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September 4 - September 6, 2020
Critical theory insists that thought must respond to the new problems and the new possibilities for liberation that arise from changing historical circumstances. Interdisciplinary and uniquely experimental in character, deeply skeptical of tradition and all absolute claims, critical theory was always concerned not merely with how things were but how they might be and should be. This ethical imperative led its primary thinkers to develop a cluster of themes and a new critical method that transformed our understanding of society.
Immanuel Kant identified moral autonomy as the highest value for the individual. He provided critical theory with its definition of scientific rationality, and its goal of confronting reality with the prospects of freedom.
Critical theory was conceived within the intellectual crucible of Marxism. But its leading representatives were from the start dismissive of economic determinism, the stage theory of history, and any fatalistic belief in the “inevitable” triumph of socialism.
Their Marxism was of a different variety. They highlighted its critical method over its systematic claims, its concern with alienation and reification, its complicated relationship with the ideals of the Enlightenment, its utopian moment, its emphasis upon the role of ideology, and its commitment to resist the deformation of the individual.
“Western Marxism”: Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács. These two thinkers provided the framework for the critical project that later became identified with the Institute for Social Research—or “the Frankfurt School.”
Alienation and reification are the two ideas most commonly associated with critical theory. The former is usually identified with the psychological effects of exploitation and the division of labor, and the latter with how people are treated instrumentally, as “things,” through concepts that have been ripped from their historical context.
thinking was being reduced to mechanical notions of what is operative and profitable, ethical reflection was tending to vanish, and aesthetic enjoyment was becoming more standardized.
Conformity was undermining autonomy. If capitalist development is connected with standardization and reification, then progress actually constitutes a form of regression.
new “culture industry”—arguably the most famous concept associated with critical theory—was constantly striving to lower the lowest common denominator in order to maximize sales.
Alienation has its roots in an inability to grasp the workings of history and subject them to human control. The division of labor expresses this situation. It leaves workers increasingly divorced from the products they produce, their fellows with whom they work, and—ultimately—their possibilities as individuals.
The young Marx offers an apocalyptic vision. Political emancipation in the liberal state is subordinated to the ideal of human emancipation in a classless, free association of producers.
Alienation and, implicitly, reification now become the targets of radical activity.
Unity and harmony are forfeited. Adam and Eve exhibited free will. They brought about their expulsion from Eden—by succumbing to evil.
Hegel understood history as a “slaughter-bench” even though the realization of human freedom is pre-ordained. Such a realm can be defined as one in which each individual is fully recognized as a subject in his or her own right. Universal reciprocity ultimately becomes incarnated in a bureaucratic state under the rule of law, a civil society based on the market in which all enter freely and equally, and a nuclear family in which each subject is emotionally embraced as such.
Realizing freedom is the culmination of a teleological process wherein the arbitrary exercise of power is negated in a new state governed by the rule of law.
Alienation and reification continue to exist in the exploitative class relations of civil society.
Hegel noted in The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) that the lords and masters of every historical epoch have an existential and material interest in preventing such consciousness from coming about. They seek to make their servants and slaves believe in their dependence upon them, their masters, through ideological and institutional means. This was the point of departure for Hegel and the young Marx. The critical method becomes the tool by which the servants and the slaves—and the masses of the proletariat—realize their power as producers of the particular order
Abolishing alienation thus depends upon the consciousness of the slave—or, better, the worker.
The very existence of this disenfranchised and exploited class demonstrates how freedom has been truncated. The structural domination of this class is ignored. Capitalism is understood by the bourgeois as resting on egoistic assumptions with the individual as the primary unit of productive activity.
under capitalism, humanity is dominated by the products of its hands. Marx believed that the working class was growing poorer even while bourgeois society was growing richer. The proletariat was also becoming more spiritually impoverished. It was becoming an appendage of the machine. Individuality, creativity, solidarity were all being eroded for the great bulk of humanity. The imperatives of capitalist production call for viewing it merely as a cost of production that must be kept as minimal as possible.
Maximizing profits also requires the division of labor whereby each member of the working class is separated from others on the assembly line, kept from learning other tasks and developing his or her full potential, and conceptualizing the product that is ultimately being produced.
Human misery is the target of radical action even if capitalism increasingly brings it to fruition. Bureaucracy, money, and instrumental thinking have anthropological roots even if the new production process intensifies their dominance. The lowly and the insulted have been treated instrumentally since time immemorial.
The proletariat must now understand itself as the subject of historical action—not merely the object of external forces—whose purpose is the abolition of alienation and class society.
Enlightenment were “irretrievably fading” and society was increasingly dominated by “specialists without spirit” and “sensualists without heart.”
The ability to grasp the whole would vanish; what the Germans call the disciplinary idiot would supplant the intellectual;
Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm. Nazism had become the chief enemy for liberal and progressive intellectuals following the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
subversion of all public institutions capable of resisting the propaganda of the new regime—that is, mass media, schools, religion, and even the family—left the individual utterly isolated or atomized.
Extreme alienation of this sort is untenable. An identification with authority (i.e., the Fuhrer) is thereby generated that leaves the individual filled with hate and yet intent upon avoiding ethical responsibility.
Erich Fromm’s edition of Marx’s Concept of Man (1961) became wildly popular, and it inspired a generation of American radicals. Even before that, however, Fromm was
Capitalism was to be opposed not simply because it was materially exploitative, but because its system of impersonal market forces called upon individuals to treat one another as potential competitors and means to an end. The issue for him was not merely the mechanized society over which humanity has lost control, but the inner passivity and mental dullness that it fostered.
Hegel believed that progress is ultimately furthered by the person who is out of step with the majority. Only this person, the genuine nonconformist, really experiences the constraints on freedom. Only this person is in the position of questioning the prevailing understandings of happiness. For Hegel, indeed, the “unhappy consciousness” is the source of progress.
At stake is the substance of subjectivity and autonomy: the will and ability of the individual to resist external forces intent upon determining the meaning and experience of life.
Conformism and loss of individuality mark the happy consciousness.
Art enabled the individual to resist society not simply by challenging popular tastes and perceptions, or so Lukács argued, but by intensifying experience through its allegorical and symbolic qualities.
No less than the artwork, the critical essay through its form can elicit repressed experiences of the soul. The boundaries between philosophy and aesthetics, reflection and experience, start to collapse.
Marxists had always viewed culture as a prop for the ruling class, and Louis Althusser later wrote about an “ideological-state-apparatus.”
The Frankfurt School was elitist in its view of public life.
intent upon challenging the culture industry because it was standardizing experience and thereby rendering everyday people more and more receptive to tradition and authority.
All the great movements for political democracy and material equality—from the social democratic labor movement of the nineteenth century to the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s—generated a vibrant public sphere. It is even fair to say that the character and power of a movement can be gleaned from the vitality of its public sphere. With
Resistance against the power of the happy consciousness thus turns into an ethical imperative. At least that is what the Frankfurt School believed.
Herbert Marcuse sought to deal with this matter in what became perhaps his most notorious essay “Repressive Tolerance” (1965). In that work, he maintains that the classical liberal notion of tolerance has lost its radical character.
Marcuse’s argument once again relies on the idea that the medium is the message. Insofar as the culture industry presents all positions on any issue in a public forum, they all ultimately appear as having equal value. Tolerance as exhibited by the culture industry thus renders all truth claims relative—or, better, turns their acceptance into a matter of taste. Now it is not just beauty but truth that lies in the eye of the beholder.
The seemingly endless array of rebels without a cause evince what Adorno called “non-conformist conformity” while the shallow cynicism and pseudo-heroic combat against imagined conspiracies offer what Paul Piccone—the mercurial editor of the journal Telos that brought critical theory to America—termed “artificial negativity.”
It is probably better to speak of burgeoning new social movements—partially generated by expanding labor markets—and strip them of revolutionary and utopian pretensions. Their most impressive successes were achieved through the courts and by political legislation.
The “Great Society” programs of President Lyndon Johnson were responses to pressure from below by community-based organizations and new social movements. The “freedom riders” that fought for civil rights in the South were outsiders.
The culture industry thrives on happiness. It is standardized and prepackaged. But real happiness contests a miserable reality. It speaks only to the experience of the particular individual—like the religious notion of grace.
Young people had lessons to learn from totalitarian movements with their propaganda apparatus and their contempt for the individual.
Speaking truth to power presupposes the ability to render it visible—and concrete. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) renders an important service in this regard. Edited by Adorno, and various other collaborators, it notes psychological differences between individuals and calls for re-educating not merely the anti-Semite in particular but the parochial and bigoted personality in general. Using empirical techniques like the famous “f-scale” or “fascism scale,” its authors illuminate the reactionary character structure and castigate its effects. They emphasize how the authoritarian personality
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Alienation was defined by the young Marx with an eye on overcoming the division of labor and reasserting human control over the production process.
Enlightenment ideals evince an elective affinity with anti-authoritarian movements. Left wing movements tend to privilege cosmopolitanism over parochialism, reason over intuition, skepticism over tradition, and liberty over authority.
