The Frankfurt School

Look closely and find the demon

The philosophical tradition of the Frankfurt School – the multi-disciplinary integration of the social sciences – is  associated with the philosopher Max Horkheimer,

donald-trump-crypto-capital-planet


Look closely and find the demon

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Look closely and find the demon

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who became the director in 1930, and recruited intellectuals such as Theodor W. Adorno (philosopher, sociologist, musicologist), Erich Fromm (psychoanalyst), and Herbert Marcuse (philosopher).

In the Weimar Republic (1918–33), the continual political turmoils of the interwar years (1918–39) much affected the development of the critical theory philosophy of the Frankfurt School. The scholars were especially influenced by the Communists' failed German Revolution of 1918–19 and by the rise of Nazism (1933–45), a German form of fascism. To explain such reactionary politics, the Frankfurt scholars applied critical selections of Marxist philosophy to interpret, illuminate, and explain the origins and causes of reactionary socioeconomics in 20th-century Europe (a type of political economy unknown to Marx in the 19th century). The School's further intellectual development derived from the publication, in the 1930s, of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1932) and The German Ideology (1932), which were interpreted as showing a continuity between Hegelianism and Marxist philosophy.

As the anti-intellectual threat of Nazism increased to political violence, the founders decided to move the Institute for Social Research out of Nazi Germany (1933–45).^[8] Soon after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the Institute first moved from Frankfurt to Geneva, and then to New York City, in 1935, where it joined Columbia University. The School's journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung ("Journal of Social Research"), was renamed "Studies in Philosophy and Social Science". This began the period of the School's important work in Marxist critical theory. By the 1950s, the paths of scholarship led Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock to return to West Germany, while Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Kirchheimer remained in the U.S. In 1953, the Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) was formally re-established in Frankfurt, West Germany.

The works of the Frankfurt School are to be understood in the context of the intellectual and practical objectives of critical theory. In "Traditional and Critical Theory" (1937), Max Horkheimer defined critical theory as social critique meant to effect sociologic change and realize intellectual emancipation, by way of enlightenment that is not dogmatic in its assumptions. Critical theory analyzes the true significance of the ruling understandings (the dominant ideology) generated in bourgeois society in order to show that the dominant ideology misrepresents how human relations occur in the real world and how capitalism justifies and legitimates the domination of people.

According to the theory of cultural hegemony, the dominant ideology is a ruling-class narrative that provides an explanatory justification of the current power-structure of society. Nonetheless, the story told through the ruling understandings conceals as much as it reveals about society. The task of the Frankfurt School was sociological analysis and interpretation of the areas of social-relation that Marx did not discuss in the 19th century – especially the base and superstructure aspects of a capitalist society.

Horkheimer opposed critical theory to traditional theory, wherein the word theory is applied in the positivistic sense of scientism, in the sense of a purely observational mode, which finds and establishes scientific law (generalizations) about the real world. Social sciences differ from natural sciences because their scientific generalizations cannot be readily derived from experience. The researcher's understanding of a social experience is always filtered through biases in the researcher's mind. What the researcher does not understand is that he or she operates within an historical and ideological context. The results for the theory being tested would conform to the ideas of the researcher rather than the facts of the experience proper; in "Traditional and Critical Theory" (1937), Horkheimer said:

The facts, which our senses present to us, are socially performed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived, and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception.

For Horkheimer, the methods of investigation applicable to the social sciences cannot imitate the scientific method applicable to the natural sciences. In that vein, the theoretical approaches of positivism and pragmatism, of neo-Kantianism and phenomenology failed to surpass the ideological constraints that restricted their application to social science, because of the inherent logico–mathematic prejudice that separates theory from actual life, i.e. such methods of investigation seek a logic that is always true, and independent of and without consideration for continuing human activity in the field under study. He felt that the appropriate response to such a dilemma was the development of a critical theory of Marxism.^[14]

Horkheimer believed the problem was epistemological saying "we should reconsider not merely the scientist, but the knowing individual, in general."^[15] Unlike orthodox Marxism, which applies a template to critique and to action, critical theory is self-critical, with no claim to the universality of absolute truth. As such, it does not grant primacy to matter (materialism) or consciousness (idealism), because each epistemology distorts the reality under study to the benefit of a small group. In practice, critical theory is outside the philosophical strictures of traditional theory; however, as a way of thinking and of recovering humanity's self-knowledge, critical theory draws investigational resources and methods from Marxism.^[11]

In contrast to modes of reasoning that view things in abstraction, each by itself and as though endowed with fixed properties, Hegel's "dialectical" innovation was to consider reality according to its movement and change in time, according to interrelations and interactions of its various components or "moments". The Frankfurt School attempted to reformulate Hegel's idealistic dialectics into a more concrete method of investigation.^[16]

According to Hegel, human history can be reconstructed to show how what is rational in reality is the result of the overcoming of past contradictions. It is an intelligible process of human activity, the Weltgeist, which is the idea of progress towards a specific human condition; namely, the actualization of human freedom.^[17] However, the problem of future contingents (considerations about the future) did not interest Hegel, for whom philosophy cannot be prescriptive and normative, because philosophy comprehends only in hindsight.^[18][19] The study of history is limited to descriptions of past and present human realities.^[17] For Hegel and his successors (the right Hegelians), philosophy can only describe what is rational in the reality of the present, which in Hegel's time was Christianity and the Prussian state.

Karl Marx and the young Hegelians strongly criticized that perspective. According to them, Hegel had over-reached in his abstract conception of "absolute reason" and had failed to notice the "real"— that is, undesirable and irrational – life conditions of the proletariat. Marx claims to invert Hegel's idealist dialectics in his own theory of dialectical materialism, arguing that "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but that their social being that determines their consciousness."^[20] Marx's theory follows a materialist conception of history and geographic space, where the development of the productive forces is the primary motive force for historical change.^[21] The social and material contradictions inherent to capitalism must lead to its negation, which according to this theory, will be the replacement of capitalism with communism, a new, rational form of society.^[22]

Marx used dialectical analysis to uncover the contradictions in the predominant ideas of society, and in the social relations to which they are linked – exposing the underlying struggle between opposing forces. Only by becoming aware of the dialectic (i.e., attaining class consciousness) of such opposing forces in a struggle for power can men and women intellectually liberate themselves, and change the existing social order through social progress.^[23] The Frankfurt School understood that a dialectical method could only be adopted if it could be applied to itself; if they adopted a self-correcting method – a dialectical method that would enable the correction of previous, false interpretations of the dialectical investigation. Accordingly, critical theory rejected the historicism and materialism of orthodox Marxism.^[24]

Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, written during the Institute's exile in America, was published in 1944. While retaining many Marxist insights, this work shifted emphasis from a critique of the material forces of production to a critique of the social and ideological forces bought about by early capitalism. The Dialectic of Enlightenment uses the Odyssey as a paradigm for their analysis of bourgeois consciousness. In this work, Adorno and Horkheimer introduce many themes that central to subsequent social thought. Their exposition of the domination of nature as a central characteristic of instrumental rationality and its application within the capitalism of the post-Enlightenment era was made long before ecology and environmentalism became popular concerns.

They claim that Instrumental rationality is the new means of cultural reproduction within the mechanical age. It is a fusion of domination and technological rationality that brings all of external and internal nature under the power of the human subject. In the process the subject gets swallowed up and no social force analogous to the proletariat can be identified that could enable the subject to emancipate itself.

It is their contention that, at a time when it appears that reality itself has become the basis for ideology, the greatest contribution that critical theory can make is to explore the dialectical contradictions of individual subjective experience, on the one hand, and to preserve the truth of theory, on the other. Even dialectical progress is put into doubt: "Its truth or untruth is not inherent in the method itself, but in its intention in the historical process." This intention must be oriented toward integral freedom and happiness: "The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption."^[25]

From a sociological point of view, Adorno and Horkheimer's works demonstrate an ambivalence concerning the ultimate source of social domination, an ambivalence that gave rise to the "pessimism" of critical theory about the possibility of human emancipation and freedom.^[26] This ambivalence was rooted in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, in particular, the rise of Nazism, state capitalism, and mass culture as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional Marxist sociology.^[27] For Adorno and Horkheimer, state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and "material productive forces of society"—a tension that, according to traditional Marxist theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The previously "free" market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) and "irrevocable" private property of Marx's epoch gradually had been replaced by the more central role of management hierarchies at the firm level and macroeconomic interventions at the state level in contemporary Western societies.^[28] The dialectic through which Marx predicted the emancipation of modern society was suppressed, effectively subjugated to a positivist rationality of domination.

Philosopher and critical theorist Nikolas Kompridis writes:

According to the now canonical view of its history, Frankfurt School critical theory began in the 1930s as a fairly confident interdisciplinary and materialist research program, the general aim of which was to connect normative social criticism to the emancipatory potential latent in concrete historical processes. Only a decade or so later, however, having revisited the premises of their philosophy of history, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment steered the whole enterprise, provocatively and self-consciously, into a skeptical cul-de-sac.^[29]

Kompridis argues that this "sceptical cul-de-sac" was arrived at with "a lot of help from the once unspeakable and unprecedented barbarity of European fascism" and could not be gotten out of without "some well-marked [exit or] Ausgang, showing the way out of the ever-recurring nightmare in which Enlightenment hopes and Holocaust horrors are fatally entangled." However, Ausgang, according to Kompridis, this would not come until later – purportedly in the form of Jürgen Habermas's work on the intersubjective bases of communicative rationality.^[29]

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