International Scholars
The Dialectical Imagination.
by Martin Jay.
Little, Brown. 416 pp. $12.50.
On February 3, 1923 a decree of the Education Ministry marked the official creation of the Institut fur Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt, Germany. Financed primarily by Felip J. Weil, an Argentine Jew of German descent, the Institute immediately drew to itself a formidable array of intellectual talent. Most of the original members of the Institute—and most of those who came later—were German Jews of upper-middle-class “assimilated” families. Sympathetic to the Marxist Left, they found the German Social Democratic party too timid, but the German Communist party too rigid, for their taste. During the 1920's the major efforts of the group (despite substantial differences among them) involved an effort to revitalize Marxism. They wished to rescue it from the stultification it was undergoing in the Soviet Union, and to provide an analysis of contemporary society which would clarify its direction and perhaps serve as a guide to social action.
Driven from Germany by the Nazi revolution, the Institute's members emigrated to France, England, and the United States, where the great bulk of them settled. Some returned to Germany after World War II. Others remained in the United States as teachers, scholars, and writers. The names of those associated with the Institute at one time or another read like a who's who of international scholarship. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Karl Wittfogel (one of the few non-Jews affiliated with the Institute), Leo Lowenthal, and others have collectively exercised a tremendous influence on political thinking in both Europe and the United States. During the 1960's at least one of their number, Marcuse, became a leading guru to the New Left.
Martin Jay in The Dialectical Imagination has attempted to chronicle the history of the “Frankfurt School” from its founding, through the period of emigration, and to the immediate postwar years. The 1960's are outside his ken, although this is of relatively little importance since most of the ideas which became prominent then had been developed earlier. The volume is essentially a multi-person intellectual biography of leading Institute figures which weaves together the life-history of individual members with an analysis of their work and ideas. Jay has done a remarkable job. The book is skillfully and gracefully written; its intellectual level is high; and, most importantly, it is eminently fair-minded in its discussion of the issues with which it deals. While Jay is clearly sympathetic to the Institute's dominant ideas, he has not hesitated to be critical, and to raise questions where he felt them legitimate.
Jay's study is not easily summarized. Members of the Institute differed from each other in a number of important ways, and their own thinking changed with time. Yet a number of central themes do characterize the work of those affiliated with the Institute. The first has already been mentioned: most of the members of the Institute were hostile to the “bourgeois” democracy of the Weimar Republic. Although they were “para-Marxist” in their thinking, developments in the Soviet Union and the behavior of the German working class had already filled them with a certain pessimism about the utility of traditional Marxist categories. They attempted to understand what had gone wrong through a reexamination of these categories. The reexamination involved a renewed study of Hegel (and the early works of Marx), and an attempt to recapture the “insights” which had been buried in the more “mechanical” interpretation of Engels and the Soviets.
Their analyses led (for the most part) to even greater pessimism concerning the historical role Marx had assigned to the working class as a source of liberation. State capitalism in bourgeois societies and in the Soviet Union had more or less stabilized the former and brought forth new sources of domination in the latter. While most members of the Institute (especially Marcuse) remained cautiously sympathetic to the Soviet experience, feeling that the seeds of liberation were more likely to flower there than in bourgeois societies, they felt that a more radical break with traditional categories of thought was necessary if, indeed, man was to be liberated.
Their pessimism grew rather than diminished with the emergence of the Nazi regime and the emigration of Institute members to America. By the 1950's, indeed, many had all but broken with traditional Marxist analyses of the future, and had come to level a fundamental attack on the whole of European culture. They especially criticized its emphases on rationality and domination, themes which were picked up secondhand by the counter-culture in the
United States and acted out during the 1960's both here and in Germany. Some of the members of the Institute, at least, were dismayed by this experience, and Adorno, in his last years, under sharp attack by German students, plaintively noted that he had not expected his writing to lead to the making of Molotov cocktails. Others were more ambivalent. Marcuse, for example, saw much that was positive in the student movement, while condemning certain of its “excesses.”
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One of the greatest theoretical efforts of the Frankfurt school, beginning in the 1920's, and reaching some sort of culmination in Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, was the attempt to combine elements of Marxism with psychoanalysis. The effort led in two directions. Erich Fromm, while retaining his belief in the unconscious and a dynamic concept of personality, eventually abandoned much of Freud, including (critically) libido theory. Most of the Institute's members did not take this course, however, and indeed Marcuse and Fromm engaged in a bitter debate on the issue in the 1950's, Marcuse charging Fromm with paving the way for further conformism and domination. The position taken by Marcuse was to accept Freud's argument that sexual and death drives were basic, but to argue that “surplus” repression had given greater reign to the latter than to the former. With the end of scarcity, however, it would be possible to put a close to the hegemony of the “performance principle” and genital sexuality and usher in a period of “polymorphous perversity” and the reign of eros. At the moment, a bowdlerized version of Marcuse's views is still popular on the Left, providing justification for many of the assumptions current in the counterculture, the more radical segment of the women's movement, and gay liberation.
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Theoretical discussions of the relation between psychoanalysis and social structure were not the only ways in which Institute members attempted to use Freud's insights. Perhaps the most important single contribution to American social science made by them was the concept of the “authoritarian personality.” Supported by a grant from the American Jewish Committee, Adorno and other Institute members, along with American collaborators, undertook a massive study of anti-Semitism and the potential for fascism in America. The results were published in 1950.
The emphasis of The Authoritarian Personality was on empirical investigation. Nevertheless, Institute members had brought their own preconceptions to the work, and many of the ideas with which this study was informed had already been developed in earlier studies of the German worker, in which the authoritarian personality had been compared with the revolutionary. Partly to fit in better with the American milieu, the latter type now became the “democratic” personality. It is hardly surprising, then, that authoritarians, by and large, turned out to be conservatives, while those on the Left were usually “democrats.” In retrospect it seems clear that the instruments used in compiling data for The Authoritarian Personality, while they tapped right-wing authoritarianism, were not designed to explore the same phenomenon among radicals of the Left. In fact, the authoritarianism scale which the study developed was basically an exercise in circular reasoning: conservatism was made to equal authoritarianism almost by definition.
Despite the critiques leveled against The Authoritarian Personality and its biases, the scales developed by Institute workers (and others derived from them) have continued to play an important role in social-science research in this country. Nor has any new measure of authoritarianism come into widespread use which completely eliminates the bias of the original.
The influence enjoyed by the Institute's study among social scientists undoubtedly reflected American anti-fascist reaction to the experience of World War II. It also reflected, however, a major ethnic shift then taking place in the social-science profession, i.e., the increasing role in sociology and social psychology being played by liberal American Jews who shared, in milder form, many of the assumptions of the Frankfurt school. And this raises another issue. Jay is not especially concerned with understanding the sources of the Frankfurt school's thinking. It is clear, though, that most of the members reflected in their thinking a particular German upper-middle-class background. Their penchant for a certain kind of theoretical approach—solving “empirical” problems by first defining the nature of man and “true understanding” and proceeding from there—is itself peculiarly German, and in following such modes of thought, Institute members were influenced by the whole history of German idealism. Their background is indicated also by their distaste for popular American culture and the “sweatiness” of the common man—a disdain which served them as a basis for criticizing contemporary society and arguing for a new, “higher” social order.
What else can we say of their background? Jay raises the question of the Jewishness of most Institute members. Except in the case of a few (Erich Fromm, for example) the men themselves not only denied the relevance of this fact, but even the reality of German anti-Semitism. They considered themselves radical intellectuals of a universal type, rather than Jews. Jay feels, nevertheless, that the Jewish background of the members must have played some role in their thinking, and examines briefly the relation between their ideas and aspects of the Jewish tradition. He fails, however, to establish any real connections. Yet it is quite obvious, in the very denials of Institute members themselves, that a desire was at work, both in their lives and in the modes of thought to which they were most attracted, to end the remnants of felt marginality. Marxism and psychoanalysis both served the same function for Institute members in this regard, for both systems deny the reality of cultural differences, affirming instead a universal ideology applicable across cultures and across ethnic lines. What better way to end one's marginality than by undermining the categories that define one as marginal?
Unfortunately the intellectual tools chosen to overcome marginality never seem to work out in practice. Once European Communist parties became large movements they absorbed, through their membership, most of the prejudices which, theoretically, should have had no place in such parties. In Germany, at least, the counter-culture seems likely to follow the same route. After having played such an important role in developing the categories which gave the counter-culture a measure of intellectual respectability, Adorno should perhaps have perceived that the radical German students who harassed him in the late 1960's bore a distinct psychological resemblance to those who had shouted for his blood in the late 1920's. Only the rhetoric had changed.
