? Adorno and Horkheimer put the problem in more precise terms in their Introduction:

The dilemma that faced us in our work proved to be the first phenomenon for investigation: the self-destruction of the Enlightenment. We are wholly convinced […] that social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought. Nevertheless, we believe that we have just as clearly that the notion of this very way of thinking, no less than the actual historic forms – the social institutions – with which it is interwoven, already contains the seed of the reversal universally apparent today.

Note that Adorno and Horkheimer, in contrast to liberal notions, stress the self-destructive character of the Enlightenment. They proclaim themselves committed to the Enlightenment project: however, precisely for this reason, they have to take stock of the horrors, as they see it, that the progress of Enlightenment itself has wrought. In order to rescue the radical, liberating impulse buried within the Enlightenment, they therefore have to undertake a painstaking and painful critique of the Enlightenment itself. For them, the seeds of the disasters of the twentieth century do not lie in the rejection of Enlightenment values, but a certain direction taken by the Enlightenment itself in the course of its history. They clarify this thought just a few lines later: