Collection: Horkheimer's Fragments d’Essais Matérialistes (ca. 1935/36-1938)
Translations of unpublished textual variants on the materialistic self-conception of early critical theory
Part of the series on Horkheimer’s 1930s Essais Matérialistes.
Fragments d’Essais Matérialistes (ca. 1935/36-1938)
Translator’s Remarks.
Remark 1: On Locating the “Notizen” in the Development of Early Critical Theory.
The following “Notizen” were published in the twelfth volume of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften (1985) under the title “Notizen 1935.” In the “Editorische Vorbemerkung,” Gunzelin Schmid Noerr writes:
The notes consolidated here are part of a collection Friedrich Pollock compiled under the title “New York Notizen (1945)” along with a table of contents—perhaps in 1969, as with the “Aufzeichnungen und Entwürfe zur ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung’” collection. The publication for which they were intended never came to fruition. This collection includes an excerpt entitled “Zum Gottesbegriff,” given this title by Pollock, which had already appeared in the ZfS in 1935 under the title “Nachbemerkung.” Another excerpt included in this collection titled “Vertragstheorie” also appeared in the ZfS in 1935, as a part of the essay “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology.” In addition, the excerpt titled “Der Schrecken in der französischen Revolution” was partially included in the [ZfS] essay “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [of 1936]. Such circumstances raise doubts concerning the reliability of Pollock’s dating in other cases as well. The type of typewriter and paper used for the manuscript “Zum Gottesbegriff” are similar to those of a number of other undated notes and only differ significantly from the three notes in the NY 1945 collection explicitly dated ‘1945.’ Last but not least, however, the largely unbroken trust in the possibility and meaning of proletarian revolution expressed in the sketches presented here certainly excludes Pollock’s dating of the collection as a whole. The notes compiled by Pollock were therefore split into two groups—“Notizen 1935” and “NY Notizen 1945”—for this edition. While the excerpts “Zum Gottesbegriff” and “Vertragstheorie” were removed from this collection, the excerpt entitled “Der Schrecken in der französischen Revolution” was retained, as only a part of this text was used, in a heavily modified form, in “Egoism and Freedom Movements.” The dating of ‘1935’ has no justification by any other indications than those given above and, therefore, is subject to a certain degree of uncertainty. With regard to its thematic, “Notizen 1935” has numerous connections to that of Dämmerung [(1934)]. The diagnosis which was provided in the latter of the decline [Untergang] of the old, liberal world and of the bourgeoisie is intensified in these notes by the experience of the victorious establishment of fascism and the order and everydayness of its terror. In view of the seemingly unresolved alternative between fascist barbarism and proletarian revolution, Horkheimer outlines his own position in the excerpt entitled “Bürgerliche Welt” in formulations which are far more open and far less guarded than corresponding passages in the articles published in the ZfS.1
Here, Noerr makes two arguments. First, he argues that the editorial decision Pollock made to date this collection “New York Notizen 1945” in the Horkheimer archive at some point in the late 60’s (ostensibly in preparation for a publication that never came to fruition) cannot be justified, since several of the “Notizen” were, either in part or in full, seemingly excerpted from essays Horkheimer had published in the ZfS in 1935/36. (In this collection, partial overlaps include: “‘The Terror’ in the French Revolution,” a variation on text from Horkheimer’s “Egoism” essay of 1936; “The Human Being Changes in History,” partly coincides with text from Horkheimer’s “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” of 1935.) Second, he argues that distinctive similarities in both physical materials (paper, ink, typesetting, etc) and theoretical concerns between those excerpts known to be from 1935/36 and the nine notes below provides minimal warrant for dating this collection in 1935. In the rest of this remark, I will argue that this dating is, in large part, justified—but not for the reasons Noerr offers.
Though conceding that “the dating of ‘1935’ has no justification by any other indications than those given above and, therefore, is subject to a certain degree of uncertainty,” Noerr nevertheless claims the dating of ‘1945’ must be false even for the notes which cannot be linked to essays in the ZfS—and in particular, the short essay Pollock gave the title “Bourgeois World” [Bürgerliche Welt]2—on the grounds that “the largely unbroken trust in the possibility and meaning of proletarian revolution expressed in the sketches presented here certainly excludes Pollock’s dating of the collection as a whole.” In this, Noerr is consistent with the traditional interpretation of the trajectory of early critical theory, according to which the work of the early critical theorists throughout the 1930s and 1940s is the arc of a long “farewell” to Marxism. This interpretation is, despite and because of its hegemony, less justified by archival research and close theoretical reconstruction than academic conventions which have (for reasons of political and intellectual context) overdetermined the transmission and reception of early critical theory in West Germany since the 1960s. Noerr himself acknowledges this in a later essay, the introduction, co-authored with Eva-Maria Ziege, to a recent collection of essays on the Dialectic of Enlightenment, titled Zur Kritik der regressiven Vernunft (2019):
[The] ongoing controversy about the extent to which Dialectic of Enlightenment represents a break with the essays in the Journal for Social Research is much more than just a matter of antiquarian interest. It is connected to the question of whether, and to what extent if so, critical theory distanced itself from Marx and turned towards a negativistic philosophy of history in the 1940s. This is what Jürgen Habermas, the most prominent successor of the ‘school’, argued (...) about Horkheimer's work in particular. (...) Adorno himself confirmed that the paradigmatic core of critical theory from the Dialectic of Enlightenment to The Authoritarian Personality was precisely that of Marx’s work, in continuity with the studies of the Journal for Social Research. Alfred Schmidt, a prominent student of Horkheimer, also interpreted it in this sense. The theoretical explication of critical theory as a ‘school’ began with controversial interpretations such as those of Habermas or Schmidt.3
The process of interpretation and the struggle between interpretations was, as can be seen in many instances, inseparable from the political struggles of the Cold War. In the secondary literature that emerged, various hypotheses were offered and tested to determine the exact timing of Horkheimer’s or Adorno’s departure from the Marxian ‘school core’. While major essays from the Journal for Social Research were still considered Marxist, for some, the first break was renaming the journal in 1939 while others dated this break with the publication of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and others did so with that of The Authoritarian Personality. Whether—and, if so, to what extent—Marxian core elements were still detectable in the reconstituted IfS after 1950 was also a matter of controversy.4
The conflict between this traditional interpretation and the Marxian self-conception of early critical theory throughout the late 1940s is increasingly evident—particularly in light of the current state of archival research made possible by the posthumous publications, which is in large part a consequence of Noerr’s own groundbreaking editorial work with the Horkheimer Nachlass. Already in his ‘Editor’s Afterword,’ written for the MHGS, Bd. 5 (1987), to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Noerr is forced by his qualified endorsement of the traditional interpretation (of the “farewell to Marxism”) into the awkward position of having to explain away the fact that, in 1947, “at the time of the [Dialectic’s] first publication, the authors continued to regard themselves as Marxists.”5 This task is made significantly more difficult by Noerr’s own editorial efforts in the publication of MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985) just two years prior, as the latter volume contains a transcript of Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1946 discussions on the proposed sequel to the Dialectic (the ‘Rescue’, or Rettung, for short), from which Noerr directly quotes:
[Horkheimer:] We see this moment of unity (in the analysis of politics and philosophy) in holding fast to the radical impulses of Marxism and, in fact, of the entire Enlightenment—for the rescue of the Enlightenment is our concern—but without identifying ourselves with any empirically existing group. Our position is, in a sense, a materialism which dispenses with the prejudice of regarding any moment of existing material reality as directly positive. The paradox, the dialectical secret of a true politics, consists in choosing a critical standpoint which does not hypostatize itself as the positive standpoint.6
Rather than enumerate the remaining ‘professions’ of not only Marxism but a commitment to revolutionary socialism in the ISR core’s correspondence and posthumous texts (some of the most radical, authored as late as 1946—seemingly, as sketches for the Rettung—are still unpublished, even in the Gesammelte Schriften), I will conclude this remark by posing one problem for the reception of early critical theory: If Adorno and Horkheimer were mistaken in their self-conception as Marxists through the late 1940s, notwithstanding their alleged ‘farewell’ to Marxism, how do we account for their mistake? Even if they were fundamentally mistaken about their own theoretical standpoint, how was it possible for them to be that mistaken? (This includes the corollary problem, which can only be resolved, if at all, by further archival research, of how it was possible for Pollock to mis-label these fragments by assigning them the date of ‘1945,’ which is after the Fragmente, the first variant of the Dialectic, had already been published.) This question—if it is asked at all—has not been answered in the secondary literature. It is also the only means by which the traditional interpretation of the long ‘farewell’ to Marxism through the 1930s-40s can be maintained.
My hope, which I share with the other editors of the CTWG, is that by translating, sharing, analyzing, and discussing texts from the archives of early critical theory—as, for example, in J.E. Morain’s systematic reconstruction of the Marxian conceptual core of the ISR’s Studien über Autorität und Familie (1936) based on original research at the Erich Fromm archive7—these materials, though they do not ‘speak for themselves’ in the manner of self-evident demonstrations (and are in fact consciously, and often unhelpfully, written to resist this kind of automatic academic reference), will, at the very least, show the traditional interpretation of the long ‘farewell’ to Marxism is untenable in its present form. More than that, however, we hope through our collective work (as in Margin Notes: Volume I. Kernels of Early Critical Theory) to be part of a different kind of reception, one which does justice to the cause of the early critical theorists and holds them accountable to it. As Horkheimer says in “Bourgeois World” below: “their ideals will either, and only, be realized through proletarian revolution, and within a socialist order, or will never be realized at all.”8
Remark 2: Fragments d’Essais Matérialistes.
Though three of the fragments collected below (§§7-9) are textual variants of passages found in Horkheimer’s “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” [1935],9 one (§5) was almost certainly not written until Horkheimer began his intensive work on “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936] in the summer of 1936. Furthermore, several fragments have significant overlap not only with Horkheimer’s lectures on “Authority and Society” [1936],10 but with arguments Horkheimer will develop throughout 1938—for example, §9. “The Bad Elements of Liberalism,” which partially coincides with the text of “Remarks” [1935] but develops Horkheimer’s critique of the latent fascist reaction fostered by liberalism that features prominently in “Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism” [1938] and “The Jews and Europe” [1938/39].
The fragment (§10) titled “Zum Gottesbegriff” by Pollock was originally published in Vol. 4 of the ZfS under the nondescript title “Nachbemerkung.”11 It was later collected in the two-volume republication of select essays from the ZfS under the direction of Horkheimer himself, Kritische Theorie (1968) with the title “Gedanke über Religion.”12 It has been translated into English under the title “Thoughts on Religion” by Matthew J. O’Connell for the Critical Theory (2002) collection of Horkheimer’s early essays,13 itself a partial selection from Kritische Theorie (1968). The essays which appeared in the highly politicized Kritische Theorie (1968) collection were heavily revised under the editorial auspices of Alfred Schmidt given demands made by Horkheimer to the publisher (S. Fischer Verlag).14 Horkheimer openly acknowledges the motives for the revisions in his April 1968 “Preface” to the collection, also translated for the English collection Critical Theory (2002), but does not acknowledge the revisions themselves.15 Several are significant enough to have undoubtedly contributed to the prevalence of the “farewell to Marxism” interpretation criticized above.16 To date, no extensive analysis has been made of the differences between the texts published in the ZfS and those collected in Kritische Theorie (1968) and subsequently translated into English for Critical Theory (2002).
While the fragment “Gedanke über Religion” (1968) is, to the knowledge of the author, uniquely faithful to its source text, the “Nachbemerkung” of the ZfS (1935), the decision by Noerr and the other editors of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften to exclude the fragment titled “Zum Gottesbegriff” from the archival collection “New Yorker Notizen [II],” compiled by Pollock in the late 1960s,17 is, unfortunately, less than surprising. Like the other fragments collected in these “Notizen,” “Zum Gottesbegriff” is a variant of a published text: the “Nachbemerkung” (“Gedanke über Religion”/“Thoughts on Religion”). “Zum Gottesbegriff” likely remained unpublished because of its outspoken criticism of fascism (rather than the more innocuous ”totalitarianism” of the published “Nachbemerkung”), as well as the “clueless liberals” and the religious pacifists of the so-called ‘resistance’ within fascist countries, not to mention Horkheimer’s profession that the true legacy of the radical impulse contained within the religious discipleship of the past is now found in the militant atheism of the revolutionary and the attitude of anti-fascist martyr who refuses to suffer, or let others suffer, the evils of the world. This revolutionary atheology and anti-fascist matryrology of the materialist is echoed throughout Horkheimer’s works of the late 1930s, particularly his polemical review of Theodor Haecker’s Der Christ und die Geschichte, published in the ZfS in 1936.18 I have also translated Erich Trier’s review of a number of books for ZfS Vol. 4 (1935), including two by Karl Barth, which provides essential context for Horkheimer’s anti-fascist political-theological interventions in the “Nachbemerkung,” as it follows Trier’s review directly. That Tier’s review of so many books which commend the faithful to collaboration or at least careful dialogue with the Nazi regime is so terse and unamused is an appropriate complement to Horkheimer’s scathing fury in the few pages that follow—but is especially evident in “Zum Gottesbegriff.”
The parallels between these fragments and Horkheimer’s essays between 1935 and the end of the ZfS in 193919 are too many to list, but I want to conclude by proposing they be read as Fragments d’Essais Matérialistes, since, in Adorno’s elegant and concise formulation, Horkheimer’s programmatic essays of this period turned on the axis of a single idea: “(the communication [Kommunikation] of enlightenment and Marxism).”20 What Horkheimer describes in the fragment §8. “On the Materialist Theory of History” as the composure of the historical materialist who struggles for universal happiness before the void, he describes in the published textual variant from “Remarks” [1935] as the conviction of the student of the classical and French Enlightenment. This orientation, as he presents it in the latter text, results in a unique “concept of self-consciousness,” what he describes elsewhere as the “illusionless composure of the true fighter” which “arises from the consciousness of overcoming the existing unjust divisions and catastrophic contradictions in favor of a, still to be worked out, happier state of humanity.”21 Concluding the “Egoism” [1936] essay, he writes:
Insofar as humanity (…) enters a higher form of existence, it will change reality and thereby quickly acquire the freer psychic constitution of which the great number of fighters and martyrs for that general transformation is already possessed without psychological mediation, because the dark ethos of a dying epoch, an ethos that would deny them all happiness, no longer has any power over them.22
Accordingly, as he writes both in “Remarks” [1935] and “The Rationalism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy” [1934], the materialist critic has a responsibility before and among the fighters and matryrs who fall in the struggle against fascism and for the realization of classless society—
By unmasking the metaphysical idols which have long constituted a centerpiece of its theory, materialism directed the human capacity for love away from the products of fantasy, away from the mere symbols and reflections, and toward real living beings. For many of them, a greater composure may emerge not only from their solidarity with one another but from a clarity of consciousness. The simple establishment of commonality in suffering and the description of oppressive relations, which tend to be hidden from the light of consciousness by the ideological apparatus, can be liberating. Neither is it simply thought as such that can acquire such significance, but rather the structure in which the various ideas stand to each other and toward reality. However differentiated and meticulous, thought in itself means little to materialism. What matters is that a few insights stand at the center of knowledge, capable of illuminating the reality of a particular historical moment.23
Thus, next to its historical role as a weapon in social struggles, materialist thought may exert a liberating and affirming effect on the individual and thereby constitute a psychic aid. If it does so, this is not only because it values highly the possession of knowledge irrespective of all practical tasks and aims, but because some psychic fetters under which human beings suffer today burst when the right word is sounded, and because this word can to a great extent dissolve the tremendous isolation of human beings from one another peculiar to the current period. This force is characteristic of truth, though truth not only rejects all ideological consolation but is indeed intent upon destroying it.24
Throughout the following fragments, Horkheimer develops this “communication of enlightenment and Marxism”—the illumination of misery for the sake of solidarity. In the words of Voltaire: “je veux ramener les hommes à l’amour de l’humanité par l’horreur de la barbarie.”25
Table of Contents.
§1. Chivalry.26
§2. Bourgeois World.27
§3. Narrowness of the Heart.28
§4. Inevitability?29
§5. ‘The Terror’ in the French Revolution.30
Published Textual Variant 1—Excerpt from “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era” (1936).31
§6. Authority and Reason.32
§7. The Human Being Changes in History.33
Published Textual Variant 2—Excerpt from “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” (1935).34
§8. On the Materialist Theory of History.35
Published Textual Variant 3—Excerpt from “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” (1935).36
§9. The Bad Elements of Liberalism.37
Published Textual Variant 4—Excerpt from “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” (1935).38
§10. On the Concept of God (Fragment).39
Published Textual Variant 5—”Postscript” [“Thoughts on Religion”]
Erich Trier, [Review / “Reichsidee und Gottesreich” & etc.] (1935)40
Horkheimer, “Postscript” [“Thoughts on Religion”]41
Appendix 1: ‘The right attitude towards society.’
§1. Chivalry.
In that period in which bourgeois institutions were still intact, human beings developed corresponding character traits which, now that such institutions are no longer intact, reveal the contradictions [Widersprüche] inherent to them, just as society at large now does. In bourgeois marriage, the man was the breadwinner, the one with the responsibility. What appeared in the common ideology as the belief that the hard-working get ahead, and that the true measure of this was one’s material success, respect, and honor in the world, was reflected in the consciousness of the woman as trust in her husband. The drive to justify this was among the strongest psychic motors for being socially well-adjusted: the industry, the tenacity, the ambition with which these men set to work. The pride of the bourgeois woman who took part in the ascent of such a man still appeared legitimate to her. Her residence, her clothes, her well-bred children confirmed her husband’s value; from the admiration she was paid by society, she was able to gauge the [measure of] respect he had earned a right to. The success of her spouse in social competition retrospectively consecrated the erotic decision by which he took her into his hands. The effect of a good economy was not only expressed in the price of shares for industrialists and bankers, but also in the value of their ladies.
These fortunate misrecognized the irrational ground for their ascent and naively availed themselves of the pleasant position which the woman of the upper spheres finds furnished for her by the same society that reserves only hard work, humiliation, dirt, and meanness for the women below. At today’s stage of the competitive struggle, however, the negative and guilty character of this naivete comes to the fore, and stamps its bearer as an intellectually backward and hollow individual. Wherever the law of the falling rate of profit has already transformed the so-called peaceful competition within countries into a latent state of war; [wherever] the means of power of states are at the disposal of the strongest economic forces for the barely concealed robbery of the weaker members of their own class, under those social principles under which no individual, however high and refined, is safe from disgrace and shame, from violence in all its basest forms; wherever the masses are methodically stupefied and dehumanized, intentionally thrown back into earlier stages of social development; wherever sadism is made one of a piece with the art of government; wherever hatred of all that is light, intellectual, free [is made one of a piece with] the program of education, and brutality with virtue—there, chivalry towards women, which was already limited to the circle of those more privileged, loses the slightest glimmer of truthfulness. As the wife of the patrician or parvenus was able to avert her eyes from the miserable conditions of existence under which the self-consciousness, beauty, and happiness of her proletarian sister were deteriorating, such that her gaze only fell on rivals within her own social circle, so too she herself experiences under fascism the rule that women, through no fault of their own or even of their husband’s, and, in fact, because of those very qualities she had been accustomed to respect, are transformed from human beings into bundles of shame and despair. In class society, consideration and tenderness towards women have always contained, in addition to their [function as] positive, civilizing factors, an element of mendacity; but today, in this period of decline, the woman who is unable to recognize this element within them and who accepts this conventional tribute without the slightest reluctance, appears at best a vain fool. In countries where fascism is only just in its preliminary stages, there are yet Jewish entrepreneurs and scholars who are willing to pay the cost to introduce their wives into the more exclusive circles of society, wherein their wives are not yet overcome with horror.
Society is a totality. Within a ruling class which, in the midst of the highest stage of development of the civilizing forces humanity has ever achieved, can discover no abomination it does not use with joy, there are no longer any spiritual instincts unaffected by this state of affairs. Within a world in which hells are constructed where they are visible to everyone, in which human beings may be humiliated and tortured without any end in sight; in which the girls who stood by their lovers despite the paranoid decrees against the Jews are ex officio dragged through the streets of the city and driven mad with shame and disgrace—in this world, the polite bow, the conventional respect for the other sex, is warped into a grimace. In opposition to this, the respect for women is sublated [aufgehoben] in that attitude which negates [verneint] chivalry in general as a sign of unjust and vanishing forms of society and takes it up into conscious human solidarity without distinction for sex.42 In the qualitative change of the feeling towards women, the contradictions [Widersprüche] which were hidden away in it disappear. When society exists under the principles which have their purpose in happiness instead of the greatest possible exploitation of human beings, the joy of a woman in the force of her beauty and gifts will no longer be an illusion which can become her shame at any moment, but rather a natural reaction become a rational one. But among the greater and lesser lords of the world, where life itself is not respected, the respect feigned for women cannot replace the real respect they lack for humanity. If women were able to see through to the ground at the bottom of the polite gesture, the only response it would leave them is horror.
§2. Bourgeois World.
In proletarian usage, the concept ‘bourgeois’ means: belonging to the ruling class. Just as other expressions of this provenance were adopted by the fascists for propagandistic purposes, today this word too is put to the service of confusing and misleading. The ‘bourgeois’ against which the counter-revolution of today struggles denotes those paltry tendencies of liberal ideology which ran counter to the complete terrorization of the working class, and above all the proletariat, the exploited class itself. In fascist usage, the meaning of the concept has not been productively transformed, but intentionally perverted: [in such usage] freedom means the sacrifice of the poor for the rich, the awakening of the nation means the beginning of the final disenfranchisement of the masses and a glorious life for the Führer-clique.
The terminology does coincide for short stretches. For example, there is a kind of theory which belongs to the ‘bourgeoisie’ in the fascist sense as much as in the proletarian one. Not the bourgeoisie who spoke in favor of exploitation, nor the bourgeoisie who sympathized with that hypocritical liberalism which, by its very essence, leads to fascism—what is at issue is rather the posing of a question which lies in and springs from the ground of the bourgeois form of existence [Existenzform]. Throughout history, only members or descendants of the ruling class have been able to lead the life to which the problems of this theory correspond. In the name of those values betrayed by the bourgeoisie itself, this kind of thinking unites with proletarian forces and rises up against the very social order it created. But this theory is not itself proletarian. The strength of its bearers does not arise whatsoever from the wish to better their own class standing. Grief over the ruling injustice, disgust and hatred for the supporters of this economic system degenerating into blood and horror, compassion for that life which is everywhere suffocated, desperate longing for a social atmosphere in which productive labor would be possible, the wish for the happiness for free human beings—all this drives some of the descendants of the bourgeois to the side of the struggling proletariat, without thereby becoming proletarians themselves.
Even if in the vanguard of the revolution, particularly during the period of the struggle for power, a type of worker may rise in significance who has been schooled in the same sources as those sympathetic bourgeois, and even feel similarly as they do, it is nevertheless a fact that the proletarian revolution will ultimately be made by the workers themselves. Their labor on the factory floor, the radically public character of their whole existence, their unbroken collectivism—these are the workers’ own forms of life [Lebensformen], which they must, at least at first, transfer over onto society as a whole, even if a new or another sort of differentiatedness may develop in a later phase. The more difficulties the working class confronts after its victory, the greater the poverty, the more the worker will have to impose those hated conditions under which the proletariat itself suffered in capitalism on the world: the abolition [Aufhebung] of the free and happy existence of the individual, the struggle against any who try to slip through the meshes of its great net, indifference to the individual, labor as the highest law.
The reversal of this morality into its opposite, which can only happen in general for a later generation, has already been accomplished in the souls of the enlightened bourgeois, and those few proletarian fighters who are like them in this respect, in direct connection with the great enlightened tradition of France and Germany. It lies in the way these bourgeois love, enjoy a painting, and listen to music; in the way they contemplate death, in the way they realize on the whole, even as they think by means of an unswerving Marxist dialectic, that a happy and sheltered youth still has a real impact—and it is precisely why they are now so alone. They have turned away from their own class. The individual once proclaimed free by the French Revolution, and whose development was once so important, has become the mere element of a mass in the capitalist order, directed by authorities with cruelty and contempt; this individual is helplessly at the mercy of blind chance. By the very measures the bourgeoisie developed during its ascendancy, the passive role of the individual as a mere object of governance and his pitiful psychological constitution must appear unworthy of human beings. For in modern times, the consciousness has spread that the fortune of each individual should not be decided by a blind chain of circumstance but by participation in social labor on the basis of equal conditions for all. In the eighteenth century, the realization of these ideas was still considered the work of the future. Ever since capitalist property relations solidified, and even more so since they have turned from a historically progressive power into a straightjacket for all the good and living forces of humanity, the capitalists and their lackeys have draped the vain thought that this demand for justice has been fundamentally fulfilled in the society of the present as an ideological cloak over their bankrupt economic system. However, this cloak, woven from the fraud of ‘human rights,’ has become so transparent that capitalism finds it too threadbare and everywhere exchanges it for the fascist uniform.43
Thus, these enlightened bourgeois have nothing whatsoever to do with the few remaining whole- and half-liberal ideologues who are devoted to the principles of democracy to the same extent that Jewish blood flows in their veins. As heirs of the enlightenment, they are obliged to be clever. They know the mendacity of those Jewish professors and corrupt trade union bosses who, for the sake of a respectable and lucrative position, do not speak the truth even if they think it, and, therefore, do not think it because they do not speak it. That intellectual apparatus in which not only problems and methods, but whole branches of research are invented and kept in operation solely in order to keep developing the image of lively, scientific activity, in spite of its flight from the reality of class struggle and in spite of its sensitive consideration for the bloody rulers of the world—arouses their disgust. The late bourgeois [die späten Bürger] know that their ideals will either, and only, be realized through proletarian revolution, and within a socialist order, or will never be realized at all.44 If there can be any theoretical knowledge in the field of human, and social, life; if anything whatsoever has been manifestly proven by history—then it is this insight. Every dramatic reform for the benefit of the poor, every law passed for their aid aiming for justice, must, in the present phase of this social order, turn into its antithesis [Gegenteil] and, ultimately, serve injustice. The expenditure on illness, old age, and unemployment for the masses only hopelessly burdens the state budget and, in countries where it does not already exist, is the motor of fascism; the laws for the protection of freedom have always, in the end, been turned against those who defended them.45 Therefore, those who carry the bourgeois ideals not so much in their words but in their hearts find as little community with those miserable liberal and democratic reformers as they do with fascists themselves, and, conversely, both of these groups know very well that their enemy is simply uncompromising knowledge, and the attitude which corresponds to it.
But even if only mutual hatred remains between the official and unofficial bourgeois world, on one side, and the last remnants of its own tradition, on the other, the late bourgeois cannot imagine they have a home among the proletariat either. Where the path of the late bourgeois leads is undetermined, and their concerns and problems are only in part the concerns of others, and their concerns are structured differently from those which concern the proletariat directly. The philosophical, aesthetic, and erotic questions of the sympathetic bourgeois are connected with a concept of the individual [Begriff des Individuums] which seldom develops in today’s conditions and is not necessarily contained in the collective ethos of mass struggle. In one’s hatred of this capitalist world, it makes a difference whether one knows its fruits from enjoying them or only from watching others do so: anger, scorn, and outspoken contempt for the pleasures of a refined civilization are one thing, the grief of those who have enjoyed these pleasures but see others excluded from them are another. These last bourgeois are capable of enjoyment; their materialism is totally sincere, they do not revile the good life. They understand something of the fire of good wine and the charm of a well-groomed woman, they love the Italian countryside and the coasts of France, and they have the security and bird’s-eye-view of things which only long membership to their class can provide, even if they have meanwhile become poor. The lords of large capitals devalue pleasure because they are the barbarians, shackled to their business ventures and their ideology; the poor despise pleasure in order to better come to terms with their powerlessness. But these late bourgeois are revolutionary precisely because they know what happiness means, and that, without favorable conditions, human talents suffocate and degenerate.
For some philistine politicians, who themselves stem from the bourgeois camp, intellectuals should have the task of giving expression to the consciousness and feelings of the masses. This task is not to the taste of those we’ve spoken of here. For it is precisely because the majority of human beings live under miserable conditions in capitalism that the knowledge which gives rise to the drive towards revolution can only develop among exceptionally advanced groups, but not among the masses. These late bourgeois, however, do not remotely constitute such a group today, nor do they exercise historical influence, but are scattered, and their real relationship to the proletariat is highly mediated. Perhaps, however, in a much later time, some of their ideas—and the memory of their specific, materialistic attitude—will turn out not to be entirely without value to a freer humanity. In this time of transition, historical conditions still exist for the continuation of an existence centered on the values of the bourgeoisie, on driving the development of problems in bourgeois art, literature, and philosophy somewhat further, even where their connection with the question of the revolution is wholly unclear; what grows out of these efforts need not be lost. But for these individuals, neither their work towards nor their commitment to the revolution is necessarily affected by all of this. They are not idealist philosophers who imagine that a distinction of being [Unterschied des Seins] must correspond to a distinction in action [Unterschied des Handelns], or who always want to bring what they do into harmony with their so-called essence or vocation. Certainly, the majority of proletarians have a different attitude towards life than they do, but there is as yet no uniform answer that can be given to whether the proletarians are materially better or worse off than these outsiders of the bourgeoisie. But undoubtedly, alongside all the suffering which gives rise to the resolution and hope of the proletarian fighter, for these individualists there is also the grief over irreparable events in detail and the wholly unheroic despair over the horrors of every minute in this terrible world.
§3. Narrowness of the Heart.
There is not only a narrowness of consciousness [Enge des Bewußtseins] in the sense of pop psychology, but also narrowness of the heart [Enge des Herzens], which is spoken of by the poets. This means the restriction of the drives, above all the ability to love, of every human being to a much smaller portion of their own world.46 But there is also a positive side to this. The agony caused by a perpetual fear, however insignificant it originally appears to be, may by its sheer duration make it more terrible than the effect of a greater, but fleeting, danger. Many a flight into madness or death, unintelligible to the observer, can be explained solely by the effect of its perpetuity. The boundaries of our capacity to feel thereby acquire a biological meaning. Due to [such boundaries], new psychic movements may arise to the effect that an old fear changes in character or disappears completely.
This use of boundaries may appear a procedure of nature for the adaptation of human beings to life with the dangerous gift of their sensitivity. Yet, not infrequently, this trick results in failure. The propulsive drive to flee from a real, agonizing fear into a new misery is so strong that it may even lead to physical annihilation. As with fever, this mechanism is an immune response of the body from which one might die. Its effect, of course, is somewhat unequal across the various [class] strata of society. It is true that a new danger, a new fear, can easily replace an older state of affairs, simply because the unpleasurable affects tend to be stronger and more persistent than happy ones. But the living situation of a poor man is usually of the kind that any attempt to escape, indeed, any carelessness at all, leads right into ruin. A low-level employee who is afraid of losing his position because he is too slow, too old, or is simply surplus, need only risk a single word against his boss, or the whole system, to ensure his own fall into oblivion. But when neither an attack on his subordinates nor the intensification of any other activity helps lift the general director out of his depressive mood, when all of his joys fall through and he really must resort to suffering, a night of love-making may under certain circumstances be sufficient to give him the option of a variety of different fears for at least a few weeks. Mostly, however, he will not put his own peace of mind into question, but stake the security of his workers, and make some daring decision in which their lives are wagered, while he himself merely strains his iron nerves, like the generals of the last World War under the barrage of fire raining down on their troops.47 In human society, the teleological mechanisms of nature have an extremely variable and varied effect. That the real fears of the poor man, from a purely psychological point of view, offer a better prognosis than the many neuroses which are the prerogative of the ruling class, those little malices of the gods whose envy must, at any rate, fall mute before the power of the greater capital.
§4. Inevitability?
Many of the generation born around 1900 will remember their astonishment when they first encountered concepts such as “mobilization,” “declaration of war,” “neutrality,” “armistice,” “peace treaty”—in short, the customs of modern warfare. Although the threat of war had previously only been discussed rather vaguely at lunch or before bed, suddenly everyone seemed familiar with the subject down to the last detail, and young boys and girls quickly began to imitate the adults in demonstrations of such knowledge. It was as if they had absorbed the categories of international law through their mother’s milk; in all countries, they passed certain judgment on breach of contract and perfidy on the part of the enemy. That the rules, which always and everywhere were supposed to benefit their own country, were to be interpreted in this way and no other, that the whole mechanism of war was to operate in this way and no other—all of this was, at first, noted with astonishment, and then accepted as a fact of nature [Naturtatsachen], just as day becomes night and trees bloom in spring but not in autumn. Things might have been different, but this was just the way the world had been set up. Shooting the wounded or torturing prisoners was forbidden. On the other hand, healing the wounded to send them back into the fray, and even the abuse of one’s own troops, was both necessary and permitted. That’s how it used to be, and that’s the way it was kept. For a soldier to die slowly from a shot to the abdomen or poison gas, under all the tortures of hell, for one, two, three, five, ten hours in a row, and for this to happen again and again for seven days and nights in a row—this was all in order. After all, war is fought with soldiers, and they ought to expect death. That is how it’s always been. But if a drunken sergeant accidentally shot the body of an elderly gentleman—in the midst of war, at the very moment a hundred soldiers happened to croak—then, it seemed, humanity should rise up against it.
This generation, a generation which went to war so young, was not surprised by it. It recognized the facts and adjusted its feelings to reality accordingly. When a sixty or seventy-year-old is slowly pushed out of existence, there is nothing to be surprised about. That the sick must do without goes without saying. They are sick, after all. Have you ever noticed the feeling of righteous outrage in the voice of the healthy who denies the sick a forbidden pleasure, or who notices the sick getting sicker because they have not followed the rule—the rule that the healthy are to enjoy and the sick are to do without? Doesn’t the whole education of the human race consist in everyone learning to submit to what is necessary? Don’t the harshness of the strictest schoolmaster and the love of the kindest father, the wisdom of Stoic philosophy and the world-averseness of Buddhism, meet precisely on this point, in teaching human beings to accept the way of the world and conform to it—body and soul? Doesn’t the grown up distinguish themselves from the child, the rational person from the fool, to the extent which they make concessions to and tolerate the unchangeable—that is, the inevitable [das Unabänderliche] we cannot reconcile with our concepts of happiness and justice?
But in these notions, a hopeless chaos prevails. That everyone tries to bear their own suffering as calmly as possible has nothing whatsoever to do with the rational standing of the fact that they are the one suffering and miserable. This advice, to cope by oneself, comes from prudence [Klugheit], not ethics [Ethik].48 When the sick ‘go without,’ there may be something purposeful in their condition, but this by necessity presents them with a new suffering, a new punishment, just as senseless as the sickness from which it results. The indignation of the healthy in the presence of the sick most often merely expresses their desire to rule [Herrschsucht], the accumulated anger in every human being, the dissatisfaction with the circumstances which the sick have brought upon them; all too often, it gives vent to the personal hatred for the sick the healthy kept to themselves when the sick were still healthy. “At last, you find out not everything goes as you wish, … your unbridled demand for happiness has been checked. At last, you have to give up; that’s just the way the world is!” The belief that sickness was sent by the gods as a test, as punishment for unknown reasons, was surely first suggested by the healthy who were burdened by the sick. The healthy find an easy excuse for their outrage in the unreasonable interests of the sick: even when the healthy has the right to do so, this trace of a motive usually provides a welcome opportunity to vent their superiority on the sick. The mixing-up of the procedure of the Stoic, which might make the philosopher’s own existence easier, and an ethical demand on the sufferer; the mixing of cognition [Erkenntnis] and recognition [Anerkennung] of fact; the confusion which beclouds all of today’s concepts of reality, necessity, and the course of the world, is a relic of all the futile attempts of religion and metaphysics to hold that which exists as inherently meaningful, a hypocritical unclarity in thinking which, of course, belongs to the basic essence of common sense, the epitome of the ruling ideology.
That these equivocations have endured for so long and are so deep-rooted is no coincidence. They may certainly have their eternal grounds: the healthy and the young, even without wanting or realizing it, form a front against the sick and the dying, just as the civilians survive while the soldiers are shot. But the capitalist constitution of society helps quite a lot. It provides an excellent atmosphere for the proliferation of all those seemingly subtle logical errors.
Conceiving social relations as facts of nature, and thereby transfiguring them, is among the most important mechanisms, or indeed even the prototype, of ideology-formation. But if the immutable power of nature itself were merely accepted and not affirmed, if reality and value were distinguished with determinacy within general consciousness, then this mechanism could no longer function, and the interpretation of the present state of affairs as one of nature would no longer mean transfiguration. It is probably not wrong to assume that the alleged eternity of nature’s course, the view that some must always die in agony so that others may live, this image of the indelibility of misery in the non-human realm was cultivated and maintained with such zeal precisely because it is supposed to justify injustice within human society. The bridges over all of the rivers of the earth, the electric light, and the art of medicine prove the correctability of the course of nature, which is, at the very least, a changeable social category relative to the boundaries of human abilities; it encompasses all of the processes with which the human being cannot yet have a practicable, rational relation.
But even if nature is not held to be good on the whole, but only as unavoidable [unabwendbar], the same cannot be said for what happens in human society itself. The contradiction [Widerspruch] between the death of the soldier and the life of the elderly gentleman arises from the fact that the roles of both are randomly distributed in capitalism, and the purposes for which the former dies are of less concern to him than they are to the civilian. If there were no doubt that the elderly gentleman does not march onto the battlefield simply because of physical powerlessness, as was the case in the full bloom of ancient Greece, then the contradiction [Widerspruch] would already be mitigated. The demand to adapt to one’s own situation in society and to accept one’s fate becomes all the more disingenuous and outrageous when it is not even remotely disguised by an appeal to physical differences. A world which blames the poor child for taking the few pennies they were given to the pastry chef and the beggar for drinking their spare change away, that thinks it is in order for a man to be modest because he is poor, that bows to all the human-eaters [Menschenfressern] on the surface of the earth with every newspaper and parade and monument, and still demands that everyone accept their condition, and that they live as they deserve to, is, in final analysis, ripe for collapse.
§5. ‘The Terror’ in the French Revolution.
In history to date, the end of a given system of government has in no way meant the beginning of a state of affairs without authority. Unless, that is, by ‘authority’ one understands only the power of the current state. In such moments of transition, the form of authority [Autoritätsform] which has already taken hold in most places on the ground of deeper-lying social relations tends to take hold in terms of political domination as well. The terror of the French revolution is essentially the unfettered actuation of the principle of petty-bourgeois morality: the absolute severity towards powerlessness side-by-side with respect for power, the emergence of the cruelty of the economical and respectable individual; the sadism which develops inside them through their struggle against their own impulses, only to be turned outwards in the form of life-envy against those who are actually or seemingly capable of enjoyment (bourgeois ressentiment against the nobility and anti-Semitism have similar psychic functions). That one has to fit themselves into given social relations and that blind necessity knows no consideration—this is what the guillotine brings before our eyes. It symbolizes the complete indifference to personal fate and worth corresponding to the system already in application for the petty-bourgeois masses of the cities, and acquired general dominion through these [masses] themselves. Through this system, social necessity prevails blindly and respectlessly—but not without authority. The title of ‘Nation’ did not refer to a rational and classless social organization, but rather to a system of dependency which necessarily generates cruelty within human beings. This has expressed itself in similar shape not only in the mass murders after the fall of Napoleon, but in a whole series of so-called uprisings that extends into the present. The factual dependence, insofar as it is perceived as unpreventable and eternal, makes dependence evil. Throughout the French Revolution, and even more so in the midst of the terror of the counter-revolution, with the exception of very few currents, the necessity of economic subordination, poverty, and the harshness of existence was never once in question. Those struggles do, of course, have features which nevertheless indicate something beyond this stretch of time as a whole; already, they contain the hope of an epoch without oppression within them. In connection with such forward-driving tendencies, the terror loses the moral sense which otherwise accompanies it. So far as it is necessary for defense, it is no longer for the sake of satisfying the feelings of one’s own partisans, nor is it calculated to suit their mood, but is only applied for the combat and intimidation of the true opponents. In the French Revolution, these two functions were fused [and, thereby, confused]. The feeling of prospectless dependence and a wasted life, the conviction that oppression is objectively necessary and, because one cannot outrun it oneself, other must also have a taste of it as well, the course of nature as measure and model of human society—the strongest expression of which is in death—is taken as justification for the senseless ruination of happiness and abilities in society; this bourgeois belief in authority, bound as it is to defiance and sense of self, finds its satisfaction in the sight of the suffering of others. According to Mathiez, the policeman Dutard reported on the execution of the twelve condemned at the outset of the terror: “L'épouse qui a perdu son mari, le père qui a perdu son fils, le marchand qui n'a plus de commerce, l'ouvrier qui paye tout si cher que son wagere se réduit à presque rien, ne consentenent de composer peutêtre avec les maux qu'ils éprouvent qu'à la vue des hommes plus malheureux qu'eux et en qui ils croient voir leurs ennemis.”49 [“The wife who has lost her husband, the father who has lost his son, the merchant who no longer has a business, the worker who pays so much for everything that his wage is reduced almost to nothing, can be reconciled with the evils that oppress them only when they see people who are even more unhappy than they are and whom they believe to be enemies.”] This observation applies to more revolutions than the French.
Published Textual Variant 1—Excerpt from “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era” (1936)
In salient historical moments, this bourgeois nihilism is expressed in the specific form of terror. There have been certain periods in history in which terror was an instrument of the government. But various elements must be distinguished in this. Its rational goal consists in intimidating the opponent. Gruesome acts directed at the enemy are protective measures of domestic and foreign policy. But terror also serves another purpose, one which its originators are not always consciously aware of, and which is even more rarely admitted by them: the satisfaction of their own followers. Insofar as this second element plays a role even in such progressive movements as the French Revolution, it corresponds to the deep contempt, the hatred of happiness itself, that is connected with the morally mediated compulsion to asceticism. The preaching of honorable poverty which accompanies the everyday life of this age, one that has nonetheless made wealth its God, eventually becomes more intense in the course of the uprising and sets the basic tone even of the most liberal bourgeois leader's speech. The deepest instincts of the audience take this to mean that after the return to order, what will begin is not a new, meaningful, and joyous existence that will really put an end to misery—in which case terror would not be required for their satisfaction—but the return to hard work, low pay, and actual subjugation and impotence vis-à-vis those who need make no sacrifices in order to be honest. The equality which the individuals of the mass sense as fair and just at such moments, and which they demand, amounts to a universal abasement to the life of poverty so emphatically commended to them. If pleasure, or even just the capacity for pleasure, which they have had to fight in themselves since their youth, is so ruinous, then those who embody this vice and remind one of it in their whole being, appearance, clothing, and attitude should also be extinguished so that the source of scandal disappears and one's own renunciation is confirmed. The individuals of the mass would have to view the entirety of their lives as misspent if it turned out that pleasure is really worthwhile and that the halo of renunciation exists only in the imagination. Through the clumsy and frenzied attempts to grab whatever is possible, through the imitation of orgies as he imagines them, the little man who one day came to power documents the same inner fear as the obstinately virtuous parvenu of missing the chance of his lifetime. For it is always a question of the soul. Driven by serious curiosity and inextinguishable hatred, people seek the forbidden behind what is alien to them, behind every door which they cannot enter, in harmless clubs and sects, monastery walls and palaces. The concept of the alien becomes synonymous with that of the forbidden and dangerous, and the enmity is all the more fatal since its carriers feel that this forbid- den thing is irretrievably lost for themselves by virtue of their own rigid character. Petit bourgeois resentment against the nobility and anti-Semitism have similar psychic functions. Behind the hatred of the courtesan, the contempt for aristocratic existence, the rage over Jewish immorality, over Epicureanism and materialism is hidden a deep erotic resentment which demands the death of their representatives. They must be wiped out, if possible with torments, for the sense of one's own existence is called into question every moment by the existence of the others. In the orgies of the aristocracy, licentiousness in rebellious cities, and bloodthirstiness of the followers of an opposed religion—in the kind of deeds they impute to their victims—virtue betrays its own dream. It is not so much the scarcity of luxury that sets the ideologically dominated masses in motion as it is the very possibility of luxury at all. Luxury is therefore essentially considered impertinent not because there is poverty, but because poverty is taken to be the better of the two. All are equally nothing, and so soon as they believe themselves to be more, they are reduced to nothing. This brutality toward personal destiny, which in the bourgeois world is the law for most, is made plain for all to see by the guillotine, which moreover gives the masses the blissful feeling of omnipotence by virtue of their own principle having attained power. The guillotine symbolizes negative equality, the worst kind of democracy, which is identical with its own opposite: utter contempt for the person. Accordingly, the cruel treatment of suspects in the prisons and tribunals of the bourgeois freedom movements and counter-revolutions is typically accompanied by moral abuse, castigation, and insults. “To make equal” has two meanings: to elevate what is below, to consciously set the highest claim to happiness as the standard of society, or to drag down, to cancel happiness, to bring everything down to the level of the present misery of the masses. Even the rebellions of this era that have been liberating and decisive for humanity harbor elements of this second meaning. Both principles are at work in the masses, and often enough they conflict. Even though only the negative one became operative in the counterrevolutions, it must also be said that the positive one, which points beyond the structure of the epoch, has already predominantly defined the character of a number of historical phenomena.
Nevertheless, one need not read Taine’s descriptions, inspired by wild enmity,50 to recognize this nihilism even in the Terror of the French Revolution. The “philosophical policeman Dutard,” whom Mathiez quotes, expresses the significance of terror for the masses more clearly than any listing of terrible incidents. In his report on the execution of twelve condemned men, he makes the following observation:
“I must tell you that these executions have the greatest effect in politics, but the most important one consists in calming the people's resentment for the evils they have borne. They exercise their revenge in this way. The wife who has lost her husband, the father who has lost his son, the merchant who no longer has a business, the worker who pays so much for everything that his wage is reduced almost to nothing, can be reconciled with the evils that oppress them only when they see people who are even more unhappy than they are and whom they believe to be enemies.”51
Marx and Engels did not overlook the contemptible side of the Terror of the French Revolution. “The whole French terrorism,” they wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, “was nothing but a plebeian manner of getting even with the enemies of the bourgeoisie: absolutism, feudalism, philistinism.”52 And in 1870 Engels wrote: “La terreur amounted to mostly useless cruelties, such as are committed by anxious people for their own reassurance. I am convinced that the guilt for the Reign of Terror of the year 1793 falls almost exclusively on the shoulders of overly anxious bourgeois acting like patriots, the narrow-minded … petty bourgeois, and the ragged mob (Lumpenmob) that made their living from the Terror.”53 Though Engels in this passage understands the Terror mainly as a ridiculous exaggeration of the rational goal, his revulsion toward the petit bourgeois and the ragged mob also points to the socially conditioned sado-masochistic constitution of these strata, who were no less to blame for French terror than the opponents' activity.
In view of the indefinite postponement of a really thorough and lasting improvement for the poor, and of the certainty that the real inequality would continue despite the empty phrase "equality," the leaders hit upon the solution of offering the masses the unhappiness of particular people in place of the happiness of all the people. The beautiful Claire Lacombe played a certain role in the Revolution since the August 10 revolt, in which she had distinguished herself. She was closely affiliated with the radical leftists and had a great deal of influence among revolutionary women. When she came into conflict with Robespierre and his followers, her execution was announced even before her final arrest with the words,
“The woman or girl Lacombe is finally in prison and been rendered incapable of doing harm. This bacchantic counterrevolutionary now drinks nothing but water; it is known that she was very fond of wine, no less than she was of good food and men. Proof: the intimate friendship between herself, Jacques Roux, Leclerc, and comrades.”54
Robespierre generally represented this petit bourgeois spirit in his policies. Personally, his ascetic predisposition disposed him to it, but the great progressive significance of the Revolution is also expressed in his character. “The people,” he writes in his notes, “what obstacle stands in the way of instructing them? Misery. When will the people, then, be enlightened? When they have bread, and the rich as well as the government stop buying vile pens and tongues to deceive them. When their interest has fused with the people's. When will their interest have fused with the people's? Never.”55 But these sentences actually went beyond the movement he led. He crossed them out in his manuscript. Similarly, Saint-Just had arrived at a great insight. “Happiness is a new idea in Europe.”56 He expressed it in connection with the laws which led to the fall of his government. After Thermidor, it was not happiness but lawless and unrestricted terror that was put on the agenda.
§6. Authority and Reason.
In the totalitarian state of the present, all social activity derives from the will of the leader. He commands and the masses obey. It might seem that each individual only develops reason and will within the framework of certain authorizations handed down from above, and, moreover, becomes a mere tool by his own consent. Between dependence on the leader and the judgment of all who follow him, there is no room for contradiction [Widerspruch], and because every action, down to the smallest detail, is brought into mental association with the state, there is fundamentally no resistance [Widerstreben], but only positive cooperation in whichever direction the leader points. Liberalism protests this state of affairs in the name of reason. The individual has given away his sovereignty, and has handed free disposal of his person over to an alien authority. According to classical bourgeois philosophy, this would mean the person voluntarily enters into slavery—an impossible, contradictory action, in which a man defrauds himself of his own essence. For certain purposes, a person or corporation may be permitted to exercise power of command within strict boundaries of scope and time-frame without having to take responsibility for what occurs in such a framework. But, however belatedly, even the general will eventually be held accountable by the general public. The meaning of the institutions of bourgeois democracy lies in referring all public measures back to the free discretion of each individual, in order to subject them to the control of reason that resides in every individual. This alone is considered to be the final, and the sole legitimate, authority.
In Germany, it was this bourgeois democracy that failed. Again and again, the people elected their representatives to parliament, the parliaments elected governments, overthrew them, and replaced them with new ones. The bourgeois individual did not sign himself over to any leader for life and in death; only the decision of the individual, and not any alien will, was recognized in public and private life as the rightful source [of authority]. Nevertheless, poverty and unemployment increased tremendously. The bourgeois who were not among the magnates lost their livelihoods, workers their employment. Cultural life, which spreads only on the foundation of a certain welfare and security, decayed. Gross injustice, hunger, and general dereliction mark the end of this order; the economic crisis drives it into war and revolution. In view of this situation, broad swathes of the bourgeois masses, as well as their representatives, renounced their trust in their own reason and pledged themselves to their leader. Has reason [itself] therefore been shipwrecked?—Certainly not. It has just become clear that, under the conditions of the present system, appeal to the judgment of each individual is not enough to adapt the forms of social life to the needs of the general public.
But reason is by no means merely the formal freedom to decide according to one’s own discretion. The one-sidedness of the liberal doctrine of the state, which oversees the objective, substantive side of things, is grounded on this error. Rather, ‘reason’ denotes the right judgment as much as it does one’s own judgment, and ‘freedom’ denotes the real possibility of living and developing one’s capacity for living as much as it does one’s decision thereof. The theoreticians of liberalism thought that if everyone pursued their own interests, the happiness of the general public would necessarily result—and that everyone was supposed to know what their own interests were. The subjective and objective sides of reason—that is, independent discretion and substantive purposiveness—were just as immediately thought to be the same as those interests of each individual and the well-being of the whole. Because of this, subjection to an alien will appeared to them, fundamentally, to be slavery. If, however, not merely the wealth of society, but also the whole educational system, church, school, effective means of propaganda, laws, and weapons are in the hands of small groups, then the individual’s capacity for judgment and what objectively ought to occur fall far asunder. The appeal to one’s own discretion, which had largely been reduced to mere act of choosing between propagandists who were equally alien from and inscrutable to the masses, shrank into a mere formality. To call this nodding or naying in public life, this preference for one miserable action over another in one’s sorry private existence, by the name of ‘reason,’ and to oppose it to alien authority, would make a mockery of reason.
As an organizer equipped with enormous financial resources, in the face of a desperate situation, demanded the renunciation of this miserable remainder of ratio and, by means of the most gigantic apparatus of propaganda, proclaimed to fight for the Volk against their exploiters—no wonder he came to power without serious resistance. Such democratic freedom, a belief in which the workers were largely held captive by their own leaders, had long since become illusion. If the promise of bread for all and happiness according to real contribution, of placing the economy in the service of human beings, had not merely been words stolen and twisted from out of radical theory, this authority, which demands of human beings the renunciation of their autonomy, could truthfully boast of being more rational than the freedom of the very liberalism from which it arose. The totalitarian state is not to blame for the fact that people subject themselves to dictatorship; however, the fact that this dictatorship runs counter to the interests of the people signs its verdict. On the grounds of existing means and methods of production, on the grounds of the rationalization of the whole economic apparatus and the technical skill of human beings, a mode of production is possible today in which all the means of production are no longer held by a minority while the majority suffer in need. Moreover, the economic apparatus has outgrown its present owners, and in their perplexity they drive it into ever new catastrophes.
A mode of production which corresponds to the present level of human capability and social wealth would not only better satisfy all needs, but really change the present state of affairs that has long since become untenable, and in which the possibilities for development and happiness are exceedingly limited. That the authoritarian state exists only to protect this outdated state of affairs and hold back the necessary change, that it pretends to be a friend of the people while in reality maintaining a bureaucracy oppressive to the people, that it leaves everything essential as it was and deceives the masses about the reality of social relations—it is this unreason [Unvernunft] which violates the dignity of human beings who subordinate themselves to it much more than the subordination in itself. What freedom and human dignity are cannot be determined in the abstract—every definition is only a point of departure from which to begin, and every beginning is wrong when taken in isolation—but only in the full context of the historical situation. That one says yes to their place in society is certainly part of their freedom. But whether they are right to affirm it depends on the content of the life they affirm. Opposition [Gegensatz] to the real interests of the people is precisely what compels the authoritarian system to base its authority not so much on substantive achievements as on the mystical qualities of the leader. There is all the more talk about the mission of the dictator, the party, the people, and the race the less there is to be said about the system’s own revolutionary actions and the betterment of the world.
For the social order to cease functioning so poorly, it must be adapted to the needs of the general public. Human beings require that public wealth be administered in such a way that everyone has work and can make a living on the basis of their work. But there is a divergence of concepts: the farmer and petty bourgeois think of competition and individual earnings, as they grew up within the category of those with private property and attempt to return to a social order which corresponds to this; the conscious worker knows this time is over. The conscious workers want the necessary balance between the legitimate needs of human beings and the economic order; the conscious workers want justice. The masses only followed the leader because they believed he would fulfill this demand, the demand which they carried the most varied images of in their souls; since the leader cannot keep his promise, he cannot diminish the pressure [Druck] of this demand. This authority [Autorität] [of the leader] is now failing in the face of the same authority [Instanz] before which formal self-determination proved it was powerless—before justice in the sense of a social order which corresponds to the present level of human development. The realization of this order is the concrete configuration of reason [die konkrete Gestalt der Vernunft], and its two moments, the free self-determination of individuals as well as the satisfaction of their needs, will only find adequate expression in a humanity that consciously takes its fate into its own hands, determines itself, and cares for itself.
§7. The Human Being Changes in History.
During the Middle Ages, a person’s power and prestige were based on their birth. In accordance with this, poverty was considered a misfortune to be sure, but not a personal fault. Modernity has cleared this matter up for us. Power becomes transferable through its incarnation in money. Money is easy to move, as a rule, by tricks of bookkeeping. Anyone can earn money, all that is required is achievement [Leistung]. The thinkers of the early bourgeois—Machiavelli, Spinoza, the Aufklärer—all condemned power by birth and posited the position one earned through one’s own labor as the sole criterion for prestige. The responsibility human beings have for one another, as is well known, has thus ceased to obligate. Everyone ought to take care of themselves. Everyone ought to work. Everyone considers themselves contenders for prizes that can be won by achievement. They have to prove themselves in what they do, and, if they can’t or have some bad luck, they will fall by the wayside.
This is how everyone sees everyone else. The hopelessly poor cease to be a subject [Subjekt]; in the best case scenario, they become an object [Gegenstand] of social policy. They become burdens. In such a social order, someone can go from being a benefactor of humanity to just another piece of trash solely due to fluctuations in cotton stock. Fascism has, in a certain way, reinstated power by birth—or, rather, by inborn qualities of leadership. As brothers in Christ, one’s fellow citizens ought to be entitled to one’s help. But this is merely a distorted and disingenuous repetition of pre-bourgeois conditions. The entire course of society since the time of the Renaissance has not occurred for nothing. The principle of achievement [das Prinzip der Leistung] still holds. In these hard centuries, human beings have learned through great hardship to recognize that pleasure does not depend on the gods, but on their own labor. But the acuity of their understanding will finally turn against the concept of the individual [Begriff des Individuums] itself and discover that it is determined in form and content by the dynamic of society as a whole. In every achievement of the individual, down to his capacity and the material of his labor, it is not just his youth and upbringing which have their effect, but also the whole economic system and the relations of dependency and law throughout society, in addition to his own past and possible failures and chances. In every act of the individual, subjective and objective moments are indissolubly intertwined; it cannot be said that any human property was present as it is in germinal form and then simply grew out into what it has become.57
The achievement of the individual does not depend on him alone, but on society. Society itself, the Volk, or the nation are not beings [Wesenheiten] in contrast to which individuals would be naught. Individuals, as they have developed in history, belong to the dynamics of society. Though they might have, in any one instant, a wholly determinate being all their own, this much, however, is certain: the origin of the abilities and the labor of every human being is not to be sought in any one of them alone, but in the fate of society as a whole. This dominates personal development from the beginning, as much through long-enduring social relations as intermittently, by means of catastrophes or lesser [social] events. It is true that everyone brings their own virtues with them, that everything rests on whether every one applies and unfolds their own—but the word “their” does not refer to a relation between fixed things. Speaking of “their” actions refers, rather, to effects; and in the prehistory [Vorgeschichte] of these effects, the individual’s constitution at any one time may itself only constitute a relatively insignificant moment.
What matters is not the mystical qualities of the origin, but of labor under the guidance of reason, of which sheer enjoyment is the true fruit. This consciousness of the bourgeois world will play a part in the future of society as an element, but in a transformed sense. The category of the individual will be stripped of its metaphysical closure and achievement will appear as a function of the whole in which every one takes part. But birth will therefore once again confer a power—namely, that of being a member of a truly human society. In the Middle Ages, the principle of birth was identical with the domination of chance, as no one could be blamed for it. For the bourgeoisie, such chance was eliminated in principle, and the equality of all human beings was proclaimed in essence. It was not birth, but, on the contrary, achievement which was supposed to decide one’s fate. In actuality, however, the domination of chance returned because the conditions for labor and enjoyment were still differentiated according to one’s class. Now, it is high time for mere entry into the world to mean happiness again, not through power over others, but through the rule of classless humanity over nature; for nobility by birth to be reintroduced as its antithesis [Gegenteil], the equality of human beings, is transformed from lie into truth.58 The human being changes in history.
Published Textual Variant 2—Excerpt from “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” (1935)
… Whatever holds for such special traits as faithfulness to a contract and resoluteness holds as well for the characteristics of the image of man. These characteristics are the focus of traditional anthropological interests: instead of seeking simple approval or immediate correction of philosophical doctrines, enlightened thinking attempts to bring the definition of “man” into association with groups and phases of the social life process and to overcome metaphysics by means of theory. In Greece there existed a famous distinction in anthropology. The view that human capabilities were determined at birth was opposed by the notion that inequality was a product of social relationships and individual fate. According to Aristotle, it was a commonplace notion that humans were born with the qualifications either of mastery or of slavery.59 In Democritus on the other hand we read: “More men become good through practice than by nature.”60 He holds that nature and education are similar to one another, for education transforms human nature and by this means creates a second nature.61 In the modern age, these anthropological concepts have been used for the justification of political systems. Aristotle's view is an integral component of conservative doctrines that incline toward feudalism and the Middle Ages; Democritus's notion belongs to the ideology of the aspiring bourgeoisie. The belief in human equality and in nobility by birth stood irreconcilably side by side. In the present age, there exists no conclusive settlement for either of these convictions. Each of them reflects a period of social reality, but naturally in a false, distorted form, and both represent a self-concept of man on two different levels. Just so, the modified position of current progressive groups toward both images of man reflects a future reality. The criticism of the distortions that each of these images contains, as well as the recognition of their relative truth, play a role in the historical praxis that looks ahead to the future. The new form of existence, which is superior to any that is reflected in past anthropological principles, is already embodied by its pioneers. Only an opinion regarding the distinction drawn by the ancient Greek thinkers, in which actual historical tendencies find expression, can really lead beyond them. Both sides are correct in a limited way.
In the Middle Ages, power and status were determined by birth. Poverty was accordingly a misfortune, but was not a source of guilt. The modern age has obliterated these notions. Hegel “may therefore say, ‘Never has innocence suffered; every suffering is guilt.’”62 Power has become negotiable because it is incarnated in money. Money is easily moved, and as a rule it is subject to an accountant's manipulations. Anyone can attain money if only he achieves. Earlier bourgeois thinkers, Machiavelli, Spinoza, the Enlightenment philosophers, all denounced power that was derived solely from birth and held that only those positions earned from work were a criterion of status. As we know, with this notion the responsibility of humans toward one another ceased to exist. Each individual was supposed to be concerned only with himself. Each person was supposed to work. Everyone considered himself a competitor for prizes that could be won by achievement. People had to prove their capabilities, and when they were capable of nothing or had bad luck, they went to the dogs. This is the context in which each person observes others. A benefactor of humanity can become a nothing overnight simply because of vacillations in the stock exchange. The hopelessly indigent ceases to be a subject. In the best case scenario, he becomes an object of social policy. He becomes a burden.
The totalitarian state has, in a certain way, introduced once again the status of power as derived from birth or, more precisely, from innate qualities of leadership. In earlier periods, the Christian neighbor had a right to be helped; now it is the “comrade of the people” who has. This, however, is merely the impossible repetition of the past. The entire epoch that followed the Renaissance was not in vain. The principle of achievement is basically correct. In these difficult centuries humanity learned the difficult lesson that pleasure is not contingent on the gods, but rather on one's own labor. However, in the end the acuity of human understanding led people to attack the concept of the individual and to discover that this concept, in both its form and its content, is determined by the dynamic of the entire society. Everything that this individual achieves, whether through his innate ability or from the content of his labor, is an effect not only of his youth and education but also of the entire economic system, the legal relationships and conditions of dependence within his society, and his own past and potential failures and chances. In each individual act, subjective and objective elements are inextricably interwoven. It cannot be said of any human characteristic that it existed in embryo exactly as it exists now, and that it simply attained full growth directly from this embryo.
The achievement of the individual does not depend on him alone but on society as well. Society itself, the people or the nation, is of course not an entity in relation to which all individuals are nothing. Individuals belong to the dynamic of the society in the same way in which they developed in history. In every moment, they have a fully particular existence. The genesis of capabilities and of the labor of each human being is to be sought not in this individual human being but rather in the fate of the entire society. This society regulates personal development by means of both long-lasting relationships and intermittent and small events or catastrophes. It is true that everything depends on whether or not each person applies and cultivates his individual powers. However, this word “his” does not designate a relationship between fixed entities. “His” actions refer to effects, in whose prehistory the character of the individual need only constitute a relatively inconsequential moment.
We are here concerned not with mythological elements of the origin, but with labor that is derived from reason, and with pleasure as its benefit. This consciousness of the present will enter into considerations of a future society. However, its meaning will have changed. The category of the individual will be stripped of its metaphysical isolation, if not completely rejected. The extent to which each individual is alone and unique depends on the condition of society and the degree to which it can govern and control nature, and on the individual's inner character. Achievement will be recognized as a function of the whole in which each individual participates. However, birth will once again confer a certain kind of power, namely, that of being a member of a truly human society. In the Middle Ages, the principle of birth was identical to the rule of chance, for no one was at fault in determining it. In the age of the bourgeoisie, this concept of chance was repudiated, and the natural equality of all human beings was proclaimed. Achievement, not birth, was now the decisive element. In reality, however, chance reasserted itself, since the conditions for labor and for pleasure were contingent on class. We have now reached the point at which mere admission into the world means luck, not through the power over others but rather through the dominion of man over nature. The man who is noble by birth appears again when his opposite, the man who is equal by nature, is transformed from an ideology into a truth. The preconditions for this lie neither in the state constitution and legislature—this was the illusion of the French Revolution—nor in the souls of human beings—this was German idealism—but rather in the foundational structures of the social life process, in which both elements are tightly interwoven.
The meaning of all anthropological categories is changed in their very foundations concomitantly with great historical transformations. This occurs without any interruption in historical continuity. …
§8. On the Materialist Theory of History.
That the materialist theory of history, in contrast to every idealistic point of view, attributes no inherent meaning to the world, has certain consequences for its conception of its own significance. Whoever has understood this theory must not imagine his professed participation in proletarian struggles could influence his relation to any entities which might underlie the world. These are but vapor, and one’s own existence is, in all earnestness, ephemeral, leaving no trace. The hope that anything extends beyond time and space is in vain. If all goes well, later generations will remember those who were martyrs for the cause of freedom, but to those bygone fighters themselves, this will mean as much as it did to the musketeer killed in the last World War when the Prince of Wales lingered in mourning at the tomb of the unknown soldier: namely, nothing.
The thought of shaping a freer and happier existence of other individuals can improve one’s composure. Provided the ends which determine his own life don’t perish with him, but are carried further in the course of society, he may hope his death need not mark the end of what he considers his substance and vocation. He has not restricted his will to unfolding himself as an individual, but has placed it in the development of humanity, so the end does not appear to him mere annihilation: the achievement of his goals does not depend exclusively on his personal existence. He can be independent and daring. This composure has an advantage over other kinds of courage, consonant with the truth achievable at present; but religious, or other, superstitions may provide just as deep a reassurance. To the contrary, those who follow a religion at least have greater prospects in the afterlife or in some inexhaustible, divine, and primordial ground of life. The materialist, for their part, possesses the knowledge that those future generations for whom he is fighting are themselves absolutely ephemeral and that, in the end, nothingness will always triumph over joy. Certainly, he is inspired by the thought of a higher form of society and a lighter existence for all human beings. But the reason why he prefers risking his own person over adapting to existing reality, and to a career within it, is no commandment, no promising inner voice, but only his wish and his whim, both of which will one day disappear.
Historical materialism is part of the struggle to better human conditions. It may seem a noble goal—for the humans on this earth to live happier and wiser for a while than to live under the bloody and stupefying domination of capital and the fascist enforcers of its order. But in the end, those later generations will perish too, and the earth will continue on its course as if nothing had happened. It is easy to speak of nihilism here; in reality, honest consciousness and human action only begin where this simple truth takes hold and is held fast.
Published Textual Variant 3—Excerpt from “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” (1935)
A theory derived from the classical and the French Enlightenments, which, in contrast to the idealistic conception, holds that the world contains no inherent meaning, has consequences for the concept of self-consciousness that follows from it. Whoever accepts this theory does not link its corresponding existential demands with an eternal, spiritual being. The hope that there is something beyond space and time appears futile to him. When things are going well, later generations will remember the martyrs who died for freedom. However, this will mean about as much for these martyrs and their convictions as it did for the three hundred men of Leonidas who died in battle long before this wanderer came to Sparta and proclaimed that he saw them lying dead, as the law required him to do. That is, it will mean absolutely nothing. However, this knowledge in no way provides action with a narrower horizon. The idea of helping other individuals become freer and happier can always boost the self-esteem of a particular human being. As long as the goals that determine his own life do not crumble along with him, but rather can be pursued in society after his death, he may cherish the hope that his death will not mean the end of his will. The goal of self-realization is not, for him, contingent on his status as an individual, but rather is dependent on the development of humanity, and the end does not appear to him merely as destruction. The attainment of his goals does not depend exclusively on his personal existence. He can be independent and brave.
This self-concept is, for various reasons, superior to other forms of courage that involve living in harmony with a truth that is immediately attainable. Simple belief, however, can provide consolation that is just as profound. Those who believe in a particular religion have even stronger views regarding a beyond or an inexhaustible, divine realm of life. The student of the Enlightenment, however, is convinced that the future generations for which he is fighting are irrevocably transitory and that, in the end, nothingness is victorious over joy. Certainly he is inspired by the notion of a higher form of society and of a brighter existence for all human beings. However, the reason why he prefers personal engagement to conformity toward existing reality and a career lies not in a commandment or an inner voice pregnant with promises, but rather only in his wishes and desires, which will one day disappear. It may appear a noble goal for humans to live on this earth more happily and wisely than they did under the bloody and stultifying conditions that tend to designate the end of social life forms. However, the future generations will die out anyway, and the earth will continue its course as if nothing had happened. Skepticism and nihilism are speaking here. In reality, a sincere consciousness and honest action begin in the place where this simple truth gains ground and is resolutely retained.
§9. The Bad Elements of Liberalism.
There is even something in the present contempt for powerlessness that may be justified. The lack of influence and standing which some individuals have relative to other members of their group is not infrequently due to the fact that they cannot love anyone, but are always only brooding over their own affairs. Because these people cannot be happy for anyone else, nor share in their fears, they eventually lose the sympathy of those around them and become unsuccessful. Economic development has progressed to such an extent that the ability to take a certain interest in the fate of others is a requisite for securing a good outcome for oneself. In the free-market economy, under otherwise equal conditions, the seller who understands how to respond to the customer has a head start on his competitor. In addition to the participation of the bourgeoisie in government, the necessity for each of its members to look after the buyer, to offer him what would be advantageous to him, to guess and guide his decisions, counteracted the purely egocentric tendency and compelled him to develop a sense for others.
If this interpersonal understanding, which, even in its more sublime forms bore the stamp of the connection between trade and industry, was in truth not the same as the unreflective feeling of unity in pre-bourgeois forms of community, or even like conscious proletarian solidarity, bourgeois intercourse nevertheless cultivated its own negation, individualistic altruism, alongside egoism. Those class strata which have lagged behind in capitalist development, such as peasants in certain parts of the country, appear to the refined bourgeois consciousness as spiritual cripples, not least because of their self-imposed limitations. However, just as with other economic mechanisms which originally brought about the development of human qualities which lost their significance with the decline of the bourgeois order or took on the opposite meaning entirely, in times of deepening crisis, the component of hate and mistrust in the bourgeois understanding of one’s fellow human beings gains the upper hand. One of the most important tasks of fascism, which seeks to rally the Völker into unified strike forces against one another in the service of national power-groups, is to channel the excessive aggression which arises on the grounds of need either into willingness to sacrifice one’s own person or fighting spirit against supposed national enemies. Under the worsening conditions of capitalism, this diversion of an originally positive side of bourgeois humanity towards destructive aims becomes even more difficult, and requires an even more complicated apparatus. At the same time, however, contempt for all-too-individualistic types loses its justification. The fascist enthusiast who succeeds in channeling his hatred and love in the prescribed direction has little advantage over the narrow-minded egoist who is interested only in himself. In the distinctionless Volksgemeinschaft of fascism, the declaration of which is immediately profitable, any relation to alien individuals is no longer mediated by an understanding of their peculiar properties. Love and hate arise from command rather than insight.
This is precisely why there is, objectively, less of an individual to understand: in monopoly capitalism, the individual sinks to the condition of one more element of a mass—an element which, ultimately, resembles all of the other elements. In becoming proletarianized through the process of the accumulation of capital, in the absence of finding any productive work, this generation loses the narrowness, hardness, and solitary ways of bourgeois existence and acquires the negative presupposition for socialism [die negative Voraussetzung für den Sozialismus]—namely, poverty in the face of enormous social wealth and the most developed apparatus of production known to history. Of course, there are still those types who are unsuccessful due to a lack of participation. But for a twofold reason [doppeltem Grund], they are difficult to distinguish from the rest. For the mass of human beings, any success whatsoever becomes a matter of legend, which is derived mainly from the biographies of heroes and leaders. On the other hand, under the conditions of the present economic phase, the human qualities which form the criteria for replenishing the ranks of this hierarchy have become increasingly questionable. The virtues which are required for lower and higher sub-leaders [Unterführer] are usually found only in connection with brutality and disloyalty. Under fascism, the competitive struggle has become more ruthless and more uncontrolled, not only on the world market but also within the Völker themselves. Under fascism, the bad elements of liberalism continue to flourish.
Published Textual Variant 4—Excerpt from “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” (1935)
In the bourgeois age, when one was incapable of looking after others, he was termed inferior. The lack of influence and understanding associated with certain individuals vis-à-vis other group members commonly originates in their inability to love someone and their ability only to brood over their own concerns. Because such people never communicate their anxieties or express their joy to someone, they ultimately forfeit their place in their milieu and become failures. Economic development has progressed to a point where even successful advancement within society is contingent on the ability to show interest in the concerns of others. In a free market economy, other things being equal, the salesman who shows such concern for his customers has a distinct advantage over his competitor. Besides the participation of the bourgeoisie in the government, each citizen is bound by the necessities of taking pains for customers, of showing them what is to their advantage, and of guessing and influencing their inclinations. These exigencies counteract purely selfish dispositions and develop the capacity for compassion toward others. This interpersonal understanding, which even in its more sublime manifestations bears the mark of its relationship with trade and commerce, is not equivalent to the spontaneous feeling of unity in pre-bourgeois forms of community or to unconditional solidarity. Nevertheless, bourgeois commerce in conjunction with egoism has nurtured its own negation: altruism. Classes that were left behind in economic development—for example, a segment of the farmers in certain parts of a country—appear to the more refined, bourgeois consciousness as emotional cripples, not least because of their concern only with themselves.
However, just like other economic mechanisms that originally facilitated the unfolding of human qualities but that have now lost their meaning or come to mean their opposite, hate and mistrust gain the upper hand in human relationships in times of growing economic crisis. One of the most important tasks of the latest Weltanschauung consists in channeling the huge amounts of aggression, which are emerging in a climate of destitution, either into self-sacrificial devotion against each particular individual or into a spirit of battle against potential national enemies. This deflection of an originally positive side of bourgeois man into destructive aims becomes more and more difficult under worsening economic conditions and requires an increasingly complicated apparatus. At the same time, however, contempt for an all too individualistic character loses its relevance. The staunchly zealous person who succeeds in steering his hatred and his love in the prescribed direction has nothing on the narrow egoist who has only his own interests at heart. In a society in which everyone is alike, the analysis of which is immediately useful, the relationship to unfamiliar individuals is no longer mediated by an understanding of their particular individuality. Love and hate originate here from commands, not from insight. Precisely because of this, there exists less that can be objectively understood. Under these conditions the individual sinks to the level of an element of the masses that ultimately looks similar to all other elements. This form of equality does not entail that each person is able to survey the whole and find his own goals sublated in it on the basis of a rationalization of the labor process. Rather, it implies only negative equality before the law, which recognizes no differences. Not everyone has the same freedom to develop his or her potentials. Rather, each person must sacrifice them equally.
It is axiomatic that those who fail because of their lack of participation in society surface again and again. However, they are difficult to identify for two reasons. First, the majority of human beings regard success as a legend whose main sources are revealed in the biographies of heroes and leaders. Second, under the conditions of current economic trends, increasingly questionable human qualities are coming to form the criteria for building a hierarchy. The virtues that decide whether or not one climbs socially are these days more often than not connected with ruthlessness. In the age of the totalitarian state, competition has become wilder and more unscrupulous not only on the world market but also among peoples. The bad elements of liberalism are proliferating madly at present, while the good ones have come under censure.
§10. On the Concept of God (Fragment) [NYN II]
For a long time, the concept of God preserved the notion that there were other norms than those to which nature and society have expressed by enaction. The recognition of a transcendent being draws its strongest force from dissatisfaction with earthly fate. If justice resides with God, it is absent from the world to the same degree. The wishes, longings, and accusations of numberless generations are recorded in religion.
Yet, the more the rule of God was made to accord with this-worldly events in Christianity, the more this meaning of religion was inverted. In a certain respect, Catholicism already regarded God as the creator of the earthly order; Protestantism traced the course of the world directly back to the will of the almighty. Doing so not only transfigures [verklärt] the earthly regime in one’s time with the semblance of divine justice, but reduces it down to the rotten relations of ruling actuality. Christianity has lost its cultural function of lending expression to ideals in the same measure as it has become a co-conspirator of the state.
The productive form of the critique of that which exists, which, in earlier periods, expressed itself as the belief in a heavenly judge, is at present the struggle for more rational forms of social life. Soteriology [Erlösungslehre] is displaced by the critical theory of political economy. But just as, according to Kant, reason cannot ward off the resurgence of certain defeated illusions, despite knowing better, there is a semblance [Schein] which has remained behind after the transposition of religious longing into conscious social practice, one which may well be refuted but yet cannot be wholly banished. It is the image of complete and perfect justice.
This image can never become realized in history, for even when a better society has unfolded and superseded the present disorder, there will be no compensation for the misery of the past and the hardship [Not] of enveloping nature will not be abolished [aufgehoben]. Here too we are dealing with illusion, a proliferation of representations which likely arose in connection with the primitive economy of exchange. That each must have their share and all an equal right to happiness is the generalization of economically conditioned rules, their expansion into the unbounded. But the drive to transcend the possible in thinking, this powerless rebellion against actuality, is part of human beings as they have been formed in history. Not the rejection of this image, but the knowledge of its fundamental unfulfillability is what distinguishes the progressive type of person from the backward.
So far as fascism seems to enter into a historic struggle against religion, what is at stake is essentially a question of whether they will compete with, conform to, or diverge from one another. The fascist bureaucracy, adapted to the relations of monopoly capitalism, takes over the older ideological apparatus, in which the Church certainly had its share, and reorganizes it. Though not without hardship, the Church must finally realize that its own social position depends upon the success of fascism, upon the maintenance of capitalist exploitation. The Church has everything to lose and nothing to gain from the revolution. Its share of the spoils rests on absolute justice being not merely an image projected by human beings, but rather a truly eternal power; future society, however, will renounce this lie.
It is a vain hope that the well-intentioned beatings of fascists will drum the living religion of its beginnings back into the Church. Good will, solidarity with misery, and striving for a better world have cast off their religious vestments and become political factors. The attitude [Haltung] of martyrs is no longer holy sufferance towards evil, but action; their goal is no longer immortality for themselves in the beyond, but the happiness of human beings who come after them; they no longer breathe their last on the cross, but under the clubs and batons of fascist gangs.
Mere spiritual resistance is another cog in the machinery of fascism. True discipleship, to which many Christians may be called again today, does not lead back to religion, but towards atheism. However, the image of complete and perfect justice, from the preaching of which neither power nor esteem is won for here or hereafter, and which is accompanied by an ever-increasing consciousness of its own futility, may stand more purely before the souls of apostate believers than to the clueless liberals who merely tolerated or turned a blind eye to religion throughout their lives.
Humanity loses religion along its path, but this loss does not leave it unmarked. A portion of the drives and wishes which religious belief has preserved and kept alive are emancipated from their inhibiting form and enter into social praxis as productive forces. Even the immoderateness of the illusion destroyed acquires a positive form in this process and undergoes conversion into truth. In the disposition [Gesinnung] of the materialist, the concept of the infinite is retained as consciousness of the finality of earthly events and the inalterable forsakenness of human beings, and safeguards society from thoughtless optimism, from proclaiming its own knowledge as a new religion.
Published Textual Variant 5—”Postscript” [“Thoughts on Religion”]
I. Erich Trier, [Review / “Reichsidee und Gottesreich” & etc.] (1935)
Wendland, Heinz Dietrich, Reichsidee und Gottesreich. Eugen Diedrichs. Jena 1934. (98 S.; RM. 2.90);
Barth, Karl, Die Kirche Jesu Christi. Chr. Kaiser. München 1933. (24 S.; RM. 0.80);
Barth, Karl, Offenbarung, Kirche, Theologie. Chr. Kaiser. München 1934 (43 S.; RM. 0.80);
Wobbermin, Georg, Deutscher Staat und evangelische Kirche. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Göttingen 1934.;
Veigel, Fritz, Die Braune Kirche. W. Kohlhammer. Stuttgart und Berlin 1934. (92 S.; RM. 1.50);
Mandel, Hermann, Deutscher Gottglaube von der deutschen Mystik bis zur Gegenwart. Armanen-Verlag. Leipzig 1934. (VII u. 128 S.; RM. 4.20);
Die Bekenntnisse und grundsätzlichen Äußerungen zur Kirchenfrage des Jahres 1933. Gesammelt und eingeleitet von Kurt Dietrich Schmidt. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Göttingen 1934. (200 S.; RM. 4.60, geb. RM. 5.60);
Hentrich, Konrad, Nationalkatholizismus. Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt. Hamburg 1934. (40 S.; RM. 1.50)
Wendland believes the meaning of current events can be interpreted as “the collapse of utopia.” By “Utopia,” he understands “a ‘secularized,’ i.e. worldly, originally, however, religiously grounded hope in the future and doctrine of the future as such, or ‘eschatology,’ the wholly and entirely profane expectation of a ‘kingdom of the end of days’ [Endreich]… which constitutes the completion of the structure of state and society, economy and culture… .” Utopia is, “strictly speaking, anti-Christian, namely decision against Christ” and thus specifically Jewish. —One may infer from these hints that the author counts Marxist socialism among the most important forms of the utopian decision [Entscheidungsformen der Utopie]—or, as he often says: the worldly expectation of the end. This and all remaining shapes of “worldly belief in the kingdom of the end of days” were destroyed by the National Socialist upheaval, which was a breakthrough of the “mythical” powers.
The first of Karl Barth’s writings again reveals his attitude towards the church-political disputes in Germany: “... it is not because of the German Christians, but because of our Protestant Church, in whose space and womb all of this has happened, that we all, whether we belong, or belonged, to the German Christians or whether we have always stood in opposition—that we all have reason to be ashamed before God and his angels, over the fact this was possible.” Barth turns against misunderstandings which have arisen abroad regarding his opposition against the German Christians. Though he is not a National Socialist, his fight is only against “a theology which, today, seeks refuge in National Socialism, not the National Socialist order of state and society.”
In the foreword to his work Offenbarung, Kirche und Theologie, Barth refers to Emanuel Hirsch’s Die gegenwärtige Geisteslage. Against Hirsch’s basic thesis that the spiritual situation of the present, i.e. the so-called “German Hour,” is to be interpreted as an “encounter with God”: “This is—however clever and however engrossing, however pious and however ecclesiastical it may have been thought or said, in accordance with everything which has been called such in church history (and I wouldn’t even think about giving up this judgment)—pure enthusiasm [Schwärmerei], which, if carried through, would dissolve the Protestant church and, deservedly, hand it over to the Pope, who could do the same much better!”
Wobbermin’s text is a polemical dispute with the intuitions represented by Barth. He provides the thesis that the claim made by the Church upon man “does not extend to earthly affairs,” a well-known interpretation which is entirely compatible with “joyful consent and firm support for the totalitarian state.” In order to prove that the Church did not violate the Christian principle of faith with the introduction of the Aryan paragraph, he emphasizes that the Church is not only “an object of faith,” but also “an organization and institution,” and that the Aryan question “relates exclusively to the external institution of the Church,” such that the introduction of the well-known provision of church law could not in any way represent an abdication of the fundamental principle of faith of the New Testament, which lies on a wholly different level. Not only through this argument, but through its whole construction, Weise’s book shows just how easily theological distinctions can serve the legitimization of the forms of domination of church and state through all-too-accommodating interpretations.
The church of the Middle Ages, according to Veigel, remained alien to the essence of the German man; he calls it “the black church.” It was so powerful that “the great, glorious uprising of the German soul for 400 years, … the first German onslaught, was broken; it became a legacy, not a victory.” The church which arose at that time was “the grey church.” “And the more the storm of life outside surged on to the unforeseen developments of the 19th and 20th centuries, the greyer the Church, colorless, calcified, gray with age, incapable of bearing the powerful, living tensions of its time.” There was no “German Church,” and “the great Pious were outside the churches, and sought the new church out there—whether they did so in the name of man or of the devil;” now, however, the faithfulness upon which the National Socialist movement is borne will give its following the strength for a new piety and overcome the dim “day to day of the black and grey Church” for the sake of building “the brown church.”
Mandel laments in the introduction to his book, completed on “Gilbhart”63 8, 1933, about today’s situation in the following words: “In all areas of life, we should and would become German only in appearance, but not in the innermost, in the German heart [Gemüt], in piety and faithfulness, if one takes their cue from the churches, including the “German Christians.”” For the German people “will not always endure the domination of over-alienating and over-alienated theology, but will once more meet their faith, their God.” Mandel’s writing is a pursuit of the “Nordic-Aryan-Germanic piety and vision of God… for the Christian millennium.” Of the many curious theses advanced in these remarks, only one should be mentioned here: The author imagines that “next to the Reformation and German mysticism,” it is, above all, German idealism—“far, of course, from idealism in the narrow, epistemological sense”—which proves how the “old, Nordic-German belief in the God-permeated world” continues to breaks through. Mandel counts vitalistic metaphysics in particular among those spiritual and intellectual movements which have shown idealism the path to the “cosmic God” and metaphysico-religious vision of the world, and names Simmel and Bergson, two non-Aryan thinkers, as the most important representatives of the spiritual attitude [Geisteshaltung] which leads back towards German-Nordic faithfulness.
Mandel particularly counts vitalistic metaphysics among the intellectual movements that have shown idealism this path to the "cosmic God" and metaphysical-religious worldview, and he names Simmel and Bergson, two non-Aryan thinkers, as the most important representatives of this intellectual attitude leading back to German-Nordic belief.
Schmidt’s book is a commendable collection of important documents from the church-political disputes of 1933. The text is divided into three parts: 1. “Confessions and Confessional Theses,” 2. “Fundamental Statements on the Church Question,” 3. “Theological Expert Opinions.” The introduction is concerned with the reasons for “the astonishing fact that a fourteen-year-long fight against Christianity has produced hardly any confession, whereas a single year of National Socialist governing has produced a flood.”
Henrtrich’s text aims to be “an aid to those Catholic Christians who, perhaps out of religious reservations, are reluctant to walk the path of a total state.” It aims to demonstrate, through numerous examples out of France’s past and present, “that Catholicism is entirely compatible with unconditional nationalism.” The author laments that, for the time being, “the figure of the great reformer still divides Catholic and Protestant Germans.” He believes Saint Joan, the national heroine of France, was “Protestant in essence and attitude” and “had much of the Germanic in her.” Therefore, he believes that we may all understand Joan, and concludes the text with the question of whether we should not all come to understand Luther, the German, whose aftereffect is still division for us today.
II. Horkheimer, “Postscript” [“Thoughts on Religion”]
The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation. Dissatisfaction with earthly destiny is the strongest motive for acceptance of a transcendental being. If justice resides with God, then it is not to be found in the same measure in the world. Religion is the record of the wishes, desires, and accusations of countless generations.
But the more Christianity brought God's rule into harmony with events in the world, the more the meaning of religion became perverted. In Catholicism God was already regarded as in certain respects the creator of the earthly order, while Protestantism attributed the world's course directly to the will of the Almighty. Not only was the state of affairs on earth at any given moment transfigured with the radiance of divine justice, but the latter was itself brought down to the level of the corrupt relations which mark earthly life. Christianity lost its function of expressing the ideal, to the extent that it became the bed-fellow of the state.
The productive kind of criticism of the status quo which found expression in earlier times as a belief in a heavenly judge today takes the form of a struggle for more rational forms of societal life. But just as reason after Kant, even though it knows better, cannot avoid falling into shattered but nonetheless recurring illusions, so too, ever since the transition from religious longing to conscious social practice, there continues to exist an illusion which can be exposed but not entirely banished. It is the image of a perfect justice.
It is impossible that such justice should ever become a reality within history. For, even if a better society develops and eliminates the present disorder, there will be no compensation for the wretchedness of past ages and no end to the distress in nature. We are therefore dealing here with an illusion, the spontaneous growth of ideas which probably arose out of primitive exchange. The principle that each one must have his share and that each one has the same basic right to happiness is a generalization of economically conditioned rules, their extension into the infinite. Yet the urge to such a conceptual transcending of the possible, to this impotent revolt against reality, is part of man as he has been moulded by history. What distinguishes the progressive type of man from the retrogressive is not the refusal of the idea but the understanding of the limits set to its fulfillment.
When the authoritarian state seems to engage in a historic conflict with religion, the essential issue is whether the two shall compete, be coordinated, or go their separate ways. A bureaucracy au courant with the contemporary situation takes over and reorganizes the old ideological apparatus in which the church had its share. Even if it involves hardship the church must ultimately see that its own social position depends on the continued existence of the basic traits of the present system. If these were to change, the church would lose all and gain nothing. Its position rests on the belief that absolute justice is not simply a projection of men's minds but a real eternal power; a future society, however, would cease to perpetuate this belief.
It is a vain hope that contemporary debates in the church would make religion once again the vital reality it was in the beginning. Good will, solidarity with wretchedness, and the struggle for a better world have now thrown off their religious garb. The attitude of today's martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the afterlife but the happiness of men who come after them and for whom they know how to die.
A purely spiritual resistance becomes just a wheel in the machine of the totalitarian state. True discipleship, to which many Christians may once again be called, does not lead men back to religion. Yet that image of perfect justice, the spreading of which brings neither power nor respect in this world or the beyond and which is accompanied by a growing awareness of its own vanity, may be more attractive to disillusioned believers than the empty self-satisfaction which religion in the last century either did not see within itself or else tolerated as well-intentioned.
Mankind loses religion as it moves through history, but the loss leaves its mark behind. Part of the drives and desires which religious belief preserved and kept alive are detached from the inhibiting religious form and become productive forces in social practice. In the process even the immoderation characteristic of shattered illusions acquires a positive form and is truly transformed. In a really free mind the concept of infinity is preserved in an awareness of the finality of human life and of the inalterable aloneness of men, and it keeps society from indulging in a thoughtless optimism, an inflation of its own knowledge into a new religion.
Appendix 1: ‘The right attitude towards society.’
[Excerpt from: Memorandum. Friedrich Pollock—Max Horkheimer. New York, August 1935.]64
[IX.] The right attitude towards society: results from keeping the following in mind: in society today, all human relationships are falsified; all kindness, all approval, all goodwill are, in a fundamental sense, never meant in earnest; what is serious is only the competition within each class and the struggle between them. All recognition, all success, all seemingly sympathetic interest comes from jailers who indifferently permit all of those without success and power to rot, or torture them to the point of bloodshed. All acts of kindness are shown not to the person, but to their position in society—and this is made manifest in all of its brutality whenever the person has lost their position through some minor or major change in the ongoing struggle (stock market, Jew-hatred). But this abstract insight is not what’s most important. You must always keep in mind that it is you—you yourself—who will be delivered over to the mercy of others when all of those people of kindness and goodwill you deal with on a daily basis discover that you have in fact become one of the powerless. Consequence: never on the side of the jailers; solidarity with the victims. (Note: There are in this society some human beings who are not merely its functionaries, particularly among women. But they are much rarer than one commonly assumes.)
In: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften Band 12: Nachgelassene Schriften, 1931-1949. Edited by Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 223. Author’s translation.
As the MHGS Bd. 12 editors note, all titles, with the exception of “Chivalry” and “Authority and Reason,” were given, or at least written, by Pollock, likely in the late 60s.
Noerr and Ziege, “70 Jahre Dialektik der Aufklärung.” Zur Kritik der regressiven Vernunft. Edited by G. Schmid Noerr and E.-M. Ziege. (Springer, 2019), 8-9. Author’s translation.
In: Ibid., 10-11. Author’s translation.
In: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott. (SUP, 2002 [1987]), 241.
Ibid. The quote (translated by Jephcott for the 2002 English edition of DoE) is excerpted from Horkheimer and Adorno, “Rettung der Aufklärung. Diskussion über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik” (1946), in: MHGS, Bd. 12 (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 597-599·
See J.E. Morain, “The Origins of Studien über Autorität und Familie: A report on the early history of the Institute for Social Research's Studien über Autorität und Familie project.” In: CTWG blog (4/27/2024). Link: ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2024/origins\_of\_the\_family/
[Bürgerliche Welt], in: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 230. Author’s translation.
In: Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, Max Horkheimer. Translated by G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (MIT Press, 1993), 151-175.
See CTWG’s “ZfS in English” page for high-quality PDFs of previous English translations of essays which appeared in the ZfS.
In: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 39-68.
“Nachbemerkung. Gottesbegriff.” ZfS vol. 4, no. 2 (1935), 307-308.
“Gedanke über Religion.” In: Kritische Theorie. Eine Dokumentation. Band I. Edited by Alfred Schmidt. (S. Fischer Verlag, 1968), 374-376.
"Thoughts on Religion.” In: Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Max Horkheimer. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and Others. (Continuum, 2002), 129-131.
See Horkheimer to Hannah and Paul Tillich, 1/5/1965: “One of the many emotional and theoretical reasons I have for thinking about you on a daily basis is the question that has preoccupied me in the past year, that is, the publication of my work from the thirties and early forties. Spurred on by students and others, the big publishing houses are after me, and I finally gave Fischer a kind of promise. What’s bothering me are my not infrequent orthodox Marxist analyses. Even if I am still able to affirm what motivated them, they have nonetheless not proven to be accurate. Just think about the predicted intensification of crises and the pauperization of the workers. It is difficult for me to contradict the publishers’ statement that these essays have in one way become common property, that photocopies are circulating among the students, and that they can’t be stopped. I’ve written a preface that describes the discrepancy with reality but acknowledges the spirit of the work. The edition would run to about six hundred pages, but I am procrastinating because the publication will provide material for reactionaries and because the preface will disappoint friends, young people above all. Awhile ago I carelessly told the Fischer people that you once really liked the essays that mostly appeared in the institute’s journal, and now they want you to write a brief introduction. But, as I already said, I haven’t yet decided whether to do it at all. It may be better to wait until it can be published posthumously.” In: A Life in Letters (2007), 332.
In this “Preface,” Horkheimer claims that the essays “are dominated by economic and political ideas which no longer have any direct application”—that is, the ideas of Marxian social theory—and urges “careful reflection” in attempting “to relate them properly to the present situation.” In: Ibid., v-x.
For example, in the original publication of “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” Horkheimer writes:
Critical theory, despite the clarity it may have into the individual steps of social transformation and the agreement of its elements with those of the most advanced traditional theories, has no authority of its own except the concern for the abolition of class domination [Interesse an der Aufhebung der Klassenherrschaft] connected with it.
In: ZfS vol. 6, no. 2, (1937), 291-292. Author’s translation.
The extant English translation of “Traditional and Critical Theory” in Critical Theory (2002) is sourced from the revised version of the text in Kritische Theorie (1968), which substitutes “gesellschaftliche Unrecht” [social injustice] for “Klassenherrschaft” [class domination].
See the digitized Horkheimer Nachlass: “New Yorker Notizen [II], 1945:; (14.) 'Zum Gottesbegriff':”; [link]
Horkheimer, “Zu Theodor Haecker’s Der Christ und die Geschichte,” ZfS vol. 5, no. 3 (1936), 372-383. (Translation by the author forthcoming)
The ISR’s English journal, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, which ran only from late 1939 through early 1941, was an intellectual organ with a different purpose, organization, and self-conception. See my previous post on the Essais Matérialistes.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 10/12/1936. In: MHGS, Bd. 15, 662-663. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer continues: “In this the clear knowledge of oppositions is just as decisive a moment as knowledge of the tendencies that strive towards unity, the judgement of the opposing interests just as important as connection with the correct forces. Not to view the unity of the interior, but to realize it externally is the historical task.” In: “On Bergson’s metaphysics of time” [1934]. Translation by Peter Thomas, revised by Stewart Martin. Radical Philosophy 131, May/June 2005, 15.
Link: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/on-bergsons-metaphysics-of-time
Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 108-109.
Horkheimer, “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” [1935]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 157-158.
Horkheimer, “The Rationalism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy” [1934]. In: Ibid., 262.
[Ritterlichkeit], in: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 225-227.
[Bürgerliche Welt], in: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 227-232.
[Enge des Herzens], In: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 232-234.
[Unabänderlichkeit?], in: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 234-238.
[Der Schrecken in der französischen Revolution], in: MHGS Bd. 12, 238-239.
In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 100-103.
[Autorität und Vernunft], in: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 239-244.
[Der Mensch verändert sich in der Geschichte], in: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 244-246.
In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 168-171.
[Zur materialistischen Geschichtstheorie], in: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 246-247.
In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 157-158.
[Die schlechten Elemente des Liberalismus], in: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 247-249.
In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 172-174.
Erich Trier, Review [Reichsidee und Gottesreich] ZfS Vol. 4, No. 2 (1935), 304-307.
In: Critical Theory (2002), 129-131. English translation from the German republication of the text as “Gedanke über Religion” in: Kritische Theorie. Eine Dokumentation. Band I. Edited by Alfred Schmidt. (S. Fischer Verlag, 1968), 374-376. Originally published as: “Nachbemerkung. Gottesbegriff.” ZfS vol. 4, no. 2 (1935), 307-308.
For more on the relation universal human solidarity and the ability to love individuals as an individual, see Horkheimer “Materialism and Morality” [1933]: “However, (…) love has nothing to do with the person as economic subject or as an item in the property of the one who loves, but rather as a potential member of a happy humanity. It is not directed at the role and standing of a particular individual in civil life, but at its neediness and powers, which point toward the future. Unless the aim of a future happy life for all, which admittedly arises not on the basis of a revelation but out of the privation of the present, is included in the description of this love, it proves impossible to define. To all, inasmuch as they are, after all, human beings, it wishes the free development of their creative powers. To love it appears as if all living beings have a claim to happiness, for which it would not in the least ask any justification or grounds. It stands in primordial contradiction to stringency, even though there may be psychic processes which sustain both moments in themselves.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 34-35.
Cf. “Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism” [1938]: “Fascism is not opposed to bourgeois society, but is rather its appropriate form under definite historical conditions. Given the lawlike quality intrinsic to the system, capital in the contemporary period is capable of occupying a growing majority of the population with tasks unrelated to the satisfaction of general needs. It takes on the character of the oligarchical cliques that prepare to divide the world anew in order to exploit it with modern means. That is the direction of European development. In this period, the mediating categories cast off their humanistic appearance. Money, the universal equivalent, which seemed to equate human beings to each other in a fundamental way, sheds the ephemeral character of independence. It has always mediated and expressed social relations. This becomes openly manifest today. The national group that has good apparatuses of production and repression, and which develops on this basis a rigid military and social organization, becomes increasingly independent of money—or, rather, presses it into its service. Domestic finance is formally taken in hand by capital and its state. The latter determines how the dominated groups shall live. State expenditures with the purpose of binding the masses to the regime, dividing them from themselves, and organizing them instrumentally; public works; official charities, etc. so-called socialism—encounter serious resistance only in the transition to fascism, so long as the government is not unambiguously sworn to big industry. The complaints of smaller employers are harnessed until the proper authoritarian power is formed, in the face of which rebelliousness is reduced to harmless grumbling. Obstruction goes only this far, and demonstrates the powerlessness of all but the fascist approach. The apparent independence of financial power disappears along with that of parliament. The stratum that controls the means of material production, the industrial and political bureaucracy, emerges formally as authoritative. Competition has always functioned merely as a mediating factor; now it recedes in domestic affairs. In Germany, heavy industry—which came to open domination with the authoritarian state—was at that moment insolvent, remaining far behind other industries. Measured on liberal principles of competition, it was quite unsound despite its power. In fascism, however, power competes in essence only internationally; domestically, it carries on the struggle against competing industries as well as against the labor force with state resources. Furthermore, it becomes clear that the work relationship was only formally based on the contract; decree and command now openly take its place. It wins new significance as agreement between equally strong cliques within the state, not unlike many relationships in the Middle Ages. In the new system of justice, the universality of law and the independence of judges are openly abandoned. Under liberalism, inequality was masked by equal rights—which guaranteed a minimum of freedom because the mask itself was not without substance. Now, a clean sweep is made of human rights as just another ideology. Specific groups, indeed individuals are affected by the law; laws are enforced retroactively. The judges are freed from the pedestrian obligation of merely interpreting and promulgating the law; they are promoted to the immediate executors of higher orders, and thus become equals of the executioner. This unmasking takes place along with other decisive social factors.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 299-300.
Cf. Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936]: “The words "the realm of freedom" do not mean that the fruits borne by culture's present level of development should be extended in a “refined” form to benefit the “whole people,” as is usually said. This undialectical view, which naively adopts the bourgeois notion of culture, ascetic scale of priorities, and concept of morality but remains ignorant of its great artistic achievements, has dominated the reform efforts of even the progressive nineteenth-century political parties to this very day, made thinking shallow, and ultimately contributed to defeat. With the increasing hopelessness of the masses' condition, the individual is finally left the choice between two modes of behavior. One is the conscious struggle against the conditions of reality—this retains the positive element of bourgeois morality, the demand for freedom and justice, while annulling its ideological hypostatization. The other is a continued profession of this morality and its corresponding hierarchy—this leads to a secret contempt for one's own concrete existence and to hatred for the happiness of others, to a nihilism which has expressed itself again and again in the history of the modern age as the practical destruction of everything joyful and happy, as barbarity and destruction.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 99-100.
Cf. Horkheimer, “Materialism and Morality” [1933]: “Indeed, they are ready to throw overboard and pull from the curriculum all the ideals which the fathers of the bourgeois revolution championed, worked for, and fought for, as soon as people are developed and desperate enough to no longer apply them mechanically to the preservation of institutions, but to apply them dialectically to the realization of a better order. The requirements of internal and external control entail that all progressive elements of bourgeois morality be stifled or deliberately eliminated in many places.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 42.
And: “The materialist critique of political economy first showed that the realization of the ideal in terms of which the present society was established—namely the union of general and particular interest—can take place only by the sublation of its own conditions. Today it is claimed that the bourgeois ideals of Freedom, Equality, and Justice have proven themselves to be poor ones; however, it is not the ideals of the bourgeoisie, but conditions which do not correspond to them, which have shown their untenability. The battle cries of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution are valid now more than ever. The dialectical critique of the world, which is borne along by them, consists precisely in the demonstration that they have retained their actuality rather than lost it on the basis of reality. These ideas and values are nothing but the isolated traits of the rational society, as they are anticipated in morality as a necessary goal. Politics in accord with this goal therefore must not abandon these demands, but realize them—not, however, by clinging in a utopian manner to definitions which are historically conditioned, but in accordance with their meaning. The content of the ideas is not eternal, but is subject to historical change—surely not because “Spirit” of itself capriciously infringes upon the principle of identity, but because the human impulses which demand something better take different forms according to the historical material with which they have to work. The unity of such concepts results less from the invariability of their elements than from the historical development of the circumstances under which their realization is necessary. In materialist theory, the main point is not to maintain concepts unchanged but to improve the lot of humanity. In the struggle for this, ideas have altered their content. Today, the freedom of individuals means the sublation of their economic independence in a plan. The presupposition of the ideas of Equality and Justice hitherto was the prevailing inequality of economic and human subjects; it must disappear in a unified society, whereupon these ideas will lose their meaning. “Equality exists only in contrast to inequality, justice to injustice; they are therefore still burdened with the contrast to the old, previous history, hence with the old society itself.” [Fn. 50: Friedrich Engels, Vorarbeiten zum "Anti-Dühring," Marx-Engels-Archiv, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1927), p. 408.] Hitherto, all these concepts took their determinate content from the relations of the free market, which with time were supposed to function to the benefit of all. Today they have transformed themselves into the concrete image of a better society, which will be born out of the present one, if humanity does not first sink into barbarism. The concept of Justice, which played a decisive role as a battle cry in the struggle for a rational organization of society, is older than morality. It is as old as class society, i.e., as old as known European history itself. As a universal principle to be realized in this world, Justice in connection with Freedom and Equality first found recognition in bourgeois philosophy; though only today have the resources of humanity become great enough that their adequate realization is set as an immediate historical task. The intense struggle for their fulfillment marks our epoch of transition.” In: Ibid., 37-38.
For more on this ‘restriction’ under the conditions of the division of labor, see Horkheimer, “History and Psychology” [1932]: “The rejection of a psychology rooted in economistic prejudices should not distract us, however, from the fact that the economic situation affects the most minute aspects of human inner life. The strength as well as the content of the eruptions of the psychic apparatus are economically conditioned. In the face of the slightest annoyance or of an insignificant but pleasant change of pace, certain relationships give rise to mood swings of an intensity hardly comprehensible to the outside observer. Reduction of one's life to a restricted sphere leads to a corresponding distribution of love and desire that reacts back upon and qualitatively influences character. In contrast, more favorable situations in the production process, such as the management of large industries, afford so broad an overview that pleasures and distresses that would entail great shifts in the lives of other human beings become irrelevant. Moral conceptions and world views, held rigidly by and determining the lives of those for whom social connections are not visible, are surveyed from the vantage of high economic positions in their conditioning and vicissitudes, so that their rigid character dissolves. Even if we assume that inborn psychic differences are extremely great, the structure of fundamental interests stamped upon individuals from childhood onward by their fate—the horizon prescribed to them by their function in society—only rarely permits the uninterrupted development of those original differences. The chances for such development themselves vary according to the social stratum to which the individual belongs. Above all, intelligence and a series of other talents may develop more easily if their situation in life puts fewer hindrances in their way from the very beginning. The present is characterized more by the unrecognized effect of economic relationships on the overall shaping of a life than it is by conscious economic motives.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 125-126.
Horkheimer is most likely referring to Erich Ludendorff, a Prussian General who was primarily responsible for Germany’s military policy and strategy in the later years of WWI, and who was renowned for his “iron nerves” in the blind pursuit of victory, regardless of the conditions of the battlefield or, as Horkheimer alludes here, the cost of human life—even with regard to his own troops. Horkheimer’s hatred for Ludendorff was a lifelong affair. In a letter to Kirchheimer (7/19/1947), Horkheimer writes: “In the gray uniformity of this banal idealism; which passes itself off as existentialism and who knows what else, the scraps he uses from Rickert, Scheler, Dilthey, and Heidegger all look alike, like peas in a pod. What comes to mind is a meeting at the Goethe Museum in the 1920s at which Margarete Susman said, "People must again be confronted with death." I replied that Ludendorff had already done this, and this didn't win me any friends. I don't know whether one dare even publish books about death.” In: A Life in Letters. Selected Correspondence by Max Horkheimer. Edited and translated by Evelyn M. Jacobson, Manfred R. Jacobson. (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 250.
See Horkheimer’s critique of trying to ground morality in ‘temporal prudence’ as the same error in reverse of trying to discover a transcendent authority for morality. In: “Materialism and Morality” [1933] Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 34-35.
[MHGS Bd. 12 ed. Fn.]: A. Mathiez, La révolution française, Tome III, Paris 1928, S. 81.
[Fn. #137 from Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993):] Cf. Hyppolite Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine, vol. 3 (Paris, 1881), pp. 294ff.; also vol. 4, pp. 276ff.
[Fn. #138 from Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993):] A. Mathiez, La Révolution française, vol. 3 (Paris, 1928), p. 81.
[Fn. #139 from Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993):] “Bilanz der preussischen Revolution,” in Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von K. Marx und F. Engels, ed. F. Mehring, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1920), p. 211.
[Fn. #140 from Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993):] Engels to Marx, letter dated 4.9.1870, in Marx/Engels Briefwechsel, vol. 4 (Berlin, 1951), p. 577.
[Fn. #141 from Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993):] Mathiez, La vie chère, p. 356.
[Fn. #142 from Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993):] J. Juarès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française, vol. 8 (Paris, 1924), p. 259.
[Fn. #143 from Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993):] Saint-Just, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris, 1905), p. 248.
Cf. Horkheimer, “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” [1935]: “Rather, we want to stress the existence and transformation of characteristics that may well determine the actual course of history. The concept of man here appears not as uniform, but as consisting in characteristics that designate certain groups. These characteristics arise together with the social life process, are transmitted from one class to another, and under certain circumstances are either absorbed by the entire society and given new meaning or else disappear. Every feature of the present age should be understood as a factor in a historical dynamic and not as a manifestation of an eternal being.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 161.
Cf. Horkheimer, “Materialism and Morality” [1933]: “In this history of humanity, in which inequality constitutes such a fundamental trait, a certain human reaction has repeatedly become apparent, whether as inequality's other side or as its effect. The abolition of inequality has been demanded at different times and in different places. Not only the dominated classes but also renegades from the ruling classes have denounced inequality. The equality which was to be brought about (and which, in the materialist view, developed with the exchange relationship) has been understood in the most various ways. From the basic demand that everyone should receive an equal share of the consumer goods produced by society (e.g., in early Christendom) to the proposition that to each should be allotted that share which corresponds to his labor (e.g., Proudhon), to the thought that the most sensitive should be the least burdened (Nietzsche), there is an exceedingly wide range of ideas about the correct state of affairs. All of them make reference to the point that happiness, insofar as it is possible for each person in comparison with others on the basis of their lot in society, is not to be determined by fortuitous, capricious factors which are external to the individual—in other words, that the degree of inequality of the life conditions of individuals at least be no greater than that dictated by the maintenance of the total social supply of goods at the given level. That is the universal content of the concept of Justice; according to this concept, the social inequality prevailing at any given time requires a rational foundation. It ceases to be considered as a good, and becomes something that should be overcome.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 39-40.
[Fn. #17 from Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993):] Aristotle, Politics, 1254a 23.
[Fn. #18 from Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993):] Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1956), fragment 242. Translation from Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), P. 113.
[Fn. #19 from Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993):] Diels and Kranz, Fragmente, fragment 33; Freeman, Ancilla, p. 99.
[Fn. #20 from Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993):] Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia, 1981), p. 233.
[Gilbhart]: archaic German for ‘October,’ literally ‘yellowing [month]’
Memorandum Friedrich Pollock—Max Horkheimer. New York August 1935. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 380-. Author’s translation.