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Critical theory as a philosophical tendency was formed within German culture, but the term was actually coined in the United States. The critical theory project took shape at the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923 in Frankfurt. The first director of the institute, Carl Grunberg, and many of its early members like Henryk Grossman, Fritz Sternberg, and Felix Weill were primarily interested in the study of political economy, imperialism, and the history of the socialist labor movement.

Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, And The Frankfurt School

Max Horkheimer, who took over as the new director of the Institute for Social Research in 1930, changed the orientation of critical theory. Seminars of an interdisciplinary sort were organized among the members of Horkheimer’s inner circle and, ultimately, they would produce the major works of critical theory normally associated with the Frankfurt school. Participants included Leo Lowenthal, an expert in literary criticism who joined the institute in 1926, and Theodor W. Adorno, who was considered valuable for his knowledge of music, and who began his collaboration with the institute in 1928, yet only became an official member ten years later. There was also Erich Fromm, a gifted psychologist, who started his nine-year collaboration in 1930; Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher and former student of Martin Heidegger, who joined in 1933; and Walter Benjamin, the most unique of these thinkers, who never officially was a member at all.

Benjamin was completely unknown in the United States until the preeminent political theorist, Hannah Arendt, edited a collection of his essays, Illuminations (1969). Benjamin thereafter became celebrated as an iconoclastic thinker involved with investigating and meshing traditions as diverse as Jewish messianism, baroque, modernism, and Marxism. With the new popularity of the radically subjective postmodern movement during the 1980s, however, his fame reached extraordinary proportions: A library of secondary works has appeared and almost every volume of Benjamin’s four-volume Selected Writings has become an academic bestseller. His critique of progress and optimistic illusions, his attempt to reconstruct theory through the assimilation of seemingly mutually exclusive traditions, his skepticism concerning traditional foundations and universal claims, and his preoccupation with subjectivity produced a transformation of the entire critical project. Benjamin’s work spoke directly to many on the left who, following the collapse of the social and cultural movements associated with the 1960s, felt they were living in an age of ruins. Above all, however, his inability to decide whether to emigrate to Israel or the United States and his subsequent tragic death in 1940, while attempting to flee the Nazi invasion of France, put a particularly dramatic stamp on his life and the experience of exile.

Exile marked the work of the Institute for Social Research. Horkheimer, in fact, only coined the term critical theory in 1937, after having fled to the United States. His seminal essay on the subject, “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), treated it as an approach qualitatively different from “vulgar” materialism—that is to say positivism or behaviorism—and metaphysical idealism. Following the approach developed in the classic works of unorthodox Western Marxists like Marxism and Philosophy by Karl Korsch and History and Class Consciousness by Georg Lukács, Horkheimer insisted that critical theory should be understood neither as a philosophical system nor a fixed set of proscriptions. He instead viewed it as a method of liberation, a cluster of themes or concerns that would express an explicit interest in the abolition of social injustice and the psychological, cultural, and political reasons why the international proletarian revolution failed following the events of 1917 in Russia. With the publication of “Authority and the Family” (1934), for example, Horkheimer sought to analyze how a patriarchal familial structure inhibited the development of revolutionary consciousness among workers. “The Jews and Europe” (1938) insisted that confronting bigotry called for confronting economic exploitation: or, as Horkheimer put the matter in his essay, “he who wishes to speak of anti-Semitism must also speak of capitalism. ”Works like these set the stage for a new mode of dialectical thinking—a version of Marxism—that went beyond the economic interests of classes and elites as well as the institutional dynamics of the state.

The Critique Of Ideology And Totalitarianism

Reactionary sexual mores, mass culture, the division of labor, and the need to grasp the universal through the particular would prove essential themes for the Institute for Social Research. Deeper issues mired in the anthropology of human existence also became matters of concern for critical theory. Indeed, the need for a response to these issues turned critical theory into an ongoing threat to the stultifying dogma and collectivism of “actually existing socialism.” In the spirit of Marxism, critical theory leveled an attack on all ideological and institutional forms of oppression including those justified by Marxism itself. Critical theory was—from the first—intended to foster critical reflection, a capacity for fantasy, and new forms of political action in an increasingly bureaucratized world.

Most members of the institute remained suspicious of the different ways in which supposedly neutral formulations of science veiled repressive social interests. That is why they employed a methodological approach indebted to both the critique of ideology (Ideologiekritik) that derived from German idealism and Marx’s sociology of knowledge. Ideals of freedom and liberation thus provided the basis for the social critique of the existing order. In the United States, however, the character of this engagement changed dramatically from that of the early days. The most compelling reasons were connected with the failure of the proletarian revolution, the increasingly stark reality of totalitarianism, and the looming shadow of McCarthyism.

Major scholars associated with the Institute for Social Research—albeit often at the fringes—added much to an understanding of the ideological forces behind the new totalitarian phenomenon and its structure. Its emergence in Germany was analyzed in diverse works of an interdisciplinary character. Escape from Freedom (1941) by Erich Fromm, which proved enormously popular, analyzed the psychological appeal of Nazi totalitarianism. Siegfried Kracauer, who was close to Adorno and Benjamin, offered what would prove a classic examination of German film in the Weimar Republic in his work entitled From Caligari to Hitler (1947). In a more social scientific vein, Otto Kirchheimer contributed Political Justice (1961) and Franz Neumann, with Behemoth (1942), introduced the first significant work that analyzed the structure of the Nazi state. Horkheimer himself edited a five-volume work, Studies in Prejudice (1949), for the American Jewish Committee while Adorno led a team of researchers in producing the classic book The Authoritarian Personality (1950). In the context of the United States, both looking backward to the 1930s and forward to McCarthyism, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1948) by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman as well as Lowenthal’s work on American anti-Semitism, Images of Prejudice (1945), are significant works.

Following the Hitler-Stalin Pact that unleashed World War II (1939–1945), the proletarian revolution ceased to serve as the ultimate aim of the critical enterprise. The working class lost its standing as the revolutionary subject of history and the Frankfurt school no longer saw its interests as sufficient for generating a critique of the status quo. A new phase in the development of critical theory began with the completion of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), including a sensational last chapter “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” in 1947. Horkheimer and Adorno, its authors, called into question the old belief in progress, science, and the benefits of modernity. They insisted that by privileging mathematical reason, the Enlightenment not only assaulted reactionary forms of religious dogma, but also, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the more progressive normative ways of thinking. Scientific rationality divorced from ethical concerns was, indeed, seen as culminating in the number tattooed on the arm of the concentration camp inmate.

Dialectic of Enlightenment offers less the vision of a better world emerging from the Enlightenment than one increasingly defined by the commodity form and bureaucratic rationality, in which the individual is stripped of conscience and spontaneity. Stalinism on the left, Nazism on the right, and an increasingly bureaucratic and robotic mass society emerging in the United States inspired this book: mass society, the horror of war, and—perhaps above all—the concentration camp universe. The new reality demanded a significant revision in the more traditional understandings of critical and radical theory.

Theodor Adorno And The Critique Of The Bureaucratic Order

Communism had turned into a nightmare, Nazism was even worse, social democracy had been integrated into the status quo, and liberalism—with its emphasis upon the abstract individual of the social contract—had seemingly become anachronistic. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the possibility of revolutionary transformation faded in the face of an apparently seamless bureaucratic order buttressed by the culture industry intent on eliminating subjectivity and any genuinely critical opposition to the status quo. This development is what required rethinking of the usually positive view that progressives had traditionally accorded the Enlightenment. Not the philosophe or the political critic but the bohemian intellectual, who challenged society in its entirety, was seen as embodying whatever emancipatory hope existed for the future. Thus, for the proponents of critical theory, it had become necessary to supplement the dialectical framework of Hegel and Marx with the more modernist and subjectivist tenets of nineteenth-century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche in combating the collectivist strains within advanced industrial society.

It was now incumbent upon a genuinely critical theory to explore the ways in which civilization in general, and modernity in particular, were flawed from the beginning. The critical theory of society would thus require a more directly anthropological form of inquiry. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, indeed, it was now necessary to highlight not the needs of some class-bound and collectivist “revolutionary subject” like the proletariat, but the ways in which individual subjectivity might resist the conformity generated by an increasingly administered and culturally barbaric universe. Political resistance thus made way for a philosophic-aesthetic assertion of subjectivity in Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970), two monumental works by Adorno, while Horkheimer emphasized a philosophico-religious understanding of resistance in The Longing for the Totally Other (1970).

Adorno was probably the most talented proponent of this new turn in critical theory. His interests extended from musicology and literary analysis to sociology, metapsychology, and philosophy. Adorno’s works evidence a rare standard of intellectual brilliance. They include extraordinary studies on modern music, in his masterful Aesthetic Theory, and Minima Moralia: Reflections of a Damaged Life (1947).

Adorno’s work exemplifies the abstruse style that has become identified with the Frankfurt school. The heritage of dialectical philosophy surely had an impact on its formation and the complex use of complex concepts employed often demanded a complex articulation. Especially in the ideologically charged context of the war and its aftermath, however, members of the Institute for Social Research also self-consciously employed an Aesopian form of writing. As exiles living in the United States, they sought to hide their indebtedness to Marx by substituting the highly abstract language of Hegel. But also noteworthy about the style of Adorno and Horkheimer, their famous analysis of the culture industry developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, written while they were living in Los Angeles, implied that popularity would necessarily “neutralize” whatever critical or emancipatory messages a work might retain. Nevertheless, there was nothing ambivalent about the willingness of Erich Fromm—or Herbert Marcuse—to engage the public in a radical fashion.

Erich Fromm And Herbert Marcuse

Erich Fromm was surely the most lucid stylist to emerge from the Institute for Social Research. He was also the most popular and, arguably, the most loyal to its original purpose insofar as he always sought to link theory with the practical demands of social change and individual transformation. Fromm grew up Orthodox and he studied with some of the leading rabbis in Europe. His dissertation dealt with the Jewish Diaspora and another of his early works with the Sabbath. The psychoanalytic institute he founded in Berlin with his first wife, Frieda Reichmann, soon became known as the Torah-peutikum. His interest in the psychological appeal and ethical impulse provided by religion, indeed, never fully disappeared.

Fromm was initially one of the most influential members of the institute and a close friend of Horkheimer. His concern was with how psychological attitudes mediated the relation between the individual and society. Even during the 1920s, he was intent upon linking Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory with Marx’s historical materialism. For this reason, when Adorno first insisted on developing an anthropological critique of civilization from the standpoint of Freud’s instinct theory, he clashed with Fromm, who insisted upon the primacy of Freud’s more practical clinical studies. The dazzling newcomer won the battle. Fromm divorced himself from the institute by 1940 and proceeded to write a number of bestsellers, including Escape from Freedom. Quickly enough, his former colleagues condemned him for the “superficial” quality of his writings even while his influence soared among left-wing intellectuals and a broader public from the 1950s to the 1970s.

As for Herbert Marcuse, while in the United States, he not only worked with the Office of Strategic Services as an expert on West European politics, but also wrote papers on totalitarianism and, in 1958, published a highly respected study entitled Soviet Marxism. In spite of his penchant for utopian thought, so prominent in Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse also remained faithful to the original practical impulse of critical theory. His most influential work, One-Dimensional Man (1964), actually anticipated the seminal role of the new social movements and a radical cultural politics in responding to the bureaucracy, commodification, and conformism of advanced industrial society. Pessimism concerning the future of a society in which all radical alternatives were being absorbed, and all ideological contradictions were being flattened out, combined with a utopian vision built upon the radical humanism of the young Marx, the play principle of Schiller with its utopian assault upon the repression demanded by reality, and the metapsychology of Freud. This tension, indeed, permeated all of Marcuse’s writings.

The Legacy Of The Frankfurt School And Future Of Critical Theory

In the United States, the popularity of Fromm and Marcuse contrasted strikingly with a virtually total ignorance of the work produced by the rest of the Frankfurt school. The legend that critical theory inspired the movement of the 1960s is, certainly in America, misleading; its major works were translated only in the 1970s. During that decade, journals like Telos and New German Critique helped publicize its ideas and the works of its most important representatives. In Europe, however, the influence of the Frankfurt school on the partisans of 1968 was strong. Its emphasis upon alienation, the domination of nature, the regressive components of progress, the mutability of human nature, and the stultifying effects of the culture industry and advanced industrial society made the enterprise relevant for young intellectuals who had come of age through the movement of the 1960s.

Horkheimer and Adorno, however, were appalled by what they had helped inspire. Following their return to Germany, the former became rector and the latter, somewhat later, a dean at the University of Frankfurt. It is somewhat ironic that these new stalwarts of the establishment should have anticipated the movement’s concern with a cultural revolution and the transformation of everyday life demanded by so many of their students. These themes were as real for many activists of the 1960s, both in Europe and the United States, as the quest for racial justice and the anti-imperialist opposition to the Vietnam War (1959–1975). Nevertheless, these themes lost their salience in the general malaise that followed the collapse of the movement and the emergence of a neoconservative assault upon the so-called adversary culture.

A new set of academic radicals embraced instead the deconstructive and radically subjectivist elements in the thinking of the Frankfurt school in general, and in the work of Adorno and Benjamin in particular, with their emphasis upon the fragmentary character of reality, the illusion of progress, and the need to substitute experimental cultural for political resistance. All this fit the time in which radicalism retreated from the streets into the university. Critical theory of this new deconstructive or poststructuralist sort invaded the most prestigious journals and disciplines ranging from anthropology and film to religion, linguistics, and political science. Elements of it have, indeed, have become features of the very society that the Frankfurt school ostensibly wished to challenge.

But that time, too, is passing. If it is to remain relevant, especially in the United States, critical theory must begin taming its metaphysical excesses, mitigating its subjectivism, and affirming its repressed political character. These concerns inform much of the work undertaken by Jürgen Habermas, the brilliant student of Horkheimer and Adorno, who came to maturity in the aftermath of World War II. Of particular interest, in this vein, is his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (1985). Habermas was never in exile: He experienced the impact of totalitarianism directly in his youth, and it left him with a profound respect for the liberal political legacy, the public sphere, and the repressed possibilities of communicative action. Habermas has also gained a large academic following in the United States. Nevertheless, his work provides an important beginning for resurrecting the critical undertaking.

A clash of civilizations, globalization, new forms of imperialism, and a powerful tide of conservatism are creating new problems for a new generation of critical theorists. It is becoming increasingly necessary to begin reconstructing the practical impulse of the critical project, its repressed political purpose, and its speculative legacy for the present. Critical theory was originally intended to foster social justice, cultural experimentation, and human happiness. Its academic transformation into a form of metaphysics cannot remain immune from criticism. Remaining honest to the tradition of critical theory thus calls for confronting it from the critical standpoint. Whatever the other differences between them, all of its major representatives would assuredly—today—find themselves in agreement with that claim.

Bibliography:

Adorno,Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books, 1974.
Benjamin,Walter. Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Bronner, Stephen Eric. Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Bronner, Stephen Eric, and Douglas MacKay Kellner, eds. Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.
Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory: Selected Essays, translated by Matthew O’Connell. New York: Continuum, 1982.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Fragments, translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
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Kellner, Douglas. Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Oxford: Polity Press, 1989.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.
Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, translated by Michael Robertson. Oxford: Polity Press, 1994.