He and Herbert Marcuse would follow up in the 3/1937 number with separate essays, both under the title of "Philosophie und kritische Theorie."
Critical theory is an appeal in the broadest sense for critical thinking, including in particular critical thinking about society and the role of individuals and classes in it.
Expressed at such a high level of generalization, this could be taken as an innocuous statement of the ideal of a liberal education, or the mission statement of a humanities department. But for Horkheimer and Marcuse, the point is that logical and scientific theories should not be innocuous.
Horkheimer in this essay indicates some major themes of critical theory:
- Critique of positivism and pragmatism
- An analytical perspective keeping in focus the mutual interactions of social relations (particularly class) and scientific theories
- Rejection of relativism: scientific theories describe reality but are also limited by the social perspectives of the thinker and by the social determinants of the reception of the theories
- Focuses on ways society can lead individuals to embrace ideas that are irrational and poorly descriptive of their own reality
- Radio and film created opportunities for mass manipulation that would have been almost unthinkable in 1900 and critical theory gives considerable attention to understanding the implications of that
Their thinking takes place in within particular philosophical and political traditions. And their particular development in the 1930s was overwhelmingly influenced by the realities of National Socialism in Germany. And they were viewing this phenomenon not only through their own experience of exile from Germany, but also in terms of their pre-1933 political perspective.
That perspective lay between that of the Social Democratic and Communist Parties, generally leaning toward the militant perspective of the latter, though the Institut für Sozialforschung was an independent group, not a Party organization required to reflect a Party line. Both streams of left thought understood themselves still in the 1930s as working within the Marxist tradition of thought, though each group condemned the other for operating on wrong interpretations and making bad political decisions.
The perspective that Horkheimer labels "critical theory" for the first time in this essay combined other strains of thought, as well, notably Freudian psychology and existentialism. It's hard to avoid the impression that, while continuing to identify themselves as Marxists, that creating the notion of critical theory as a school of thought was a way of asserting and recognizing that their approach was dealing with conditions that had developed and changed considerably since the latter decades of the 19th century, when Marxism represented the general perspective of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Formulations like this one of Horkheimer's reflect that rich combination of broad theoretical perspectives:
... kritische Denken heute [ist] durch den Versuch motiviert, die Spannng real zu überwinden, den Gegensatz zwischen der im Individuum angelegten Zielbewusstheit, Spontaneität, Vernüftigkeit und der für die Gesellschaft grundlegenden Beziehungen des Arbeitsprozesses aufzuheben. Das kritische Denken enthält einen Begriff des Menschen, der sich selbst widerstreitet, solange diese Identität nicht vollzogen ist.Without understanding this background, some of what they wrote in the 1930s can sound downright cryptic. The cataclysmic events of the First World War, in which four major empires came to an end (the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman) and which brought a government to power in Russia that understood itself as a workers' regime, had shown them that sweeping changes could come relatively suddenly and unexpectedly. The coming to power of Social Democratic Parties in Germany and Austria at the end of the war boosted this sense of what they saw as historical processes moving toward a higher, freer level of development.
[... critical thought today {is} motivated by the attempt to overcome in reality the tension, the opposition between the goal-consciousness, spontaneity and rationality founded in the individual and the work processes that lie at the basis of social relationships. Critical thinking contains and concept of humanity which contradicts itself, so long as this identity isn't realized.]
But the time between the end of the war and 1937 had also given them major reasons for pessimism. Given the wartime devastation and the Carthaginian peace imposed at Versailles on Germany, the political success of the SPD was seriously limited. The early postwar split between the SPD and the KPD (German Communist Party) reflected both internal German conditions and the foreign policy of the Soviet Union as filtered through the Comintern. But that division, mirrored in most other European countries, represented a major division in the political force of the working classes that were the base voters and supporters of both Social Democrats and Communists. It was a major departure from the unity of the prewar SPD, when it had been the largest German party in voting strength since 1877 and was the leading advocate of both democratic government and the abolition of capitalism as the economic organizations of society.
So, on the one hand, the rapid social and political changes at the end of the World War had confirmed in the minds of the Frankfurt School that a socialist transformation of society was a near-term possibility. But there had been major setbacks, with the rise of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany being the most alarming examples. In their perspective, these movements didn't just represent accidents of history in those particular countries. They were a more general development in which the capitalist rulers in those countries had abandoned democracy and political liberalism for a new form of totalitarian dictatorship. (Horkheimer uses the "totalitarian" formulation in this essay.)
At the same time, Horkheimer had been expecting that the Hitler dictatorship would be overthrown by revolution, a prospect which surely appeared far less likely to them as an immediate event in 1937 than it had in 1933. Because the Hitler regime seemed to have found ways to bind large portions of the public in at least passive loyalty to the government. The methods of doing so including massive and unprecedented use of the mass media of radio, film and television for political propaganda, suppression of overt challenges to the ruling ideology in word or deed, and by making mass institutions like unions, churches and sports clubs subservient to the Nazi Party ideology.
These were practical as well as theoretical problems for the Frankfurt School. And it's important to understand that, on the one hand, they made very clear distinctions between democratic regimes and dictatorships. But they also believed that Fascism and Nazism were extreme expressions of basic tendencies within capitalist societies. So some of their arguments were in defense of classical "bourgeois" (capitalist, classical liberal) ideology against dictatorship. Other arguments were focused particularly against the capitalist dictatorships in the first rank but also against governments and economic trends in democratic capitalist countries.
All of this is typically expressed in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung in intellectual, academic language. And therefore much of it assumes a solid grounding in the relevant history, economics and philosophy in question. It's not written to be campaign arguments for elections. And even allowing for that, it’s sometimes written in generalizations that can make the argument fairly obtuse if the reader doesn't recognize the references.
In Part 2 tomorrow, I'll discuss Horkheimer's "Traditionelle und kritische Theorie" in more detail.
Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school,, frankfurter schule, kritische theorie, max horkheimer, max horkheimer
No comments:
Post a Comment