SOURCE: Tar, Zoltán. “The Critical Theory of Max Horkheimer.” In The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pp. 16-71. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1977.

[In the following essay, Tar traces Horkheimer's work as director of the Frankfurt School and places his Critical Theory within the context of twentieth-century sociological, psychological, and political thought.]

INSTITUTIONAL BACKGROUND

The beginnings of the institutional matrix of the Frankfurt School date back to 1923, when the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), affiliated with the University of Frankfurt, was founded. Felix J. Weil first proposed the idea of an institute of social research along Marxist lines. His father, Hermann Weil, had previously left Germany for South America to become a wealthy Argentinian grain dealer and financially supported the socialist ambitions of his son. Felix J. Weil, born and raised in Argentina, went to Frankfurt and earned his Ph.D. in 1921.¹

Carl Grünberg, professor of political economy in Vienna and editor of a journal devoted to the history of socialism and the labor movement (Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung or Grünberg Archiv), became the first director of the institute and held that position until 1928. An economist of the historical school, he later became a Marxist and the first Kathedermarxist (academic Marxist) at a German university. Marxism as an economic and sociological system, until then a stepchild at German universities, was to have a home in the new institute.

The first years of the institute were shaped by the influence of Grünberg, who considered Marxism to be both a Weltanschauung and a research method. He was convinced that contemporary society was in a “transition from capitalism to socialism.” His interpretation of Marxism was vehemently antiphilosophical:

Philosophical and historical materialism have conceptually nothing to do with each other. … The problem of materialist, historical conceptualization is not to arrive at eternal categories by way of speculation, or to grasp the “thing-in-itself,” or to investigate the relationship between mind and external reality.²

To Grünberg, historical materialism had no validity independent of space and time, but only a relative and historically conditioned meaning. Its task is the investigation of “the given concrete world in its becoming and change (‘die gegebene konkrete Welt in ihrem Werden und Wandel’)”. He declared induction the correct scientific method. Grünberg's opening address emphasized the necessity of “the dictatorship of the director” of the institute: “A sharing of the direction of the institute with those who have a different Weltanschauung or methodological approaches is entirely inconceivable.”³

Among the first members of the institute were such young intellectuals as Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Henryk Grossman, Richard Sorge, and the Sinologist Karl Wittfogel. Later in the 1930s, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno joined their ranks. The research associates represented a truly interdisciplinary cross section of academia, ranging from philosophy and sociology to literary scholarship, political science, and economics. Most of them had a Jewish middle- or upper-middle-class background and were in some way active in left-wing politics. At least four of them were Communist Party members: Sorge, who later became a master spy for the Soviet Union and was executed in Japan, Wittfogel, a CP candidate for the Reichstag, Grossman, and Pollock.

In 1928 illness forced Grünberg to give up his directorship. After a short interim period under the directorship of Pollock, Horkheimer became the director, and a new era began for the annals of the institute.

THE BIOGRAPHICAL AND EXISTENTIAL MATRIX OF CRITICAL THEORY

A real understanding of Critical Theory would require a close scrutiny of the men, their works, and their socio-historical matrix in order to show the existential determination of the Frankfurt theorists, that is, to shed light on the correlation between biographical data and theoretical achievements. A definitive study along these lines must wait until all the information and manuscripts are available. Yet, in the light of the existing material, the significant factor of biographical information must not be ignored, and certain tentative propositions can be made. It is mandatory to look into the existential determination of the intellectual development of Horkheimer to demonstrate how his authoritarian, domineering father led to the young Horkheimer's defiance of this immediate authority, which symbolized for him the authoritarianism of the larger society of contemporary Wilhelminian Germany, prior to its collapse in 1918.

Protest against human suffering and social injustice coupled with “longing for another world” were permanent themes for Horkheimer's thinking throughout his life. His Jewish haute bourgeois family background was the source of both his protest and his longing. Working in the family business as his father wished, and being next to him in the line of command, the 20-year-old Horkheimer reflected on the situation in his diary:

I have a splendid position and an even more promising future in my father's business. I can afford all the pleasures of the world that attract me. I can immerse myself in my work or amuse myself and follow my hobbies—and yet … the burning flames of yearning consume me. … I do not seem to be able to control this longing, and so I will let myself be guided by it through all my life, regardless of where this mad journey might take me.⁴

Young Horkheimer, shocked and repelled by the working conditions in his father's factory, wrote to a friend:

Who can complain about suffering, you and me? We, who are complaining that the flesh of the slaughtered gives us belly aches, are cannibals. … You enjoy your peace and property for whose sake others have to suffocate, to bleed to death … and to endure the most inhuman conditions.⁵

This motif of remonstrance never disappears; it develops into Horkheimer's later longing that “the murderer might not triumph over his innocent victim.”⁶ Vehement rejection of the existing social order and a metaphysical yearning for a more perfect world were the chief motives of Horkheimer's philosophy from the very beginning. Young Horkheimer stated his Weltanschauung in 1914.

The positive, the existing is always bad, yet its constitution is the only point of reference from which we can proceed to divine its spiritual content that we cannot grasp but that constitutes its great beauty. Therein lies the reason why beautiful things can never quite satisfy us and a painful yearning remains. This is a yearning for perfection, which cannot be attained as long as we possess a body and perceive it through senses. … We wish salvation from the earth and yet we are attached to it with our whole heart.⁷

Horkheimer's conflict and his revolt against paternal authority was aggravated by additional problems. At the age of 21 he fell in love with his father's secretary, Rose Riekehr. She was the daughter of an Englishwoman and a bankrupt German in the hotel business. In addition, she was a gentile and eight years older than Horkheimer. His parents opposed their marriage vehemently.

A 10-year strained relationship and confrontation between father and son and a struggle for emancipation followed.⁸

In 1916 Horkheimer was drafted into the army, but he was never sent to the front. Under the impact of the senseless and murderous war, he turned pacifist. This marks the beginning of his political awakening. Half a century later he recalled those times:

I had been in Paris and London and so could never believe that the people there were more for war than our “peace-loving” Kaiser; I could not see that they were worse human beings than I and that therefore now I have to shoot them. … My faith in the childhood teachings of the German Reich was shaken. I had the distinct feeling that something horrible had happened to Europe and mankind that could not be reversed.⁹

Indeed, his immediate reaction was the rejection of the criminal war that was destined to protect the property of a few under the guise of national interests. He wrote in 1914:

I cannot believe that an act deemed to be criminal for the individual should be a noble one for a nation. … I hate the armies that are on the march to protect property. … Bestial motives guide their arms—motives that must be overcome in our drive for enlightenment and have to be destroyed if we want to become human beings.¹⁰

The dominant ideas of the young Horkheimer were the rejection of nationalism coupled with the embracing of mankind; there was also a deep underlying pessimism of mankind's future prospects, as expressed in his early writings:

Why can't I be a human being only … without belonging to any nation. … What you fight for is not my concern. Your order within nations and laws might be necessary for you because you are all predatory beasts (Raubtiere). … As long as the majority of mankind consists of blockheads and rowdies, their union, i.e., society, cannot be anything else but an inferior one whether it calls itself autocratic, socialistic or anarchistic; and I have to believe that this “as long” may seem eternity.¹¹

The end of the war found Horkheimer in Munich, where he experienced the November 1918 revolution. He greeted the revolution enthusiastically and hailed it as a liberation from the authority of father and fatherland. The experience of the revolution moved young Horkheimer toward the problems of society and toward Marxism. In an autobiographical short story, entitled “Jochai,” he wrote of his hero:

Private Jochai could not force himself to shoot and chose to run. … The deep resentment compelled him, the Jew, not to kill but to vent his desperation, the desperation of all slaves, in a piercing scream that would reach the ears of the masters and destroy their contended indifference and help to demolish the consciousness-betraying facade of their world; in this way, he chose intellectual victory.¹²

Years of study at Frankfurt University with the neo-Kantian philosopher, Hans Cornelius, who was in addition a painter and a musician, was followed by further study with Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg. Heidegger's impact is explicitly acknowledged by Horkheimer: “Today, I know that Heidegger is one of the most important personalities whom I ever came across in my life. …”¹³ Yet, on the whole, his encounter with academic philosophy ended in disappointment, and he summarized his Freiburg experience as follows:

The more I am taken by philosophy, the further I grow from the academic understanding of philosophy as practiced at this university. What I mean is we have to look for matter-of-fact assertions [materielle Aussagen] about our life and its meaning and not search for formal laws of a theory of knowledge that are basically irrelevant.¹⁴

Yet, in view of the continuous opposition of his parents to his marriage, Horkheimer decided to pursue an academic career. He wrote in one of his fictional letters that he hated “the university and its pedantic ways” but regarded the university career as the “one and only acceptable profession” in which one can assist in the problems of society.¹⁵ Horkheimer received his Ph.D. in 1922 and three years later handed in his Habilitationsschrift. Thus he started his academic career as a Privatdozent and married Rose Riekehr.

THE CURRENTS OF THE 1920S

At the time at which young Horkheimer entered the academic scene in the 1920s, a revival of Marxian theory took place in Central and Western Europe. This revival took on a multiplicity of forms, such as the Marxism of Georg Lukács in Vienna, that of Antonio Gramsci in Rome, that of Karl Korsch in Leipzig, and the “bourgeois” Marxism of Karl Mannheim in Frankfurt.

The Marxism of Lukács and Korsch was an immediate reaction to, and a theoretical reflection on, the post World War I revolutionary situation in Europe. Waves of revolutionary movements in Russia, Germany, and Hungary inspired both Lukács and Korsch. A revolutionary messianism and optimism, the expectation of a world revolution permeated the Zeitgeist of the postwar period. Lenin wrote in his farewell address to the Swiss workers that the Russian revolution is “a prelude to and a step toward the world socialist revolution.” He continued: “The objective conditions of the imperialist war make it certain that the revolution will not be limited to the first stage of the Russian revolution, that the revolution will not be limited to Russia.”¹⁶ In spite of the defeat of the 1919 Hungarian proletarian revolution, Lukács still saw in 1923 the European working class as the agent of world historical change, and as the subject and object of the world historical process. At the same time, Lukács and Korsch rediscovered the philosophical (Hegelian) and the humanist dimensions of the Marxian theory. It might be noted that a renewed interest in Hegel had commenced at the beginning of the century with Dilthey's Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels (1906) and Croce's What is Alive and What is Dead in Hegel's Philosophy (1906). Marx's lifelong interest in man's alienation in a capitalist society was uncovered by Lukács' and Korsch's careful reading of Das Kapital, especially its “commodity fetishism” chapter, a decade before the publication of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Korsch's Marxismus und Philosophie, first published in 1923, was republished in the Grünberg Archiv in 1925. Lukác's History and Class Consciousness, a collection of essays, some of them written during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic when Lukács occupied the position of Commissar of Cultural Affairs, was also published in 1923.¹⁷ Because of the diversity of these essays, they are sometimes considered somewhat contradictory, that is, Lukács is celebrated as the founder of a modern humanist-existentialist Marxism on the one hand, and he is condemned for the glorification of the Communist Party's vanguard role, supposedly outdoing Lenin, on the other. Yet creative Marxism is the unifying theme of Lukács' book, and its main theses can be summed up under five major propositions. First, “orthodox Marxism” means a return to Marx's method, which emphasized the primacy of totality. Second, Marx's dialectics is a method to be applied to historical studies of society as opposed to Engels' Dialectics of Nature. Third, the phenomenon of “reification” is the essence of capitalist society. Lukács wrote:

at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back … to the riddle of commodity-structure. … Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a “phantom-objectivity,” an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.

Reification is “the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects.”¹⁸ Fourth, Lukács' philosophy of history claims that the proletariat is the agent (subject-object) of an inevitable world-historical process. Fifth, the party is the “objectification of its [the proletariat's] own will [obscure though this may be to themselves].”¹⁹

The influence of the “Occidental Marxism” (Merleau-Ponty's term) of Lukács and Korsch on the Frankfurt theorists is undeniable, although the relationship is rather complex, and it is difficult to determine its exact nature. Early Critical Theory did not emphasize unequivocally the primacy of totality as expressed in Horkheimer's critical review of Mannheim (1930): “It is not the grasping of a ‘totality’ or of a total and absolute truth but the changing of certain societal conditions that was the intention of his [Marx's] science.”²⁰ Yet at the same time Critical Theory aspired to be the comprehensive social philosophy of contemporary capitalist society. There is considerable agreement between the Frankfurt School theorists and Lukács in their anti-Engels and antiscience sentiments, both having their roots in German Idealism and romantic anticapitalist social thought. All the dichotomous formulations such as Verstand (intellect) versus Vernunft (reason), civilization versus culture, Gesellschaft versus Gemeinschaft, and Naturwissenschaft versus Geisteswissenschaft are just different manifestations of the same issue. For the early Critical Theory of Horkheimer, “exchange” was a basic category: “Critical Theory of society begins with the idea of the simple exchange of commodities. …”²¹ Adorno too relied on Lukács' theory of reification in his “On the Fetish Character in Music” (1938), and later the notion of society based on the “dominance of exchange value” became a central category for his Theory of Society: “The spread of the [exchange] principle imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total.”²² The theories of both Lukács and the Frankfurt School took an all pervasive, but by no means identical, ethical stand. The main difference, due to changed historical circumstances and to differences in personalities, was concerned with the alleged “historical mission” of the proletariat, the vanguard role of the Communist parties and the use of violence—as is discussed later in this chapter.

In 1930 a chair for social philosophy was created for Horkheimer at the University of Frankfurt, and in 1931 he became the new director of the institute. In the 1930s the Frankfurt theorists faced a different social reality than Lukács and Korsch had faced a decade earlier. European societies were in deep economic and political crises. The powerlessness of bourgeois-liberal democracies had become evident. Only the communists and fascists seemed to offer alternative solutions. Horkheimer accused the communists of authoritarianism and of being addicted to the use of force. The rise of fascisms, and the emerging Stalinism, with its bureaucratic, authoritarian traits and consequent purges, and also the gradual integration of American labor into what C. Wright Mills called “the middle levels of power”—the outcome of all these historical events—left no working-class movement with which to be allied. The German working-class movement was split. In Horkheimer's opinion, the splitting of the working class on the basis of the economic process into one stratum of the unemployed, who were immediately interested in the revolution but lacked a theoretical orientation and class consciousness, and another stratum with clear theoretical consciousness but without immediate interest in revolution, was reflected in the existence of two working class parties and the fluctuation of great masses of the unemployed between the Communist and Nazi parties.²³

Horkheimer, never having been committed to any organization, attempted to steer a middle course between official Party Marxisms and unaffiliated liberal left bourgeois intellectuals. He hoped to salvage the philosophical-theoretical heritage of a humanist Marxism combined with other elements of European bourgeois thought, in the hopes of being able to work out some theoretical guidelines for a possible future course of action that was destined to lead ultimately to a just society.

HORKHEIMER: DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE

Horkheimer took over his new office as director of the institute in January 1931. His opening address (Antrittsvorlesung), entitled, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” indicated the shift in emphasis of the future course of the institute.²⁴

Edward Shils, in contrasting the career of Max Horkheimer and Karl Mannheim (who was also a professor of sociology at Frankfurt University before going into exile in London in 1933), concluded that Horkheimer's position at the institute was a key factor in the subsequent success of his ideas, in spite of the fact that “Mannheim was the more original and many-sided of the two.” Mannheim was not associated with any institution and truly became a “free-floating intellectual” in exile. In Shils' opinion,

institutionalization … renders more probable the consolidation, elaboration and diffusion of a set of ideas. It serves to make ideas more available to potential recipients, it renders possible concentration effort on them, it fosters interaction about them, and it aids their communication.²⁵

In my opinion, Shils' statement seems beside the point. Mannheim has indeed become, albeit somewhat marginally, a part of American sociology through his book Ideology and Utopia, whereas the name and theories of Horkheimer never entered the mainstream of American sociology. Adorno is remembered mainly as the first name on the list of coauthors of The Authoritarian Personality, and Marcuse's world wide success in the late 1960s was not a result of his one-time association with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research some 20 years earlier.

HORKHEIMER'S INITIAL PROGRAM

In Horkheimer's opening address, he placed the essence of Marxian theory in the universal explanation of societal movements on the basis of class relations, as determined by economic developments. In his view, “the ultimate aim of social philosophy is the philosophical interpretation of man's fate as a member of a community.”²⁶ Horkheimer outlined the main task of examining the interrelationship among three spheres: the economic substructure of society, the psychic development of the individual, and cultural phenomena. According to Horkheimer, the real order of the day was to establish a close and fruitful cooperation between philosophy and the specialized disciplines. Social philosophy was seen as a materialist theory of history combined with empirical research. Philosophy, in the Hegelian sense, aims at the grasping of the objective essence of appearances. It must be receptive to change and to the impact of empirical studies. The immediate task was to organize research based on philosophical formulations of problems, in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists unite in permanent research teams. The first research projects were to deal with problems of skilled laborers and white collar employees in Germany. Horkheimer called attention to the excellence of American research methods that were to be emulated and incorporated into the work of the institute, a branch of which was established in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Grünberg Archiv, the journal of the institute until 1930, ceased publication, and a new journal of the institute, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung [Journal for Social Research] was launched. Horkheimer's Preface to the first volume of the Zeitschrift states that social research (Sozialforschung) is research in special areas at different levels of abstraction intended to “promote the theory of contemporary society in its totality.” Its aim was the grasping of the societal process in its totality and presumed the possibility of comprehending forces active underneath the chaotic surface of historical events. History may appear arbitrary, but its dynamics are dominated by laws. Therefore, its cognition is a science. The work of the Zeitschrift would be based on that assumption. Thus history is concerned with all the factors of economic, psychic, and societal nature that determine social life. The treatment of problems belonging to the realm of Weltanschauung and philosophy would be included if they bore on the “theory of society”.

Social research and traditional academic sociology were not seen as identical: although both deal with societal phenomena, the former extends its research into “nonsociological areas”. The problems of this social research concern the interrelationship of specific areas of culture and the laws governing their change. One of the major tasks for the solution of this problem would be “the creation of a historically oriented social psychology”. The Zeitschrift was to deal with both general theoretical problems and specific investigations of concrete problems of contemporary society and economy.

Interestingly enough, a “value-free” social research was announced as the objective: “The obligation to scientific criteria separates social research also methodologically from politics. It must preserve the independence of its claim to cognition vis-à-vis positions of all Weltanschauungen and political stands”.²⁷ Part 1 of Volume 1 of the Zeitschrift (1933) was still published in Germany; the second part of Volume 2 was put out in Paris by Libraire Felix Alcan. In the preface, Horkheimer thanked the publisher for making the “scholarly publication in the German language” possible and pledged the continuation of the effort of the institute “to promote the theory of society and its auxiliary sciences”. Continuity with the German cultural heritage was always emphasized and stated again in the preface to the sixth volume: (1937) “The Zeitschrift and other publications of the institute today are among the few scholarly publications that continue the German geisteswissenschaftliche tradition in the German language abroad”.²⁸ Only the third section of the 1939 volume and the last (1940/1941) volume were published under the title Studies in Philosophy and Social Science in New York, with all contributions in English.

The Zeitschrift was somewhat comparable in its aspirations to Durkheim's Année Sociologique. A perusal of its nine volumes reveals a broad interdisciplinary spectrum of an attempted grand program. Critical Theory has no magnum opus, no Cours de philosophie positive, no Das Kapital, no Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, no systematic explication of its principles, concepts, methodology, and findings. Its dominant form of expression has been essays, articles, aphorisms, fragments, and monographs devoted to specific topics. Despite this fragmentary and multiple character, the volumes of the Zeitschrift, a torso in view of Horkheimer's program, are nevertheless a remarkable document of European intellectual history.

THE GENESIS OF CRITICAL THEORY

Horkheimer's Critical Theory was developed in about a dozen essays, most of them written in German while he was in exile in New York City and published in the Zeitschrift between 1933 and 1940. Critical Theory was meant to be a critique of the “bourgeois” (traditional) theory. It is an amalgamation of diverse influences on Horkheimer's thought, the German idealist philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer the most notable among them. Judaic ethics (i.e., concern with social justice), Gestalt psychology, and certain selected elements of Marxian thought all played their parts in the crystallization of Critical Theory.

CRITICAL VERSUS TRADITIONAL THEORY

The term “Critical Theory” was coined by Horkheimer in a programmatic article to contrast with “traditional theory”. Horkheimer identifies “traditional theory” with the influence of Descartes and Husserl. Descartes' scientific method asserts as one of its maxims,

to conduct my thoughts in an orderly way, beginning with the simplest objects and the easiest to know, in order to climb gradually, as by degrees, as far as the knowledge of the most complex, and even supposing some order among these objects which do not precede each other naturally.²⁹

Descartes asserts that

everything which can be encompassed by man's knowledge is linked in the same way … and that one always keeps the right order for one thing to be deduced from that which precedes it; there can be nothing so distant that one does not reach it eventually, or so hidden that one cannot discover it.³⁰

Thus traditional or hypothetical-deductive theory is a sum of propositions in a research area in which the propositions are interlocked so that some of them can be deduced from others. Husserl maintained that theory is “a systematically linked set of propositions in the form of a systematically unified deduction”.³¹ Validity depends on the congruence of propositions with empirical evidence. Theory is accumulated knowledge. Theoretical explanation means the establishment of a connection between pure perception of facts and the conceptual structure of knowledge. Traditional theory aims at establishing a mathematical sign system. Logical operations are rationalized to the extent that, in a great part of the natural sciences, theory construction has become identical with mathematical constructs. The same conceptualization is applied to living and nonliving nature. The unity of scientific method is a primary objective. The sciences of man and society are to follow the examples of the more successful and advanced natural sciences. Representatives of dominant schools of “traditional theory,” the philosophers of science, positivism, and pragmatism, designate prognosis and utility of results as the main task of science.

In Horkheimer's opinion:

The fruitfulness of newly discovered factual connections for the renewal of existent knowledge, and the application of such knowledge to the facts, do not derive from purely logical or methodological sources but can rather be understood only in the context of real social processes.³²

If theory is made an independent predicament, that is, if it is established ahistorically, as emanating from some inner essence of cognition, then it is transformed into a reified, ideological category. But the changes exhibited by scientific structures, both of all-embracing grand theories and minute everyday research operations, always depend on specific social situations. The influence of the subject matter on theory, as well as the application of theory on the subject, is not merely an intrascientific but also a societal process. As Horkheimer argues: “Bringing hypotheses to bear on facts is an activity that goes on ultimately, not in the savant's head but in industry.”³³ Regardless of the belief or nonbelief of the scientist in an independent, suprasocial knowledge, he and his science are integrated into the societal apparatus. They are moments of the self-preservation and continuous reproduction of existing socio-economic systems. Science is part of the forces of production that makes possible modern industrial systems. Diverse branches of production, in the division of labor of the capitalist mode of production, are not independent entities but historical specifications of the mode of society's confrontation with nature. This includes science, which only appears to be independent, just as there appears to be freedom of the economic subject in bourgeois society in that individuals seem to make decisions when in reality they are merely agents of concealed societal mechanisms.

Critical Theory is a critique of the “traditional theory” from an ethical standpoint. Horkheimer emphasizes continuity—the idea that there is no absolute break with past theoretical achievements, because Critical Theory “contains within it elements from traditional theories and from our declining culture generally.”³⁴ Traditional and Critical Theory differ mainly in regard to the subject's, that is, the scientist-scholar's attitude toward his society. Critical Theory's opposition to the traditional concept of theory springs in general from the difference not so much of objects as of subjects. “For men of critical mind, the facts, as they emerge from the work of society, are not extrinsic to the same degree as they are for the savant or for members of other professions who all think like little savants.”³⁵

“Traditional theory” is bent on the preservation and gradual reformation of society to achieve a better functioning of the social structure as a whole or of any of its particular elements. Its intention is to eliminate the abuses and disturbing or dysfunctional elements. This attitude is based on the premise that

the individual as a rule must simply accept the basic conditions of his existence as given and strive to fulfill them; he finds his satisfaction and praise in accomplishing as well as he can the tasks connected with his place in society and in courageously doing his duty despite all the sharp criticism he may choose to exercise in particular matters.³⁶

Critical Theory considers the “abuses” or “dysfunctional aspects” of capitalist society “as necessarily connected with the way in which the social structure is organized.” It does not intend to achieve a better functioning of class society by perfecting and promoting dominant social arrangements. Even the terms “better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable” are suspect. The sum total of blind interactions of individual activities in capitalist society, based on its division of labor and class structure, ultimately “originates in human action and therefore is a possible object of planful decision and rational determination of goals.”

Critical Theory, concerned with a radical transformation of existing social arrangements, is proposed, in opposition to the system-maintaining “traditional theory.” As Horkheimer argues:

The self-knowledge of present-day man is not a mathematicized natural science, which claims to be the eternal Logos, but a critical theory of contemporary society, a theory permeated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions in life. (italics mine)³⁷

The term critical is to be understood “less in the sense it has in the critique of pure reason than in the sense it has in the dialectical critique of political economy.”³⁸

Consequently, the adherence to certain basic notions of the original Marxian conceptual framework, such as the theory of impoverishment (Verelendung) and the inevitability of the breakdown of capitalism, is asserted by Horkheimer:

The categories of class, exploitation, surplus value, profit, pauperization, and breakdown are elements in a conceptual whole, and the meaning of this whole is to be sought not in the preservation of contemporary society but in its transformation into the right kind of society.³⁹

Thus Critical Theory is permeated by the idea of a future society as a community of free men, which is possible through technical means already at hand. Today there is a duality of social totality: the economy and culture of the present era are products of conscious human activity with which representatives of Critical Theory can identify themselves, but at the same time they state that certain phenomena of the same society (wars and oppression) seem to work like “nonhuman natural processes.” Horkheimer argues: “That world is not theirs but the world of capital.”⁴⁰ This duality is manifested in thought by their acceptance and at the same time their condemnation of societal categories such as work, value, and productivity. Today men act “as members of an organism which lacks reason.” Organism as a naturally developing and declining unity, Horkheimer contends, cannot be a sort of model for society, but only a form of deadened existence from which society must emancipate itself.⁴¹ A critical theoretical work must serve this aim of emancipation and must be permeated by it. Therefore, it must reject the “separation of value and research, knowledge and action” of traditional theory. A major part of this research might be devoted to the social determination of ideas and theories, as the sociology of knowledge does. But whereas the latter contents itself with establishing a relationship between thought and its societal conditioning, Critical Theory must go beyond that stand to “look towards a new kind of organization of work.” Its aim is to “transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual's purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built.”⁴² The issue is the rational individual versus the irrational society; Horkheimer's firm belief in the former is emphasized again and again. He maintains that “the thrust towards a rational society … is really innate in every man (italics mine).⁴³ A more elaborate discussion of the term rationality and its modification under different stages of bourgeois society came about when the era of the “eclipse of reason” began.

Critical Theory aims at the coordination of thought and action. For the critical theorist,

the subject is no mathematical point like the ego of bourgeois philosophy; his activity is the construction of the social present. … [Today] in reflection on man, subject and object are sundered; their identity lies in the future.⁴⁴

The path to this projected identity is not only a logical process of clarification for Critical Theory but also a concrete socio-historic process, in the course of which the entire social structure changes, as does the relationship of the theorist to society. The role of historical experience in reorganizing society on the basis of reason is crucial for Critical Theory. Today production does not serve the interest of the majority but the profit interests of a minority, a state of affairs that is ultimately rooted in existing property relations.

THE SEARCH FOR AN AGENT OF CHANGE

Horkheimer's search for the societal agent of the necessary historical transformation of an unjust capitalist socioeconomic order into a “just society” leads him to an analysis of the revolutionary potential of the capitalist social structure, which in turn ends in pessimism, even though at times he wavers between optimism and pessimism.

Marx and Engels saw the proletariat as the class that “experiences the connection between work that puts even more powerful instruments into men's hands in their struggle with nature, and the continuous renewal of an outmoded social organization.”⁴⁵ In view of the decline of the European proletarian revolutionary movement in the late 1930s, Critical Theory is sceptical of this insight and subsequently of the role of the proletariat. In Horkheimer's words: “Even the situation of the proletariat is, in this society, no guarantee of correct knowledge.”⁴⁶ False consciousness dominates proletarian insight and Weltanschauung. Critical Theory cannot belong exclusively to the proletariat, or, for that matter, to any social class. As Horkheimer expresses it: “Nor is there a social class by whose acceptance of the theory one could be guided.” A clear rejection of the historical role of the proletariat as primary agent of revolutionary change, a role rooted in its objective socio-economic situation is reiterated: “It is possible for the consciousness of every social stratum today to be limited and corrupted by ideology, however much, for its circumstances, it may be bent on truth.”⁴⁷

It is clear that the bureaucratization of German working class parties served as a major source of Horkheimer's fear of any organized movements. In Horkheimer's words: “Where the unity of discipline and freedom has disappeared, the movement becomes a matter of interest only to its own bureaucracy, a play that already belongs to the repertory of modern history.”⁴⁸

Furthermore, Horkheimer stated that if Critical Theory consisted of the formulation of the specific sentiments and ideas of a class, it would not differ from other special disciplines. Systematizing the consciousness of the proletariat would not produce the real picture of its existence and interests. It would be another traditional theory with a specific problem setting and not the intellectual side of the historic process of the emancipation of the proletariat. This would be so even if one limits oneself to pronouncing not the ideas of the proletariat in general but those of its most advanced segment or part of its leadership. The process of thought and of theory construction would remain one thing and its object, the proletariat, another.

THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUALS

As for the intellectuals, they waver between positions of exaggerated optimism, emanating from a feeling of power because of their alliance with the immense forces of defeat. This description of the attitude and sentiments of intellectuals in general was certainly characteristic of the critical theorists. Expressing a firm and militant optimism, Horkheimer wrote: “Today … in the transition from the present form of society to a future one, mankind will for the first time be a conscious subject and actively determine its own way of life.”⁴⁹ On the other hand, under the impact of the Nazi onslaught on the German and European labor movement, Horkheimer wrote pessimistically that

under the conditions of late capitalism and the impotence of the workers before the authoritarian state's apparatus of oppression, truth has sought refuge among small groups of admirable men. But these have been decimated by terrorism and have little time for refining the theory. (italics mine)⁵⁰

Consequently, Horkheimer advocates withdrawal as the only possible attitude because “the kind of thinking which is the most topical, which has the deepest grasp of the historical situation and is most pregnant with the future, must at certain times isolate its subject and throw him back upon himself.”⁵¹

Horkheimer's position on the role of the critical theorist is somewhat ambivalent. On one hand, he believes that the proper role of theory must be conceived in the dynamic sense of Marx, who asserted that “theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.” Therefore, if the critical

theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that his presentation of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges. (italics mine)⁵²

The course of confrontation between the vanguard of the class and the individuals who pronounce the truth about it, and the confrontation of this most advanced group and its theorist with the rest of the class are to be understood as a socio-historic process, a reciprocal interaction, in which the liberating consciousness unfolds itself along with the driving and disciplining power. The image of the future arises out of a thorough understanding of the present, but it takes imagination as well. It is the theorist among the most advanced groups who most have this “obstinacy of imagination [Eigensinn der Phantasie].”

Yet, on the other hand, Horkheimer advocated a demarcation between the orthodox Marxism of working class organizations and Mannheim's freischwebende Intelligenz. “Critical Theory,” Horkheimer contends, “is neither ‘deeply rooted’ like totalitarian propaganda nor ‘detached’ like the liberal intelligentsia.”⁵³ The critique of the theorist aims at both conscious apologists of existing conditions and at the diverting, conformist, or utopian tendencies in his own camp. The critical theorist must maintain a certain independent status, because “the theoretician whose business is to accelerate developments which will lead to a society without injustice can find himself in opposition to views prevailing even among the proletariat.”⁵⁴

A deliberate antiorganizational stand is expressed by Horkheimer; Critical Theory's “transmission will not take place via solidly established practice and fixed ways of acting but via concern [Interesse] for social transformation” (italics mine).⁵⁵ “Concern” refers to a small circle of intellectuals bound together by their shared theoretical knowledge of capitalist society and their longing for a society with no exploitation and oppression. “The circle of transmitters of this tradition … is constituted and maintained not by biological or testamentary inheritance, but by a knowledge which brings its own obligations with it” (italics mine).⁵⁶

As Horkheimer repeats again and again:

In the general historical upheaval the truth may reside with numerically small groups of men. History teaches us that such groups, hardly noticed even by those opposed to the status quo, outlawed but imperturbable, may at the decisive moment become the leaders because of their deeper insight.⁵⁷

THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIAL CHANGE

In regard to questions of epistemology, Horkheimer asserts that materialism has in common with positivism that it acknowledges as real only what is given in sense experience. The materialist theory of knowledge considers sense experience a starting point for all thought, but it does not absolutize sensation. Critical Theory opposes the reduction of all knowledge to sensation. Theory is always more than sensibility alone and cannot be totally reduced to sensations. Relying heavily on the work of Kurt Koffka and Max Wertheimer of Gestalt psychology, Horkheimer asserts, that far from being the elementary building blocks of the world or even of psychic life, sensations are derivatives arising through a complicated process of abstraction involving the destruction of formations that the psyche had shaped. He approvingly quotes Koffka: “Sensations, which for so long were the basis of psychology are … not the starting points but the end points of a development.”⁵⁸ Sensations are also historicized; like the relation of the subject to data, they are conditioned and changeable. The historically changing and active aspect of both subject and object and the active role of the former are emphasized. This theory of knowledge is dialectical, which means that subject and object interact. Horkheimer writes:

The world which is given to the individual and which he must accept and take into account is, in its present and continuing form, a product of the activity of society as a whole. The objects we perceive in our surroundings—cities, villages, fields, and woods—bear the mark of having been worked on by man.⁵⁹

Horkheimer goes on to explain the dialectical and historical character of sense perception:

Even the way men see and hear is inseparable from the social life-process as it has evolved over the millennia. 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.⁶⁰

In Critical Theory, materialism does not mean the ontological primacy of matter over consciousness. “Materialism is not tied down to a set conception of matter,” Horkheimer argues. “No authority has a say on what matter is except natural science as it moves forward.”⁶¹

Any treatment of materialism, then, Horkheimer argues, is misguided, for it is interested primarily in metaphysical questions. For the age of the rising bourgeoisie, materialism was a weapon for mastering nature and man. Problems of epistemology and of natural science dominated the materialism of that time. The practical requirements of concrete problems affect both the content and the form of materialist theory. Theory is only a tool, the essence of which arises from the tasks that, at any given historical period, are to be mastered with the help of the theory. In our age, we are told, the knowledge of movements and tendencies affecting society as a whole is immensely important for materialist theory. Thus, whereas idealism attempts to answer the same perennial questions, the same eternal riddle, problems of materialist philosophy are essentially determined by the tasks to be mastered at the moment.

It seems that the difference between materialism and idealism in Critical Theory is reduced to the question of the historical versus ahistorical character of problems and categories. Furthermore, “materialism” in Critical Theory means a predominance of imminent societal problems of the age wedded to the instrumentalism of the theory. “Materialism is not interested in a world view or in the souls of men. It is concerned with changing the concrete conditions under which men suffer and in which, of course, their souls must become stunted.”⁶²

Horkheimer repeatedly asserted the primacy of ethics over epistemological and ontological issues. In his words:

The principle that the materialist doctrine designates as reality is not fit to furnish a norm. … Matter in itself is meaningless: its qualities cannot provide the maxims for the shaping of life either in regard to the commandments or to the ideal. … Knowledge … yields no models, maxims or advice for an authentic life.⁶³

The relegation of epistemological and ontological issues to a secondary position was, of course, determined by the socio-historical situation and possibly motivated by Judaic thought. As is known, Judaic philosophy consists predominantly of ethics and has no ontology.

CRITICAL THEORY AND MARXISM

In concluding this discussion of Critical Theory, one must consider Horkheimer's convergence with Marxism or his divergence from it, since the reputation of Critical Theory as having a Marxist orientation is based primarily on his formulation of Critical Theory in the 1930s.

Before examining whether or not Horkheimer's Critical Theory represents a neo-Marxist orientation, a short discourse about Marxism is necessary. Marxism, as a convergence of German philosophy, British political economy, and French socialism, represents the unity of theory and practice (praxis). Marxian social theory is an empirical, positive, and verifiable social science. In other words, it is a sociological orientation, usually called historical materialism, that is, the use of a conceptual apparatus and the adherence to a materialist epistemological and ontological position. Thus Marxism, in a comprehensive sense, means the grasping of the relationship between economics and politics and the praxis derived from that understanding.

There is an additional problem in discussing Marxian social theory. Its interpreters usually contrast the “young-humanist-philosopher” Marx with the “mature-scientist-economist” Marx.⁶⁴ In my opinion, it is more appropriate to speak of the unity of Marx's work and a gradual widening of the Marxian framework and approach, Marx's theoretical life work constitutes a continuous Aufhebung—the suppression and preservation of a previous stage on a higher level. Marxian theory is then what one would now call an interdisciplinary approach of philosophy, history, and political economy with an underlying “value-commitment.” Marx's successive incorporation of the disciplines can easily be traced. Until about 1844, philosophy dominated Marx's approach.⁶⁵ Around 1845 the emphasis shifted to history. In a passage of The German Ideology, not usually translated in the English editions, Marx and Engels state: “We know only of one science, the science of history.”⁶⁶ An increasing awareness of the ills of capitalist society and the search for their root causes had already gradually shifted Marx's attention to the study of political enomomy in the mid 1840s. The Paris Manuscripts of 1844 are economic and philosophic manuscripts. Marx later gave an account of his intellectual development:

I was led by my studies to the conclusion that legal relations as well as forms of State could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material conditions of life … and that the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy. (italics mine)⁶⁷

Marx's shifting emphasis did not mean a drifting from discipline to discipline, but rather a synthesis of the various perspectives.⁶⁸

MARXISM AND ACADEMIC SOCIOLOGY

In nineteenth century Western European societies, two sociological orientations emerged independently of each other as theoretical responses to the socio-historic developments after the French Revolution. They were Comte's positivist sociology and the social theory of Marx and Engels. The line of development of the former orientation can be followed up to Talcott Parsons and contemporary Western academic sociology, and the latter from Marx and Engels to modern Marxist social sciences both in the East and the West.⁶⁹ Within both orientations further differentiations took place, most notably the emergence of the German historical-sociological school of Dilthey, Rickert, Weber and Simmel.⁷⁰

Both lines of development contain continuities and discontinuities, and scientific and ideological elements. The two orientations started out with an ignorance and a contempt for each other.⁷¹ A mutual distrust and ignorance was present much of the time in the relationship of academic sociology and Marxian social sciences from the days of Comte and Marx. Yet in the work of the leading articulators of both orientations a fruitful cross fertilization took place. Weber had a lifelong debate with the “ghost” of Karl Marx, whose work he considered “a work of scholarship of the highest order,”⁷² as did Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, Karl Mannheim, Joseph Schumpeter, and C. Wright Mills. In the Marxist camp, Max Adler, Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, and others engaged in a scholarly dialogue with “bourgeois” sociology.

After the mutual debunking and denouncing period of the Cold War era in the 1950s, the issue of their relationship was reopened in both camps. With the revival of Marxist sociology as an academic discipline within the larger framework of Marxism in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries in the 1960s the dialogue between Marxist and “bourgeois” sociology began anew.⁷³

Marxian sociology, then, has five basic characteristics. First, it is historical, in opposition to ahistorical, formalistic sociologies. Second, it is materialistic, in opposition to idealistic social theories.⁷⁴ Third, it is empirical as opposed to speculative theorizing.⁷⁵ Fourth, its subject matter is the research of societal relations that result from the relation of production, which determine the objective structure of historically concrete societies and the law-governed conditions of its development.⁷⁶ Fifth, Marxian sociology makes use of the category of totality, including the analysis of socioeconomic base and that of political, cultural, and ideological superstructure, in its reciprocal interrelationship.⁷⁷ Sixth, it is value committed, that is, committed to the optimistic idea that society can become perfect and just.

CRITICAL THEORY AND MARXIAN SOCIAL THEORY

In sum, early Critical Theory adhered to certain basic tenets of Marxian social theory, such as the historical approach and the notion of societal developments founded on societal laws, and recognized the importance of empirical research. However, Critical Theory also deviates from the basic tenets of classic Marxist epistemology and ontology: these tenets can be summarized as follows:

1. Objective external reality exists independently of our consciousness and perception.
2. There is no limit to what science can explain in regard to the laws of nature and society. Consequently, the difference between phenomenon and the unknowable Ding an sich is rejected. (Here a point of agreement with positivism should be noted.)
3. The image of objective reality is given to us by our senses (theory of reflection or copy theory).
4. Practice serves as the verification of the correctness or falseness of the images of external reality.
5. The ontological assumption of the primacy of matter is the basis for the idea of the unity of the sciences.⁷⁸

Although Critical Theory never took a systematic stand on questions of Marxian epistemology and ontology and never presented its own position in a systematic way, one can detect the points of disagreement between the two. In Critical Theory, the question of objective reality was brushed aside as a question of secondary importance. Critical Theory never subscribed to the theory of reflection (the copy theory), considering it a nineteenth century relic. Although Critical Theory lamented the positivist separation of theory and praxis, it abstained from praxis, for a variety of reasons, throughout its career, as discussed later. The idea of the unity of sciences was explicitly rejected by Critical Theory. Dilthey's doctrine of the dichotomy of the natural sciences and the cultural-social sciences was the most important single influence in this respect. The Marxian optimistic belief in progress was shaken by political events in Europe and by the impact of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Critical Theory cannot qualify as Marxist because it deviates from the basic tenets of Marxist social theory, on one hand, and because it never represented a synthesis of theory and praxis, on the other. The many complex reasons for this lack of synthesis require a brief discussion.

THEORY-PRAXIS: DEBATES OVER VIOLENCE

At decisive historic times, the theory-praxis issue often boils down to the problem of justifying the use of force. Many great political thinkers of our age, Weber, Sorel and Lukács among others, wrestled with this question and have come up with different answers. Three “ideal-type” answers given by intellectuals of post World War I Europe can be identified: first, the Realpolitik (middle-of-the-road) solution of Weber; second, the unconditional endorsement of violence as a historical necessity by Lukács; and third, the pacifist-humanist attitude of Horkheimer.⁷⁹

As a Realpolitiker, Max Weber was fully aware of the sociological fact that legitimate violence is part of the political process at certain stages in the historical development of every society. He summed up:

Violent social action is obviously something absolutely primordial. Every group, from the household to the political party, has always resorted to physical violence when it had to protect the interests of its members and was capable of doing so. However, the monopolization of legitimate violence by the political-territorial association (the state) and its rational consociation (Vergesellschaftung) into an institutional order is nothing primordial, but a product of evolution.⁸⁰

Weber also approvingly quoted Trotsky's dictum that “Every state is founded on force.” However, everyday politics and salvation are different spheres for Weber. He emphatically stated: “He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence.”⁸¹ Violence and politics even work against the salvation of the soul: “Everything that is striven for through political action operating with violent means … endangers the ‘salvation of the soul’” (italics mine).⁸² Two ethics are then in conflict here: the ethic of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) and the ethic of absolute ends (Gesinnungsethik). At one point Weber declares that “One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility, or when the one and when the other.”⁸³

Nevertheless, in his conclusion Weber pleads for some kind of compromise and declares that “an ethic of absolute ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man—a man who can have the ‘calling for politics.’”⁸⁴

Weber's opposition to revolutionary violence rested on his experience with Central European revolutions. He believed that those immature attempts had only discredited the cause of socialism. He wrote to Lukács in 1920: “My dear friend, we are naturally separated by our political views. I am absolutely convinced that these experiments will only have one effect: to discredit socialism for the coming 100 years.”⁸⁵ He also had considerable misgivings about Jewish overrepresentation in the Central European (especially German and Hungarian) post World War I revolutions. In spite of his understanding of and sympathy for the complexities of the Jewish predicament in Europe, he feared that the overrepresentation would result in a strengthening of anti-Semitism—a fear that was certainly vindicated by subsequent tragic historical events. Marianna Weber reports:

Weber despised anti-Semitism, but he regretted the fact that in those days there were so many Jews among the revolutionary leaders. … He said that on the basis of the historical situation of the Jews it was understandable that they in particular produced these revolutionary natures. But given the prevailing ways of thinking, it was practically imprudent for Jews to be admitted to leadership and for them to appear as leaders.⁸⁶

Weber's essay “Politics as a Vocation” summarizes the long debates of the so-called Weber-Kreis that took place in Heidelberg during the war years and engaged such participants as Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Karl Jaspers, and scores of young revolutionary intellectuals from Tsarist Russia.⁸⁷

The Weber lecture was delivered in Munich in 1919 as the German revolution was being played out in the background. Young Horkheimer attended one of Weber's lectures and recorded his disappointment 40-odd years later:

Max Weber lectured on the Soviet system. The auditorium was crowded to its doors, but great disappointment followed. Instead of theoretical reflection and analysis, which would have led to a reasoned structuring of the future, not only in posing the problem but in every single step of thinking, we listened for two or three hours to finely balanced definitions of the Russian system, shrewdly formulated ideal types, by which it was possible to define the Soviet order. It was all so precise, so scientifically exact, so value-free that we all went sadly home.⁸⁸

The same year that Weber delivered his speech in Munich, his one-time student and friend, Georg Lukács, in Budapest in the midst of revolutionary turmoil, faced the same dilemma about the use of force. A bourgeois-democratic revolution took place in Hungary in October 1918. Masses of former prisoners of war, many of whom participated in the Bolshevik revolution, returned from Russia and pushed events in Hungary toward the repetition of the Russian historical course, that is toward a transition from the bourgeois to the Bolshevik phase of the dual revolution. Lukács and his circle, all of them progressive bourgeois intellectuals, were caught up in a moral and political dilemma.

As related earlier, Horkheimer and Lukács had in common the predominance of the ethical element in their thought. However, whereas Horkheimer's ethical stance was pacifist, passive-pessimistic-messianic, we can characterize Lukács' position as militant, active-progressive-messianic. Much of the Lukács literature points to a break—sometimes called radical—in Lukács' intellectual career and appears to be vexed by the sudden and unexpected conversion of the formerly bourgeois esthete to Marxism. Recent scholarship, however, rightly emphasizes the basic continuity and unity in the Lukácsian life and work in general and in its strong ethical bent in particular.⁸⁹ It has been demonstrated that embracing Marxism and joining the Communist Party was a culmination of his development, that is, a logical step partly due to his personality development, his gradual disenchantment with decaying European bourgeois-capitalist civilization, and partly to the thrust of historical events, the revolutionary wave of post World War I Europe.

A tracing of Lukács' career, sketchy and incomplete as it unavoidably must be, shows young Lukács, the critic, to be always “longing for value and form, for measure and order.”⁹⁰ Writing in 1910, Lukács, the essayist, longing for harmony, could not see any room for solution any other than “the formation and salvation” of the individual soul. He proclaimed that a “new type of esthete is in the process of being born.”⁹¹ Young Lukács' messianism was clearly expressed in language reminiscent of the prophets of the Old Testament. He wrote: “The critic has been sent into the world … to proclaim … to judge.”⁹² The intellectual tool of the critic (Lukács) is the essay, and “the essay is a judgment.”⁹³ Lukács believed in the redeeming power of the form, proclaiming that “esthetic culture is the formation of the soul.”⁹⁴ Aesthetics and ethics were thus brought together: Form is the highest judge of life. “Form-giving is a judging force, an ethic; there is a value judgment in everything that has been given form. Every kind of form-giving, every literary form, is a step in the hierarchy of life-possibilities. …” (italics mine).⁹⁵ This was a radical view of the form, and the concept of violence found its place in it:

The essence of art is the creation of form, the conquering of resistance and of hostile forces, the creation of unity out of discord. … Form is the last judgment over things. It is a last judgment that means the salvation of everything possible, a judgment that forces salvation on everything by a holy terror (italics mine).⁹⁶

Young Marx too, it should be recalled, advocated a universal liberation and salvation. Marx approvingly quoted Thomas Münzer, the German revolutionary theologue, who declared it intolerable “that every creature should be transformed into property—the fishes of the water, the birds of the air, the plants of the earth: the creature too should become free.”⁹⁷

The uncertainties of a disintegrating bourgeois order drove young Lukács toward a “longing for certainty, for measure and dogma.” Marx's doctrine seemed to provide the solution to that uncertainty. After the 1917 Russian Revolution and the first (bourgeois) Hungarian revolution of October 1918, Lukács moved from his romantic anticapitalist stance to a quasi-social-democratic position. His theory was summarized in the December 1918 article, “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem.”⁹⁸ Lukács' article discusses the alternatives: either the gradual creation of a new world order through peaceful and democratic means or the adoption of the position of the dictatorship of the proletariat through terror and an even more ruthless class domination than the existing one, in hopes of ultimately abolishing all class conflicts.

A few weeks later, after meeting Béla Kun, the charismatic leader of the 1919 Hungarian proletarian revolution,⁹⁹ Lukács joined the Communist Party and fought both with gun and pen for the cause of proletarian internationalism. The theoretical basis for his conversion was summarized in a second political essay “Tactics and Ethics.” The concluding sentence of the essay reads as follows:

Only he who acknowledges unflinchingly and without any reservations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can commit the murderous deed that is truly—and tragically—moral. To express this sense of the most profound human tragedy in the incomparably beautiful words of Hebbel's Judith: ‘Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me—who am I to be able to escape it?’¹⁰⁰

Indeed, Lukács firmly believed in the historical necessity of violence: “Violence is now put to the service of man and it serves his unfolding as a man.”¹⁰¹

Another contemporary German thinker, Ernst Bloch, a friend of Lukács and a member of the Weber circle, called this attitude “the categorical imperative with a revolver in the hand.” “Now and then,” Bloch wrote in 1918, “evil can be conquered in order to destroy the bad that exists.” Otherwise, Bloch warns, “the soul might take upon itself an even greater guilt by retreating into the idyllic state of mind, and by accepting a seemingly harmless tolerance of injustice.”¹⁰² It might be noted parenthetically that Lukács and Bloch agreed with Marx, who assigned a specific role to violence. Marx wrote that “revolution is necessary … not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”¹⁰³

As for Lukács, many influences combined to shape his ethical attitude and personality, most notably of Dostoyevski, Sorel, and the Russian anarchist Savinkov.¹⁰⁴ The personality of Lukács, the revolutionary thinker, had been masterfully portrayed by Thomas Mann in the figure of Leo Naphta of his monumental Magic Mountain. Lukács met Mann in 1922 in Vienna, where Lukács was living in exile after the defeat of the Hungarian proletarian revolution, and made a great impact on Thomas Mann.¹⁰⁵

The combination of many factors, most notably, the differences in intellectual and psychological temperament and socio-historical circumstances, accounts for the divergence between Lukács and the critical theorists (here primarily Horkheimer) regarding their views on the use and justification of violence. Horkheimer's reluctance to condone and accept violence under any circumstances can be traced more specifically to his adherence to a bourgeois life style, his interpretation of the Judaic ethic, and the early impact of the pessimistic Weltanschauung of Schopenhauer.

Some of the autobiographical and semiautobiographical writings of Horkheimer are most revealing in this respect. Although Horkheimer was disappointed with Weber's “value-free” political analysis of the 1919 events, he could never bring himself to make an unequivocal decision about the moral dilemma over violence. Therefore, the search for a solution, “the yearning for something entirely different,” was a permanent theme of his entire life. In the late 1920s he reflected on the use of violence, on pacifism and harmony:

It is definitely more innocuous to reject violence in every form than to try to eliminate violence by the use of violence. A pacifist is always sure of himself; should he become the object of violence, he will choose not to take up the challenge. His life is thus more harmonious than that of the revolutionary. In situations of extreme misery he must appear to the revolutionary as an angel in the realm of hell. Just imagine the scene: the man of violence lies unconscious on the floor, conquered by his enemies and victimized by the opposing forces just as the masses he led experienced before him. Then he is assisted by an angel who is in the position to help him because the man never approved the practice of violence and was therefore spared of it! But then the thought keeps coming back: would not humanity have sunk deeper into barbarism without those in the course of history who set out to liberate it by the use of force? Is it possible that humanity needs such violence? Is it conceivable that we have to pay for our “harmony” with the renunciation of all practical help? These questions are enough to destroy one's peace of mind.¹⁰⁶

Having lived up to his confession, as stated in this quotation, Horkheimer all his life remained a pacifist with a somewhat uneasy conscience.

The problem of alternative lifestyles, that is, the choice between a revolutionary path always threatened by misery, persecution, and jail or a comfortable academic career admired by students and honored by the authorities, was carefully weighed by Horkheimer. He wrote:

The development of the proletarian elite does not take place in an academic setting. Rather, it is brought about by battles in the factories and unions, by disciplinary punishments and some very dirty altercations (schmutzige Auseinandersetzung) within the parties and outside of them, by jail sentences and illegality. Students do not flock in large numbers there as they do to the lecture halls and laboratories of the bourgeoisie. The career of a revolutionary does not consist of banquets and honorary titles, of interesting research projects and professional salaries; more likely, it will acquaint him with misery, dishonor and jail and, at the end, uncertainty. These conditions are made bearable only by a super-human faith. Understandably, this way of life will not be the choice of those who are nothing more than clever.¹⁰⁷

Horkheimer could never call up “the super-human faith” required for a revolutionary career under those circumstances. The later Horkheimer states explicitly his interpretation of Judaism as consisting of two basic themes: suffering (Leid) and the refusal to accept violence. In 1960 he categorically declared:

No people has suffered more than the Jews. … The refusal to accept violence as a proof of the truth is a perennial trait in Jewish history, and Judaism has turned the suffering it endured in consequence in its own unity and permanence. … Suffering and hope have become inseparable in Judaism.¹⁰⁸

In light of this summarized statement of Horkheimer, it is easy to trace this Judaic theme throughout the earlier phases of Critical Theory. It was definitely there in 1933: “Past injustice will never be made up; the suffering of past generations receives no compensation.”¹⁰⁹ It is reiterated in a reformulated version four years later: “And even after the new society shall have come into existence, the happiness of its members will not make up for the wretchedness of those who are being destroyed in our contemporary society.”¹¹⁰ After Auschwitz, the culmination of the theme in the following declaration is understandable: “The real individuals of our time are the martyrs who have gone through infernos of suffering and degredation. … The anonymous martyrs of the concentration camps are the symbols of humanity that is striving to be born. The task of philosophy is to translate what they have done into language that will be heard. …”¹¹¹ In the same vein, the cofounder of the Frankfurt School, Adorno, wrote: “The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression, is objectively conveyed.”¹¹²

SCHOPENHAUER'S INFLUENCE

The pessimism of Critical Theory rested on Horkheimer's inability to find an agent of socio-historical transformation, and his lifelong preoccupation with Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer was the first real “bourgeois” of German philosophy. His career differed from those of all other earlier German philosophers. Throughout his life he was free of financial problems, travelled all over Europe, and felt no pressure to pursue an academic career; he was independently wealthy—a capitalist “rentier.” (The close biographical agreement between Horkheimer and Schopenhauer might be noted: both were from an upper bourgeois social background that gave them lifelong, financial independence, and they both turned to philosophy after a short apprenticeship in business.)

In terms of philosophy, Schopenhauer has usually been considered the first representative of philosophical irrationalism. Although his main work, The World as Will and Idea, was published in 1818, his real impact commenced only after the defeat of the 1848 German bourgeois-democratic revolution. The basic sociological fact of German development after 1848 was the bourgeoisie's renunciation of any claim to political power in exchange for free capitalist development.¹¹³

Schopenhauer's philosophy, an “indirect apologetics of capitalism,” (Lukács) explains all the negative aspects of capitalist society as eternal features of the general human condition. Consequently, the fight against the evils of capitalism is declared to be a senseless and hopeless endeavor. This tenet leads to the kernel of Schopenhauer's philosophy, his pessimism, which is a justification of the senselessness of all political activity. Instead of activism, contemplation is suggested. This is the basic social function of his philosophy of “indirect apologetics.”¹¹⁴

Horkheimer acknowledges his debt to Schopenhauer and comments on the primacy and dominant influence of Schopenhauer's philosophy on him: “My first acquaintance with philosophy was with the work of Schopenhauer. My relationship to the teachings of Hegel and Marx … could not obliterate my encounter with his [Schopenhauer's] philosophy.”¹¹⁵ Horkheimer's relation to Schopenhauer is most clearly manifested in his pessimism about the society of the future. Horkheimer claims that perfect justice can never be realized in history, because, even if a better society replaces the present disorder, the past misery is not undone. Consequently, Critical Theory has always contained an element of sadness. Even after the new society is realized, the happiness of its members cannot compensate for the misery of those who are presently being destroyed in contemporary society. (Later Adorno called his science “sad science” [traurige Wissenschaft] as opposed to Nietzsche's “gay science” [fröhliche Wissenschaft].)¹¹⁶

Horkheimer always had a high esteem for Schopenhauer, “the clairvoyant pessimist” who anticipated the “dialectic of enlightenment,” the historic process that was to become the main theme of Horkheimer and Adorno's philosophy of history in the middle period (1940s) of Critical Theory. It was Schopenhauer who

saw things too clearly to exclude the possibility of historical improvement. The end of almost all manual labor, especially of hard physical labor, is something he foresaw more precisely than most of the economists of his day. But he also suspected the result of such a change. He took technical, economic and social improvements into account; but from the very beginning he perceived other consequences: the blind devotion to success and a setback for a peaceful course of events. In sum, he saw the dialectic of enlightenment.¹¹⁷

Schopenhauer measured the world in terms of its professed ideals and found it wanting. A conservative theorist can be just as critical as a revolutionary Marxist, argued the later Horkheimer, pointing out that Marx's protest was made when the aims of the bourgeois revolution—liberté, égalité, fraternité—had been realized only for a minority in a capitalist society. Although in the 1930s Horkheimer could still envision a proletarian revolution in Germany as an alternative to National Socialism, his vision of a successful revolution was marred by serious doubts. The later Horkheimer reflects: “I was already sceptical at that time that a Marxian proletarian solidarity would ultimately lead to the right society.”¹¹⁸

The underlying pessimism of Critical Theory echoes Schopenhauer's scepticism, which holds that a radical change in the world faces almost insurmountable difficulties. Horkheimer writes:

It might seem a wonderful objective that future generations will live a happier and more intelligent life on earth than today's generation does under the present bloody and stupefying conditions. But ultimately even those future generations will disappear and the world will continue in its orbit as if nothing happened.¹¹⁹

It should be emphasized that this point is not marginal to Critical Theory. Horkheimer is convinced that even “future generations … will irrevocably pass away (vergänglich) and at the end nothingness triumphs over happiness (Freude).”¹²⁰

Because the Schopenhauerian notion is that all satisfaction has a negative character and consequently only pain and suffering have a positive character, the idea of love for humanity is characterized by an all-pervading pessimism. Thus there cannot be a joyous coactivity between human beings. Love for humanity is manifested solely as Mitleid (universal solidarity and compassion). Mitleid is the only ethical motivation. Hence, Schopenhauerian ethics—and Horkheimerian ethics, too—have a passive, sorrowful bent. The notion of Mitleid is mainly attributed to the animal world, and Schopenhauer sees it almost as a metaphysical duty; he states that cruelty to animals is never a mark of a good man. He considers the moral teachings of Christianity to be deficient in their neglect of the animal world.

Horkheimer shares with Schopenhauer this theme of Mitleid with all suffering creatures, human and nonhuman. He writes in 1933, the year fascism triumphed in Germany: “Men might … overcome pain and illness … but in nature the reign of suffering and death will continue (in der Natur aber herrscht weiter das Leiden und der Tod).”¹²¹ This theme might have come both from Schopenhauer and from Judaism, but its pessimistic tone suggests that its source is more likely the former, since in the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah foresees a world of perfect reconciliation in which “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid … and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”¹²² Whatever the origin of Horkheimer's Mitleid with the sufferings of animals and nature, the theme remained a permanent one for Horkheimer and Adorno.

JUDAIC INFLUENCES ON HORKHEIMER

It was not until the last phase of Horkheimer's lifework (and Adorno's as well) that explicit references to Judaism were made and indebtedness to Judaic thought was in any way indicated. However, if we accept Marx's dictum that “the tradition of all past generations weighs like a mountain on the minds of the living,” then this factor of existential determination cannot be ignored, even if it is only latent in the Critical Theory of the 1930s.

Selma Stern's summary describes the post-Enlightenment situation best when “the Jew achieved some sort of synthesis between Judaism and European culture.” At the end of the eighteenth century it was possible to achieve this synthesis because

his [the Jew's] demand for civil, social and economic equality were in harmony with the literary, pedagogic and philosophical concepts of his age. The ideas of Reason and Enlightenment, of Deism and Humanism, the doctrines of Tolerance and Humanity were not foreign to the spirit of Judaism. It was not difficult to reconcile and harmonize the moral doctrines of Kant with the moral doctrines of the Talmud, the fervor of Schiller with the fervor of the prophets. …¹²³

As a result of this synthesis between “Judaism and the Zeitgeist,” it was possible to try to understand one's own existence or “to penetrate the surrounding world and come to an understanding with its spiritual forces.”¹²⁴

Habermas tried to clarify the close and fruitful relationship between German idealism and Jewish philosophers in an essay in which he established a sort of “elective affinity” (Wahlverwandtschaft). He remarks that certain central motives of the basically Protestant German idealist philosophy are made more accessible through the experience of Jewish tradition. This is so because German idealist philosophy incorporated in itself a cabbalistic heritage; thus, the idealist philosophy in turn becomes more luminous when reflected in a mind that, even though it may not be aware of the fact, contains a shot of Jewish mysticism.¹²⁵

Franz Rosenzweig in his work, Der Stern der Erlösung (1921), undertook a new interpretation of German idealism from the standpoint of Jewish mysticism.¹²⁶ When Rosenzweig writes that true philosophy is that which cannot “ignore the scream of despairing humanity,” we are reminded of the young Horkheimer's fictional hero Jochai: “The intellectual victory of Private Jochai would bring salvation for his fellow man, for the ‘desperate slaves.”¹²⁷ Redemption is one of the central categories of Judaic thought. In rejecting the war, Horkheimer went one step beyond pacifism in saying that he did not want to belong to any nation, that being a human being is enough for him. True enough, he did not identify the cause and source of his feelings. However, Franz Rosenzweig wrote a letter from the front, at the very same time that Horkheimer wrote of Jochai, that identified the reason for his own feelings:

Because the Jews stand already beyond the antitheses of world history and particularly homeland and belief, heaven and earth, antitheses that govern the actions of nations, they do not need wars any more.¹²⁸

Horkheimer's early realization of what he expected of philosophy and a university career were directed toward the problems of society and humanity. Habermas very convincingly argues the why of Horkheimer's interest:

The Jews have experienced society as a limiting and threatening force more keenly than anybody else, and it followed that their life-experience served as a sociological training. … And so it happened that Jews dominated German sociology since the days of Ludwig Gumplowicz.¹²⁹

If Horkheimer perceives no possibility of praxis, he can still cling to the yearning for justice and truth. Herein lies the direct link between Horkheimer and Hermann Cohen, one of the greatest German-Jewish philosophers at the turn of the century. It might be added parenthetically that both Horkheimer and Adorno were students of another neo-Kantian thinker, Hans Cornelius, under whom they wrote their dissertations.

Neo-Kantianism was the dominant philosophical school in Germany around the turn of the century. Its basic slogan was “back to Kant,” and its aim was to make philosophy scientific. Helmholtz, an eminent physicist and physiologist, restated the epistemological question of space and spatial perceptions; and in the work of Hermann Cohen “neo-Kantianism reached its climax” (Cassirer). The two branches of neo-Kantianism are the Marburg school and the Baden school. In the latter, Windelband and Rickert, building on the work of Dilthey, restated the notion of a sharp distinction between natural and cultural-social sciences; they attempted to work out a systematic epistemological foundation for the latter.

Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was the founder of the Marburg or natural scientific branch of neo-Kantianism, and Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer became its other most outstanding representatives. Cohen not only conducted an in-depth analysis of Kantian philosophy and transformed it in the process, but, toward the end of his career, he introduced his own philosophical system in the work of Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (1902). Relatively less known is Cohen's interest in the significance of Judaism for the religious progress of mankind, a topic that he discussed in many essays during his life and that culminated in his posthumous Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism).

Cohen's numerous treatises on Kant and his expositions of Kantian philosophy were based on his view of philosophy as a science, based on the laws of logic. He was more consistent and therefore more successful than Kant in applying the transcendental critical method in ethics. Cohen's critical methodology made the logical science of jurisprudence the basis for ethics. Judaism proved to be as strong a philosophical influence on Cohen as Kantian philosophy, and he strove to prove an intimate relationship between these two, especially in regard to ethical teachings. One of the main similarities lies in the primacy of reason.

Furthermore, both Judaism and Kant base their ethics on voluntarism (although supplemented by “commandments,” that is, ethical legislation). However, their origins of ethical legislation differ: whereas Kant designates creative reason as the source, Judaism derives the law from God.

Cohen wrote many essays relating Kant and Judaism, the most important one entitled “Innere Bezeihungen der Kantischen Philosophie zum Judentum” (Intimate Relationships between Kantian Philosophy and Judaism). All these essays are collected in the book Jüdische Schriften (Judaic Writings).¹³⁰ Here Cohen states among others that Kant's categorical imperative is “in the blood of the Jew” because it too affirms the dignity of human beings without exploitation that is explicitly stated in the social legislation of Judaism:

The prophets would indeed not have been the originators of true political ethics had they not taught the self-purpose of man in so aggressive a manner, and had they not given their blood for it. Their accomplishment is the social legislation of the Pentateuch, the greatest creation of social-ethical idealism, which has not remained a mere utopia.¹³¹

Cohen points out that Judaism couples social justice with peace to form the basic ingredients of messianic era. Social justice and peace, as we have seen, were the two main concerns of Horkheimer's early writings.

Yearning for God means yearning for salvation, for deliverance from the constricting burden of feelings of guilt. This yearning stems from anxiety, which might compel man to flee himself, to lose his way. Thus, yearning for God is equal to man's natural impulse not to fall into despair but to cling to the anchorage of his self-confidence so that he can save himself from desperation and self-condemnation. This is to say, yearning is nothing less than the hope for rescue in a threatening death-struggle.

However, Horkheimer's yearning for social justice became increasingly tempered by pessimism. He wrote in 1933 that “past injustice will never be made up; the suffering of past generations receives no compensation.” In the same vein, he restated the idea in 1937: “And even after the new society shall have come into existence, the happiness of its members will not make up for the wretchedness of those who are being destroyed in our contemporary society.”¹³²

As we have seen, the language of Critical Theory even in the 1930s is saturated with biblical terminology such as true, truth, false, salvation (Erlösung), suffering (Leid), compassion (Mitleid), and reconciliation (Versöhnung). These remarks lead to another aspect of Horkheimer's Judaism, which is of immediate relevance, the problem of language. George Steiner remarks that the European Jew came late to secular literature. Since languages are the codifications of immemorial reflexes and communal experiences, the Jew, even if he passed from the Hebrew into any of the European languages via Yiddish, “had to slip into the garb and glove” of his oppressors.¹³³ Jewish writers tried to weld their legacy, that is the uniqueness of their social and historical condition and their collective experience, to a borrowed idiom. The most obvious example is Franz Kafka, the Jew living in Prague, a Czech city of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, who wrote in German. He was conscious of this specific form of alienation and was tormented by it. In 1911 he wrote in his diary:

Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as only I could have loved her because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is not “Mutter”, to call her “Mutter” makes her a little comic. … For the Jew, “Mutter” is specifically German, it unconsciously connotes Christian splendor together with Christian coldness; also, the Jewish woman who is called “Mutter” therefore becomes not only comic but strange. … I believe that it is solely the memories of the Ghetto that preserve the Jewish family, for the word “Vater” does not approximate the Jewish father either.¹³⁴

Horkheimer and Adorno, also well aware of the problem of language, were concerned with it throughout their lives. Independent of Kafka, Horkheimer expressed the very same ideas in almost identical terms at the same time in My Political Confession:

Had I just arrived from my homeland of Palestine, and in an amazingly short time mastered the rudiments of writing in German, this essay could not have been more difficult to write. The style here does not bear the mark of a facile genius. I tried to communicate with the help of what I read and heard, subconsciously assembling fragments of a language that springs from a strange mentality. What else can a stranger do? But my strong will prevailed because my message deserves to be said regardless of its stylistic shortcomings.¹³⁵

There is obviously more to this Horkheimer statement than the worry that he would lack the power and poignancy to express perfectly what he wished to say. The existential character of the passage is evident. Horkheimer shares with Walter Benjamin, Kurt Tucholsky, Karl Kraus—not to speak of Kafka—the preoccupation with language¹³⁶ and the feeling of either homelessness or estrangement. Again it was Kafka who summarized the problem best in one of his letters to Max Brod, written in 1921. Kafka spoke about the relationship of the young Jews of his time to their Jewishness, and about “the terrible inner situation of this generation.” They want to become German writers (or intellectuals) and wish to get away from Judaism but “with their hind legs they remained stuck with the Jewishness of their fathers, while their front legs were unable to find new ground. The despair about this was their inspiration. …”¹³⁷

Notes

1. The playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was acquainted with members of the Frankfurt School and participated in several discussions in their California exile, wrote in his diary on May 12, 1942: “Lunch with Eisler at Horkheimer. Afterwards Eisler suggests the story of the Frankfurt Institute of sociology as topic for The Tui Novel.” Brecht had been engaged in the writing of a satirical portrayal of intellectuals in the Weimer Republic, with the working title, The Tui Novel. Tui was defined by him as “the intellectual of this era of markets and commodities.” Brecht continued: “A rich old man, the grain speculator Weil dies, disturbed by the miseries on earth. In his will he leaves a large sum for the establishment of an institute to investigate the sources of that misery, which is, of course, he himself.” Brecht's novel was never completed. (Bertolt Brecht, Arbeitsjournal 1938-1942, Werner Hecht (Ed.) vol. I, Frankfurt am Main, 1973, p. 443).

2. Carl Grünberg, “Festrede, gehalten zur Einweihung des Instituts für Sozialforschung an der Universität Frankfurt a.M. am 22. Juni 1924,” Frankfurter Universitätsreden, 1924, p. 10.

3. Ibid., p. 7.

4. Unpublished, Horkheimer Archives, quoted in Helmut Gumnior and Rudolf Ringguth, Max Horkheimer in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1973, p. 17.

5. Ibid., p. 7.

6. Max Horkheimer, Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen, Hamburg, 1970, p. 62.

7. Max Horkheimer, Aus der Pubertät. Novellen und Tagebuchblätter, München, 1974, p. 22.

8. Gumnior-Ringguth, pp. 18-27.

9. Max Horkheimer, “Nachwort,” in Porträts deutsch-jüdischer Geistesgeschichte, Thilo Koch (Ed.) Köln, 1961, pp. 256-7.

10. Horkheimer, Aus der Pubertät, p. 14.

11. Ibid., pp. 19-20.

12. Ibid., p. 257.

13. Quoted in Gumnior-Ringguth, p. 24. Hans Cornelius is remembered in the history of philosophy as the philosopher who was denounced by Lenin as “this police sergeant in a professorial chair.” See, V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Moscow, 1952, pp. 223-224.

14. Ibid., p. 23.

15. Horkheimer, Aus der Pubertät, p. 20.

16. V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. VI, New York, 1929, p. 17.

17. Karl Korsch, Marxismus und Philosophie, Leipzig, 1923; and Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, Berlin, 1923. See also, István Mészaros, Lukács' Concept of Dialectic, London, 1972, and G. H. R. Parkinson (Ed.), Georg Lukács, The Man, His Work and His Ideas, London, 1970, and Paul Breines, Lukács and Korsch 1910-1932. A Study in the Genesis and Impact of Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein and Marxismus und Philosophie, unpub. diss. The University of Wisconsin, 1972, and Mihály Vajda, “Karl Korsch's ‘Marxism and Philosophy’” in Dick Howard and Karl E. Klare (Eds.), The Unknown Dimension. European Marxism since Lenin, New York, 1972, pp. 131-146.

18. Georg Lukács, Geschichte …, p. 94.

19. Ibid., p. 54. For a modern assessment of this work see István Mészáros (Ed.), Aspects of History and Class Consciousness, London, 1971.

20. Max Horkheimer, “Ein neuer Ideologiebegriff?,” Grünberg Archiv, Vol. 15, 1930, p. 33.

21. Max Horkheimer, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” ZfS, VI, 2 (1937), p. 278.

22. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966, p. 147.

23. Heinrich Regius (Horkheimer's pseudonym), Dämmerung. Notizen in Deutschland, Zürich, 1934, pp. 122-130.

24. Max Horkheimer, “Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozial-philosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozial-forschung,” Frankfurter Universitätsreden, 1931, pp. 3-16.

25. Edward Shils, “Tradition, Ecology, and Institution in the History of Sociology,” Daedalus, 99 (Fall, 1970), p. 777.

26. Horkheimer, “Die gegenwärtige Lage,” p. 3. For a brief summary of the state of German sociology during the Weimar Republic see Karl Mannheim, “German Sociology (1918-1933),” in Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology, Paul Kecskemeti (Ed.) London, 1953, pp. 209-228.

27. Max Horkheimer, “Vorwort,” ZfS, I (1932), p. III.

28. ZfS, VI, 1 (1937), p. 1.

29. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Other Writings, Baltimore, 1968, p. 41.

30. Ibid., p. 41.

31. Max Horkheimer, “Traditionelle …,” ZfS, VI, 2 (1937), p. 247.

32. Ibid., p. 251.

33. Ibid., p. 252.

34. Ibid., p. 292.

35. Ibid., p. 264.

36. Ibid., p. 262.

37. Ibid., p. 254.

38. Ibid., p. 261/n. 1.

39. Ibid., p. 271.

40. Ibid., p. 262.

41. The organistic model of society has haunted sociology throughout its history from Saint Simon via Spencer to Talcott Parsons. To Saint Simon, the study of society is general physiology that “addresses itself to considerations of a higher order. It towers above individuals, looking on them merely as organs of the social body, whose organic functions it must examine, just as specialized physiology studies those of individuals.” Emile Durkheim, Socialism, New York, 1962, p. 126. Parsons maintains that “developments in biological theory and in the social sciences have created firm grounds for accepting the fundamental continuity of society and culture as part of a more general theory of the evolution of living systems.” Talcott Parsons, The System of Modern Societies, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971, p. 2.

42. Horkheimer, “Traditionelle …,” p. 264.

43. Max Horkheimer, “Philosophie und kritische Theorie,” ZfS, VI, 3, p. 630.

44. Horkheimer, “Traditionelle …,” p. 265.

45. Ibid., p. 267

46. Ibid., p. 267.

47. Ibid., p. 291.

48. Ibid., p. 271.

49. Ibid., p. 284.

50. Ibid., p. 288.

51. Ibid., p. 268.

52. Ibid., p. 269.

53. Ibid., p. 276.

54. Ibid., p. 274.

55. Ibid., pp. 290-291.

56. Ibid., p. 291.

57. Ibid., p. 291.

58. Max Horkheimer, “Materialismus und Metaphysik,” ZfS, II, 1 (1933), p. 31n.

59. Horkheimer, “Traditionelle …,” p. 255.

60. Ibid., p. 255.

61. Horkheimer, “Materialismus …,” p. 24.

62. Marcuse was more outspoken on that issue; change must be brought about by a structural transformation of society, as he expressed it in the Zeitschrift in 1936. He wrote that change must come “not through an act of education or of the moral renewal of man but through an economic and political process encompassing the disposal over the means of production by the community, the reorientation of the productive process towards the needs and wants of the whole society … the active participation of the individuals in the administration of the whole. When all present subjective and objective potentialities of development have been unbound, the needs and wants themselves will change.” Cf. Herbert Marcuse, “Zur Kritik des Hedonismus,” ZfS, VI, 1937, pp. 55-89. Later, at the height of the worldwide student protest movement of the late 1960s, Marcuse reversed the order of the change and advocated the possibility, even the necessity, of changing consciousness first. Cf. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, Boston, 1963.

63. Horkheimer, “Materialismus …,” p. 9.

64. There are two main reasons for the fad of contrasting the young Marx with the mature one. First, the post World War II years favored a more humanistic Marxism in the West as opposed to the dogmatic and unimaginative Stalinist Marxism. It was also easier to combine a humanistic Marxism with other philosophies, such as existentialism, as Sartre had attempted to do. Second, the centerpiece, the connecting element of the Marxian theoretical edifice, the Grundrisse, was not made available to the larger public until its 1953 East German publication. The translator of the 1973 English language edition says that only three copies of the original 1939 Moscow publication reached the West. The Grundrisse continues to discuss the problem of alienation and thus reaches back to The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1884 of the young Marx. Yet it also presents the first systematic analysis of capitalist society in terms of political economy and thereby represents the link to the mature Marx's Das Kapital. As the late Georg Lichtheim argued correctly, the discovery of the Grundrisse makes it impossible to dichotomize Marx into a young Hegelian existentialist philosopher and a mature Ricardian economist, because the Grundrisse marks the point at which the Hegelian and the Ricardian in Marx interpenetrate.

65. See Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Critique, Moscow, 1956, and Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, New York, 1964.

66. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Vol. 3, Berlin (East), 1962, p. 18.

67. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, New York, 1970, p. 20.

68. Noone could deny the philosophical interest of the mature Marx when reading the chapter on “The Fetishism of Commodities …” in Das Kapital. Neither could one overlook the moral indignation of Marx, again in Das Kapital, when discussing the enclosure movement and the role of slave trade in “The So-called Primitive Accumulation” chapter. His closing sentence reads: “If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek’, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, New York, p. 760). Thus the massive volumes of Das Kapital represent the history, sociology, and political economy of capitalist society.

69. See Alvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, New York, 1970, pp. 11ff.

70. Rejecting the scientism of the positivists and insisting on the uniqueness of the cultural and historical sciences and their differences from the physical sciences, they also rejected the Marxian ideas of a goal towards which history is moving. At the same time Weber responded positively to influences from both these traditions, while seeking to establish a third orientation.

71. In 1866 Marx wrote to Engels in a letter: “I am now reading Comte, because the British and French make so much fuss over that guy (Kerl). What they are taken by is the encyclopaedic la synthese. But it is a miserable one compared to Hegel, though Comte is superior to him as a professional mathematician and physicist, that is, he is superior in details, yet Hegel is greater overall. And this shit-positivism (Scheisspositivismus) was published in 1832!” Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Part 3, Berlin Vol. 3, 1931-1932, p. 345.

72. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik, Tübingen, Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1924, pp. 504-505.

73. For recent statements see Peter Berger (Ed.), Marxism and Sociology. Views from Eastern Europe, New York, 1969; Peter Bollhagen, Soziologie und Geschichte, Berlin, 1966; Gabor Kiss, Marxismus als Soziologie, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1971; Georges Gurvitch, La Sociologie de Karl Marx, Paris, 1959; and Henri Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx, New York, 1969. Alexander Vucinich, “Marx and Parsons in Soviet Sociology,” The Russian Review, 33, 1. (Jan. 1974), pp. 1-19.

74. Lenin and Bukharin used historical materialism and Marxist sociology as identical terms. See Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism. A System of Sociology, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969.

75. Marx and Engels insisted on this characteristic of their science: “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both these which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.” And again Marx and Engels assert that “Where speculation ends … there real, positive science begins.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, New York, 1970, pp. 42 and 48.

76. The interpretation of the Marxian emphasis on objective lawfulness versus human action led later to two divergent post-Marxian orientations: the mechanistic and the activistic. Kautsky, Plekhanov, and Bukharin of the first school overemphasized the objective, lawful determination of socio-historical movements. The other camp, the activists—Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Antonio Gramsci—stressed the role of conscious human activity in the determination of historical events.

77. Marx and Engels summed up: “This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e., civil society in its various stages) as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., and then trace their origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another) (italics mine). Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, New York, 1970, p. 58.

78. See particularly Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow, 1962; Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, New York, 1967; and V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Moscow, 1952. For modern assessments see, Épistémologie et Marxisme, Paris, 1972 and Marxistische Erkenntnistheorie. Texte zu ihrem Forschungsstand in den sozialistischen Ländern, Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Ed.) Stuttgart, 1973.

79. For definition of “ideal-type” see Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (Trans. and Ed.) New York, 1949, pp. 90, 93, 103.

80. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Eds.) Vol. 2, New York, 1968, pp. 904-905.

81. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Transls. and Eds.) From Max Weber; Essays in Sociology, New York, 1958, p. 126.

82. Ibid., p. 126.

83. Ibid., p. 127.

84. Ibid., p. 127.

85. See Footn. 99 in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik 1890-1920, 2nd ed., Tübingen, 1974, p. 332.

86. See Marianne Weber, Max Weber. A Biography, Harry Zohn (Transl. and Ed.) New York, 1975, p. 648.

87. Ibid., pp. 465-466. See also Paul Honigsheim, On Max Weber, New York, 1968, pp. 24-28; Karl Jaspers, “Heidelberger Erinnerungen,” in Heidelberger Jahrbücher, V, 1961, pp. 1-10.

88. In Otto Stammer (Ed.) Max Weber und die Soziologie heute, Tübingen, 1965, pp. 65-66.

89. See Judith Marcus Tar, Thomas Mann und Georg Lukács, unpublished dissertation for the German Dept. of the University of Kansas, 1976.

90. Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, Anna Bostock (Transl.) Cambridge, Mass., 1974, p. 17.

91. György Lukács, Esztétikai Kultura, Budapest, 1913, p. 26.

92. Lukács, Soul and Form, p. 16.

93. Ibid., p. 18.

94. Idem, Esztétikai Kultura, p. 28.

95. Ibid., p. 27.

96. Ibid., p. 27.

97. Karl Marx, Early Writings, T. B. Bottomore (Transl. and Ed.), New York, 1964, p. 37.

98. György Lukács, “A bolsevizmus mint erkölcsi probléma,” in Szabadgondolat, (December 1918), pp. 228-232.

99. I am indebted to Mr. Tibor Gergely, painter and illustrator, New York, for sharing with me his recollections of those times with the “Lukács-circle.”

100. Georg Lukács, “Tactics and Ethics,” in Political Writings 1919-1929, translated from the German version by Michael McColgan, London, 1972, p. 11.

101. Idem., Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, Studien über marxistische Dialektik, Neuwied-Berlin, 1968, p. 397.

102. Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie, München, 1918, pp. 405-406.

103. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, C. J. Arthur (Ed.), New York, 1970, pp. 94-95.

104. See Judith Marcus Tar, Thomas Mann und Georg Lukács, cf., Footn. 89; further see Paul Ernst und Georg Lukács. Dokumente einer Freundschaft, Karl August Kutzbach (Ed.), Emsdetten/Westf., 1974.

105. See Chapter 2 “Zauberberg als Zeitroman,” in Judith Marcus Tar, Thomas Mann und Georg Lukács, cf., notes 89 and 104.

106. Heinrich Regius (Horkheimer's pseudonym), Dämmerung. Notizen in Deutschland, p. 22.

107. Ibid., pp. 74-5.

108. Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason, Lectures and Essays since the end of World War II, Matthew J. O'Connell et al., (Transl.) New York, 1974, p. 122.

109. Idem., Critical Theory, Matthew J. O'Connell et al., (Transl.) New York, 1972, p. 26.

110. Ibid., p. 251.

111. Idem., Eclipse of Reason, New York, 1947, p. 161.

112. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 27. For sociological and philosophical discussions of violence, see Christian von Ferber, Die Gewalt in der Politik, Stuttgart, 1970; Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze, Frankfurt am Main, 1965; and Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic, New York, 1972.

113. See Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, New York, 1973, pp. 23-25. For a recent sociological treatment, see Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Boston, 1966.

114. See Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Berlin (East), 1954, pp. 156-197 and Franz Mehring, Gesammelte Schriften und Aufsätze, Vol. 6, Zur Geschichte der Philosophie, Berlin, 1929-33.

115. Max Horkheimer, Kritische Theorie, Vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main, 1968, p. XII.

116. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, Frankfurt am Main, 1969, p. 7.

117. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Sociologica II, Frankfurt am Main, 1962, p. 126.

118. Max Horkheimer, Die Sehnsucht …, p. 55.

119. Idem., “Bemerkungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie,” ZfS, IV, 1 (1935), p. 8.

120. Ibid., p. 8.

121. Idem., “Materialismus und Moral,” ZfS II, 2 (1933), p. 184.

122. The Holy Bible. King James Version, New York, n.d., p. 559. Friedrich Nietzsche, who greatly influenced Horkheimer's and Adorno's thinking, also dealt with the theme of Mitleid in his The Genealogy of Morals, New York, 1956, pp. 154 ff.

123. Selma Stern, The Court Jew, A Contribution to the History of the Period of Absolutism in Central Europe, Ralph Weiman (Transl.) Philadelphia, 1950, p. 241.

124. Ibid., p. 242.

125. Jürgen Habermas, “Der deutsche Idealismus der jüdischen Philosophen,” in Philosophisch-politische Profile, Frankfurt am Main, 1971, pp. 37-66.

126. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, Boston, 1972.

127. Max Horkheimer, Aus der Pubertät …, p. 257.

128. Quoted in J. Habermas, “Der deutsche Idealismus …,” pp. 41-42.

129. Ibid., p. 58. See also Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Kurt H. Wolff (Ed.) New York, 1950, pp. 402-408; and Thorstein Veblen, “The Intellectual Preeminence of Jews in Modern Europe,” in Thorstein Veblen. Selections from his Work, Bernard Rosenberg (Ed.) New York, 1963, pp. 91-100.

130. Hermann Cohen, Jüdische Schriften, 3 vols., Berlin, 1924.

131. Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 300-301.

132. Max Horkheimer, Aus der Pubertät …, p. 22. Idem., “Materialismus und Metaphysik,” ZfS II, 1 (1933), p. 16; and “Philosophie und kritische Theorie,” ZfS, VI, 3 (1937), p. 630. I am thankful to Professor Michael Landmann who called my attention to the connection of Horkheimer's ideas with Talmudic thought.

133. Georg Steiner, Language and Silence, New York, 1972, p. 125.

134. Franz Kafka, Tagebücher 1910-1923, New York, 1949, pp. 115-116.

135. Max Horkheimer, Aus der Pubertät …, p. 265. Franz Rosenzweig writes on the problem: “While every other people is one with its own language, while that language withers in its mouth the moment it ceases to be a people, the Jewish people never quite grows one with the languages it speaks. Even when it speaks the language of its host, a special vocabulary, or, at least a special selection from the general vocabulary, a special word order, its own feeling for what is beautiful or ugly in the language, betray that it is not its own.” Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, p. 301.

136. Walter Benjamin wrote to his friend, Gershom Scholem, in January 1930, that he gave up all hope for being able to learn Hebrew while in Germany. “From now on, his ambition will be directed toward becoming the most noted critic of German literature.” Quoted in Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, die Geschichte einer Freundschaft, Frankfurt am Main, 1975, p. 200. cf. Klaus Peter Schulz, Kurt Tucholsky in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1959. Shortly before his suicide, Tucholsky wrote in one of his letters: “I will never be able to write in another language—almost without exception it is an impossibility. … It is due to more than merely political developments. The world as we knew it and toiled for, is … dead. One has to draw the appropriate conclusion. … (p. 165)”

137. See Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924, New York, 1958, p. 337. Later in his letter, Kafka speaks mournfully of “those young Jews” who had entered the German literary language “boisterously or secretively or even masochistically appropriating foreign capital that they had not earned but, having hurriedly seized it, stolen.”

The following abbreviations are used throughout the book:

ZfS: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung

SPSS: Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences

KZfSS: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie