resist the status quo, however heavily it may weigh upon him. Quite differently than in the context of critical philosophy, to speak of man today is to engage in the endless quest for an image of man that will provide orientation and guidance.”33 The abstract appeal to “man,” whether anthropological or existential, is a deception designed to distract attention from the contradictory social realities that still smolder beneath an alienated totality that remains irrational to the core.
Rather than upholding the virtue of empathetic identification with individuals, “The Concept of Man” repeats the bleak characterization of the fate of individuality in the modern world that Horkheimer had lamented in earlier works written in the shadow of the Holocaust, such as Dialectic of Enlightenment or Eclipse of Reason: “The factors in the contemporary situation—population growth, a technology that is becoming fully automated, the centralization of economic and therefore political power, the increased rationality of the individual as a result of his work in industry—are inflicting upon life a degree of organization and manipulation that leaves the individual only enough spontaneity to launch himself onto the path prescribed for him.”34 Any appeal to personal “authenticity” is thus ideological, an “empty well from which those who cannot achieve their own private life, their own decisions and inner power, fill up their dreams.”35
Significantly, Horkheimer bemoaned the ineffectiveness of the contemporary nuclear family in resisting these tendencies, an argument that drew on the empirical work the Institute had done on the crisis of the bourgeois family in the 1930s.36 Because children were becoming ever more directly socialized by society, particularly by the seductions of consumerism, they could not develop the interior strength needed to reject its conformist blandishments. The family was no longer a “haven in a heartless world,” defended by a nurturing mother, where an experience of childhood happiness might serve as a spur to critical reflection about its denial in later life.37 Instead, the family’s integrity had been eroded, so that it now functioned only as a porous shield against the penetration of commodification and the modern media. Ironically, the seemingly progressive entry of women into the labor force, Horkheimer worried, had had its costs: “The principle of equality is penetrating even into the family, and the contrast between private and social spheres is being blunted. The emancipation of woman means that she must be the equal of her husband: each partner in the marriage (the very word ‘partner’ is significant) is evaluated even within the home according to criteria that prevail in society at large.”38 Such equality was a sinister expression of the exchange principle in bourgeois society in which everything qualitatively different was rendered quantitatively fungible.
Mentioning the erosion of the traditional family lamented by Horkheimer in “The Concept of Man” raises the larger question of the symbolic function of the family in Steichen’s exhibition, which operated on two levels: the repetition of parallel images of happy nuclear families in different cultures and the metaphor in the title implying that humanity as such should be seen as one giant family. Many critics of The Family of Man excoriated it precisely for its tacit affirmation of the patriarchal, heteronormative nuclear family of the 1950s as a model of the family tout court. From our perspective today, at a time when families come in so many different varieties and the appeal to “family values” has turned into a coded way to decry those developments from a conservative perspective, it is easy to mock the homogenizing effect of the images in the exhibition.
Defenders of the exhibition, however, have contended that a tacit distinction was at work behind the depiction of the ideal family, which ironically mirrored criticisms made by Horkheimer’s own colleagues at the time in their classic study The Authoritarian Personality.39 Mindful of the ways in which fascism had been welcomed by personalities trained to obey tyrannical fathers rather than absorb maternal love, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality had argued that such families produce a child who “can apparently never quite establish his personal and masculine identity; he thus has to look for it in a collective system where there is opportunity both for submission to the powerful and for retaliation upon the powerless.”40 Unprejudiced “democratic” characters, in contrast, “received more love and therefore have basically more security in their relationships to their parents. Disagreements with, and resentment against, the parents are openly worked out, resulting in a much greater degree of independence from them. This independence is carried over into the subject’s attitude toward social institutions and authorities in general.”41 It was this version of the family, so champions of the exhibition have argued, that Steichen tacitly hoped to foster.
Although Horkheimer too favored this version of the family, he feared in “The Concept of Man” and elsewhere that it was in danger of disappearing even in ostensibly democratic countries such as the United States. This anxiety was not, however, apparent in his introduction to the exhibition. Instead, he contented himself with vague assurances that the images exhorted people to “support each other rather than torment each other and work together to the best of their ability to bring about a world constitution based on reason with which everyone can be satisfied. And that this constitution is possible.” This was clearly not the occasion, he must have reasoned, for sour pronouncements about ubiquitous threats to the type of nonauthoritarian family he thought necessary to realize that utopia.
What about the exhibition’s more general evocation of “man” as a kind of extended family? In his introduction, Horkheimer turned to the American “melting pot” experience as the source, to cite his words once again, of the healthy “awareness that there are close ties of kinship between all members of the human race, that there is a brotherhood of mankind.” Unlike Roland Barthes, with his bitter question, “But why not ask the parents of Emmett Till, the young Negro assassinated by the Whites what they think of The Great Family of Man?,”42 he did not pause to ponder how pervasive that awareness actually might be in the racially divided America of his day. Instead, he optimistically asserted that through the magic of empathetic visual identification, the viewer, and here he is talking to the citizens of Frankfurt, “can even see himself in the native in the jungle.”43 Whether or not the reverse was just as likely to be true is not a question he felt compelled to pose. Nor did he voice any concern about the gender implications of evoking universal “brotherhood” as the model of familial solidarity or think twice before invoking the stereotype of non-Westerners as “natives in jungles.”
In response to these absences, recent defenders of the exhibition’s intentions have pointed to Steichen’s acknowledgment that the title had, in fact, been suggested by his brother-in-law, poet Carl Sandburg, who had traced it to various speeches by no less an admirable figure than Abraham Lincoln.44 The distinguished pedigree of the phrase, they contend, points to its implications not only for racial equality but also for women’s suffrage, which Lincoln had explicitly championed. So, by tacitly endorsing the rhetoric of the human family and not foregrounding his anxiety over the crisis of actual families, Horkheimer, the inference might be drawn, was actually supporting the inclusivist agenda pursued by Steichen.
There is, however, another pedigree for the metaphor, which Horkheimer himself had in fact noted elsewhere with alarm. In his study of “Authoritarianism and the Family Today,” which appeared in 1949, he had noted that the Nazis had employed the rhetoric of the nation as a collective family, which had meant not only the suppression of class and other social differences but also the creation of dangerous pseudo-biological kinship distinctions that served to stigmatize alleged outsiders as racially inferior. Extending the boundaries of the putative family to the species was admittedly designed to avoid such in/out group distinctions, but it tacitly perpetuated them when it came to the domination of other animals, who were treated as not part of the family of man. Horkheimer, indebted as he was to Schopenhauer, was, in fact, an earlier critic of the instrumental treatment of animals.45 But none of this anxiety about the ambiguous implications of humanism and the family metaphor was evident in his introduction to the exhibition.
Nor did Horkheimer ponder the limits of understanding more general human relations in familial terms. Not
