Frankfurt School, 1936, studies on authority (3): Herbert Marcuse on authority in German philosophy

Herbert Marcuse’s "Ideengeschichtlicher Teil" is published in English in the collection of Marcuse’s essays called Studies in Critical Philosophy under the title "A Study in Authority," English translation by Joris De Bres. This translations here are mine unless otherwise noted.

In this essay, Marcuse discusses the broad development of the philosophy of authority from the Reformation until the present.

In the works of Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, both made a definition distinction between in inner life of the individual person, where freedom existed in matters of conscience. Luther largely excluded any notion of personal freedom as applying to the world of external authority, a position that had practical consequences of an ugly sort in his support of the German princes in the Peasant Wars.

Calvin maintained a similar distinction, although his doctrine of predestination puts its own limits on the meaning of freedom, inner or outer. But Calvin did recognize a narrow right of resistance to secular authority operating in a manner opposed to Christian principles.

It was Immanuel Kant who put freedom at the center of his philosophy. Though he too maintained a sharp separation between freedom as a primarily internal matter to the individual and not one to be widely applied in the world. He did, however, consider freedom of scholarship important for the secular authorities to maintain.

Hegel's concept of human freedom advanced from Kant’s notion of it as primarily inner freedom. For Hegel, "Freiheit ist nur als freie Tat des Menschen." (S. 180) ("Freedom exists only as the free act of a person.")

Hegel sees freedom as a matter of reality (Wirklichkeit), which for him means the unity of essence (Wesen) und existence. The real is rational, as he famously said; but what is apparent is only part of what's real and rational. Freedom continues to realize itself in the development of the real world. However, the Idea of freedom for Hegel is, as he put it, "wahrhaft nur als der Staat" ("true only in the state"). Freedom realizes itself as freedom under rational government.

Although Marcuse recognized the inherently critical function of Hegel’s dialectics, he also accepted the view that Hegel’s own philosophy wound up in what Marcuse calls "the quietist tone of a justifying [apologetic] recognition of the existing state of things."

Hegel in the Philosophy of Right justifies the monarchical form of government by its grounding in Nature, i.e., in inherited rule. Marcuse notes this "is not the only place in which irrationality breaks into the [Hegelian] system of reason." However, the emphasis on reason in classical German philosophy from Kant to Hegel became an important component of both classical liberal and socialist thought.

He contrasts this emphasis on reason as a governing principle in matters of authority with the classic counterrevolutionary philosophies stemming originally from hostile reactions to the French Revolution. He cites in particular Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), whose caution about arbitrary authority was also important in classical liberalism; Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald’s Théorie du Pouvoir (1796) and Joseph de Maistre’s Considérations sur la France (1796). Marcuse finds two key common themes (De Bres translation):

The main motifs of the counter-revolutionary theory of authority are here united: the (theological-) naturalist and personalist justification of authority. ... Government becomes a charisma [gift] which is given by God to the current governing person as such and this charisma radiates out from the person of the ruler to the whole political and social order which culminates in him. This order is essentially personal and 'by nature' is centred [sic] on a single, indivisible personality: the monarch. ...

This leads on the one hand to the irrational establishment of authority as an absolute: to the doctrine of the 'infallibility of the sovereign', and on the other to the total rejection of any attempt to change the prevailing rule of authority: to traditionalism.

Part of this trend of counterrevolutionary thought was a very low view of humanity in general (De Bres translation):

It is an image of man which is drawn in terms of hate and contempt, but also of worldly wisdom and power: man who has fallen from God is an evil, cowardly, clumsy, half-blind animal which, if left on its own, only brings about dirt and disorder, which basically desires to be ruled and led and for which total dependence is ultimately the best thing.

Such a negative view of the capability of people for self-rule was not compatible with the importance of self-government in classical liberalism and in democratic theory.

He discusses the German version of this counterrevolutionary trend of thought which, he says, took the two forms of political Romanticism and the Restoration perspective. In Germany, the period from the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 following the defeat of Napoleon to the Revolutions of 1848 is knows as the Restoration.

Among the Romantics in this category were Franz Xaver von Baader (1765-1841),
Adam Müller (1779-1829), Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829), and Johann Joseph von Görres (1776-1848). Ironically, it was Franz von Baader who introduced the world "Proletariat" into German from the French. (See Ernst Benz, "Franz von Baaders Gedanken über den 'Proletair'" Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 2/1948)


Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861)

Marcuse discusses the Restoration theorists through Friedrich Julius Stahl's Rechtsphilosophie (1830-1854); he mentions Karl Ludwig von Haller's Restauration der Staatswissenschaft (1816-1834) as a link between the Romantic and Restoration trends. They shared the general perspective of the anti-French Revolution counterrevolutionary thinkers. Marcuse writes of Stahl (De Bres translation):

Stahl's system (in its basis, not in its fully elaborated form, which reveals many concessions to bourgeois-liberal tendencies) is the first purely authoritarian German philosophy of the state, in so far as the social relations of people and the meaning and purpose of the political organization of society are from first to last directed toward the preservation and strengthening of an unassailable authority.

Stahl’s theory of social authority was explicitly anti-rational.

Marcuse next turns to Karl Marx's socialist perspective on authority. Marx challenged the dominant trend of classical German and other bourgeois philosophy that took freedom as primarily a matter of the inner individual and not of external life in society, where necessity ruled. He argued that freedom had to be embodied in collective control of production, which nevertheless would leave the struggle of humanity with nature as a realm of necessity. But it would also provide the people a realm of freedom in developing a more rational society. As part of that, he insisted on the very practical proposal for shortening the working day. In Marcuse’s version, Marx understood the material possibility of "founding the realm of freedom on the basis of the realm of necessity as a definite ‘earthly’ organization of society."

It’s worth noting that the Frankfurt School at this time left unchallenged the idea of a basic opposition between humanity and Nature. It’s not that classical German philosophy or the later liberal and socialist philosophies ignored science. On the contrary. But our present day concerns with the world actually hitting major limits of nature in the form of global climate change was not a significant consideration in their thinking. But the notion of a radical opposition between humanity as such and Nature as a distinct and opposing entity is untenable today. That’s not to say the “struggle with nature” is over. It’s arguably intensifying. It’s to say that our current scientific understandings of humans as natural beings makes the previous kind of radical split made by philosophy between humanity as spiritual beings and Nature as something fundamentally distinct inadequate.

Marcuse describes the distinction Marx made between the rational authority required by the production process itself and the particular form it takes in capitalist society, which his economics understood as demanding the greatest possible profit without taking into account any limits beyond the most minimal needs of the workers to maintain themselves. Unlike earlier theories that founded authority in God in some form or another and minimized the importance of the consent of the governed in the state and on the job, Marx understood the specific form of authority in capitalist society as based on antagonistic class relationships, especially the contradiction between the capitalist class and the working class.

Marcuse quotes Marx, "The capitalist is not a capitalist because he is an industrial leader, but rather he is an industrial commander because he is a capitalist." In other words, it’s not the rational control of the production process as such that determines the mode of authority; the rational function merges with the specific economic imperatives of capitalist society to extract maximum profit from the workers. Marx’s notion of reason as the measure of the legitimacy of authority is one that he took from Hegel and the liberal tradition.

The last section of the essay is about the transformation of 19th-century and earlier bourgeois (capitalist) theories of authority into theories that could be used in the totalitarian states of the 20th century like Italy and Germany. This is a relatively short section, focused on the theories of Georges Sorel (1847-1922) and Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923).

(Marcuse had discussed totalitarian theories of the state in much greater length in “Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der totalitären Staatsauffassung” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 2/1934. It is collected in Herbert Marcuse, Schriften Bd. 3: Ausätze aus der Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1934-1941 and appears in an English translation by Jeremy Shapiro as "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State" in Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1968). The English text of Negations is available online in an authorized SCRIBD edition from MayFly Books.)

He stresses here again the hostility of the totalitarian theorists against two main enemies (De Bres translation):

... it rests exclusively on the united front against liberalism and Marxism. It is the enemy who prescribes the position of the theory. It has no ground of its own from which the totality of social phenomena could be understood. All its basic concepts are counter-concepts: it invents the 'organic’ view of history in opposition to historical materialism [Marxism], 'heroic realism’ in opposition to liberal idealism, 'existentialist philosophy’ in opposition to the rationalist social theory of the bourgeoisie, and the totally authoritarian 'Führerstaat’ in opposition to the rational state. The material social content of the theory, i.e. the particular form of the relations of production, for the maintenance of which it functions, is obscured.

Marcuse and others in the Frankfurt School realm of thinking were not completely opposed to existentialism. In fact, existentialism was a major influence in their thinking. But they were critical of the reactionary forms of it.

In the reactionary philosophies of the 20th century, authority becomes its own justification: "After every possible rational and material content of authority has fallen away only its mere form remains: authority as such becomes the essential feature of the authoritarian state." (De Bres translation).

Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, hegel, herbert marcuse, kant, karl marx