One of the most notable early intellectual achievements of the Frankfurt School is marked by the publication of Studien über Autorität und Familie. Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforshung (1936; Studies On Authority and Family: Research Reports from the Institute for Social Research). The bulk of the long book consists in what the title suggests, discussions of the methodology and research conducted by the Insitut on how life in the family affects broader attitudes toward authority, and vice versa.
It also includes introductory essays by three of the best known thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School: Max Horkheimer, "Allgemeiner Teil"; Erich Fromm, "Sozialpsychologischer Teil"; and, Herbert Marcuse, "Ideengeschichtlicher Teil".
Max Horkheimer frames the project being reported in the book in terms of his understanding of the inter-relationships between economic developments and other aspects of social life. His arguments are directed against simplistic economic determinist concepts. He uses the examples of Chinese and Indian resistance against Western imperialism to describe how cultural factors like religion and the importance of family elders provide what sociologists were already calling a "cultural lag". While changing economic conditions and systems would eventually have their effects on other social institutions, that effect is not always direct and immediate. Other institutions, like the family and religion, develop according to laws of their own that are related to economic factors but also work independently of them.
He might also have used the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleon (1808-1814) as an example here.
Horkheimer emphasizes the important of authority as a key category for study in understanding the forces influencing social developments. He even cites Hegel from the Lectures on the Philosophy of History as saying that the role of authority is "much more important than one is inclined to believe." He discusses some of the conceptual problems in trying to distinguish between rational authority and authority which is functioning toward an irrational end, the latter being one those subordinated to it have good reason to reject. But he argues that essentially the two types are as different "as sleep and waking, as imprisonment and freedom."
Historically, he argues, bourgeois philosophy – the philosophy of the capitalist class – from Descartes to the beginning of the 19th century, was founded in the notion of the individual being able to reject established authority. Horkheimer writes, "The Enlightenment did not fight the claim of God’s existence, but rather the recognition of it on grounds of mere authority." Later, as capitalism became the dominant economic form and production and largely dominant in the governments of capitalist societies, bourgeois attitudes toward authority also changed. So that, in the time he was writing, people in capitalist countries are expected to defer to the authority of monopolists and the abstract market, even though the result appears to most individuals as though "a senseless fact" were in control, "the blind power of chance." A key characteristic of this authority since the 19th century was “the masking of the authority as it showed itself to the worker."
As always, the grim developments in Germany and Italy were very much on the minds of Horkheimer and other participants in the Frankfurt School project. He gives as an example of the ideological transition from classical liberal to authoritarian philosophy in Germany the justification for authority used by Max Scheler. Scheler criticized the none-too-libertarian English political theorist Thomas Hobbes for declaring that good and evil were relevant measures of the legitimacy of state authority. Scheler argued instead that the legitimacy of authority should be founded on social mores established by the authorities themselves (sittlichen Eigenwert der Authorität), established by command rather than by rational legitimacy or popular consent. Horkheimer says of Scheler, "Sein Denken gehört zum Übergang der liberalistischen in die totalitäre Staatsform." (His thought belongs to the transition from the liberal to the totalitarian state form.)
Though Horkheimer certainly held to the notion of historical laws and the possibility of scientifically understanding trends in societal development, he quotes approvingly a long paragraph from the second of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations describing how the notion of historical laws so firmly established in German thought by Hegel’s work can also have the effect of encouraging people to fatalistically go along with intolerable conditions and occurrences.
The concluding section of Horkheimer's essay deals with the family more specifically. Unfortunately, his narrative his becomes too vague to add much insight. He talks a lot about how the family with the father as its unquestioned head inculcates authoritarian attitudes. But that wasn't exactly news to people in 1936, much less now. The problem with his discussion is that it deals with a kind of ideal type, with little reference to who actually did what in the family, and how, say, northern German urban working-class families may have differed from Austria rural families or wealthy capitalist families in France. What happened in families that wound up being headed by the mother? How common or uncommon was that in a given area? How did women's more integrated role in the work-life of the farm differ from that of the wife of a factory worker? His general discussion here isn’t that helpful in the absence of more information about how actual families functioned.
There are interesting observations included, such as the fact that Protestant teaching on the family emphasized the natural authority of the father as being founded in his natural physical strength. But here again, the lack of information on actual families is problematic. Did this teaching make an actual difference in parenting in Protestant households? Was there a notable difference in how kids were raised in the Protestant and Catholic parts of Germany and Europe in general? Did children of Catholic families manifest notably different relationships to authority between the 16th and 20th centuries in the wake of the Reformation?
At times, his narrative in this section gets downright confusing. He cites a major study on workers by a conservative 19th-century sociologist, Frédéric Le Play (1886-1882) as expressing distress over the declining influence of paternal authority. Say what? Horkheimer uses the citation to make a point about the authoritarian tendency of the patriarchal-oriented family, but passes up the obvious question of how that supposed decline in the authority of the father affects the children's attitude toward authority. Similarly, Horkheimer cites the "disintegration of family life" which has affected the "greater part of humanity since the development of big industry", but passes up the questions that observation raises about how it affected the father-authority in families, and why.
Horkheimer does recognize the factual inequality between men and women in family life in what we these days call advanced societies of 1936. He cites the dramas of Ibsen and Strindberg as expressing these realities. But, like Freud, Horkheimer sees women in the present of 1936 as a conservative force, on the whole. He writes that the institution of female suffrage has led to more electoral support for conservatives than for the workers’ parties.
Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, max horkheimer
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