example, Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, famously the target of John Locke’s ire—but paternalist rule in general was in tension with the right of an allegedly “immature” subaltern to full autonomy. Spousal violence and child abuse were, after all, lamentably widespread practices, rarely protested until recently.46 The metaphor of brotherhood as idealized human interaction, even when extended to mean siblings in general, was also vulnerable to the charge that it forgot the ability of brothers, at least since Cain’s assault on Abel, to become rivals, indeed deadly ones. If humankind were really a family, might it not just as well be a dysfunctional one? Think, for example, of the house of Atreus—or even the family of Antigone, that epitome of sibling love, who was, it must be remembered, the daughter/sister of Oedipus, not exactly a model of filial piety.
More fundamentally, the extension of kinship to embrace the entire species, while plausible on some attenuated genetic level, ignores the powerful distinctions between endogenous and exogenous groupings that underlay the incest taboo so fundamental to human civilization. Politics, it might be said, is the art of learning to live with exogenous others, who may be marriage material, but until the knot is tied, are anything but kin, loving or otherwise. At best they may be recognizable neighbors in a tightly knit community, but they are more often anonymous strangers within the borders of a more capacious and impersonal society or a fortiori aliens outside its borders. If politics means anything, it means dealing impersonally with rivals and adversaries, as well as friends, both genuine and of convenience, who are not in any meaningful sense bound to us by the affective ties of family. A political community, as we know, is more imagined than real, the inclusivity of its members premised on the exclusion of those outside its boundaries. We may owe temporary hospitality to strangers should they come to our shores seeking succor—Kant thought it was the one binding law of a cosmopolitan world order47—but not permanent domicile in the way we might to family members. Toleration of otherness and respect for what makes us all human does not mean absorbing the stranger into our family, no matter how extended we might construe it. Moral duty does not rest on ties of affection and indeed might at times contradict them, and it is impossible to build a healthy polity on emotional grounds alone. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt once remarked, “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this very reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.”48
All of these considerations were absent from Horkheimer’s introduction and did not surface to derail his enthusiasm for the familial metaphor underlying Steichen’s exhibition. But before we dismiss him too quickly as yet another Cold War apologist for “photographic ideology,” it would be wise to pause with his self-evident motivation, which helps explain the difference between his response and that of Roland Barthes to the exhibition. In a Germany still struggling to move beyond the insidious ideology of racial hierarchy and ethnic exclusion that had brought such a ruinous outcome, it was necessary to swallow whatever qualms one might have about the potential costs of overly abstract humanist universalism and the implications of extending the metaphor of a family from the nation or race to the species. At a time when Martin Heidegger’s elevation of Being over humanity as the central focus of philosophy posed a danger to the hope of making a clean break with the Nazi past, it was important to remind Germans that Kant still remained relevant and that his thought might be compatible with liberal American intellectual traditions as well. Against the existentialist insistence that essentialism was an outmoded philosophical concept that transformed one contingent set of conditions into a dubious universality of reductive sameness, it was healthy to remember the critical work that the concept of essence might do when it is transformed from an eternal truth into a normative potential to be realized historically.49
In contrast, Roland Barthes could draw on the very different lessons a Frenchman might have learned from the negative effects of an overly abstract humanism, which had lost its appreciation of the value of cultural difference and historical variation in its zeal to carry out its alleged “civilizing mission.” These lessons, as Stefanos Geroulanos has recently shown, were shared as early as the 1930s by many in France who had developed antifoundational negative anthropologies as a result.50 Although there had long been religious condemnations of humanism, the innovation of these thinkers was their explicit atheism, which resisted the assumption that all men were the same because they were allegedly created in God’s image. Barthes, it should be noted, made precisely this connection in attacking the putative unity underlying depictions of difference in images chosen by Steichen: “This means postulating a human essence, and here is God re-introduced into our Exhibition: the diversity of men proclaims his power, his richness; the unity of gestures demonstrates his will.”51 From the perspective of an atheistic historicism, in which any positive philosophical anthropology was a “myth” grounded in the secularization of religious universalism, the exhibition could only be ideological, and Horkheimer’s defense of it a mystifying exercise in false consciousness.
From Barthes’s perspective, it is thus easy to see why the exhibition might warrant dismissal as ideological—as indeed it also might, as noted, from that adopted in many of Horkheimer’s other writings. But before we then conclude that this dismissal is the last word and reject the recent attempts at rebuttal, we need to put a little pressure on the vexed concept of ideology itself. When casually used, “ideology” is a term of opprobrium, suggesting false consciousness and mystification, either deliberate or not, and is implicitly opposed to the nobler ideals of truth, scientific knowledge or at least critique. It is understood to reflect either the interests of a group that employs it for its own partial ends, masking and/or justifying its power, or the unconscious reaction to collective psychological stress that generates ideology as a dubious way of relieving that stress (for example, through scapegoating). As such, it acts as a distorting mirror or refracting filter through which reality is prevented from revealing itself in its unmediated and naked form.
But in addition to the explicitly negative connotation of the word that draws on a positive alternative more often implied than forcefully defended, there is a more complex, dialectical alternative that acknowledges the latent critical function of ideology as well. Take, for example, the classic example of Marx’s characterization of religion as the opiate of the masses. The paragraph in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction,” where this famous formulation appears, begins with the acknowledgment that “religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Marx then says that critique, which was the methodological basis of historical materialism, “has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower.”52
It is worth recalling these familiar lines to remind us that critiques of ideology may well depend on acknowledging the discontent, albeit in mediated and distorted form, generated by intolerable and unjust conditions, and the desire to relieve those conditions, that is harbored in even the most insidiously consolatory ideological formations. Returning to our main concern, it lets us recognize that we need not reduce our response to a culturally complex phenomenon like The Family of Man to either a simple-minded dismissal or a defensive celebration. In other words, even if its detractors had a point in decrying its inadvertent ideological function, the exhibition can also be credited with possessing a critical potential—the “protest against real suffering” that Marx saw in religion—that also demands recognition.
Thus, even if Barthes is right to see a religious source of the humanist faith in a shared human essence, it is possible to acknowledge that origin not merely to unmask and debunk it, but rather to recognize that critical protest against an unjust status quo often appears, as Marx himself conceded, in the garb of religion.53 If we take Horkheimer’s interpretation of the exhibition as less a celebration of the present than a challenge to make a different and better future, his endorsement of an essential human condition as normative rather than descriptive, and his adoption of perpetual peace as the telos of history
