Frankfurt School and social psychology

Leo Löwenthal provided a good general statement of the Frankfurt School's intellectual project in the 1930s, in his essay "Die Auffassung Dostojewskis im Vorkriegsdeutschland", Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1934/3:

Um eine Ideologie, um überhaupt ein gesellschaftliches Bewusstsein zu erklären, genügt es nicht, seine Bedingtheit durch die sozial-ökonomische Situation der Klasse aufzuweisen, der es angehört; vielmehr hat dieser Aufweis ergänzt zu werden durch das Studium der psychischen Mechanismen, welche die Verfestigung des ideologischen Gehalts bedingen und verstärken.

[In order to understand an ideology, in order to explain a social consciousness at all, it is not enough to show how it is conditioned by the socio-economic situation of the class to which it belongs. Rather, this identification has to be widened to include the study of the psychic mechanisms which condition and strengthen its ideological position.]

The Frankfurt School would apply this approach to their attempts to understand the mass mobilization methods of National Socialism in Germany and of Fascism in Italy. Their attention was focused primarily on Germany, because of their German and Jewish backgrounds and because Germany was by far the more powerful player in world politics. Germany had also been the country that, until 1918-19, had been expected by socialists all over the world to be the lead country in replacing capitalism with a socialist system in which major industries and finance would be controlled by a democratic state.

The Communists had viewed the Weimar Republic of 1918-1933 as a capitalist dictatorship, although in foreign policy Germany and the USSR were secretly cooperating militarily in a limited way. The KPD (German Communist Party) never participated in a Weimar governmental coalition.

But in much of Europe, particularly eastern Europe, the Weimar Republic was considered a model democracy. Its seemingly rapid decay, ending in the triumph of Hitler's NSDAP and the elimination of all other political parties in a swift series of events in early 1933, was a shock and challenge. First of all, a challenge to the physical safety and economic well-being of those inclined to actively oppose Nazism. But also a challenge to the understanding of the Social Democratic and Communist parties whotook an anti-capitalist position, but to liberal and conservative parties that actually supported democracy.

How could a model democracy like the Weimar Republic that had replaced the undemocratic Imperial government come to such a bad end? And how could people whose interests did not lay in a Nazi government either support or tolerate or allow to remain in power a dictatorship like Hitler's?

It wasn't just that supporters of those parties inside and outside Germany were assuming that their particular political positions were better than those of the NSDAP. A majority of German voters had consistently rejected the NSDAP in elections. Even in the one election after Hitler became Chancellor, that of March 1933, an election that could only be called semi-free at best and in which the Nazis were exercising considerable repression and drumming up hysteria over the infamous Reichstag Fire, the NSDAP failed to secure a majority. The NSDAP won only 44%, monarchist parties 8%. The parties most committed to Weimar democracy (Catholic Center Party, Liberal Democrats, Social Democrats) won over 30%, the KPD 12%.

Understanding why things had come to that pass, and what the socialist and democratic parties would have to do in order to win over those who had come to actively or passively support the Hitler regime became a continuing urgent priority and remained so until after the war. It's still important as an historical question, of course.

That's the immediate context of Löwenthal's statement above. It doesn't seem nearly so unusual today to talk about using the findings of psychology, which primarily focused on individual pathologies, to understand political and social dynamics. It is in no small part because of the Frankfurt School that the combination does not seem so exotic. The socialist parties in particular had focused on economic issues as the determining factor in understanding social consciousness. The Frankfurt School realized that the role of psychological factors, including the effects of family life, had to be much better understood. The famous postwar study by Theodor Adorno and others published as The Authoritarian Personality is one of the most famous example of examining those influences.

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