target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_988bc653-ee03-5114-9d2e-4aa4c292939c">24. Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell et al., (New York, 1992).
25. See, for example, Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of the Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley, 1993).
26. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical/Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, 1991).
27. Jean-François Lyotard, “A Svelte Appendix to the Postmodern Question,” in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis, 1993), p. 28.
28. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (New York, 1990), pp. 249–252.
29. For my own thoughts on this issue, see “Class Struggle in the Classroom? The Myth of American ‘Seminarmarxism’.” Salmagundi, 85–86 (Winter, Spring, 1990). It has also been argued by Stephen T. Leonard that despite everything, Critical Theory has managed to produce significant practical effects in areas such as critical pedagogy, feminism and liberation theology. See his Critical Theory in Political Practice (Princeton, 1990). See also the earlier collection, Critical Theory and Public Life, ed., John Forester (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
30. “Urban Flights: The Institute of Social Research between Frankfurt and New York,” in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (Berkeley, 1993).
31. Willem van Reijen and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, eds., Grand Hotel Abgrund: Ein Photobiographie der Kritischen Theorie (Hamburg, 1988).
32. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
33. Adorno (Cambridge, Mass., 1984) sought to provide an overview of his career. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, 1984) attempted to situate Critical Theory’s ruminations on the concept of totality in the longer history of Western Marxism as a whole. Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York, 1985) collected my scattered essays on aspects of the Institut’s history, as well as on other emigres such as Siegfried Kracauer. An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal (Berkeley, 1987) was an edition of texts and interviews by Lowenthal.
Foreword
December, 1971
Dear Mr. Jay,
I have been asked to write a foreword to your book on the history of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. Reading your interesting work does not permit me to refuse this request; however, the condition of my health limits me to the short letter form, which should now serve as a foreword. First, my thanks are due you for the care which is demonstrated through all the chapters of your work. Much will be preserved which would be forgotten without your description.
The work to which the Institute devoted itself before its emigration from Germany—one thinks of Friedrich Pollock’s book The Experiments in Economic Planning in the Soviet Union, 1917–1927 or the subsequently published collective work, Authority and Family—meant something new in comparison to the then official educational system. It meant the ability to pursue research for which a university still offered no opportunity. The enterprise succeeded only because, thanks to the support of Hermann Weil and the intervention of his son, Felix, a group of men, interested in social theory and from different scholarly backgrounds, came together with the belief that formulating the negative in the epoch of transition was more meaningful than academic careers. What united them was the critical approach to existing society.
Already near the end of the twenties, certainly by the beginning of the thirties, we were convinced of the probability of a National Socialist victory, as well as of the fact that it could be met only through revolutionary actions. That it needed a world war we did not yet envisage at that time. We thought of an uprising in our own country and because of that, Marxism won its decisive meaning for our thought. After our emigration to America via Geneva, the Marxist interpretation of social events remained, to be sure, dominant, which did not mean in any way, however, that a dogmatic materialism had become the decisive theme of our position. Reflecting on political systems taught us rather that it was necessary, as Adorno has expressed it, “not to think of claims to the Absolute as certain and yet, not to deduct anything from the appeal to the emphatic concept of the truth.”
The appeal to an entirely other (ein ganz Anderes) than this world had primarily a social-philosophical impetus. It led finally to a more positive evaluation of certain metaphysical trends, because the empirical “whole is the untrue” (Adorno). The hope that earthly horror does not possess the last word is, to be sure, a non-scientific wish.
Those who were once associated with the Institute, as far as they are still alive, will certainly be thankful to you for recognizing in your book a history of their own ideas. I feel obliged also in the name of the dead, such as Fred Pollock, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer, to express to you, dear Mr. Jay, acknowledgment and gratitude for your work.
| Cordially, MAX HORKHEIMER |
Montagnola, Switzerland
Introduction
It has become a commonplace in the modern world to regard the intellectual as estranged, maladjusted, and discontented. Far from being disturbed by this vision, however, we have become increasingly accustomed to seeing our intellectuals as outsiders, gadflies, marginal men, and the like. The word “alienation,” indiscriminately used to signify the most banal of dyspepsias as well as the deepest of metaphysical fears, has become the chief cant phrase of our time. For even the most discerning of observers, reality and pose have become difficult to distinguish. To the horror of those who can genuinely claim to have suffered from its effects, alienation has proved a highly profitable commodity in the cultural marketplace. Modernist art with its dissonances and torments, to take one example, has become the staple diet of an increasingly voracious army of culture consumers who know good investments when they see them. The avant-garde, if indeed the term can still be used, has become an honored ornament of our cultural life, less to be feared than feted. The philosophy of existentialism, to cite another case, which scarcely a generation ago seemed like a breath of fresh air, has now degenerated into a set of easily manipulated clichés and sadly hollow gestures. This decline occurred, it should be noted, not because analytic philosophers exposed the meaninglessness of its categories, but rather as a result of our culture’s uncanny ability to absorb and defuse even its most uncompromising opponents. And finally to mention a third example, it is all too evident in 1972, a few short years after the much ballyhooed birth of an alleged counterculture, that the new infant, if not strangled in the crib, has proved easily domesticated in the ways of its elders. Here too the mechanisms of absorption and cooptation have shown themselves to be enormously effective.
The
