Much of what they argued was confirmed a decade later, with the revelations produced by the circulation of Marx’s long-neglected Paris manuscripts. When, for one reason or another, their efforts faltered, the task of reinvigorating Marxist theory was taken up primarily by the young thinkers at the Institut für Sozialforschung.
On one level, then, it can be argued that the Frankfurt School was returning to the concerns of the Left Hegelians of the 1840’s. Like that first generation of critical theorists, its members were interested in the integration of philosophy and social analysis. They likewise were concerned with the dialectical method devised by Hegel and sought, like their predecessors, to turn it in a materialist direction. And finally, like many of the Left Hegelians, they were particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of transforming the social order through human praxis.
The intervening century, however, had brought enormous changes, which made the conditions of their theorizing vastly different. Whereas the Left Hegelians were the immediate successors of the classical German idealists, the Frankfurt School was separated from Kant and Hegel by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Bergson, Weber, Husserl, and many others, not to mention the systematization of Marxism itself. As a result, Critical Theory had to reassert itself against a score of competitors who had driven Hegel from the field. And, of course, it could not avoid being influenced by certain of their ideas. But still more important, vital changes in social, economic, and political conditions between the two periods had unmistakable repercussions on the revived Critical Theory. Indeed, according to its own premises this was inevitable. The Left Hegelians wrote in a Germany just beginning to feel the effects of capitalist modernization. By the time of the Frankfurt School, Western capitalism, with Germany as one of its leading representatives, had entered a qualitatively new stage, dominated by growing monopolies and increasing governmental intervention in the economy. The only real examples of socialism available to the Left Hegelians had been a few isolated Utopian communities. The Frankfurt School, on the other hand, had the ambiguous success of the Soviet Union to ponder. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the first critical theorists had lived at a time when a new “negative” (that is, revolutionary) force in society—the proletariat—was stirring, a force that could be seen as the agent that would fulfill their philosophy. By the 1930’s, however, signs of the proletariat’s integration into society were becoming increasingly apparent; this was especially evident to the members of the Institut after their emigration to America. Thus, it might be said of the first generation of critical theorists in the 1840’s that theirs was an “immanent” critique of society based on the existence of a real historical “subject.” By the time of its renaissance in the twentieth century, Critical Theory was being increasingly forced into a position of “transcendence” by the withering away of the revolutionary working class.
In the 1920’s, however, the signs were still unclear. Lukács himself stressed the function of the working class as the “subject-object” of history before deciding that it was really the party that represented the true interests of the workers. As the passage cited from Dämmerung in Chapter 1 indicates, Horkheimer believed that the German proletariat, although badly split, was not entirely moribund. The younger members of the Institut could share the belief of its older, more orthodox leadership that socialism might still be a real possibility in the advanced countries of Western Europe. This was clearly reflected in the consistent hortatory tone of most of the Institut’s work in the pre-emigration period.
After the Institut’s resettlement at Columbia University, however, this tone underwent a subtle shift in a pessimistic direction. Articles in the Zeitschrift scrupulously avoided using words like “Marxism” or “communism,” substituting “dialectical materialism” or “the materialist theory of society” instead. Careful editing prevented emphasizing the revolutionary implications of their thought. In the Institut’s American bibliography6 the title of Grossmann’s book was shortened to The Law of Accumulation in Capitalist Society without any reference to the “law of collapse,” which had appeared in the original. These changes were doubtless due in part to the sensitive situation in which the Institut’s members found themselves at Columbia. They were also a reflection of their fundamental aversion to the type of Marxism that the Institut equated with the orthodoxy of the Soviet camp. But in addition they expressed a growing loss of that basic confidence, which Marxists had traditionally felt, in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat.
In their attempt to achieve a new perspective that might make the new situation intelligible, in a framework that was still fundamentally Marxist, the members of the Frankfurt School were fortunate in having had philosophical training outside the Marxist tradition. Like other twentieth-century contributors to the revitalization of Marxism—Lukács, Gramsci, Bloch, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty—they were influenced at an early stage in their careers by more subjectivist, even idealist philosophies. Horkheimer, who set the tone for all of the Institut’s work, had been interested in Schopenhauer and Kant before becoming fascinated with Hegel and Marx. His expression of interest in Schopenhauer in the 1960’s,7 contrary to what is often assumed, was thus a return to an early love, rather than an apostasy from a life-long Hegelianized Marxism. In fact the first book in philosophy Horkheimer actually read was Schopenhauer’s Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life,8 which Pollock gave him when they were studying French together in Brussels before the war. Both he and Lowenthal were members of the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft at Frankfurt in their student days. Horkheimer was also very much interested in Kant at that time; his first published work was an analysis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, written for his Habilitation under Hans Cornelius in 1925.9
If Horkheimer can be said to have had a true mentor, it was Hans Cornelius. As Pollock, who also studied under Cornelius, remembers it, his “influence on Horkheimer can hardly be overestimated.”10 This seems to have been true more from a personal than a theoretical point of view. Although difficult to classify, Cornelius’s philosophical perspective was antidogmatic, opposed to Kantian idealism, and insistent on the importance of experience. His initial writings showed the influence of Avenarius and Mach, but in his later work he moved away from their empiriocriticism and closer to a kind of phenomenology.11 When Horkheimer became his student, Cornelius was at the height of his career, a “passionate teacher . . . in many ways the opposite of the current image of a German university professor,, and in strong opposition to most of his colleagues.”12
Although the young Horkheimer seems to have absorbed his teacher’s critical stance, little of the substance of Cornelius’s philosophy remained with him, especially after his interest was aroused by readings in Hegel and Marx. What does appear to have made an impact were Cornelius’s humanistic cultural concerns. Born in 1863 in Munich into a family of composers, painters, and actors, Cornelius continued to pursue aesthetic interests throughout his life. Talented both as a sculptor and a painter, he made frequent trips to Italy, where he became expert in both classical and Renaissance art. In 1908 he published a study of The Elementary Laws of Pictorial Art,13 and during the war he ran art schools in Munich.
Horkheimer was also certainly attracted by Cornelius’s progressive political tendencies. Cornelius was an avowed internationalist and had been an opponent of the German war effort. Although no Marxist, he was considered an outspoken radical by the more conservative members of the Frankfurt faculty. What also doubtless made its impact on Horkheimer was his cultural pessimism, which he combined with his progressive politics. As Pollock recalls, “Cornelius never hesitated to confess openly his convictions and his despair about present-day civilization.”14 A sample of the almost apocalyptic tone he adopted, which was of course shared by many in Weimar’s early days, can be found in the autobiographical sketch he wrote in 1923:
Men have unlearned the ability to recognize the Godly in themselves and in things: nature and art, family and state have only interest for them as sensations. Therefore their lives flow meaninglessly by, and their shared culture is inwardly empty and will collapse because it is worthy of collapse. The new religion, however, which mankind
