increasing ambivalence about the militantly radical nature of prewar Critical Theory manifested, among other ways, in his reluctance to be called a “permanent exile.” “During our stay in America,” he insisted, “most us were exiles with regard to fascist Germany, but certainly not with regard to democratic states like the USA and postwar Germany.” He very clearly demonstrated his revised estimation of the value of what Marxists had traditionally denigrated as “bourgeois democracy” in 1958, when he introduced Edward Steichen’s traveling exhibition of photographs called The Family of Man to a Frankfurt audience. Horkheimer was determined to promote to the German public the liberal democratic values he had come to appreciate, if with nuanced qualification, during his years in America. Tellingly, the philosophical touchstone of his analysis was Kant rather than Marx, and he defended cosmopolitan humanism against the prioritization of cultural, class or national difference. More precisely, he saw in the concrete images of the exhibition—and here there was no trace of the Bilderverbot he so often invoked in other contexts—a happy mediation of difference and universalism.
Not surprisingly, Horkheimer’s 1958 introduction provided welcome ammunition for current art historians seeking to reverse the long-standing dismissal of Steichen’s exhibition by a wide range of critics—from Roland Barthes, Jacques Barzun and Susan Sontag to the editors of October magazine—all of whom damned it as “photographic ideology.” But when read in the context of another essay Horkheimer wrote a year earlier, “The Concept of Man,” which was far less sanguine about abstract humanism or the crisis of the modern family, his defense seems more of a tactical maneuver than a reflection of a wholesale retreat from his earlier position. Or, perhaps better put, the unresolved tension between the two pieces may be said to reflect the Frankfurt School’s postwar struggle to adapt to new circumstances in which the Marxist intransigence of their earlier years was tempered by a recognition that democratic ideals and universalist humanist values were more than mere window dressing for class domination.1
If only I knew a better term than humanity, that poor, provincial term of a half-educated European. But I don’t.
Max Horkheimer, “Humanity,” (1957–8)2
With no special fanfare or extended justification, the distinguished authors of the ambitious overview of twentieth-century art, Art since 1900, all stalwarts of the influential journal October, refer disparagingly to Edward Steichen’s “blockbuster exhibition of postwar photographic ideology, ‘The Family of Man’ at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955.”3 The context for this casual dismissal is an argument about the transfiguration of prewar avant-garde and social documentary photography into a vehicle for consumer capitalist advertising and fashion in the so-called New York School, which rose to prominence in the postwar era. Having absorbed the critiques of Steichen’s show leveled by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Alan Sekula, John Berger, Abigail Solomon-Godeau and a host of lesser commentators, the book’s authors echo their scorn for The Family of Man as an ideological exercise in sentimental humanism in the service of Cold War propaganda and the middle-brow visual culture typified by Life magazine.4
Given the now widespread disdain for the triumphalist American culture of the 1950s, their offhand characterization of the show is not surprising. But it has its cost, as the authors of Art since 1900 were oblivious to a burgeoning resistance to the conventional wisdom that sought to restore at least some of the once-glittering reputation enjoyed by the exhibition when it was first seen by millions around the world in the 1950s. Eric Sandeen’s 1995 Picturing an Exhibition began the advancement of a more nuanced, forgiving, even positive estimation of the political intentions, aesthetic achievements and popular impact of The Family of Man, and this momentum carried into later essays by Blake Stimson, Fred Turner, Sarah E. James, Gerd Hurm and others.5 In this revisionist effort, unexpected ammunition has been supplied by the recent rediscovery of a forgotten text by the Frankfurt School’s leading figure, Max Horkheimer, that accompanied the show when it opened in that German city in 1958.6
What are the implications of Horkheimer’s delayed insertion in the debate? Can remembering his intervention help counter the still powerful grip of the negative characterization of the exhibition as little more than an exercise in “photographic ideology”? Does his enthusiasm for the exhibition in the specific context of a postwar Germany struggling to move beyond its recent Nazi past and deal with its divided present translate into a more general legitimation of its cultural import and political effect, which can be useful today? Or does the more general attitude of the Frankfurt School toward humanism—which Horkheimer expressed in an essay called “The Concept of Man” just a year before his introduction to the exhibition—suggest a less comfortable fit between his position and that of those seeking to rescue entirely The Family of Man from the charge of photographic ideology?7
The occasion for Horkheimer’s talk—the exhibition’s opening on October 25, 1958, at Frankfurt’s Amerika-Haus, an institution funded by the American government—was hardly auspicious for the full display of his critical skills. Having recently returned to Germany to reestablish the Institut für Sozialforschung, with support enabled by his mutual trust with the enlightened US high commissioner for Germany, John H. McCloy, Horkheimer understood his public mission as a reeducator of Germans, especially youth, in the democratic values he had learned in exile.8 Although in private he maintained many of the darkly pessimistic sentiments and intransigent radicalism he and Theodor W. Adorno had expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment—a work, it should be noted, that remained out of print and absent from public discussion until pirated editions began to be circulated in the 1960s—in public, he was determined to play a constructive role in weaning Germany from the pathologies that had led to the Third Reich.9 In the context of the Cold War, where Horkheimer increasingly came to discern similarities between Stalinism and Nazism, it was clear that he had no hesitation about siding with the West, despite its many defects.10 Horkheimer in fact sought to retain his naturalized American citizenship even as he returned to Europe to live out the remainder of his life. For all his dismay with the culture industry he had witnessed firsthand in exile, he did not hesitate to consider himself an ambassador of the liberal democratic values, however imperfect their actual implementation, he had also absorbed during his sojourn in America.
Horkheimer began his introduction to the exhibition by stressing what he saw as its implicit philosophical point d’appui, which he argued tied together American and European, most notably German idealist, thought. Here, though, his touchstone was not Hegel, and certainly not Marx, but rather Immanuel Kant, who shared with American philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey a strong belief that the individual human being should be treated only as an end and never as a means. If there were a difference between the two traditions, it lay in the additional American assumption, derived from the immigration of people from many different backgrounds, “that there are close ties of kinship between all members of the human race, that there is a brotherhood of mankind.”11 This was a lesson that only an elite of educated Europeans had learned, because of the poison of national enmities.
To make his point, Horkheimer cited the hopeful words of Francis Lieber, whom he identified simply as “a German professor who emigrated to America in the last century”12 to the effect that nationalism might someday be replaced by a single global community. “The Family of Man,” he then argued, “illustrates this way of thinking; indeed it is representative of all the forces that are now counteracting the severe cultural shocks and regressive movements that have occurred in Europe in recent years. In this context it is eminently constructive.”13 Once again turning to Kant to spin out his argument, he evoked the philosopher’s celebrated essay of 1784, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,”14 claiming it provided a model not of the world as it was, but as it might be: “Humanity for Kant was not an entity, a living instance of which had to be found, indeed, not even a form with a content, but a posit that, in connection with other philosophical ideas, underlies much of the historical work of individuals and peoples.”15
