its past and become fully American. This reluctance can be gauged by the decision to continue using Félix Alean as publisher even after leaving Europe. By resisting the entreaties of its new American colleagues to publish in America, the Institut felt that it could more easily retain German as the language of the Zeitschrift. Although articles occasionally appeared in English and French and summaries in those languages followed each German essay, the journal remained essentially German until the war. It was in fact the only periodical of its kind published in the language that Hitler was doing so much to debase. As such, the Zeitschrift was seen by Horkheimer and the others as a vital contribution to the preservation of the humanist tradition in German culture, which was threatened with extirpation. Indeed, one of the key elements in the Institut’s self-image was this sense of being the last outpost of a waning culture. Keenly aware of the relation language bears to thought, its members were thus convinced that only by continuing to write in their native tongue could they resist the identification of Nazism with everything German. Although most of the German-speaking world had no way of obtaining copies, the Institut was willing to sacrifice an immediate audience for a future one, which indeed did materialize after the defeat of Hitler. The one regrettable by-product of this decision was the partial isolation from the American academic community that it unavoidably entailed. Although the Institut began giving lectures in the Extension Division at Columbia in 1936, and gradually developed a series of seminars on various topics,122 its focus remained primarily on theory and research. Together once again in the security of its new home on Morningside Heights—of the inner circle, only Adorno remained abroad for several years more—the Institut was thus able to resume without much difficulty the work it had started in Europe.
Although sobered by the triumph of fascism in Germany, Horkheimer and the others were still somewhat optimistic about the future. “The twilight of capitalism,” wrote “Heinrich Regius” in 1934, “need not initiate the night of humanity, which, to be sure, seems to threaten today.”123 An intensification of their explorations of the crisis of capitalism, the collapse of traditional liberalism, the rising authoritarian threat, and other, related topics seemed the best contribution they could make to the defeat of Nazism. As always, their work was grounded in a social philosophy whose articulation was the prime occupation of Horkheimer, Marcuse, and to a lesser extent, Adorno, during the 1930’s. It was here that their reworking of traditional Marxism became crucial. It is thus to the genesis and development of Critical Theory that we now must turn.
* I am grateful to Dr. Weil for providing a full explanation of this and related German terms (used below) in the academic hierarchical system, as it was around 1920: “A Privatdozent was the first step in the academic career. It corresponds to assistant professor in the U.S. To become one, a candidate, usually then serving, after his doctor’s degree, as assistant to a full professor, to the dean of the department, or to a Seminar (study group), had to submit a new qualifying thesis, the Habilitationsschrift, sponsored by two full professors, and then defend it in a Disputation before the department consisting of all the full professors. (At Frankfurt University there were five such departments: philosophy, law, economics and social sciences, medicine, and natural sciences.) If he passed, the department granted him his venia legendi, the ‘permission to lecture’ which, however, was limited to a particular field. The Privatdozent was not a civil servant (Beamter) nor did he receive a salary, only a share in the tuition fees for his course.
“The next step on the ladder was the Ausserordentliche Professor, the associate professor. He was a civil servant, with tenure and salary, and also received a share in the tuition fees. He could sponsor Doktoranden and participate in the exams, but had no vote in the departmental meetings, although he could speak at these meetings.
“The Ordentliche Professor, the full professor, had all the rights of the Ausserordentliche, plus the vote in the meetings. But unlike the Ausserordentliche he could lecture on any topic he wanted, even outside his field (for example, the holder of a chair for art history could lecture on aerodynamics, if he so wanted). He was, of course, a civil servant with tenure (and usually a large salary), a share in the tuition fees (usually a minimum guarantee) and he was entitled to the services of a university-paid assistant. The full professor’s oath of office also conferred German citizenship upon him, if he was a foreigner, unless he previously filed a declination (thus Grünberg chose to remain an Austrian, and, much later, Horkheimer preferred to remain an American)” (Letter of June 8, 1971)
II
The Genesis of Critical Theory
Viewed from the heights of reason, all life looks like some malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.
— GOETHE
I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.
— NIETZSCHE
At the very heart of Critical Theory was an aversion to closed philosophical systems. To present it as such would therefore distort its essentially open-ended, probing, unfinished quality. It was no accident that Horkheimer chose to articulate his ideas in essays and aphorisms rather than in the cumbersome tomes so characteristic of German philosophy. Although Adorno and Marcuse were less reluctant to speak through completed books, they too resisted the temptation to make those books into positive, systematic philosophical statements. Instead, Critical Theory, as its name implies, was expressed through a series of critiques of other thinkers and philosophical traditions. Its development was thus through dialogue, its genesis as dialectical as the method it purported to apply to social phenomena. Only by confronting it in its own terms, as a gadfly of other systems, can it be fully understood. What this chapter will attempt to do, therefore, is to present Critical Theory as it was first generated in the 1930’s, through contrapuntal interaction both with other schools of thought and with a changing social reality.
To trace the origins of Critical Theory to their true source would require an extensive analysis of the intellectual ferment of the 1840’s, perhaps the most extraordinary decade in nineteenth-century German intellectual history.1 It was then that Hegel’s successors first applied his philosophical insights to the social and political phenomena of Germany, which was setting out on a course of rapid modernization. The so-called Left Hegelians were of course soon eclipsed by the most talented of their number, Karl Marx. And in time, the philosophical cast of their thinking, shared by the young Marx himself, was superseded by a more “scientific,” at times positivistic approach to social reality, by Marxists and non-Marxists alike.2 By the late nineteenth century, social theory in general had ceased being “critical” and “negative” in the sense to be explained below.
The recovery of the Hegelian roots of Marx’s thought by Marxists themselves was delayed until after World War I for reasons first spelled out by Karl Korsch in the pages of Grünbergs Archiv in 1923.3 Only then were serious epistemological and methodological questions asked about the Marxist theory of society, which, despite (or perhaps because of) its scientific pretensions, had degenerated into a kind of metaphysics not unlike that which Marx himself had set out to dismantle. Ironically, a new understanding of Marx’s debt to Hegel, that most metaphysical of thinkers, served to undermine the different kind of metaphysics that had entered “Vulgar Marxism” through the back door of scientism. Hegel’s stress on consciousness as constitutive of the world challenged the passive materialism of the Second International’s theorists. Here non-Marxist thinkers like Croce and Dilthey had laid the groundwork, by reviving philosophical interest in Hegel before the war. During the same period, Sorel’s stress on spontaneity and subjectivity also played a role in undermining the mechanistic materialism of the orthodox adherents of the Second International.4 Within the Marxist camp, Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy were the most
