The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay

       II

       The Genesis of Critical Theory

      Viewed from the heights of reason, all life looks like some malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.

      — GOETHE

      I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

      — NIETZSCHE

      At the very heart of Critical Theory was an aversion to closed philosophical systems. To present it as such would therefore distort its essentially open-ended, probing, unfinished quality. It was no accident that Horkheimer chose to articulate his ideas in essays and aphorisms rather than in the cumbersome tomes so characteristic of German philosophy. Although Adorno and Marcuse were less reluctant to speak through completed books, they too resisted the temptation to make those books into positive, systematic philosophical statements. Instead, Critical Theory, as its name implies, was expressed through a series of critiques of other thinkers and philosophical traditions. Its development was thus through dialogue, its genesis as dialectical as the method it purported to apply to social phenomena. Only by confronting it in its own terms, as a gadfly of other systems, can it be fully understood. What this chapter will attempt to do, therefore, is to present Critical Theory as it was first generated in the 1930’s, through contrapuntal interaction both with other schools of thought and with a changing social reality.

      To trace the origins of Critical Theory to their true source would require an extensive analysis of the intellectual ferment of the 1840’s, perhaps the most extraordinary decade in nineteenth-century German intellectual history.¹ It was then that Hegel’s successors first applied his philosophical insights to the social and political phenomena of Germany, which was setting out on a course of rapid modernization. The so-called Left Hegelians were of course soon eclipsed by the most talented of their number, Karl Marx. And in time, the philosophical cast of their thinking, shared by the young Marx himself, was superseded by a more “scientific,” at times positivistic approach to social reality, by Marxists and non-Marxists alike.² By the late nineteenth century, social theory in general had ceased being “critical” and “negative” in the sense to be explained below.

      The recovery of the Hegelian roots of Marx’s thought by Marxists themselves was delayed until after World War I for reasons first spelled out by Karl Korsch in the pages of Grünbergs Archiv in 1923.³ Only then were serious epistemological and methodological questions asked about the Marxist theory of society, which, despite (or perhaps because of) its scientific pretensions, had degenerated into a kind of metaphysics not unlike that which Marx himself had set out to dismantle. Ironically, a new understanding of Marx’s debt to Hegel, that most metaphysical of thinkers, served to undermine the different kind of metaphysics that had entered “Vulgar Marxism” through the back door of scientism. Hegel’s stress on consciousness as constitutive of the world challenged the passive materialism of the Second International’s theorists. Here non-Marxist thinkers like Croce and Dilthey had laid the groundwork, by reviving philosophical interest in Hegel before the war. During the same period, Sorel’s stress on spontaneity and subjectivity also played a role in undermining the mechanistic materialism of the orthodox adherents of the Second International.⁴ Within the Marxist camp, Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy were the most influential stimulants in the early 1920’s to the recovery of the philosophical dimension in Marxism.⁵ Much of what they argued was confirmed a decade later, with the revelations produced by the circulation of Marx’s long-neglected Paris manuscripts. When, for one reason or another, their efforts faltered, the task of reinvigorating Marxist theory was taken up primarily by the young thinkers at the Institut für Sozialforschung.

      On one level, then, it can be argued that the Frankfurt School was returning to the concerns of the Left Hegelians of the 1840’s. Like that first generation of critical theorists, its members were interested in the integration of philosophy and social analysis. They likewise were concerned with the dialectical method devised by Hegel and sought, like their predecessors, to turn it in a materialist direction. And finally, like many of the Left Hegelians, they were particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of transforming the social order through human praxis.

      The intervening century, however, had brought enormous changes, which made the conditions of their theorizing vastly different. Whereas the Left Hegelians were the immediate successors of the classical German idealists, the Frankfurt School was separated from Kant and Hegel by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Bergson, Weber, Husserl, and many others, not to mention the systematization of Marxism itself. As a result, Critical Theory had to reassert itself against a score of competitors who had driven Hegel from the field. And, of course, it could not avoid being influenced by certain of their ideas. But still more important, vital changes in social, economic, and political conditions between the two periods had unmistakable repercussions on the revived Critical Theory. Indeed, according to its own premises this was inevitable. The Left Hegelians wrote in a Germany just beginning to feel the effects of capitalist modernization. By the time of the Frankfurt School, Western capitalism, with Germany as one of its leading representatives, had entered a qualitatively new stage, dominated by growing monopolies and increasing governmental intervention in the economy. The only real examples of socialism available to the Left Hegelians had been a few isolated Utopian communities. The Frankfurt School, on the other hand, had the ambiguous success of the Soviet Union to ponder. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the first critical theorists had lived at a time when a new “negative” (that is, revolutionary) force in society—the proletariat—was stirring, a force that could be seen as the agent that would fulfill their philosophy. By the 1930’s, however, signs of the proletariat’s integration into society were becoming increasingly apparent; this was especially evident to the members of the Institut after their emigration to America. Thus, it might be said of the first generation of critical theorists in the 1840’s that theirs was an “immanent” critique of society based on the existence of a real historical “subject.” By the time of its renaissance in the twentieth century, Critical Theory was being increasingly forced into a position of “transcendence” by the withering away of the revolutionary working class.

      In the 1920’s, however, the signs were still unclear. Lukács himself stressed the function of the working class as the “subject-object” of history before deciding that it was really the party that represented the true interests of the workers. As the passage cited from Dämmerung in Chapter 1 indicates, Horkheimer believed that the German proletariat, although badly split, was not entirely moribund. The younger members of the Institut could share the belief of its older, more orthodox leadership that socialism might still be a real possibility in the advanced countries of Western Europe. This was clearly reflected in the consistent hortatory tone of most of the Institut’s work in the pre-emigration period.

      After the Institut’s resettlement at Columbia University, however, this tone underwent a subtle shift in a pessimistic direction. Articles in the Zeitschrift scrupulously avoided using words like “Marxism” or “communism,” substituting “dialectical materialism” or “the materialist theory of society” instead. Careful editing prevented emphasizing the revolutionary implications of their thought. In the Institut’s American bibliography⁶ the title of Grossmann’s book was shortened to The Law of Accumulation in Capitalist Society without any reference to the “law of collapse,” which had appeared in the original. These changes were doubtless due in part to the sensitive situation in which the Institut’s members found themselves at Columbia. They were also a reflection of their fundamental aversion to the type of Marxism that the Institut equated with