6 The Early Definition of Critical Theory

Recapitulation: the re-founding of the Institute, 1930–31

Max Horkheimer’s (HORK-hy-mer; /ˈhɔʁkhaɪ̯mɐ/) idea of a social philosophy was born in a hard situation: Marxism in an ideological age, with all the difficulty that brought for saying anything in public. Did the Institute write in an “Aesopian” language, saying one thing so as to mean another? Its journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (TSITE-shrift fewr zoh-TSYAHL-for-shoong; /ˈtsaɪ̯tʃʁɪft fyːɐ̯ zoˈtsi̯aːlˌfɔʁʃʊŋ/) (Journal for Social Research), ran from 1932 to 1941, its last volumes published in the United States as Studies in Philosophy and Social Science.

The social philosophy mediates between materialism and idealism, life and spirit, and it treats society as a dialectical totality: the connection between the economy, the psychical development of individuals, and culture, down to fashion and sport (quotation 1, from the 1931 address). Horkheimer, inspired by Marx, is attempting a theory of the totality of human life, a philosophy that follows the Hegelian idea dialectically. The whole of human life is a dialectical whole: its parts make up the totality without any one of them losing its autonomy. And the theory must be informed by reality; it cannot rise a priori, as only the purest sciences, the mathematical ones, can.

In the 1930s this program gets a name: “critical theory.” Its first definition comes in “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937).

Traditional theory

“Traditional theory” is Horkheimer’s name for the established mode of scholarship and inquiry. Its picture of knowledge goes back to Descartes, who insists on a dualism of thought and being, mind and matter, self and world: thinking substance on one side, extended substance on the other (in Descartes’s Latin, res cogitans (RAYSS KOH-gi-tahns; /reːs ˈko.ɡi.tans/) and res extensa (RAYSS ex-TEN-sah; /reːs ekˈsten.sa/)). Descartes made epistemology the first question of philosophy, and for him the separation of the knower from the realm known is what makes causal, objective theory possible.

On this picture:

• the objective world, as science conceives it, consists of unchanging causal laws;
• the social sciences are modelled on the natural sciences, so that the method of the one maps straight onto the other. This comes out of the Enlightenment through Auguste Comte’s positivism and sociology. Positivism became, in all honesty, a kind of religion, and a hugely influential one: Comte meant it to be a good religious force.
• there is a division of labor: each scientific inquiry pursues its own task independently of the whole.

Horkheimer casts doubt over this portrait. Scientific inquiry is in fact “only one, nonindependent element” in human historical action; its “limited intellectual processes are detached from their matrix in the total activity of society.” The division of the world into separate scientific domains, physics here, biology there, then anthropology and political science, may be a reflection of the social division of labor: a reification, a separation of subjects. The ideal of separate domains and value-neutrality reflects alienation. This is a critique of the bourgeois social sciences.

But Horkheimer warns against concluding that traditional theory has nothing to offer. Despite its claims to an objectivity it cannot have, it has a “positive social function.” Science works.

Critical theory

Why doesn’t Horkheimer simply go along with sociology? Because sociology comes out of traditional theory, and by its very nature it cannot criticize itself. Cartesian dualism makes us think that inquiry is advancing toward an objective reality that stands apart from it. Horkheimer answers that no such objectivity exists for social knowledge: everything comes out of society, its forms and its shape, including the theory itself.

So we can conceive of a different human activity, one that “has society itself for its object” (p. 206). This critical attitude is “wholly distrustful of the rules of conduct with which society as presently constituted provides each of its members,” and it relativizes the separation between individual and society. It relativizes itself, too.

We are social and historical beings, and so we have a bias that cannot be overcome. But we can see that society’s inhumanity affects “everything” in it (p. 210): from the standpoint of a dialectical totality, no domain of life is innocent.

Freedom in the future

Society looks as if it cannot be changed. It resembles the natural world, because traditional theory asserts that the social world is isomorphic with nature and its laws: that is “second nature” again. Critical theory acknowledges the separation of subject and object that we live with, but holds that “their identity lies in the future, not in the present” (p. 211). When we come to recognize ourselves in the society we make, we can project a free society into the future. (Quotation 2: if we think of the object of the theory in separation from the theory, we fall into quietism or conformism; every part of the theory presupposes the critique of the existing order.)

This is the heart of the definition. Critical theory presupposes a concept of freedom that lies in the future, not in the present. Its idea of necessity is itself a critical concept: in Horkheimer’s German, er setzt den der Freiheit voraus (air ZETST dayn dair FRY-hite foh-ROWSS; /eːɐ̯ ˈzɛtst deːn deːɐ̯ ˈfʁaɪ̯haɪ̯t foˈʁaʊ̯s/), “it presupposes freedom,” even a freedom that does not yet exist. And Horkheimer distinguishes this from the idealist consolation that we are inwardly free even in chains. (Quotation 3.)

Consider how a false objectivity sustains unfreedom now. Bourgeois economics treats the economy as a set of natural laws. So does vulgar Marxist economism, with its economy driving history in a fixed direction. Both views reflect causal determinism; both assume an objective convergence on an end, a fate (inherited, perhaps, from Hegel). Critical theory refuses both. Against Marxist dogma it is heterodox, and the danger it guards against had a name in 1937: Stalin, and a Marxism that had stopped thinking. (Lukács (LOO-kahch; /ˈlukaːtʃ/), as we saw, would mock the result as the “Grand Hotel Abyss.”)

Bourgeois ideology as falsehood and truth

What does it mean to call bourgeois ideology both false and true? Bourgeois ideology has itself produced critical ideas. The French Revolution proclaimed freedom; the bourgeois order promised it, and betrayed the promise, and still the promise is real. Here Horkheimer writes a careful “on the one hand … on the other hand” (quotation 4). On the one hand, critical theory always regarded juridical relations, the law and its rights, as the surface rather than the substance of society: property and profit still rule, and the disposition of people and things stays in the hands of a particular group. On the other hand, the loss of all rights with a definite content, brought about by the concentration of economic power and completed in the authoritarian state, means the disappearance not only of an ideology but of a cultural factor with a positive value, and not simply a negative one. Fascism consumes bourgeois ideology and revokes the promise of freedom that the bourgeoisie at once permitted and betrayed. Some aspects of bourgeois society are necessary.

Not even the proletariat

Horkheimer’s theory is Marxian, but not dogmatic about the working class: “even the situation of the proletariat is, in this society, no guarantee of correct knowledge” (p. 213). In conditions of emerging barbarism, critical theory is epistemically isolated. When everything pushes humanity toward the surrender of culture, the circle of solidarity is narrow; there is no social class whose acceptance of the theory could guide it, and the consciousness of every class can be limited and corrupted by ideology. (Quotation 5.)

What does critical theory have on its side, then? Only its concern for the abolition of social injustice. This negative formulation, put abstractly, is “the materialist content of the idealist concept of reason,” and the theory’s own nature turns it toward changing history and establishing a just condition among human beings, eines gerechten Zustands unter den Menschen (EYE-ness geh-REKH-ten TSOO-shtahnts OON-ter dayn MEN-shen; /ˈaɪ̯nəs ɡəˈʁɛçtn̩ ˈtsuːʃtants ˈʊntɐ deːn ˈmɛnʃn̩/). (Quotation 6.) German Idealism held that reason can think the universal, the good. Horkheimer wants thought and reality joined. If Hegel (HAY-gel; /ˈheːɡl̩/) is Plato here, Horkheimer is something like his Aristotle, pulling the Idea down into the world.

Critical theory in the formative years, 1930–1940

Over the next decade the program fills out. Its themes are psychoanalysis, sociology, the family, authoritarianism; and aesthetics. In the coming weeks: Fromm on psychoanalysis and Horkheimer on authority and the family (next week); then Benjamin (BEN-yah-meen; /ˈbɛnjamiːn/) and Adorno on modern art; and, by 1940, a turn toward a general philosophy of history in Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer. (Fromm’s later The Art of Loving is another, gentler meeting of psychoanalysis and critical theory; and Adorno, we will see, studied composition with Alban Berg.)

Handout outline (Professor Gordon)

I. Recapitulation: the refounding of the Institute, 1930–31

• A. Horkheimer and the idea of a social philosophy
  • the predicament of Marxism in an ideological age
  • difficulties of public expression: an Aesopian language?
  • the Institute’s journal: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung [Journal for Social Research] (1932–1941) and in the US as Studies in Philosophy and Social Science
• B. Horkheimer and the idea of a social philosophy
  • mediating materialism and idealism, life and spirit: a dialectical totality [quote 1]
  • towards a definition: “critical theory” in the 1930s

II. Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937)

• A. Traditional theory
  • dualism of thought and being (as articulated by Descartes)
  • the objective world as conceived by science consists in unchanging causal laws
  • social sciences modeled after natural sciences, as in positivism and sociology
  • a division of labor: each scientific inquiry pursues its own task independently of the whole
  • scientific inquiry is in fact “only one, nonindependent element” in human historical action
  • “limited intellectual processes are detached from their matrix in the total activity of society”
  • the idea of scientifically separate domains and value-neutrality reflects “alienation”
  • traditional theory still has a “positive social function”
• B. Critical theory
  • we can also conceive of a human activity that “has society itself for its object” (206)
  • this “critical attitude” is “wholly distrustful of the rules of conduct with which society as presently constituted provides each of its members” and it relativizes the “separation between individual and society”
  • critical theory sees “inhumanity” as affecting “everything” that occurs in society (210)
  • it acknowledges separation between subject and object, “their identity lies in the future, not in the present” (211) [quote 2]
  • critical theory presupposes a concept of freedom that lies in the future, not present [quote 3]
  • bourgeois ideology as both falsehood and truth [quote 4]
  • Marxian but not dogmatic in affirming working class: “even the situation of the proletariat is, in this society, no guarantee of correct knowledge” (213)
  • the epistemic isolation of critical theory in conditions of emergent barbarism [quote 5]
  • “the materialist content of the idealist concept of reason” [quote 6]

III. Critical theory in the formative years: 1930–1940

• A. Thematic elaborations
  • psychoanalysis, sociology, family, authoritarianism
  • aesthetics
• B. Coming weeks
  • Fromm on psychoanalysis; Horkheimer on authority and the family [next week]
  • Benjamin and Adorno on modern art
  • a turn toward a general philosophy of history (Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer) by 1940

On the back: (1) Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy…” (1931); (2)–(6) Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937).