Lecture 6: The Frankfurt School

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
Theodor W Adorno (1903-1969)

1. Weber lived to see the collapse of Imperial Germany and defeat in the First World War. This disaster never shattered his faith in bourgeois society. His political testament emphasized the need to nurture charismatic elements in modernity and protect the space for individual initiative resisting the universalizing tendencies of modern bureaucratisation. In philosophical terms Weber follows the late Nietzsche in placing the real emancipatory emphasis in modernity on the individual. At the same time, he resisted Nietzsche radical utopian expectation of future cultural renewal beyond enlightenment. However, the experience of the war caused many European intellectuals to adopt a more radical response to bourgeois society, the capitalist system and its dominant rationalist traditions. Many were horrified by the destruction and senseless slaughter of the War and were driven to pacifism and Marxism especially after the apparent success of the first Communist Revolution by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. Amongst those who attended Weber’s lecture Politics as a Vocation without much enthusiasm were some of the leading members of the so-called Frankfurt School. These were well-to-do middle class Jewish intellectuals who became heavily influenced by Marxism and its revolutionary critique of capitalism.

2. The Marxist orientated Institute for Social Research was established at Frankfurt University in 1923 funded by a wealthy merchant whose son Felix Weil was sympathetic to revolutionary politics. From 1930 this Institute was headed by Max Horkheimer who gathered around himself a very talented team of philosophers, cultural critics, economists, a psychologist, social and political theorists in an interdisciplinary program aimed at a practically motivated critique of contemporary capitalist society from the standpoint of socialism. Not all members of the Frankfurt School group shared identical views although they managed to work within a common framework. I shall consider only the diagnosis of modernity associated with the two leading figures (Horkheimer and Adorno) of the Institute that emerged towards the end of the 1930’s and during the Second World War. After the National Socialist takeover in Germany in 1933, the Institute moved its headquarters to Paris and then finally to the United States where its members lived as émigrés and observed the social and cultural developments which appeared to prefigure the post war world.

3. The failure of socialist revolution in Western Europe has often been viewed as the key to understanding the Frankfurt School diagnosis of modernity. The very first sentence in Adorno's latter main work Negative Dialectics (1966) reads "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed" (p3). Socialist revolution, which would have overcome the irrationality of the existing bourgeois world and established a rational world, failed to materialise. This means that all projects to improve the world and ameliorate suffering tied to philosophical projects of molding reality in accordance with the dictates of reason have run aground.  Philosophy remains necessary, but only if it redoubles its efforts to become a radical critique of the existing world. And to achieve this it must abandon the great idealist project to conceptually grasp the world as a whole and restrict itself to self-criticism, to a negative dialectic that brings to light that which resists rationality and point to a world infinitely more complex and heterogeneous than any of its potential concepts. Horkheimer and Adorno were witnesses to the complete victory of fascism in Europe. Already in the early thirties, empirical studies under Fromm had discovered the pervasive presence of the authority personality amongst the German working class. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia had stagnated into a totalitarian form of state oppression. Rosa Luxemburg's fears about the bureaucratisation of the party seemed to be realised. The possibility of a socialist future seemed to be closed for the foreseeable future. These disappointments were compounded by the apparently successful reorganisation and stabilisation of monopoly capitalism under the New Deal in America. The success of the New Deal policies meant that increasingly consumerist American culture was never problematised but now hailed as a truly democratic expression of the popular will. The multiple crisis of the inter-war period in Europe and the world-wide Depression appeared to have been overcome but only at the cost of increased intervention of the state into the economy and the adoption of a greater planning and regulative role.

4. In the face of this historical situation, Horkheimer felt compelled to abandon the Marxian vision of history as an emancipatory process of humanity's increasing domination of nature that had underpinned the School's early interdisciplinary work. From the late 30's, these thinkers overturned the Marxist emancipatory vision of history in favor of one that views history as a process of the self-destruction of reason. I shall return to this idea later. For the moment, I want to concentrate on their diagnosis of the contemporary historical constellation that was formulated in their idea of the totally administered society. This view was built on the conviction that all contemporary economic systems--liberal democratic, fascist and socialist--seemed to be manifesting a frightening convergence in their basic logic and structure, becoming characterised by an omniscient planning and manipulation of all spheres of life. Marxists had previously maintained that the liberal, competitive bourgeois economy was rent by inescapable contradictions. Massive inequalities of wealth and economic dynamism lead to disequilbriums between production and capital valorisation, to unsold commodities and unemployment. At the same time, the self-consciousness of the proletariat was always increasing. According to this classical scenario, the combination of systemic disequilibriums and the increasing political maturity of the workers would finally lead to a revolutionary challenge to the fundamental structure of capitalist society. Frederick Pollock, an economist, provided the economic dimension of the Frankfurt School’s diagnosis. He argued that in the most recent decades bourgeois society had undergone a fundamental structural change. A radically new form of monopoly capitalism had superseded the classical competitive capitalism of the 19th century on which Marx had based his critique. The crux of this argument was that capitalism had entered a new phase in which competition had given way to government intervention and corporate planning. Pollock maintained that this transformation could contain economic contradictions for the indefinite future and therefore he could see no purely economic collapse of the bourgeois system. Pollock based his work on studies of the Soviet experience and on recent developments in Germany. He stressed the contemporary decline of the market as the primary agent of social mediation and the subordination of the profit motive to direct political and social considerations. On the basis of this work, Horkheimer and Adorno felt justified casting aside classical revolutionary optimism and viewing authoritarian state capitalism as the paradigmatic form of modernity. Fascism and other forms of authoritarian and totalitarian state appear as the political form corresponding to the new phase of monopoly capitalism. The liberal age of bourgeois society with its competitive economic relations, democratic political institutions and contractual legal arrangements had masked the domination implicit in the capitalist system. But these liberal forms of freedom were now historical memories. They were increasingly replaced by an overtly authoritarian system. With the advent of the modern totalitarian regimes, the typical liberal dualisms of individual and society, private and public, law and morals, the economy and politics are blurred and even liquidated in the service of direct control and command.

5. The traditional capitalist entrepreneur who controlled the enterprise and lived off the profits no longer controlled the economy. They had been reduced to mere rentiers and removed from a direct management function. However, even this life turned out to be very insecure and succumbed to post-War economic fluctuations. The eventual solution to these problems was increased government intervention to control prices and wages, to encourage technological innovation, to enforce full employment and avoid over accumulation through the expansion of military and defense requirements. This control exercised by the state in league with the large monopolists forestalled the worse excesses of periodic downturns in the economic cycle. Coupled with direction of the new mass media, it opened up the possibility of a new omniscience, control and manipulation of the system. Political cliques could control the state apparatus but still in the interests of the economically most powerful groups. These rackets could now exercise naked power backed by all the forces of modern administration and bureaucracy aided by the subtle yet insidious pressures of the mass media. The authoritarian state becomes the vehicle of a new mode of capitalist organisation. No longer relying on competition and the market, steering functions are now transferred to the centralised administrative activity of the apparatus of domination--governmental agencies, police, army, and media. The result is a new synthesis of monopoly capitalism and totalitarian state which brings together the calculated interests of the major corporations and the planning capacity of the state organs in a technical rationality which dominates all aspects of society and quashes all opposition either by terror or consumerist incorporation. Developments in Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States all seemed to reveal the same tendencies. On this view, modernity comes to represent a new system of total domination characterised by new manifestations of alienation, administrative manipulation, by a uniform subordination and depersonalisation. With its new power (increasing bureaucratic reach) and technological means (radio, TV), the state is able to expand its influence entering and administering every facet of life. Everything that cannot be subordinated to the demands and logic of the new system will be processed, reeducated, dispensed with. Uniformity inevitably replaces individuality. The notion of the "totally administered society" has as its complement "the end of the individual". With such total control and manipulation of all domains of society the previous major forces of social resistance to capitalist domination and totalitarian tendencies are largely defused and seduced into acquiescence.

6. The increasing power and control of the authoritarian society over the individual was facilitated by the diminishing importance of the family in socialising individuals. Horkheimer had already argued in the thirties that the decline of the liberal era of capitalist competition and the replacement of independent bourgeois operators by monopoly concerns and increased government interference impacted on the family as the principal means of capitalist socialisation and character formation. The large institutions of mass society--media, state, parties and schools--began to takeover the socialising role formerly the province of the family. Horkheimer argued that for all its repressive and authoritarian aspects, the old bourgeois family had engendered a private realm of love and security. [Using a Freudian developmental psychology mediated by Erich Fromm, Horkheimer argued that, at least the male children, having overcome the fear induced by the Oedipus complex, gained autonomy, a sense of independence and rationality]. As a result of the faltering position of the bourgeois father, the process of identification was impaired and individuals were compelled to seek beyond the family for the fulfillment of their unconscious identificatory needs--they looked to leaders and broader peer and social groups. They remained passive and susceptible to unconscious fear. Such fearfulness and passivity made them malleable to the repressive demands of the new more integrated and controlled system of domination associated with the totally administered society. The loss of paternal authority following the erosion of economic independence left the child open to a direct socialisation through administrative agencies and powers.