Ungrounded: Horkheimer and the Founding of the Frankfurt School
A perennial issue in the reception of Critical Theory is the difficulty of locating secure ground for critique once the traditional Marxist reliance on either the partisan standpoint of the proletariat or the scientific nature of Marxist theory is questioned.1 Can we establish a firm foundation—either transcendentally or immanently, in a particular history—for the normative impulse, the conviction that the current order can and should be replaced by a more just and humane alternative that distinguishes a critical from a traditional theory, as Horkheimer contended in his seminal essay of 1937? Taking seriously the parallel question of the historical founding of the Institute for Social Research, out of which the Frankfurt School developed, this chapter argues that, in both cases, there is sufficient uncertainty to warrant rethinking the apparent necessity of explicit origins, firm grounds and identifiable points d’appui in assessing the ability of an intellectual tradition to claim critical purchase for its work. Even conventional attempts to situate Critical Theory firmly in the tradition of Hegelian Marxism may falter if we take seriously the less appreciated role played by anti-Hegelian figures such as Schelling in stimulating doubts about his legacy.2 The temporal underpinning of normativity, it turns out, may well be more an imagined future than a remembered past.
In the 1962 preface to the republication of The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács introduced an epithet that has served ever since to belittle the Frankfurt School’s alleged pessimism, distance from political practice and privileged personal lives:
A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, has taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as “a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.”3
As he admitted, Lukács had used the term before, but, as it turns out, not only in reference to Schopenhauer in his 1954 Destruction of Reason. It had, in fact, been coined even earlier, in a piece he wrote in 1933, but never published in his lifetime, to mock soi-disant progressive intellectuals like Upton Sinclair or Thomas Mann, who refused to abandon their bourgeois lifestyles and affiliate themselves with the Communist Party.4 This more diffuse usage did not, however, resonate publicly, and it was not really until the identification with Adorno and his colleagues that it gained any real traction. Although normally employed by leftist detractors of the Frankfurt School, the term gained enough familiarity that a sympathetic “photobiography” of the School, edited in 1990 by Willem van Reijin and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, could be titled, without apparent irony, Grand Hotel Abgrund.5
I want to pause for a moment with this term because it raises an important question that goes beyond the easy condemnation of unaffiliated radical intellectuals for their alleged betrayal of the link between theory and practice. The German word Abgrund has a connotation that is absent in the English equivalent “abyss,” for it suggests the loss of the foundation or ground (Grund) on which one might securely support critique. For a Communist militant like Lukács, the only way for an intellectual to avoid hurtling into the abyss was to stand firmly on the ground of the vanguard party of the workers’ movement, subordinating himself to the dictates of its enlightened leadership. No matter how brilliant the analysis of an anticapitalist critic might be or how intense his moral indignation, it was only by joining with the forces that would change society that he could avoid impotence and be on the right side of history. The metaphor of a firm ground or foundation was also evident in the frequent use of the word “Standpunkt” by other Marxists of Lukács’s generation like Karl Korsch, who insisted on the proletarian standpoint of historical materialism.6 Although located in a world still riven with class divisions, it was potentially that of the universal class that would end those very divisions, and as such transcended relativism. Whether it be the consciousness of the proletariat, either actual or ascribed, an objective historical process leading to the terminal crisis of capitalism or a subtle combination of both, there was assumed to be ground on which the critical intellectual could stand, a concrete location like the French military point d’appui where forces could gather before an assault, a foundation to support a solid critique of the status quo.
In labeling the Frankfurt School “the Grand Hotel Abyss,” Lukács was thus not only denigrating the supposedly comfortable existence of its members, but also their refusal to credit the necessary role of the party and class as the concrete historical ground of radical ideas. Whether or not he was right about the former—their “damaged lives” in exile, to cite the celebrated subtitle of Minima Moralia, suggests otherwise—his second reproach was on target. From its inception, the intellectuals who gathered around the Institut für Sozialforschung knew that critique could not be directly grounded in the praxis or consciousness of the class that Marx had assigned the historical role of incipient universal class, let alone the vanguard party that claimed to be the repository of its imputed or ascribed class consciousness.7 They understood the limits of the claim, classically expressed in Vico’s verum factum principle, that those who made the world were able to know what they had made better than those who were merely contemplating it.8
Was it possible to ground it instead in an objective “scientific” grasp of the totality of social relations to allow an unaffiliated nonpartisan theoretician to decipher not only the surface phenomena of contemporary society but also the deeper, more essential trends that foreshadowed a potential future? Could intellectuals who “floated freely,” to borrow the metaphor that Karl Mannheim would make famous at the end of the decade when the Institute set up shop, have a totalizing perspective on the world below? Or is it a dangerous myth to assume anyone might have a disinterested view above the fray, especially when the very distinction between facts and values was itself being questioned? Max Horkheimer had little use, however, for Mannheim’s solution, which assumed intellectuals from different classes could somehow harmonize their positions and turn them into complementary perspectives on the whole.9 Neither rooted nor free-floating, critique was located somewhere else on a map that included utopias still to be realized.10
One possible alternative drew on the unconstrained will, in which the act of founding was ex nihilo, a gesture of assertion that drew whatever legitimacy it might have entirely from itself rather than any preceding authority, whether based in tradition, rationality or the practical activity of a privileged social group. Here the ground was temporal more than spatial, an origin more than a place.11 It was established through what came to be called decisionist fiat, most famously defended by the Weimar and then Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who argued that the decision to found a legal order could not itself be rooted in a prior legality. But this alternative was frankly irrationalist. Drawing as it did on an analogy from the purely voluntarist version of God that had been promulgated in the Middle Ages by nominalists like William of Ockham, who denied the limitations on divine will placed by any notion of rational intelligibility or ideal form, it relied solely on a spontaneous act of a sovereign subject. As such, it implied a unified metasubject, prior to individual subjects, with the power to do the founding—a subject whose unconstrained will might also lead to material world domination. Consequently, Critical Theory was never tempted by it.12
For a while, the alternative favored by Horkheimer and his colleagues was what became known as “immanent critique”—that is, eschewing any universal or transcendent vantage point above the fray and seeking an alternative in the specific normative claims of a culture that failed to live up to them in practice. Or, in more explicitly Hegelian terms, it meant finding some critical purchase in the gap between a general concept and the specific objects subsumed under it. As a recent champion of this approach, Robert Hullot-Kentor, put it, “Immanent criticism turns the principle of identity, which otherwise serves the subordination
