Revised Collection: Revolution and Rhetoric (1936/37)
Supplements and Notes for Horkheimer's "Egoism"-essay (1936)
Part of the series on Horkheimer’s 1930s Essais Matérialistes.
Table of Contents
Collection: Revolution and Rhetoric (1936/37)
I. Postscript: Editor’s Remark on Greer’s Book (1936)
II. Lecture: The Function of Speech in Modernity (October 1936)
III. Lectures: On Authority and Society (1936/37)
Postscript: Letters on Working Methods and Applications of the “Egoism”-essay (1936-)
Notes: Revolution and Rhetoric in the Essais Matérialistes
§1. The “Egoism”-Essay (1936): Program and Problematic
a) Cruelty (and the Terror)
b) Critique of Anthropology
§2. The Fate of the “Egoism”-essay: Speculation, Variation, and Self-critique
a) Speculative Annotations for a Theory of Rhetorics (1946)
b) Adornian Variations: Bourgeois Terrorism (1937/38-1952) and Negative Anthropology (1969)
c) The “Egoism”-essay: A Portrait of the Author as a Drowned Man
The third text in the following collection is a transcription of the English typescript of the lectures on “Society and Authority” (1936/37) from the digitized Horkheimer Nachlass through the former Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek at Goethe University, Frankfurt a.M. The German typescript of the lectures was published in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 12. (1985),1 under the editorial direction of Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, alongside the German typescript of the late 1936 ‘luncheon’-lecture on “The Function of Speech in Modernity,”2 which has been translated into English for the second text below. The first text is a translation of Horkheimer’s “Nachbemerkung zu Greers Buch” [Donald Greer’s The incidence of the terror during the French Revolution; a statistical interpretation (Harvard University Press, 1935)], published in the third issue of the fifth volume (fall/winter 1936) of the ZfS.3
Two Elements of the French Revolution: Judged by what could actually have been accomplished at that moment, what makes the sympathetic observer feel ashamed is not that the French Revolution went too far, or that the implementation of its program only came about during a protracted period and after severe reverses. What does disturb him is the venting of what were precisely non-revolutionary, philistine, pedantic, sadistic instincts. As a practical matter, the revolution needed the support of segments of the petite bourgeoisie. But at the very beginning, the subaltern maliciousness of those strata made an ideology of the solidarity of the nation which the revolution invoked in theory. It is true, of course, that ideology contains impulses which not only point beyond feudal society but class society generally, but they are to be found in the writings of the “philosophes” rather than among the sadistic petite bourgeoisie which came to power for a time. Compared to them, it may indeed have seemed a salvation when the representatives of the developed forces of production, i.e., the bourgeoisie that was ready to take over, assumed leadership after the fall of Robespierre. The interpretation of the French Revolution by direct recourse to the philosophy of the Enlightenment distorts reality almost as much as does the insolence of a certain romanticism which only objected to the horror of the guillotine because it did not serve the Bourbons. In today's Germany, the two elements of the French Revolution, pedantic philistinism and revolution, appear as distinct historical powers. If they do it in the service of the dominant bourgeoisie, the petit bourgeois and the peasants may rebel and call for the henchman, but the forces directed toward the creation of a more humane world are now embodied in the theory and practice of smaller groups of the proletariat. They are not concerned with the guillotine but with freedom.
— Horkheimer, Dämmerung (1934)4
I. Horkheimer’s Postscript: Editor’s Remark on Greer’s Book (1936)
Donald Greer, The incidence of the terror during the French Revolution; a statistical interpretation. (Harvard University Press, 1935)5
Two social functions of terror can be distinguished. First: the deterrence of the enemy, which a governing body or militant group enacts in order to assert itself: the target is solely the adversary. Second: terror has, however, also been implemented through history when the danger to be avoided was less the strength of the enemy than the wavering attitude of one’s own followers. In the latter case, the target consists in one’s own following [Gefolgschaft] itself. Distinguishing which of the two kinds [of terror] any one determinate terroristic act should be assigned to is difficult for the historian. As a rule, both kinds [of terror] have a role to play in coordination with one another. This is particularly true of the French Revolution, to which Greer’s book refers. On the basis of the perspective developed in the essay on “Egoism and Freedom Movements” in this journal, however, certain theoretical criteria can be derived which may have significance for understanding this individual case.6
Modern freedom movements have in large part taken on a typical course. Propertyless masses, under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, took up arms against the antiquated conditions which originated in feudalism, only to be then integrated into the new social order themselves. This second phase of the movement, which was in most cases noticeable from the beginning, can be traced back to the fact that even in this new [social] order, the masses are forced into renunciation and come into conflict with the ruling bourgeois class strata. To the extent the interests of the propertied and the broader masses coincide, there are no particular grounds for terror in the second sense—that is, calculated for the [movement’s] following. The masses hope, not only on the level of consciousness but also on the level of their instincts, for a reversal of their fate; no particular measures are needed in order to compensate their disappointments by means of bloody spectacles. However gruesome the fight against the enemy, i.e., the powers of the past; as far as the bourgeois revolution might go in response to the as-a-rule inhuman acts of the opposing side, as it captures and executes the supporters of absolutism as far as its own sphere of power extends; as long as the fighting persists in full force, [terror] is essentially a matter of deterrence. However, insofar as the terror increases, even when the enemy has largely been repelled, it increasingly acquires the second, irrational kind of significance, and the conflict between the power of the propertied class strata which have risen to power, on the one hand, and the propertyless parts of their followership which have been forced into material deprivation, on the other, manifests itself. As the more radical elements of the populace come into open opposition against the victorious party, the sacrificial victims of the terror tend less and less to be members of the nobility or the clergy than of these radical groups themselves. At this juncture, the distinction between revolution and counter-revolution in the bourgeois era also tends to become blurred, as the terror increasingly begins to take on particularly cruel and degrading forms. It is only at this stage that major concessions are made to the nihilism of the petty-bourgeois masses.
Insofar as the hope is justified that a historical movement will realize happiness not only for a determinate social strata, but rather elevate the whole of society into that state in which all may enjoy all the goods of culture in equal measure, this [movement] lacks the most important drives towards terror of the second kind. The better part of the uprisings of the bourgeois epoch may well have allowed for a lack of clarity for a period of time concerning the quality of the state which they were supposed to achieve, but, in their progression, the violence of the social distinctions in the new order they sought became apparent. However, there were also groups which participated in each of these revolutions whose goal was not merely the ideal, but the real community of all individuals, and did so in increasing measure as the era progressed. As the groups which are oriented towards a solidaristic society no longer recognize the eternal necessity of impoverishment and the renunciation of drives, the introversion [Verinnerlichung] of material demands, and idealistic morality, they are also free of ressentiment, free of the subjective grounds from which the terror derives.7 They stand in another relation entirely towards political and criminal justice [Justiz] than the one to which the terror is so closely connected. One of the primary roots of cruelty is despair over the possibility of universal happiness [allgemeinen Glücks]. The groups which consciously seek to bring this about by virtue of their social existence, for all of their resolve and resistance, have no psychological need for the spectacle of blood and misery. The stronger the belief in the emancipation of humanity, the less the desire for sacrificial victims. As the right theory of society explains rational terror, it also protects against irrational terror, which has always, in all times, been the more terrible.
II. Lecture: The Function of Speech in Modernity (October 1936)
Prefatory Remark by the Editors of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften: Horkheimer gave this lecture, the German version of which is reproduced here, as a “luncheon” speech to American historians in mid-October 1936. He mentions it in a letter dated October 27, 1936 to the psychoanalyst Karl Landauer in the context of a discussion of Freud's concept of the death drive : [“In addition to the conception of the sorrow of those left behind that you mention, the satisfaction that flows from the thought that one's name will “live on” surely also belongs among the attempts to overcome death psychically. In this context, on the occasion of a lecture that I gave about ten days ago at a history club about the function of speech in modern times, I happened upon the great significance of names, which originates in very primitive habits of thought.”]8 The theme of the lecture is closely related to the essay “Egoism and Freedom Movements” that was written shortly beforehand. The function of the leader's speech is discussed there as a preliminary step in a further investigation into early bourgeois mass movements, in which egoism becomes visible as a foundational, but contradictory, feature of the modern image of humanity. In this lecture, Horkheimer expands on this aspect of speech. First, Horkheimer develops a historical contrast between the functions of speech in antiquity and the functions of speech at the outset of modernity. Then, he extends and sharpens this into the antithesis between the structural-argumentative and structural-internalizing functions of speech.9
Since the custom of giving scholarly speeches during meals is not as widespread in German academic life as it is here, I must confess this, at your friendly invitation, is my first scientific luncheon-speech. At first, I felt a little embarrassment over the question of finding a suitable theme. As you know, I am a philosopher, and philosophizing is a difficult business when one is feeling particularly carefree. Even then, there is the real danger that one’s listener will begin to yawn—if not outwardly, out of politeness, then at the very least in spirit. What sort of philosophizing could possibly take place at a luncheon! In the end, however, I thought to myself: this custom goes back to a venerable tradition. While the banquets of the Greeks had the advantage that one did not sit at the table, but rather laid down for the duration of the speech—so that the energies of the organism had freer play—the dinners of classical antiquity may have been considerably less digestible than a light American lunch. At the Symposium, Plato reports, the wine flowed freely, in veritable streams, and yet, as is well known, the philosophy of which they spoke placed no small demands on both speaker and listener. In thinking over the function of speech, inspired by your invitation, the thought occurred to me to make it the object of my address. I ask only that you consider the few reflections I am able to contribute on the theme at this time as, essentially, a stimulus to further thinking and not as a finished theory. The philosophical literature of antiquity recognizes, in essence, two different functions of speech: first, to facilitate the discovery of truth [der Ermittlung der Wahrheit]; second, to guide the listener towards a certain goal desired by the speaker, to influence [the listener] in practice. As you know, sophistic rhetoric did not recognize any objective truth whatsoever. According to the sophist rhetorician, that which appears the more plausible by means of skillful argumentation also appears to be true. Thus, it is not speech which depends on truth, but rather truth which depends on speech. Against this sophistic concept of speech, Plato defended the possibility of speech directed toward the true and the good in the Gorgias, elaborating further in the Phaedrus, and Aristotle explains in his Politics that the nature of the logos is “to point out what is useful and what is harmful, and thus also what is just and what is unjust.”10 The further classificatory divisions made between functions of speech which we find in antiquity are unable to change this foundational divorce. Cicero, who never tires of condemning eloquence in the service of subversive goals, does not advance beyond his Greek predecessors on this issue. On the one hand, speech in the exclusive service of truth; on the other, as a mere instrument of persuasion, regardless of whether the purpose is good or bad—this distinction dominates the classical debates concerning the function of speech. The practical application of speech, i.e., the influencing of others in political and private life, and especially in court (Aristotle speaks of advisory, juridical, and virtuosic speech, the last of which is only supposed to display the skill of the speaker), always either belongs more to the type propagated by Plato or to the type propagated by the sophists. In the purest form of sophistic speech, the logos serves as a mere instrument of some individual and egotistic endeavor; the purest expression of the Platonic idea of speech is the philosophical dialectic, i.e., cognition [Erkenntnis] which unfolds in speech and counter-speech [Rede und Gegenrede], in thesis and antithesis.
If we now turn to a consideration of speech in modern history on the grounds of this orientation in the literature of antiquity on rhetoric, a clear image seems to arise before us. Even in modern times, speech has played a role in the most diverse historical processes. There is hardly a single political event—whether those involving law-giving acts or law-giving legations, the founding of Reichs or their destruction, wars or revolutions—not marked by speeches or speakers of significance. Even if the method of historiography [Geschichtsschreibung] no longer consists, as in Thucydides or Livy, in allowing the persons involved speak for themselves, i.e., by quoting word for word the speeches they actually made or by the historian inventing a speech for them in accordance with their historical situation, such a historiography nevertheless does not appear so completely absurd, since speech has always been such an important historical factor. And, of course, speeches can also be distinguished according to whether they are made in service of personal power-seeking for individuals or small groups, or, on the contrary, the welfare of society as a whole, the general good; according to whether speeches were mere skillfulness in the service of private interests or of truth and justice; according to whether they belonged more to those of the Platonic or sophistic type. As you know, for example, the theory of history of the English and French enlightenment is closely connected with this problem. Thomas Hobbes was already of the conviction that, up to his own time, history had essentially been controlled by the cunning and deception of the priestly caste. For him, the task at hand was employing the same skillfulness in speech and writing in service of the good cause of absolutism.
For Hobbes, understanding speech as an instrument of domination [Herrschaftsinstrument] is, to a great extent, the key to understanding historical events. Voltaire and his friends also believed that the lie of privileged groups essentially dominated the course of history until their time. This lie, they believed, must now be countered by truth, by reason; so far as it is, everything will turn out for the better. For the enlightenment, the logos is the strongest historical power. To the enlighteners, the whole of history appears as a contest [Ringen] between truth and lies, similar to how it appeared for the middle ages as a struggle between God and the devil. Some of you, however, will have come to feel in the course of your historical work that this—I would say: rationalistic—evaluation of speech in the historical process is not sufficient, particularly with regard to modern history. There is no doubt that, during the birth of the modern historical epoch, i.e., from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, the spoken word was an important midwife. Since the time of the forceful oratory of Arnold von Brescin (towards the end of the twelfth century), innumerable lesser and greater spiritual speakers have arisen. In opposition to the rigid forms of the church, they satisfied the needs of the developing bourgeois class by speaking of Christian ideals in the language of the land and in widely understood expressions.
On the grounds of the increasing significance of trade and commercial enterprise, the intellectual needs of the bourgeois had also developed; they had come into material and spiritual opposition with the high-clergy and feudal nobility—in particular, initially, in cities in the south of France and the north of Italy. Religious tendencies in conflict with the church arose in part from sects and preaching mendicant monks, and in part from other tendencies which permeated Catholicism with the new bourgeois element and reconciled both powers. The Albigensians and Waldensians may be mentioned as examples of the first type, the Franciscans and Dominicans of the second. Now, of course, the Catholic Church, due to its vital significance for Italian and French politics, has been able to adapt itself to the new needs in these countries. With one hand, it made the various orders of preachers subservient to itself, and with the other, the Fourth Lateran Council expressly recognized that preaching on the whole had to be reshaped in any case. In another part of the Catholic world, however, the Protestant form of Christianity finally secured its footing, the form of whose worship essentially centered around the word. This return to the word of God and, further, preaching in the language of the land as the core of service to God are two decisive achievements of the Reformation.
If we now turn to those speakers who are so significant for modernity, to the preaching of mendicant monks and the sermons of the reformers, with the classical standards in hand, the inappropriateness of such a procedure becomes immediately apparent. In this modern speech, which is most closely connected with the development of the urban bourgeoisie, a certain property plays a role which in antiquity, if it was present at all, did not possess the same crucial significance. By this, I mean the function of speech which changes the listener himself—in his inner life, in his character. He should not only be convinced of some cause, but should “enter into himself” [“in sich gehen”]; he should better himself, become a different man, a new one. Instead of setting himself on pleasure and enjoyment, the man should be induced to keep his conscience pure, to lead a spotless life, to do his duty always and everywhere. He should not seek out the faults of others more than his own; he should never be satisfied with himself, but should always be concerned with the further purification of his person [der weiteren Läuterung seiner Person], with overcoming his natural drives and demands [natürlichen Triebe und Ansprüche]. We call this function of speech its “introverting quality”11 (in German: ihre verinnerlichende Funktion), or, to express it substantively: the “introversion,”12 die Verinnerlichung, it brings about.
This function has nothing whatever to do with the problem of truth and falsity. Regardless of whether the facts, religious or otherwise, invoked by the speaker are true or are not, whether the manner in which he paints an image of hell accords with the fundamental principles [Grundsätzen] of classical logic or does not—as far as the goal is concerned, namely a transformation of the soul [seelische Veränderung], none of this really comes into consideration. The speaker does not merely appeal to reason, his rational argumentation forms only the surface of his speech; rather, he appeals to the psyche, the unconscious, the drives. Even the orators of antiquity affected the affects of their listeners; indeed, the best among them even “played” on them. Cicero himself on occasion made fun of how he had instilled such fear and terror of the Catalinian conspiracy in his fellow citizens through his brazen exaggerations.
But for the orators of antiquity, the affects were only supposed to provide the lever to induce a determinate decision, to trigger a clearly outlined action; the addressees were not thereby supposed to spiritualize their wishes nor turn inwards away from outer matters; they were not thereby supposed to be transformed in their very essence. Wherever approaches of this kind are to be found in antiquity, one will also find similar social constellations to those which are generally characteristic of modern times. In modern times, there are two primary social tasks speech has fulfilled through its introverting function [verinnerlichende Funktion]. These tasks are interwoven with, and cannot be separated from, one another in concrete cases. We will speak less of the first for now. It consists in the educational effect on those who belong to the bourgeois class themselves. The members of this social group were required to undergo a different kind of character-formation, be instilled with a different kind of virtues, than the type of human being characteristic of the Middle Ages. The latter type essentially met his social obligations by faithfully following all of the prescriptions in his predetermined sphere of life, performing his labor in the conventional manner, and ceding to the church or other lords whatever they demanded from him. When left to his own devices, he was able to let himself go to a certain degree, much like a child who has completed a certain required task. The modern human being, however, is always and everywhere responsible for themselves; the modern economy relies on everyone taking care of themselves. The businessmen and lords of the first manufactories could not just live hand-to-mouth, could not simply spend what they earned, but had to set their earnings aside to expand their businesses. They had to restrict themselves in service to enterprise. The suppression of drives, exclusive focus on acquisition, meticulous control over one’s own lifestyle and that of one’s family, and, above all else, thrift—these are the properties the prevailing type of human being of the present epoch were required to develop. This necessity largely dominates the ecclesiastical and cultural life of the era and gives ecclesiastical and even public speech in general its uniquely harsh and ascetic character. Speech has thus fulfilled a highly significant civilizational task. The ability of the human being to set aside his own drives and find satisfaction in his labor, profession, and working life is the precondition of the tremendous unfolding of science, technology, and industry in this epoch. The moralizing function of speech in this process can hardly be overstated.
But the effect on members of the propertied class strata forms only one side of the social significance of introversion. At the outset of the modern era, there arose the problem of incorporating large, propertyless masses into the new order of society. These masses consisted in part of discontented, impoverished, desperate peasants who could no longer eke out a living as a consequence of social transformations, in part of the growing propertyless class strata in the cities. The problem of managing such great masses has largely dominated history since the fourteenth century. The relation between these masses and the bourgeois class fluctuates. On the one hand, the misery of the masses was a visible expression of the obsolescence and incapacity of the feudal order, the abolition [Aufhebung] of which the businessmen and factory owners also had an interest in. On the other, the new economic order was also incapable of actually satisfying these masses. The poor had to learn how to set their wishes aside, to submit to factory regulations in particular and the demands of modern life in general—in short, to adapt as well as possible to the new conditions of life which were by no means easy to adapt to. Thus, we sometimes find the bourgeois class in league with the rebellious masses of the peasantry and the cities in an ever-renewed onslaught against feudal orders and privileges, against the nobility and the church, and at other times find the bourgeois class in opposition to these very same masses, putting them back in their place as their strict lord and master, teaching them the lesson that they are still far off from living in paradise. At high points in modern history—in the German Reformation, in the English and French Revolutions—this ambivalent relation appears clearly across the individual phases of these movements. But even in the more peaceful periods of modern history, each of the two sides can be distinguished from the other; they manifest together in politics, legislation, education, and cultural life as a whole.
The situation in which this influence—partly enlivening and inspiring, partly ascetic—is most pronounced is that of the speech of the leader at mass assemblies. Through this kind of speech, people are supposed to be filled by the nothingness of their own person instead of by their own person. The individual is supposed to set aside his immediate interests and goals for the sake of higher goals, which are represented by the leader—in fact, incarnated by him. Introversion is accomplished indirectly through love of the leader. The leader is the mediator [der Vermittler] between the decisive groups of society and the masses, and the relation between these groups and the masses fluctuates; since these groups cannot fulfill the all of the needs of the masses but are nevertheless in need of them, everything depends on the blind obedience of the masses towards the leader, on their relating to him as dutiful children submit to their admired father. The speech, however, is the most important means for establishing, strengthening, and renewing this relation. Leaders in modern times have therefore in large part been mass speakers [Massenredner]. Here, we immediately find an important distinction between speech essentially aimed at rational conviction [rationale Überzeugung] and speech essentially aimed at introversion. Wherever cognition [Erkenntnis], clarity, and actual conviction are of utmost importance, a smaller circle of listeners is preferable to a larger one. An academic seminar about a difficult theme tends to be the more fruitful the fewer participants there are. Parliaments also tend to form smaller committees to address important questions. On the other hand, wherever the aim is not so much the understanding of the listener as much as it is the listener being crushed, that he suppresses his own person and interests and finds full satisfaction in devotion to the figure of the speaker and the goals the speaker represents, the attendance of entire masses is preferable. A whole series of externalities—the solemnity of the space, the time of day, the songs before and after the speech, the ceremonious conduct of the speaker—play an important role. For the organizers of the event, the speech is not understood as a sober presentation, an analysis of actual social relations, but as a psychophysical influence, a medical treatment, a healing cure. This is already apparent from the frequency of their assemblies and the obligatory character of attendance at each of them; people are commanded to be present, and sometimes even detained for such purpose.
The ordinances from the Reformation period are very eloquent in this regard. Anyone who misses the sermon without prior excuse is punished with a fine, an iron collar [Halseisen], or imprisonment. The person of the speaker does not recede into the background, as in the case of a purely argumentative speech, but is clearly foregrounded; the place from which he speaks (given the mass of participants) must be elevated; the speaker himself, as well as some of his words, acquire an invulnerable, magical character. The attendees, who are supposed to surrender their own wishes and, in some circumstances, their own lives, cling to these symbols, by means of which they transcend themselves and their own smallness; such symbols are the guarantors of eternity. I cannot elaborate this psychological mechanism in detail here, but I hope I have succeeded in indicating the peculiarity of the kind of speech I have in mind. The whole question is closely linked to the problem of the leader in modern history. If, at the outset of the modern era, the venue for the leader’s speech was essentially the church, and its content was just as political as it was religious, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the stage for the effect of the leader on the masses was the political mass assembly. Here too, however, I would warn against judging historical phenomena one-sidedly on the basis of the present. Certainly the speaking events in some authoritarian states in Europe, those which have been calculated to have a purely suggestive effect, appear to us a procedure no longer appropriate today. These present-day appearances do not mark the beginning of modern Europe, but its end: they are latter-day repetitions. In earlier centuries, mass assemblies and mass influencing in general played a highly significant and progressive role in the development of humanity.
The incorporation of the masses into the given social order, their binding to the goals of the bourgeoisie—the hard school of modern social life first made the elements of these masses into self-conscious individuals. Without the work of its religious and political leaders and their oratorical influence on the constitution of the masses, modern history is inconceivable. Arnold of Brescia and Savonarola, Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis, Luther and Calvin, Cromwell and Danton are just a few of the more prominent names, and some of them would not even describe themselves as great orators. But these leaders had their sub-leaders and sub-sub-leaders, a whole staff of speakers, and all of them used speech as a tool to educate the masses, through love and admiration of the supreme leader, for the sake of the introversion and deployment of their person for determinate social goals.
The language in these speeches faithfully mirrors the social situation. Since the masses are supposed to help in the struggle against the old cultural forms, the cry for freedom [Ruf nach Freiheit] permeates modern speech. Honor and freedom are its grandest motifs. The leader himself appears as the rebel opposed to the authorities which are to be overthrown. On the other hand, however, only individual, determinate authorities are to be overthrown, and by no means is any autonomous and independent spirit to arise within the masses. Thus, for example, Savonarola attacks the pope of his time in the most violent manner, but by referring himself to earlier popes; he rejects the church of his time, but by referring to the authentic and true church. An even earlier political leader, Cola di Rienzo, who already bears many properties of [leaders of] the modern type, wanted to change the social relations of Rome in his time and thereby to renew the splendor of ancient Rome. The Reformation itself enters the battlefield against the Catholic Church brandishing the original, authentic Christianity. The leader declares himself in the course of his speech a liberator on the one hand and an executor of the ancient, holy powers and forces on the other; he always feels himself to be a messenger from a higher power to whom he is obedient in the same way his sub-leaders and followers are supposed to be obedient to him. All too easily, his speech can pivot from an encouraging, inspiring tone into an admonishing, even scolding and contemptuous one. There is something inherently misanthropic to many modern leaders. There are speeches from the Reformation period in which the speaker addresses his listeners as devils or breaks out into the cry: “May plague, war, and hunger come upon you.”13 Luther himself spoke the following: “In secret, burghers and peasants, men and women, children and servants, princes, officials, and their subjects are all of the devil.”14 But such contempt for the masses, which is found among many of the more modern leaders of the present, does not harm their popularity in the least.
Whenever the crowd attends a speech in which they themselves are scolded, they must have the feeling there are other people and groups somewhere out there which are more despised by the leader, and even completely rebuked by him. In the Reformation, Catholics played this role; in the French Revolution, aristocrats. The crowd feels relatively loved by the leader and, as it were, compensated for the renunciation of their drives, because at the very least he still speaks to them, but for those on the outside he has only damnation left over. I have already mentioned the symbolic significance of individual words. In addition to this, I would like to point out a further peculiarity of mass-speech in modern times, so far as these speeches aim not so much at the formation of judgment [Urteilsbildung] as irrational influence [irrationalen Einfluß]. This is evident in the repetition of individual words or individual sentences in a stereotypical form. Savonarola once said that the preacher does not need the gift of miracles, but only the frequent repetition of the word.15 At a first glance, it may seem this repetition has the purpose of ensuring certain facts are not forgotten. However, this would be a superficial perspective on the matter, which is evident from the fact that it is less important that one points out the facts than that one always uses the same signs and words—in the manner of a ritual. It is not the content, but the form that is essential. Words and signs become independent entities, so to speak; they appear to be endowed with a power of their own. This attitude towards words points back to earlier stages of human history. Through anthropology and ethnology, we learn that many primitive tribes believe a person’s name has an existence of its own, indeed that it is the soul of the one who bears it: for example, in the belief that by digging someone’s name into the earth and then crossing it out or erasing it, one has thereby inflicted something terrible upon its bearer.
The name possesses a significance akin to that of a weapon, or the image of a person. The utterance of a name or of certain words in general has at certain times a healing, at other times a fatal significance. Think of the prohibition on uttering the name of God in the Jewish religion. Even in the consciousness of modern times, we find remnants of this attitude. Thus the German saying that one should not “paint the devil on the wall” [“den Teufel nicht an die Wand malen”] which means that uttering the name of the devil will attract the devil himself, [and] in a broader sense that that misfortune strikes if one calls it by name. In another respect, the reassurance modern man feels at the notion that “his name lives on” after his death is also connected with these ancient psychic reactions. Though only a part of this attitude still remains in conscious life, we know from modern psychology that such ancient inclinations of the human race live on in the unconscious, or rather, that the logic of the unconscious psychic life of modern human beings has close affinity with the thinking and feeling of primitives. And the mass speaker who is concerned with overwhelming the listener appeals precisely to this unconscious, to the deepest and most hidden instincts of the crowd. He ensures that when certain words and sentences are spoken, a “holy shudder” of enthusiasm or a wave of hatred arises; that aggressiveness is evoked with one word, a feeling of guilt with another; that, depending on the word, contrition or rapture kicks in. He hands the crowd words which they brandish against evil, to banish any danger, like a crucifix or holy icon. On the other hand, he creates words which are inseparably bound to the concept of something bad and depraved, so that whoever is called by such a word is from then on branded with an indelible mark of shame, no matter what else he may be.
The better part of the technique of modern speech is based on the correct manipulation of repetition, and here its far-reaching commonality with advertising and propaganda becomes apparent. It would lead us too far off course to uncover the psychological mechanisms underlying the political as much as the commercial propaganda through the last four centuries. In any event, I believe I have been able to indicate to you a crucial distinction between speech for the sake of conviction [Überzeugung] and speech for the sake of introversion. In the speech which aims to enable the formation of judgment [Urteilsbildung]—regardless of whether the judgment that the speaker tries to prove is true or false—it would be extremely clumsy if the speaker were to use the exact same words over and over again, and to repeat the same sentences. The speaker has to be on guard against the accusation of stereotypy, he must take care not to detract from the liveliness of the talk with formulaic phrases, and not say the same too often—or, at least, not in the exact same words. In modern mass speeches, it is just the reverse.
Though the great speakers and leaders of modern times have not always been conscious of these facts in detail, many have nevertheless grasped the fundamentals. A great German preacher from the transition between the thirteenth and fourteenth century formulated the fact of introversion clearly: “Thus, all pious exercises were invented—be it prayer, reading, singing, keeping vigil, fasting, penance, and whatever else there may be—so that man might be kept from alien, ungodly things by them.”16 Political speakers demand the renunciation of the claims of the individual not so much with a view to God and eternity as to people and race, for which they also assert a kind of eternity. They have been extraordinarily clear about the presupposition, significance, and technique. As one contemporary orator says: “False concepts and bad knowledge can be eliminated through learning, resistance of feeling never. Only an appeal to these mysterious forces [geheimnisvollen Kräfte]” (he is thinking of instincts, of the unconscious) “can be effective here; and this the writer can hardly do, but almost always only by the speaker.”17 There are considerations to be made concerning the best time for the speech, and it is expressly declared that evening is most suited for generating the desired mood, since during the day “the volitional forces [willensmäßigen Kräfte] of men seems to resist with greatest energy the attempted imposition of a foreign will and foreign opinion.”18 Whereas the speaker concerned with knowledge and reason, indeed with intellectual attention in general, wants his listeners to be as awake and as lucid as possible, it is expressly said by the mass speakers that it is better the masses are not “in full possession of their intellectual and volitional vitality”19 when the speaker addresses them. I could pile such testimonies from speakers and leaders over the last few centuries on top of one another. When you look through the documents yourselves, you will find them to be full of such evidence.
By way of conclusion, I would like to return to an objection which you, as historians, have surely already made inwardly and toward which I have even alluded on occasion. It is the question of whether speech in antiquity did not also bear the peculiarity spoken of here. To this, I answer that here, the problem is similar to many in the theory of history: a phenomenon which stands out particularly strongly in a certain historical period can already be observed earlier as an element of earlier historical events, but the weight it has is different. Certainly, there are many speeches to be found in antiquity which bear features similar to those I have highlighted. Ancient Rome knew similar social contradictions to those which predominate in modern times—namely, the contradiction between patrician and plebeian. However, there is still a significant distinction.20 The class strata which performed the most difficult labor in the Roman Empire were the slaves. They did not need to be adapted to the social process through a reformation of their character as did the masses of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and following centuries. They were not free, but compelled by physical means of violence. Their opinion, their own will played much less of a role. The speech to the masses is a social function that plays out between those who are free, not between masters and slaves. In the domination of slaves, the cross performs its real function as an instrument of torture and not as a symbol. Meneius Agrippa speaks to the masses.21 But his speech is addressed to the plebeians, not to the slaves. Beyond that, despite some affinities with more recent speeches, which arose from affinities in the situation, it has a rather rationalistic coloring and has little to do with introversion. Menenius seeks to prevent the plebeians from rebelling against the patricians.
But his parable of the stomach and the other parts of the organism is meant to make clear that it is wiser and more useful for them to submit, not, however, that they should abandon themselves. Further: the distinction we have drawn between modern and classical speech is contained within speech in the present as well. Even today, some speeches appeal more to reason and others aim more for introversion; indeed, every single speech bears both features, only in varying proportion to one another. Where in the authoritarian states of Europe, we observe the whole apparatus of mysticism and suggestion predominate in the speech of the leader, in democratic states the speaker has to appeal more to the understanding and interests of his listeners. The latter leaves it to the listeners to form a final judgment [ein endgültiges Urteil] themselves, and gives them time to think over the individual arguments in silence, and decide independently. The listener should not be persuaded, but instructed and enlightened, which requires reflection and examination of their own. I hope I have stimulated as much with my own comments today.
III. Lectures on Authority and Society (1936/37)
[Prefatory Remarks by the Editors, MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985):] Horkheimer’s three lectures on ‘Authority and Society’ constitute the beginning and end of the ISR’s first lecture series at Columbia University in New York. This series of lectures was announced [in late 1936] for the first semester of 1937 under the title ‘Authority and Status in Modern Society.’ This theme was pursued further in several lecture series; however, only the first has been preserved in the Horkheimer-Archiv. In addition to Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Lazarsfeld, Friedrich Pollock, Julian Gumperz, Erich Fromm, Franz L. Neumann, Leo Löwenthal and Ernst Schachtel—whose lecture, however, was cancelled—were listed as contributors to the lecture series. Horkheimer summarizes the content of their individual contributions in his closing lecture. This sequence of lectures immediately followed the publication of the Studien über Autorität und Familie, begun in Europe [prior to the ISR’s exile] and published in Paris [by Librairie Félix Alcan] in 1936. Horkheimer’s lectures are an introduction to the problematic developed in detail in the Studien: the centrality of ‘authority’ as a social-theoretical category. Beyond this, these lectures contain an outline of the social-philosophical method representative of the ISR, [defined] against the background of its oppositions to both the rationalist-empiricist and metaphysical traditions of [social] thought.22
[Transcribed from English typescripts in the Max Horkheimer Archive (MHA), [Na 1 651]]
A. First Lecture
The courses on Authority and Society to be given during this and the following semester by members of the Institute for Social Research including myself depart in many respects from usual procedure.
The delivery of our lectures will suffer in the main from one defect which no one can feel more keenly than myself, namely, the linguistic difficulties. It is not such things as a grammatical error, the misuse of a word, or, perhaps, the foreign accent which we ourselves shall feel in these hours as impediments—your indulgence can at least partly compensate us in this regard; it is rather our paucity of words and our deficiency in delicate shades of expression. The difficult subject makes it desirable to employ the whole wealth of nicely turned phrases and balanced constructions which the English language places at the command of the skilled. But many of us must be content to have on our lips only the simplest, the every-day phrase. This imperfection is less palpable in imparting isolated facts. It manifests itself strongly, however, in the development of abstract principles and then the linguistic form does not fit the idea like a form-fitting gown, but rather like a cowl of coarse texture that misfits the body. It would be a grave mistake to presume that this flaw can be overcome easily. I can promise you, however, that we shall do everything to offset this deficiency by other means.
The second peculiarity of our lecture is again a matter of whether we are talking the same language, but in a figurative sense. Most of us have received our intellectual training not only through the medium of the German language, but also in the German scientific tradition. With regard to our subject, it may be useful to add a few words concerning the special and distinctive characteristics of this tradition. England and France played important roles in the world economy long before Germany. Commerce and industry developed in Germany only after the middle classes of other countries had begun to exercise not only economic power but also political power and had stamped their mentality upon the cultural life of these countries. During the French revolution, and more so during the English revolution, the Germans engaged in industry led a modest and relatively submissive existence both as individuals and as a social stratum. Their entire mode of living and thinking was not directed toward seizure of the internal political power, the administration of the state or the expansion of national dominion over maritime routes and foreign continents, but toward a contemplative, introverted life. Absolutism, allied with the feudal powers, did not leave them any other outlet. Their gradually increasing energies turned instead upon themselves, upon the depth and range of ideas, ignoring, however, their applicability.
We do not have to discuss the detrimental consequences of this development. They are well known to you. While there came into being in England and France a self-conscious, world-wise middle class able to take care of its affairs, the corresponding German strata became accustomed to transacting their business under the continued guidance of a bureaucracy almost free from their control. Such qualities as reverie, fanciful imagination, romantic tendency, the inferiority complex of the individual, subordination to leadership, yearning for the privilege to obey, the whole bent for irrationalism, are characteristic of the German people, a fact which recent events have revealed clearly enough. These traditional traits manifest themselves conspicuously both in their thought and speech. French literary composition and English composition distinguish themselves still more by simplicity, preciseness, lucidity, and clearness of arrangement. These qualities have been acquired by working with nature, by handling and molding men and things and by having command over them. The Germans, driven to introversion, have developed ideas not so much to put them to use, but rather to play with their theoretical possibilities, always mirroring the general in the particular. Their judgments are often involved and only indirectly related to definite, tangible objects of reality. The same concept fulfills different functions depending upon its position in diverse trains of thought. Only the context reveals the function referred to. The idea of a sentence cannot be understood solely by what precedes it but requires even more the further reading of what follows; briefly, thinking is much less directly related to the actual Here and Now than it is in the positivist mode of thinking of Western Europe. And so German metaphysics has become synonymous with obscure, complicated, and ponderous thinking good for—one never knows what.
While we do not overlook the drawbacks inherent in such a development, the much complained-of obscurity of this mode of thinking is the price paid for certain qualities which cannot be attributed in the same measure to French and English literature. Descartes’ Meditations and David Hume’s Enquiry are works of French and English philosophy, justly famous for their exemplary lucidity. Anyone reading these writings, not so much to broaden his education or, perhaps, to pass an academic examination, but as these authors expect him to, in order to gain knowledge concerning the human mind and its relationship to the outer world, will make an amazing discovery, provided, of course, that he approaches the subject with all seriousness. The stream of thought, the individual concepts, the judgments and conclusions, apparently so pellucid, prove to be loaded with innumerable unsolved problems which never strike the attention of the superficial reader but present themselves only as one proceeds from words to actual conditions. These methods and opinions developed by these writers reveal a remarkable impotence when confronted with the concrete manifestations of the human mind, of the individual psyche as well as of configurations of societal life, the different forms of culture, the economy, the organization of states, education, religion, art, etc. When these simple thoughts are applied to the problems of the living world and one is no longer satisfied to study this or that recurrent fact in isolation, but endeavors to comprehend tendencies and the general nexus of things, it becomes manifest that this formal clarity of thinking falsely appears to indicate clarity concerning concrete objects.
The difference between this way of thinking, particularly adapted to the technique of the natural sciences and the presentation of historical facts in the Central-European tradition, lies in this. We do not maintain that we are able at the outset to formulate principles which give a definite insight into the very essence of things. We do not claim to have at our disposal such simple definitions that any further treatment of the subject would merely be in the way of differentiation, application or amendment. If this were true, I should only have to give in my next lectures definitions of authority, of society, the family, etc., later to illustrate these definitions by means of specific cases and to show their interrelation, and on your part you could look forward, after a few lectures, to taking home definite insights and preserving the finished product forever after. We are of the opinion, however, that clarity comes at the end, not at the beginning. In the beginning, naturally, we must make use of abstract definitions, but such definitions, when tested by reality, always remain isolated notions, distorted and untrue. Such untrue statements, which are necessary in all abstract definitions, are overcome only by slow and progressive proximity to concrete objects and by keeping a watchful eye for the essential. This difficulty is at the same time an advantage of the philosophical method which we will follow in our lectures.
Whenever I mention that I am studying the role which authority plays in present-day society, my interested friend will ask questions such as these: “Well, what do you think of authority anyway? What do you think of democracy and fascism? Shall children be brought up without restraint? Is this society heading toward a catastrophe?” and similar trifles which people expect me to dispose in passing. At the risk of being taken for a metaphysician hopelessly enmeshed in cobwebs of obfuscation, I usually answer that if we wanted to arrive at an understanding of the problems, both of us would have to labor hard. As a rule, my astonished friend is then polite enough to suppress the remark: “Why, you have been studying these problems for years, and now you cannot even answer such simple questions.”
Even at the conclusion of these lectures you will not have a definite formulation of the problem. You will possess only the equipment by which science enables you to analyze the functions of authority in modern society. In every case which you wish to analyze, you must adjust these tools anew to the given historical situation. The science of history does not save one the trouble of thinking—rather, it stimulates thinking, although of another sort than that required by the formal sciences. During our lectures we shall endeavor to convey to you as complete a picture as possible of the role of authority in the life of modern society. You must bear in mind, however, that this picture does not consist in a mere succession of facts. You will see that the correct understanding of every fact brought before you must be founded on theories which will be developed as we go along in our lectures. I must also warn you that we cannot give you a ready-made formula for the application of these theories to actualities since the latter are constantly changing. —So you see that the assimilation of the views which will be presented to you here is beset with a number of specific difficulties.
After having shown you all the obstacles arising from our foreign origin and our particular methods, as well as from the subject we are dealing with, I shall now delineate the procedure by which we shall seek to overcome these obstacles. You may find that this procedure, too, is somewhat unusual. —The problem of the function of credit in our economic system, the significance of sovereignty in constitutional law, the role of general concepts in epistemology, and many other problems are established subjects of scientific literature and of university lectures. On the other hand, the problem of authority in modern society, to the study of which we have devoted our efforts for several years, has no precedent in the field of scientific investigation, for it owes its origin to a newly-awakened interest in current history. In order to understand the present we must go back to the past, not for its own sake, to be sure, but for reasons which have to do with the practical tasks of the day. A few years ago our problem, which arose from the concern for contemporary history, would not have been recognized as such even by the scientifically trained. Since then it has been acknowledged as one of the most urgent theoretical problems of the present time. The complete reversal of the former attitude is reflected by a series of important publications on these subjects, no less than by the speeches delivered on the occasion of the Harvard Tercentenary. The role of authority in modern society has become one of the basic problems which the foremost scholars of the world have made the subject of their concentrated studies.
You will be disappointed if, for an elucidation of our problem, you look into the existing scientific literature, where one may readily find definite answers to questions concerning the functions of gravitation in our solar system, the circulation of the blood in the human body, or the effect of a certain bacillus on organisms. Even if books do not give the desired answer there is probably always some scientist to whom one may turn for information. On the subject of authority, we find occasional references in historical works, in text books on psychology and sociology, but above all, in the speeches and programs of statesmen. Now, quite apart from the fact that these references approach the problem from various angles and of necessity bear the stamp of superficiality because they deal with matters only loosely connected to the essence of authority, they have also the disadvantage of contradiction and mutual exclusiveness. The most disturbing factor in the study of our problem, however, is the fact that the subject matter is scattered among various more or less unrelated fields. History tells us that this or that great man had this or that view on authority; sociology, that authority in the Middle Ages was regarded in a different light than it is today; psychology, that the attitude toward authority has its roots in the family; comparative political science, in what respect democracies, from antiquity down to the present, have been clashing with authoritarian forms of government. Then again, a statesman will declare that authority is the foundation of civilization and culture, while certain philosophers, mystics, or poets, like Tolstoy, proclaim that God is the only true authority and that over-expanding secular authority is the source of all evil among mankind. The fact remains that not only in Europe but all over the world there is taking place a social struggle, filled with individual tragedies, under the banners of authority, the authoritarian state, training for authority, the authoritarian personality, etc., although the majority of the people affected—and that includes the intellectuals—do not have a very clear view of these subjects.
If I have said that our knowledge of the essence of authority must be gathered in many fields of intellectual endeavor, I do not mean to imply that in the treatment of our problem we must disregard the individual insights of the various scientific disciplines. To solve the chief problems of the theory of society in a vacuum or in the rarefied atmosphere of philosophy, or neglecting the results of the meritorious empirical work of the individual disciplines, would set us back instead of helping us advance. It is true that specialization has often borne bad fruits. But this is not directly due to the differentiation of empirical thought. What has been lacking—and this should have been done before, in view of theoretical and practical interest in the great historical tasks—is the concentrated effort to relate the product of the investigations undertaken by the various sciences to the key problems of the present time. Philosophy, the universal, all-embracing science, is exposed to the same danger as the so-called individual disciplines; like these, philosophy is not built up with reference to the important problems of the times, which are in a continuous state of evolution and transformation, and is therefore not readjusted to them as the need arises. In attacking our problem we shall of course remain mindful of our purpose and avoid getting lost in the jungle of psychological, sociological, and juridical sub-questions and sub-sub-questions, nor shall we stop with the preliminary and preliminary to preliminary questions involving principles and methods. You are going to hear exponents of the individual disciplines: economists, psychologists, statisticians, historians, etc. They will speak about their own fields like most specialists who do not deviate from the methods of their own disciplines. There will be a difference, however, in this respect. While each expert separately will speak about his particular field, their joint effort will be coordinated and directed toward the same problem, namely, the significance of authority in the life of modern society.
I know that by now you have a number of questions in your minds. For instance: what is meant by authority in this connection? Is it authority in the meaning of authoritative institutions, such as the states, the constitution, the administration of the city, the police, etc.? Is authority considered a phenomenon of consciousness of a character trait? Does the term authority designate the quality of an impressive personality, such as a so-called leader, or does it designate a relationship between individuals? A little later I shall attempt to make some conceptual differentiations so that we may have a temporary starting point. Complete clearness, however, will come to you gradually only as we proceed in this course, that is, when you begin to perceive the deeper interrelations among these problems. The answers to such fundamental questions as have been outlined here must be deferred for a little while. In the course of the lectures, when a greater wealth of material will be at our disposal, we shall revert to these questions frequently and we shall then be able to deal with them more fruitfully than could be done at present. Right now I may tell you only that we shall consider authority as a phenomenon of consciousness, as a relationship between individuals, as a function of the family and the state, and in many other aspects, such as the interrelationship of family and state authority. Manifold as may be the working methods and the materials we shall present here, the discerning among you will soon become aware that everything is bearing on one question only: the mechanisms and the tendencies of the historical development of the present era viewed as a historical entity. We believe that in order to understand these a full comprehension of the category of authority is of considerable importance.
B. Second Lecture
In my introduction, I told you we shall not advance any definitions at the beginning of our discussions. Nevertheless, as we need a working basis, we cannot entirely do so without a number of conceptual differentiations of a general order, which will guide us throughout the whole course.
The concept of authority stands in opposition to two other concepts. Firstly, to that of free, self-directed action, or autonomy. In following my own, spontaneous judgment and not that of an extraneous power, that is, when my action is the clear expression of my will—of an autonomous will, we might say—I am not following the command of an authority. The preoccupation with the significance of authority as the antithesis of autonomy or, in other words, freedom and reason, has dominated the intellectual life of the last centuries.
You know that during the Middle Ages every individual in the Christian Occident was subjected to the supreme authority of the Catholic Church in all phases of his thinking and with his whole soul. Not revelation or God, but the Church had jurisdiction in all vital questions of human life. St. Augustine himself once said that he would not believe even in the Gospel if it were not supported by the authority of the Catholic Church. The dependence of men on authority, which is expressed in all social relationships of the Middle Ages, especially in the relation of feudal lord to serf, is also reflected by all phases of medieval cultural life. And since very detail of the earthly existence of the medieval man was regulated by this conscious dependence on higher authorities—the peasant, bound to the soul, looking to his lord, and the city craftsman to his princely patron and protector—it is not hard to understand why even an idea would not be regarded true unless it was upheld by an established authority. When a subject lay outside the province of the Church, support was sought in appeal to the authority of Aristotle or Plato, and to other classical authors. Even the authors issuing from the burgher class, which increased its power with the rise of the free cities and has impressed its stamp on cultural life ever since the Renaissance, could not dispose completely with the authority of older writings. We have seen this especially during the Reformation. The authors of that period did not oppose the Catholic Church with a new theory, but only with the literal text of the Bible. Hobbes, who was an atheist and materialist, and even Spinoza, frequently marshaled the Gospel or the Old Testament in support of their views.
The standard under which the modern era has led the charge against the Middle Ages, is Reason, the rational thinking of the individual, untrammeled by interference from any extraneous authority or power. This type of reason creates autonomy, the freedom of action of the individual. Time and again, all through the great literature of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, time and again we find passionate attacks on the inward unfreedom of the individual. This unfreedom is not merely the uncritical acceptance of foreign opinions but also enslavement to one’s own desires and habits. Just as the individual in society has freed himself from the shackles of slavery or serfdom, he should throw off his inward fetters and begin to think independently. A German philosopher has said that Enlightenment is the intellectual coming-of-age of men. There is no name too great or exalted that a judgment supported by its authority should be accepted without subjecting this judgment to the critique of our reason. The type of authority described here is something negative: it is the antithesis of independence and freedom.
Upon hearing this statement someone will make the obvious objection that, after all, there is still something like desirable authority: naturally, it is not contrary to sound reason, and certainly it is in harmony with it, when a child follows the judgment of his father, a patient the instructions of the physician, or when the passenger aboard a ship places his implicit trust in the seamanship of the captain commanding it. If we did not have this kind of authority to rely upon, our lives would indeed be unproductive and we should perish before long. But remember: in the above statement we did not reject authority as such. What we reject is its authority untested by reason, for this authority is the root of heteronomy, the domination of others. When I have convinced myself, by virtue of my reasoned judgment, that another man knows more than I about a certain subject, and act accordingly, I do not consider him an authority in the same sense in which the Middle Ages looked at the Holy Scripture and the Church. We cannot rationally explain the superiority of a prophet in matters pertaining to God and to salvation, as we can the professional knowledge of a physician in matters pertaining to medicine. The physician has acquired this knowledge in a manner which is open to our rational understanding and therefore also accessible to our rational judgment. On the other hand, it is of the very nature of the prophet that his mission has been communicated to him through inspiration or grace, both mediums which elude rational control. Therein lies the difference between the two kinds of authority. I may mention now that, like the authority of the prophet, the authority of the so-called leaders in Europe, whom millions are blindly obeying at present, is of a mystic, irrational quality which is founded in the emotions of the masses.
The terminology used in our lectures carries out the distinction between the types of authority. Whenever the term “authority” is used without any qualifications, the lecturer means nothing else but the problem of authority and refers to the emotional and irrational type of authority which has no foundation in reason. Whether the subject discussed regards the relationship among persons, the character of an institution, or individual character traits, this is the type of authority which the great authors of the last centuries have designated as the antithesis of autonomy. In no way does this term imply any judgment regarding the desirability or undesirability of submission to authority in some situations. An excellent example of this type of authority is given by a woman who blindly submits all her actions to the will of a man because she loves him. This woman may find happiness or unhappiness in her submission to this man, but that will depend entirely upon the particular circumstances of the case and even more so on the qualities of the man. Happy or unhappy, one thing is certain: she does not act independently, autonomously.
Our problem is therefore concerned with the social implications of authority as heteronomy. On the other hand, in referring to authority founded in reason, we shall always qualify the term “authority”. We shall then speak of rational authority, that is, rational subordination and discipline, or, more often, in order to stress the opposition to emotional authority, we shall use the German term “Sach-Autorität,” which describes rational authority in its aspect of objective and consciously admitted superiority, complied with for practical reasons.
After having contrasted authority with independent action, or autonomy, we shall now proceed to compare authority with coercion. Authority does not enter into the condition of the Roman agricultural slave who, on the way to the fields and when driven back again to his miserable quarters, was kept in chains. This is an illustration of coercion, for the performance of the slave’s labor is not the result of subordination to authority. Of course, we do not wish to imply that authority is entirely free from coercion. What distinguishes the two is the fact that in authority, coercion is less direct and, above all, not physical. If the individual in Germany or in Italy recognizes the authority of his immediate superiors, and ultimately that of the national leader, it is not unreasonable to assume that the virtual omnipotence of the state bureaucracy and the threat of serious inconveniences if another attitude were exhibited, are not wholly inconsequential considerations. In the spontaneous respect of the labor an element of coercion is also present, although the individual is not always conscious of it. The feeling of this potential coercion, however, has been so completely incorporated in his psychological make-up that the awareness of coercion need not necessarily become effective. Elements of coercion underlie many phenomena of social life, for instance, our yielding to conventions, we are all mindful of the harmful consequences incurred by disregard of the customs of the milieu in which we live. In accepting the social order, laws, and customs, or obeying an exalted person invested with power, the individual is submitting to authority. In doing this, his action is not based entirely on reason or entirely on coercion. In the case referred to, the awareness of the high position of the feared personality has become part and parcel of the individual’s will; his fear is now enhanced by recognition and admiration. We all adjust our actions to the unconscious influence of innumerable ideas, habits, people and institutions. During the greater part of our lives we follow, without any visible coercion, the path marked out by the existing order. Our whole life is permeated by the influence of authorities. Observe yourselves, and you will discover that, on most occasions, your actions are based neither on coercion nor on your own deep convictions. In a much greater measure the same is true of the masses.
At this point you may have already realized that a thorough-going study of authority is indispensable for the understanding of society. Humanity is no longer at the state of direct coercion; but neither has humanity reached the state of a universal reasonableness which would extend to every phase of human life. Men accomplish their subordination to existing conditions mainly by letting these conditions become part of their will and then act accordingly. Neither coercion nor reason are exclusively responsible for the form of present-day societal life. It is rather the faculty of man to act in harmony with authority, which has determined the profile of history. If this faculty had been lacking in the make-up of human beings, it would have been absolutely impossible to give cohesion to society. Consequently, the study of how this faculty has been developed, how it has been modified in the course of time, together with the prediction of the future form of authority, constitutes an important chapter of sociology.
Having laid down the first conceptual differentiations, I shall proceed to my next task. I must outline to you those aspects of authority which are peculiar to authority of modern times compared with other historical epochs. This is a very difficult task, and I shall perhaps have to oversimplify the subject in order to be understood clearly.
In our days the concept of authority has a characteristic which it shares with all fundamental concepts. Authority does not appear as what it is, and we need therefore well-disciplined thinking to discover it among all other manifestations of everyday life. I shall make myself a little clearer yet. When I say that the individual has acted in accordance with authority not only after the 15th and 16th centuries, but even after the abolition of serfdom, a sociologist may reply: “Why, of course, this is quite obvious! We follow not only parents and teachers, but we conform ourselves to state and ecclesiastical authorities, just as we leave it to the architect to build our homes, and to the art expert to guide our aesthetic taste. We have experts in every phase of human activity, on whom we rely for the direction of affairs.” As this could be interpreted as “Sach-Autorität,” let me point to advertising: Our purchases depend on the ability of a skillful advertiser to impress us with a certain name or brand. When we buy something in a store, our selection may moreover be influenced by the clerk, and, even more easily, by a pretty sales girl. Not only in buying and selling, but also in higher cultural and social matters we are constantly under the influence of other persons and powers. Our views about the world situation as well as national affairs are to a great extent prejudged by newspapers. Whether we want it or not, we see events through the spectacles of the reporter. The radio and the movies also influence our taste and our judgments. It is unnecessary to continue this enumeration. We know that our will and our thoughts, and consequently our actions, are influenced by a great many external factors. Special branches of science, such as the psychologies of buying and selling, advertising, journalism, etc., deal with these types of influences. Now, if the subject is so well covered, what is the good of a special study of authority? Why these general discussions, since the subject before us is so clear?
Well, we think that as philosophers and sociologists, we cannot be satisfied with such easily gained clarity. A superficial study might lead us past the core of the problem and we would then fail to understand our times. We are of the opinion that we can reach an understanding of the dependence of modern man upon authorities, advertising, newspapers, political and religious prophets of all sorts, and so forth, only if we are able to demonstrate the extent of the far-reaching and specific dependence on authority of modern man, which inevitably makes him susceptible to such influences. Our present era has its particular forms of authority, just as the Middle Ages and antiquity had theirs. It would be a great error to assume that we submit to authority only when we wish to do so with our full will and knowledge, or when we invite another will to guide us.
In order to understand the problem we must inquire into what happened in society after the medieval conception of authority had given way. As you are trained in sociology, I shall not have to waste much time in explaining it. The peasant bound to the soil had to relinquish to his lord a certain portion of the product of his labor and could use for himself only the remainder. The relationship characteristic of feudalism was that of master and servant, and not of free men. In the cities, too, the relationship between craftsmen and consumers was strictly regulated. Although this latter relationship, even before the Middle Ages came to a close, had developed into one of free burghers among themselves, business life took place within relatively narrow limits, and thus the life of the individual, from the very start, was determined by very definite rules. Very little room was left to the expression of his own will. When the son of a burgher was apprenticed, he was unconditionally delivered into the hands of a harsh master and of still more brutal journeymen.
The historical process of the emancipation from feudalism, which continued through many centuries, ended in the abolition of serfdom and of the right of manorial lords to exact unpaid labor from their peasants. Concurrently with this development was the agglomeration of people in the cities, whom neither a master nor a guild could tell how to live. The old authorities of social and religious life began to crumble. But were these people actually free? Theoretically at least, they did not have to obey any person because of his inherited rights. They could do as they pleased. According to our sociologist interlocutor of a while ago, who is such an authority on authority, the roaming bands of peasants in England during the 16th and 17th centuries, and the masses of the Italian cities and in the French provinces, would have been much more independent, more “autonomous,” than modern man, for they had no newspapers, no radios, no movies, and no advertising, none of the specific instruments of authority, to influence and govern them. True enough, there were laws, but we have them today, too. Were these people after the overthrow of the feudal order, e.g., after the French Revolution, more independent than we? Or, if not, did at least no new authorities other than those which, as fundamental human phenomena had existed also during the Middle Ages, enter their lives? Did humanity from then on really organize life according to reason, or did a new authority replace the old relationship between master and servant as the foundation of social life?
I believe the answer, and a very convincing one, too, is already formulated in your minds. The authority claiming supremacy over these liberated masses at the opening of the new era was: hunger. Whereas they had formerly worked for their lords because they were their serfs for centuries, they now accepted the conditions offered by the owners of workshops and manufactories, because they had to eat and industrial employment was the only way to secure their daily bread. This situation may be clearly observed as late as the 19th century. But life was so wretched in these new places that they ran away, or at least tried to, as soon as they had earned the money for a meal. Eventually laws had to be devised to keep these people in their none-too-pleasant shops and factories. Going one step higher in the social pyramid, we discover that the direct incentive to work is no longer hunger but a desire for certain regularity of income and security of existence. Among the higher and highest social groups engaged in industry, the dominant note is the will to increase the influence and jurisdiction over men and things, or to control whole industries and markets.
But this answer which we have found so quickly does not yet permit unequivocal distinction between the conditions of the Middle Ages and those of our era. Hunger and the desire for security have been driving forces at all times; and the ambitions for gain and power have probably not been entirely unknown before our era. We shall have to go one step further if we wish to arrive at a clear distinction between the two epochs. Hunger and ambition instigate action; they are strong motives but they do not give the action content or direction. Keeping this in mind, we at once know where to look for this hidden distinction.
During the Middle Ages the individual was told by his master what he was expected to do. This rule applied as much to persons in the various ranks of the ecclesiastical and secular hierarchies as to the peasant and the burgher. Only the most exalted dignitaries of the state and of the church were their own masters, although these, too, had to accept a supreme authority. The supreme secular power in Germany was in the hands of the emperor, elected by the prince-electors, and there was also the Diet to reckon with. The church dignitaries had to defer to the cardinals’ college and, at least nominally, to the Councils. Moreover, the laws of succession, hallowed by tradition, and a number of traditional prescripts laid out the approved course for the individual. Modern man has nothing to go by, however, and must let his own experience be his guide. When great masses of people were emancipated toward the close of the Middle Ages, nobody could order them about any longer; but conditions themselves became their task-masters. Society needs the work of the individual, and also in the modern era it insists on his collaboration in the production of the necessities of life and all that is connected therewith. At work, it is now no sacrosanct tradition to which he bows; it is simply that, if he wants to live, he must work in a factory, take up a profession or some other kind of useful occupation. Nor is he free in his choice of occupation. His opportunities are limited and vary, moreover, with conditions. The best he can hope for is to strike as perfect a balance as possible between his aptitudes and the offered job. The entrepreneur, too, is not free to do as he chooses. Let us suppose that he has an inordinate liking for red patent leather boots. As long as his money lasts he can make red patent leather boots and nobody will think of stopping him. To satisfy his whim he may even run a big factory exclusively for this purpose. Some day, however, it may dawn upon him that society does not share his preference for red patent leather boots, and he will then stop manufacturing them. You noticed that no guild interfered with him to restrict his output, and that no authority enjoined him to cease and desist. The mere circumstance that nobody bought his boots forced him to stop making any more. He has been thoroughly convinced by cold facts.
To anticipate events, to follow and observe them, and not merely to take notice when it is too late, is, in our days, absolutely necessary for the worker as well as for the manufacturer, for the employee as well as for the artist and the author. A lack of this sense of reality would spell privation and ruin for the individual. In former times the needs and wishes of society were voiced through certain privileged personages and corporations. Today these needs make themselves heard through economic and social conditions, through the “language of facts.” The worker, today as in the past, follows the orders of the foreman or the manufacturer. To be sure, he no longer obeys because of any respect due them by their positions; he does so only because circumstances compel him to. The entrepreneur, too, has to adjust himself to outside forces. Neither a guild nor a protector tells him what to make and how much he may produce. All this is is regulated indirectly by market conditions and the whole structure of the economy. Authority is no longer an immediate relationship, but a “Sach-verhältnis,” a relation mediated through objective facts, and the dependence on impersonal facts has taken the place of dependence on persons. Man today is characterized by a superlatively developed sense of reality and a receptivity for all that is established; by openness and respect with regard to the tangible, as well as by a great admiration of success. All the secondary emanations of authority, which have been mentioned before—namely, newspapers, advertising, radio, etc.—are but the amplification and intensification of the “language of facts.” These factors of modern life are surface phenomenon only and presuppose a highly developed veneration of facts. The resignation to the higher will of God or his representatives on earth has been replaced by a resignation to the exigencies of life. In societies where this resignation prevails, sensualism and empiricism, positivism and pragmatism are the outstanding systems of philosophy.
Here and now I should like to answer an objection which might easily have arisen in your minds. As good positivists you could argue that the respect for facts is not a peculiar trait of modern man, corresponding to the respect for persons characteristic of medieval man; that “respect for facts” is but another name for “good common sense”; and that in the absence of the latter quality reasoning and action would not harmonize with the realities of the material world and would lead the individual to a certain fall.
You would be quite right, too. But truth though it is, it is not the whole truth. Plain common sense, the registering of concrete facts, and the recognition of that which is, is a part of all thinking; but thinking which limits itself to such categories does not deserve being regarded as reason. The sense of reality is a necessary, but not sufficient foundation of truth. I believe that you will not hesitate to agree with me on this point.—In a country where slavery exists, this institution is a fact which may be interwoven into the laws of the land, and even in the social pattern. If all citizens of that country accept slavery as something firmly established, and arrange their lives in such a manner as to avoid any collision with this institution, then slavery will never be abolished there. I know of a number of people, however, and among them a few celebrated American statesmen, who never resigned themselves to that situation and refused to accept it. Such a behavior caused them great inconvenience, for it is always unprofitable not to bow to fundamental facts; it creates a serious conflict with one’s environment, and may indeed spell disaster. Over such a conflict a great civil war was fought in this country. Abraham Lincoln may have been what is usually called a “practical man with common sense,” and he unquestioningly accepted many “facts,” but on the point of slavery he deviated from the general pattern. Let me cite yet another example. Boundaries between countries are one of the fundamental principles of national life in Europe at the present. Anyone of you who has traveled in Europe may have had the experience of being awakened in the train for a new passport and customs inspection when he had scarcely fallen asleep after passing one national border. It may be that these borders coincide with the boundaries of a language, as on the frontier between France and Spain; and then again, as in the case of France and Switzerland, the same language may be spoken on both sides of the border. However this may be, the life of the European nations is dominated by the existence of boundaries. The gigantic expenditures for armies and bureaucracies are due to this fact, and a great portion of the economic and social life of the European countries is based thereon. In fact, every detail of European life at present is intimately connected with the existence of these boundaries. If one state should forsake the notion of borderlines, it would not be long before its neighbors divided its territory among themselves. Although boundaries, in this respect, are an essential condition of the continued existence of a state and consequently must be taken into account by the European, it is not inconceivable that they be abolished someday. You will appreciate this idea, for America has dared to carry it out. For the time being, however, the European is still willing to give his life rather than question the justification of boundaries.
Now you would have the opportunity to object again, and in these terms: Well, if this is so, then all science and technics, and eventually every kind of activity, is an attack upon existing facts. The physicist, who splits the atom; the engineer, who builds dams and changes the course of rivers; the industrial chemist, who converts wood into sugar; the physician, who, not content with wiping deadly diseases and epidemics which formerly depopulated whole countrysides from the surface of the earth, has also developed the ability to improve upon the natural constitution of man—they are all men who lack respect for facts which at one time were deemed immutable. Now, this objection expresses exactly the opposite of what you thought before when you assumed that submission to the facts is inevitable. Both objections contain their grain of truth, but do not hold the whole truth.
The registration of facts is the form in which modern man takes notice of the conditions to which he must submit. His resignation to these facts, whether he adjusts himself to them or seeks to change them, depends on his physical and intellectual abilities. But there are a great number of situations which an individual, however gifted, cannot modify by his isolated efforts. I am not thinking at all of such remote forces as, let us say, the weather conditions, e.g., drought, the effects of which are capable of spreading misery over whole countries. What I have in mind are social facts, such as the boundaries referred to above, or wars, the existence of large-scale poverty and unemployment, the ruin of whole industries, stock market crashes, and the like. The individual is completely powerless when faced with these situations which, in themselves, are only the culmination of perennial processes operating in our social system. The individual, overburdened with daily cares and realizing his helplessness, eventually comes to regard these situations as unchangeable and part of an eternal plan, just as he does the weather or the alternation of day and night.
What we have attempted to drive home is that the sense of reality, indispensable in every form of thinking, must at length cause the individual to accept as phenomena of nature a number of events and conditions; this will be the case primarily with regard to those conditions which seem to be beyond his control. The awareness of facts, “cognition,” turns without warning into the respect for facts, “recognition.” This attitude reveals itself not only in connection with the catastrophic situations which I have enumerated before; it is manifest in the most minute details of every day life. [In Europe] I have often wondered why it is that a man who was snubbed by his family, his friends, and everybody else in his environment when he was poor, is suddenly regarded as a person of extreme importance when he has become rich. No sooner had he become powerful than every one of his qualities assumes a great importance. The same applies to other fields as well. A book is published. It is not in great demand, perhaps because of the unfavorable criticism of a book reviewer paid for that purpose, or for some other reason. Let us suppose that overnight it becomes a bestseller. The reading public will instinctively interpret the high sales figures as a vindication of the intrinsic worth of the book. Permit me to cite a last example. I know a celebrated orchestra leader to whom recognition was denied in his own country until he rose to fame abroad. Immediately his countrymen, too, “discovered” him. Facts are the instrumentality by which, in our era, justified as well as unjustified, modifiable as well as unmodifiable conditions assert their claim to authority. Indeed, the belief in the existing constitutes per se the sentiment of authority of modern man.
Thus we see that one of the many distinctions between modern man and the man of the Middle Ages is the greater receptivity for authority in our era. In the following lectures we shall trace for you in many fields the effects of this peculiarity of man and of the corresponding aspects of social life. In this connection the question will loom up as to how this quality, which is not included in the natural endowment of man, comes into being and renews itself in successive generations. The factors which help to build up this side of the human character are everywhere: in the school, the church, literature, jurisprudence, in short, to some extent in every phase of cultural life; but they are found above all in the family. To psychology, more perhaps than any other science, we are indebted for the knowledge dating from only a few decades ago, that the decisive character traits of man are developed in the first years of his life. In later years they may be differentiated or directed toward other goals, but they very rarely undergo a fundamental change. During our lectures we shall devote some time to the study of the family as the source of receptivity for authority, which is so important a quality in the household of life.
In view of the development of modern family life, it might be doubted by some of you that it is the function of the family to condition man for ready submission to existing circumstances. In one of the lectures devoted to the consideration of the authoritarian state, you will hear that this state has a very great influence on family authority. From superficial descriptions you may gather that family life has been destroyed in Germany and Italy by a ruthless policy which forces the children into youth organizations and calls the fathers away from their homes for military drills. Anyone with deeper insight into the situation will at once realize the one-sidedness of such an outlook. While it is true that the family must offer costly sacrifices to the state in the form of time, and that in the beginning, at least, difficulties may arise from these continued absences from the home, it is no less true that the family gains infinitely more than it loses, through the education efforts of a state which, with every ounce of its authority, works for the reorganization and intensification of family life. This statement refers not only to the inducements offered for marriages and the propaganda for large families; it explains also why the authoritarian state restricts the occupational opportunities of women and stresses their role as mothers and homemakers. All lectures on cultural topics, and the instructions given to educators in Germany and Italy, are extolling the virtues of family life.
There is a very good reason why these countries go to all that trouble. The authority of the leader and of the other powers in the authoritarian state springs only outwardly from the love for the leader. In reality, the leader and his executive organs, even though the party may originally have had but few adherents, now command an enormous power apparatus through which they impose their authority. This apparatus symbolizes the fact that the dictatorial government has become firstly established, and woe to the individual who should dare to assail it. The leader and his lieutenants have been successful, they are here, and the individual has learned to resign himself to these facts. The authority which is the attribute of the leader and his organization is built upon presupposes the peculiar characterological constitution of those masses which obey them. This authority depends on receptivity for the authority of cold facts, just as does, in the unpolitical field, the success of advertising. The sense of receptivity is one of the early requirements of men in the countries which I have mentioned, it is cultivated through the family. Now you will understand why everything is done there to provide a strong and authoritative family life.
Before closing these introductory considerations on the concept of authority, I should like to make several remarks of a technical nature. The theories and facts which we shall lay before you are largely the product of research work undertaken in Europe. We have not been in America long enough to draw many comparisons with conditions here. Consequently, whenever we want to contrast situations in Germany and Italy with those in democratic countries, we shall use examples referring to England, France, and Switzerland, where we have carried out extensive studies. This applies to the problem of authority as well as that of the family, as well as the various institutions in which we are interested here.
Furthermore I should like to make it clear again that although we shall frequently speak here of the authoritarian states, it is not these alone that we have before our eyes, but the conditions of the whole modern era. The absolutism of the 17th and 18th centuries is sufficient proof that the category of authority has always played a prominent role in the modern era. We shall offer further corroboration of this statement in subsequent lectures on the “History of Theories of Domination and Subordination,” which are based on the writings of the best-known philosophical and religious authors. The principal insights which we hope to convey to you apply to liberal England in the 19th century and democratic France in the 20th century, as well as to present-day Germany and Italy. We must forego the discussion of conditions in contemporary Russia because all our conclusions would be based on second-hand information, the correctness of which we have had no opportunity to test. I trust that these remarks have given you a general idea of the meaning and scope of our problem. I have warned you in the beginning, however, that a complete understanding of the subject may not be expected before the conclusion of this course.
C. Closing Lecture
Tonight’s lecture was the last one during this academic year. On such occasions a review of the past is appropriate. I shall essay to sketch, in retrospect, in as few words as possible, the problems discussed here during the two sessions.
In my introductory lecture, dealing with the problem in a general philosophical manner, I undertook to show the difference between authority and physical coercion, on the one hand, and authority and rational action, on the other. Inner and outer compulsion had been characteristic of the earlier stages of human history, I said, and now, after so many centuries, man had hacked his way to every greater freedom along a path that was marked not only by peaceful work in industry and science, but also by wars and revolutions. The central idea of our lectures, I tried to make clear, was the fact, however, that mankind had not as yet attained to the highest possible degree of freedom, and that most men are inwardly and outwardly dependent on alien wills. We also had to bear in mind that the forms exemplifying such dependence had changed in the course of time. During the latest period of history, which begins approximately with the Renaissance, the individual had acquired the conviction that he was acting as a free and independent agent. Actually, however, men must conform themselves to the economic forces which are grounded in the organization of their economic system and in the prevailing arrangements of governing property. I pointed out that the dependence of the individual is no longer a direct dependence on other individuals, as exemplified by the institution of slavery in classical antiquity. Today this dependence is vested in objects. In our days individuals, at least in the democratic states, are not subject to an immediate relationship of dependence, but are enslaved by the world as it is, by the power of matters of fact. The distribution of wealth, the conditions of the labor market, as well as economic crises, are accepted as overwhelming forces, predictable perhaps, even amenable to some degree of regulation in the same manner in which one may provide for a failing crop, but with forces to which one must submit. The dependence of men on social conditions manifests itself in other fields as well, and thus is reflected in philosophical and religious conceptions, and in personal character traits.
Mr. Marcuse described here a number of philosophical systems viewed from the standpoint maintained here. He has shown that the established doctrines of this era constitute an amalgam of the idea of freedom with the idea of implicit obedience and strictest subordination. The conception of liberty which sprang from this union was the conception of an inner freedom which is altogether compatible with outer servitude. In connection with the discussion of Hobbes, Mr. Marcuse has also shown that the conception of private property became ever more distinctly the category conditioning the freedom and the unfreedom characteristic of the period. This freedom consisted mainly in the right to use one’s property according to one’s own wishes. The exclusiveness of property thus produced the unfreedom of those separated from property. We then met these ideas again in Locke and Kant. The theories of the French counter-revolution (Restoration) proved, as we saw, that in such an order the problem of ruling masses assumed a menacing aspect. In the modern philosophies, this aspect is manifest in the idealization of the ruling class, the elite which the philosophers conceive merely in terms of a political group. Actually this class comprises those sections of industry which economic development has lifted to a position of supreme power, as well as the upper ranks of the bureaucracy.
Continuing from the point to which these historical considerations had brought us, Mr. Lazarsfeld introduced you to empirical sociology. He has demonstrated that, by correctly formulating the problem in hand, it is possible to undertake a minute examination of the interrelation between economic processes and various aspects of human life. He described, along general lines, the methods to be employed in such investigations, and then proceeded to discuss several investigations carried out by the Institute. While still in Europe, the Institute completed an inquiry in several countries into the extent to which authority of parents depended on their economic function in the family. A short while ago, the Institute started a similar inquiry in an American city, using as subjects a homogeneous group of families whose heads were unemployed. It is our objective to determine whether and to what extent a man suffers a loss in authority with regard to his family when he loses his job. During his lecture, Dr. Lazarsfeld thoroughly discussed other aspects of the authority problem as well.
Mr. Pollock, and, during his illness, I also have attempted to trace the function of authority throughout our economic system in a more or less general fashion. At the outset, we delineated the decay of a formerly very powerful authority during the transitional period when the medieval economic system had to give way to new economic arrangements. This authority was the Catholic Church. The examination of the causes determining the transformation of one authority and its forms into another authority, subsequently led us to examine the alterations which the authority pattern has undergone within the modern system of economy. We divided the latter into three periods: Mercantilism, Liberalism, and Monopoly Capitalism, and studied the manner in which the two factors—liberty of the individual and dependence on economic forces—manifested themselves during these three periods. In spite of all the restrictions imposed by the absolutistic regime during the first period—Mercantilism –, when the middle class and its economic activities were still subject to the tutelage of that regime, there developed a liberalistic form of economy. During the Liberalistic period, an entire section of society was able to realize its aspirations to liberty, and an ideology of complete liberty and supreme authority of Reason gained universal ascendancy. Under Monopoly Capitalism, this ideology has finally been shown up in all its absurdity. Only a small group enjoys the positive sides of that freedom, while the great majority of society bears the brunt of the negative side of freedom, that is to say, ruthless competition and the never ending struggle for holding onto one’s job.
All the preceding discussions had reference to Europe only. It was then incumbent on Mr. Gumperz to present in short outline the development of economic institutions in the United States. He has set forth how greatly the conception of private property has changed in this country, and has explained in what respect the modern captain of industry differs from the entrepreneur of fifty years ago. Further, he has discussed the difference not only between past and present in the economic life of the Western world, but also the specific difference between American and European economic development.
The lectures held by Mr. Fromm were designed to present to you a picture of the character pattern of modern man which is the outgrowth of the prevailing competitive system and of the existing relations of dependence. After a summary introduction into modern psychology and its methods, Mr. Fromm proceeded to delineate that picture. He has shown you that underneath the self-assured consciousness of enjoying full freedom and the display of feverish industry, men have an unconscious feeling of their insecurity and dependence. They feel completely isolated. The idea that unless they rule they will themselves be ruled has a stranglehold on their minds and drives them forever to achieve success, regardless of the cost. But while they struggle after that goal, they cannot help realizing that such a success does not depend on them alone. Under a thin coating of good-fellowship, frankness, and sympathy, there are deep layers of ambition, self-interest, and a bitter antagonism, which form the true content of their lives. The psyche of the individual indeed reveals the falsehood of the doctrine that absolute freedom and reason are the dominant forces of our day. The contradiction between the consciousness of freedom and the actuality of dependence on a great number of social factors is faithfully reflected by the contradictory personality of modern man. Eventually the insecurity of his existence generates in him the psychical need to seek shelter with, and to subordinate himself to, a power with which he may identify himself.
What power is like in the modern authoritarian states of Europe, Mr. Neumann told you during the last lecture. The present ascendancy of this power cannot be explained by reference to psychological factors. It lies in the direct line of historical developments which Mr. Neumann has traced for you, if only within the narrow limits imposed upon him by the lack of time. He has been able to explain to you that the character types described by Mr. Fromm, especially those belonging to the middle class, are, of necessity, continuously reproduced by the social process. Mr. Neumann’s lecture is too fresh in your minds to require recapitulation by me. What must be stressed, however, especially with regard to that lecture, is the point that the existence of the authoritarian states in Europe implies by no means a break with the past, as it is frequently declared to be, but is the inevitable outgrowth of certain conditions prevailing there. The negative elements which have always been present in Liberalism became, by virtue of certain circumstances, the factors which now imprint their stamp upon the life of those countries. The fundamental relations of authority of the past have been maintained intact. The only change that has taken place is that compliance with authority is enforced more rigorously and through forms adapted to the new situation.
Mr. Löwenthal, who has just concluded his lecture, can dispense with me as his interpreter. But I also speak in his name when I express our regret that we have not more time for a thoroughgoing discussion of the role of authority in recent literature and education.
The schedule lecture by Mr. Schachtel on the formulation of authority relations in family legislation had to be canceled. That lecture, which would have acquainted you with a large array of significant facts, was ready to be delivered. It had to be omitted, however, so as to enable us to complete our line of thought, at least in broad outline, in spite of the shortness of time. This change in our program was mainly due to the fact that during the past year we have lectured here for the first time. We hope that during the next year we shall be able to keep all our promises.
Postscript: Letters on Working Methods and Applications of the “Egoism”-essay (1936-)
§1. Re: The Category of the “Foreigner.”
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Fromm, 1/21/1936.]23
My dear Fromm, I must spare you all of the substantive matters for communication until I return. Needless to say, I look forward to it. We don’t leave until February 12th. It was impossible to make any advance in the matters we have before us in a shorter amount of time. I am trying to set things into motion in Europe to ensure that, on the one hand, we fulfill the obligation to share our efforts with those to whom they may mean something and, on the other, we no longer have to do so much in New York to accomplish this. We cannot keep this up in any case, for I feel with each passing day that the formulation of our thoughts is what matters most. As soon as I return, whatever conditions may be, I must return to my work as well. There is much to discuss. The narrative and technical-organizational questions form one part; the other concerns theoretical ideas.
In particular, I have been thinking a lot about a short sociological-psychological meditation on the “foreigner” [Fremden]. The entire apparatus of entertainment in Europe—even in the big cities—is designed with foreigners in mind. In the lack of working-through in content, in the entirely outward outfitting, in the quality which its promoters themselves no longer believe it has, clearly expresses contempt which mirrors the ascetic morality of the masses. Foreigners may enjoy themselves, but this is in fact something contemptible. Therefore, in this area, all manner of plundering is permitted.
One seeks to squeeze out as much money as possible by offering entertainment of the worst possible quality. There is no morality of the honest salesman here, for instead there is certainty that, in accordance with their ideal type, the fact that only foreigners can enjoy makes them contemptible. The masses of their own country must do without, and it is suffering which is self-evident, the sole truly human attitude: “‘We’ live very modestly, these revues and bars are not there for our sake: these, naturally, are only for foreigners. Otherwise, no such establishments would be permitted. How could we ever frequent them?” All this was already there in a certain sense in the bourgeois age, but nevertheless in a different mode, thwarted by other tendencies. The rise of the customs barriers and tariffs, the exclusivity of states in relation to one another, make the public spirit wholly provincial. All luxurious performances increasingly become Bauernfängerei. The propertied further inland flaunt their luxurious lifestyle less and less, and once again take refuge in the bosom of nature: “Monte Carlo is so garish, so much make-up, so much kitsch. The Cap d’Antibes is much more tranquil, one is more oneself there, more alone.” For this reason, the Maisons de Rendez-Vous are being torn down. The mass performance of the music hall is replaced by the fascist mass assembly—and these have become more grandiose in organization and aesthetic. As the quality of the latter rises, the quality of the former declines in equal measure. These [mass assemblies] aren’t for foreigners either—they’re just for locals. In addition, they are certainly moral. Paris, however, is still the best for foreigners by far. In some places here one can still feel the old splendor, and it is nice that, in the literary world at least, the representatives of the arts—but not the representatives of the sciences, which prepare themselves for capitulation—that which is new still announces itself and—whether only ‘still’ or ‘already,’ I know not—has a place.
§2. Re: Working Method of the “Egoism”-essay.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Hans Honegger, 6/8/1936.]24
Dear Herr Honegger! Many thanks for your two letters of April 25th and May 9th. That I’m only replying today is due to the fact that, until very recently, I have been at a major project day and night. It is an essay, which you will probably be able to read this autumn: “Egoism and Freedom Movements. On The Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era.” As the title suggests, the essay speaks about all manner of things. My old endeavor, one which you and I share and often spoke of in Paris, to harness together various specialist sciences for the examination of actuality is particularly evident in this work. Of course, this isn’t entirely for the best. The primary disadvantage is that there is no readily comprehensible order, because this working method [Arbeitsweise] leads one to continuously delimit any one determinate point of view as one-sided and inadequate. Since, however, the reader is accustomed to being guided through a special-scientific field by an author familiar with it, and which the author will never have reason to leave, a working method such as ours gives the reader a feeling of insecurity, and this then makes him anxious about the whole affair. This may be one of the reasons you’ve not found it easy to publish your major works. Your manner of thinking corresponds to the grand philosophical tradition in which specialized sciences provide the tools without the permanent confinement of reflexion to any one of these areas. This is particularly clear in the case of Schopenhauer, as you’ve mentioned. Recall that even his books were considered wastepaper until he was well on in his years!
§3. Adorno, Re: “Egoism”-essay.
[Excerpt from: Adorno to Horkheimer, 6/29/1936.]25
Dear Herr Horkheimer, I could not leave London and return to Germany without at least having said to you that your essay on Sadism, the study of which I have now concluded, has moved and gripped me to my very core. I know of nothing else from you with such power of illumination and such “spark” as the third chapter, especially the conclusion, the rescue of sadism and the abyss-deep interpretation of Aristotle. I find it impossible to say anything more about it beyond the fact that I agree with the work in its very centrum—even with those turns so difficult for outsiders to understand, as the Nietzsche apology (about which I’ve already spoken with Pollock, by the way)—and that the only “bourgeois” reaction I can muster against it is the jealousy that I was not the one to write it. I need not tell you this is no dangerous jealousy—nor that such jealousy seldom, if ever, affects me at all. Incidentally, the plan of my “Decadence”-essay moves completely within the sphere of this one and I will directly connect it to this one (and this one to Nietzsche). In particular, I would like to emphasize agreement with the attitude towards the revolutionaries who positively adopt bourgeois morality. But I know I am completely of one mind with you, even down to the details like the footnote on Reich.
Some time ago, I called his cult of genital sexuality romantic-anarchistic (whilst simultaneously recognizing his progress beyond Freud); your reference to it as “utopian” is precisely the same; in fact, I have always regarded him as one among the type of anarchists against whom Max fought. —In this connection, I would say that, after another reading, I have revised my view on Groddeck; in Ich als Symbol, there is a great deal which is astonishing. (N.B. The concept of the child ought to be dialecticized; beyond the bourgeois, sentimental ideal of innocence, as you’ve characterized it, there are also features which are exactly the opposite, and it is Groddeck’s great merit to have brought this opposing side to light. By no means do I deny the danger of the “utopian” in him; but, put simply, he has an infinitely richer and more concrete psychological intuition than Reich.)
Something particularly validating to me about your essay is the language, which, towards the conclusion, rises to a true force of expression such as I have hardly known—it is as if, today, in your hands, even the tactical means of silence have themselves been transformed into a means of expression: the whole thing vibrates with silence. It would seem to me that our stylistic ideals are no longer so distant from one another. The only critical thing I could possibly say is the first chapter seems to me rather far-reaching, and the description of bourgeois anthropology rather spacious in relation to the very concrete thesis. One could, perhaps, center the problem of cruelty more from the outset (as well as in the documentation). The schematizing in the first section might not be as tight as that in the rest; a few cuts could make it more sculpted. I would, to pick an example, not dismiss the Max Weber dispute about whether or not religion is cause or effect so peremptorily in a single sentence. For it concerns an important taboo of bourgeois science; and it is precisely because I share your views to such a great extent that I would prefer it were explained by principle and by evidence, rather than arising as an aside and without thorough analysis. But such objections have very little weight, and I would only ask you to consider them suggestions for alterations if such alterations would not burden you with senseless sacrifice of time and work.
§4. Re: Method and “Rebel.”
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer and Pollock to Ludwig Marcuse, 8/5/1936.]26
The following remarks are “written in the margins” of your draft [viz., “The Rebel”] in a twofold respect: first, they refer primarily to the thoughts that seemed to warrant additions and critique (and therefore give a totally false impression, as they pass over everything with which we agree in silence); second, that they presuppose your familiarity with the treatise on “Egoism and Freedom Movements,” which you will find in the most recent issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. On top of that, the short time we have available before the departure of the next express steamer prohibits the level of detail befitting the importance of the object.
As a study of the above-mentioned essay will make clear, the accent of the Institute’s investigations, as we related to you in our last few times we met, is neither on biographical details nor psychological types, but on precise knowledge of that questionable formation [fragwürdigen Gebildes] we have designated the bourgeois character. Individual investigations of particularly exceptional points in modern history are meant to contribute to the comprehension of this structure, and the means of its conservation (or its elimination), to the description of its functioning and its manifestations, and to articulate what typifies it. Undoubtedly, Father Jahn [viz., “Turnvater” Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852)] is is a model example of this type of character in many respects, but it is precisely this that interests us much less than his role as a “leader,” in the performance of which he would influence the masses who were to pay the costs of the wars of liberation and, in fact, serve the masses who were to reap the fruits. As you can already see, there is a distinction between the perspective of your draft and our studies: you had an interest in the “leader” as a psychological phenomenon, his unique character structure, the “tricks” he implemented, his social function. All of this is of interest to us as well, but specifically in relation to the “led,” and to their social and psychological situation. We would like to know more about the citizens and peasants [Bürger und Bauern] who are Jahn’s addressees, who he wishes to toughen up, who will be soldiers in the wars of liberation and who will subsequently largely be duped. What did the ruling class in Prussia look like at the time? To what extent did it embrace the commoners [Bürgerliche], whether as servants or beneficiaries of the liberation? We do not know whether your material will suffice for a satisfactory answer to these and many other questions, nor do we assume you would agree to shift the focal point of your book in the direction of our central interests, and we must accordingly leave any decisions on this matter up to you. Even if you decide not to do so, your book will nevertheless certainly be of great value to us.
The extent to which the selection of “models” [Vorbilder] and counterparts in the “illustrative” section of your work is successful is a different problem entirely. On the basis of our close personal ties with you and the commonality of our scientific aims, we feel it is only right to say without reservation that we consider standing the provincial celebrity Jahn in the same lineage of three world-historical figures such as Luther, Rienzo, and Robespierre. It is not because Jahn was a wild, stubborn, “Borussian” schoolmaster, but because of the petty social circumstances in which he moved that you must refuse him any greater stature too. By this we don’t mean to say that the world spirit in its bottomless cynicism could not get as much use out of a schoolmaster as from a monk, lawyer, or painter. What is crucial, however, lies in the fact that historical greatness is conditioned by the scene onto which the individual in question steps—and the Prussia of 1815 was (by contrast to the Prussia of Hindenburg) a world-historical quantité négligeable. We would also like to register our doubts about whether Father Jahn himself played anything more than a minor role among his Prussian contemporaries, and whether you would not find many similar figures upon closer study of the Prussian “freedom movement.” With regard to your view that Jahn was a “Robespierre in the making,” we believe even the presentations of Robespierre by his bitterest enemies make him appear as a titan next to Jahn. And finally with regard to the parallel you propose with Rienzo, we cannot see how you would justify this. Historically speaking, Jahn himself hardly considered the Tribune (who only became well-known in Germany again around the middle of the century) as his model, and the characteristics Jahn has in common with Rienzo are, so far as we can judge, primarily byproducts of your formation of the concept of the “Rebel.”
What is the status of this category? Certainly, there is a demonstrable family resemblance between the great leaders of bourgeois freedom movements and the most minor bourgeois demagogues, since both have typical bourgeois characteristics, make use of similar means, and preach the same renunciation to the masses. But, as a rule, the gulf between the historical significance of these two groups is so great that they cannot be placed side-by-side. Though you have attempted to conceptualize the category of the rebel socially, in your hands it once again assumes its original psychological character. You are obviously conscious of the danger in this—namely, in conceiving history itself as the result of specific character-figures. As you know, we certainly don’t belong with those who see history as a mechanical proceeding, and that we, as much as you are yourself, are more concerned with articulating the dialectical relation between personality and determinate events. Bourgeois freedom movements do not follow their typical course because those who lead them are merely rebels and not revolutionaries, but (to express it schematically) because under particular social relations it is only human beings with these character dispositions who can have more than just momentary successes.
With regard to the psychological qualities of the leaders themselves, the black-and-white picture you have sketched on the fourth page of your draft is most likely conditioned by the need for concise keywords and is supposed to demarcate the extremes. [Ed. Fn.: In a section on the “Psychology of the Rebel” in the first, “fundamental division” of his study, L. Marcuse provided a schematic contrast between the type of the “revolutionary” and that of the “rebel” according to the following characteristics: active – aggressive; goal-oriented – goal-less; enraged by the natural enemy – cruel towards the artificially constructed enemy; moderate – immoderate; modest – vain. (MHA: I 17.359).] You know as well as we do that Robespierre, for instance, manifested a number of essential characteristics you attribute to the revolutionary, and that there are countless cases in which fighters whose revolutionary character we cannot deny in the least manifest many of those qualities you have assigned to the “rebel.” We have not been able to understand your hints about the social existence of the rebel. What do you mean when you say that he conquers “without weapons” and that two victors, but no vanquished, arise from his struggle? Perhaps these obscurities stem from the fact you want to conceptualize the rebel too broadly and it would be better if the concept were restricted to the bourgeois rebel alone. To the extent you treat the figure of the rebel under a social aspect, you picture the leader who fights for determinate bourgeois interests, as opposed to the revolutionary who is concerned with the de facto transformation of the social order for the sake of proletarian interests. That your focus is primarily psychological is due to the fact that your central category expresses first and foremost the character traits rather than the objective role of the “rebellious”—and not even their qualities as a leader. Certainly there is merit in this viewpoint, but we think it is more the concern of the psychologist than the social researcher, for whom the psychological prerequisites of the leader are of secondary interest compared to his function as a leader, his position in the social process, and his confrontation with those he leads and those who commission him, with his followers and his clients. A cursory glance at your draft shows that you have already treated many of the elements we take to have primary importance in more or less detail. Therefore, these remarks are aimed not so much at the material itself so much as the distribution of accent you place on it.
However you eventually decide to place the accents in your work, it is doubtlessly a highly commendable undertaking to shed light on the murky haze of the “wars of liberation” through the application of certain theoretical considerations. Be assured that we have the greatest sympathy for your work and, in any event, expect it will be of considerable value for us in our own research. If the above-mentioned article [viz., the “Egoism”-essay] (for which we will send you the proofs before it will be printed, since we have just been notified the publication of the issue will be postponed by two weeks as the printer is on holiday) should inspire you to place even greater weight on the illumination of our special problems than you otherwise might have done, we would be particularly gratified.
§5. Benjamin, Re: The Cult of the French Revolution.
[Excerpt from: Benjamin to Horkheimer, 10/13/1936.]27
By way of conclusion, I would like to say a few words about the grand impression “Egoism and Freedom Movements” made on me. Setting aside the details, some of which are of immense import to me—the historical perspective of oratory [Redekunst], which you pursue from Socrates through the sermon into the Volk-assembly of the present; the “medicine-man solemnity” of our cultural endeavors; your unmasking of the popular appeal to the youth—I would perhaps formulate the one thing most important to me as follows: that the spirit of these notes, which I first heard in the presence of Asja Lacis at your place in Cronberg, determines the context of construction for the work itself. If I am not mistaken, there are two facts involved in this: first, the transparency with which conventional morality appears as factotum in the thought-economy of the neurotic individual; second, the critique of the ideological side of the French Revolution. And then the decisive thing—the connection between both of these moments: the legibility [Einsichtigkeit] with which the anthropological type you’ve characterized slides out of the womb of the bourgeois revolution as a monstrosity. I believe the political character of your thesis, which it bears on the lapel of its philosophical truth, could not fail to have such an impression on one so at home with the French intellectuals over here, and who has become acquainted with the illusions which arise from the cult of the great revolution, or, rather, which constitute it—and with illusions like these, who knows what manner of acquaintance is yet to be made!
§6. Re: Motive and Method of “Egoism”-essay.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 10/23/1936.]28
Dear Herr Lowe, I am genuinely pleased my “Egoism”-essay could be of use to you. (...) As you no doubt noticed, next to the objective concerns, I sought to show how the historical presentation [Darstellung], psychology, and indeed the Geisteswissenschaften overall intercalate in thinking interested in historical tasks. I doubt whether a general anthropology is possible apart from a theory of history. As far as I can see, conclusions drawn about the future from analysis of a determinate historical situation need not arise from any hidden anthropology; rather, they are grounded on representations of the course of history, which arise from the complicated reciprocity between the human beings of a given period, as they stand opposite each other socially, and, on the other hand, extra-human factors of nature. Remaining conscious of the circumstance that subjective interests play a structuring role in the whole theory of the course of history and thus in our image of the future as well, then we guard ourselves against any hypostasizing of this image and will not project it back into an eternal idea of the human being in which such an image is already enclosed.
We may thus relinquish providing any justificatory grounds for our participating in that future which rationalizes the passionate interest in it by means of a comprehensive, conclusive concept of the human being. I have always associated the need for such rationalizing—as it is expressed explicitly in philosophical anthropology as much in the conviction (...) that such [rationalizing], where not articulated, is, at the very least, implicitly present—with the bourgeois quest for an unconditioned foothold as already expressed in the Cartesian philosophy. Human beings are so insecure, so accustomed to their own judgment, that they cannot even conceive there might be an action whose fundamental principles [Grundsätze] are not demonstrable in toto, whose presuppositions cannot be rationally constructed in this manner. The representation of a totality that can be thought out in full so conceivable, which still plays a role in philosophical anthropology—and especially when considered a presupposition for desired historical transformation—, belongs to idealism. The repression of interest (in the materialistic sense) by means of the through-rationalization of our motivating grounds mentioned above is itself one among the many idealistic functions which I attempted to lay bare in the “Egoism”-essay. Please forgive this difficult, and very erratic, excursus. The length and circuitousness of these sentences can only be explained by the shortness of time I have to write you at the moment. —This unity of opposites is quite disturbing!
Regarding the idea of “spontaneous collectivism,” I will certainly understand this with greater precision when I receive your Geburtstagsgabe from Paulus (Tillich). As far as I can tell from the lines on the topic you’ve written in your last letter, it is opposed to the doctrine of the transition from the domination of human beings to the administration of things,29 the doctrine to which, for the time being, I still adhere. But it is possible that I have not understood you correctly. However, if my interpretation is on the mark, the danger persists that the brutal father would be replaced not by a “genuine balance between the father and the mother,” as you write, but only by another father still, which would mean the very same heteronomy of social life would continue on. I cannot separate the notion of the father, in relation to the child, from his role in class society—and here, once again, the problematic of the application of psychological structures to the course of history as a whole is apparent. The father as social symbol indicates domination over human beings. Maternal love, however, signifies saying yes to the happiness of all her children without them having to earn it first; that is, (it signifies) a society in which happiness is no longer tied to the moral precondition of hard work, nor to any kind of renunciation of the drives which is not conditioned by solidarity in the struggle with nature. For this reason, Engels, for example, took such a strong interest in the study of matriarchal social forms. I expect you are already familiar with Fromm’s essay on the social-political significance of Mutterrechtstheorie in the third volume of the ZfS (196ff.), and with which I thoroughly agree. The true point of difference between us, however, seems to me to lie not so much in these unfortunately rather utopian differences of opinion, but in the following: you see substantive conflicts of interest, through which you provide justificatory grounds for the role of the father in the society of the future, as highly important for the theory of the present, and, indeed, for the motivation of any action. I, on the other hand, actually aim to trivialize these conflicts. This distinction is connected to the same difference spoken of above. I do not orient myself on the basis of a philosophical anthropology; I even consider one impossible. When it comes to this discipline, as with so many others, I believe it is not the science in question itself, but only its critique which can be legitimate. This leads us to problems which we can only clarify through discussing them further in person.
§7. Dialectic and Death-wish.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Karl Landauer, 10/27/1936.]30
Dear Karl, I want to thank you right away for your letter of October 4 with at least a few lines. The care with which you read the egoism essay as well as your general agreement gave me real pleasure. Unfortunately, I can't yet respond with my opinion of your work on affect because in the last few months, since I've been back from vacation, I haven't gotten around to reading anything that is not directly related to my own work in progress. I believe I told you something about it in my last letter. On top of everything else there are also requests for me to give lectures, and I am only partially successful in defending myself from giving in. To a large extent I was aware of your position on the death wish. Nonetheless, it was gratifying to me that you once again formulated it in your letter. Furthermore, in my essay I intended to refer explicitly in a footnote to the fact that psychoanalytic theory even today is represented in a very productive form that does not include the hypothesis of the death wish, and I then intended to name names. I refrained from doing so because I didn't want to cite you in opposition to Freud. Both of us probably think alike about the attempt of some analysts to specifically emphasize such an opposition. It is certainly entirely correct that even in Freud's early works death wishes have been part of his theory. To the extent I am able to judge, the way in which he then explained them, that is, as a reaction to aversion stimuli, is much more productive and, in any case, much more adequate to a dialectical method than the construct of an inherent death wish. In addition to the conception of the sorrow of those left behind that you mention, the satisfaction that flows from the thought that one's name will “live on” surely also belongs among the attempts to overcome death psychically. In this context, on the occasion of a lecture that I gave about ten days ago at a history club about the function of speech in modern times, I happened upon the great significance of names, which originates in very primitive habits of thought. …
§8. “The Fundamental Evil of All Sociology.”
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 1/4/1938.]31
The substantive questions in your letter, as you yourself know, cannot of course be answered in a letter. They relate in large part to the problem already raised the discussion we’ve been having. For my part, I believe I can only advance [this discussion] through further development and clarification of my theoretical thoughts, as I plan to in my upcoming works. You are undoubtedly aware that the contradiction between, on the one hand, the representation of an unmediated identity of particular and universal interest and, on the other, the alternative between dictatorship and conformism presents a specific accentuation of the problem of a future social life, which only appears under determinate historical aspects and not as the essential [one] in general. The urgency with which it is declared today is, I believe, based above all on the turn that developments in Russia have taken. When, precisely in view of these historical circumstances, the topicality of this kind of question-posing cannot be denied, the centering of the ‘Eastern’ problematic cannot be equated with that of an historically possible human community in general.
The alternative between mass domination and conformism, which is not a true alternative, because both elements coincide with one another historically, is too pessimistic for me, because the concept of conformism encompasses the affirmation of given conditions that could not be better nor be changed for the better. It is no accident that this concept is rightly used as an expression of condemnation by some and as an expression of high regard by others. When employed as a decisive sociological category, there is a danger that the contradictions of the sacrificium and the conservatio intellectus, of human dependence and spontaneity, of reason [Vernunft] and anti-reason [Widervernunft], will not be sublated but will perish instead.
It then has a worrisome tendency towards formalism, that fundamental evil of all sociology. In the theory of society, particularly where the future is at stake, it is precisely a question of concept-formation in which these contradictions remain visible. They should be overcome not only through spirit or even through words, but in practice. The concept of mass domination is then to be opposed not so much by that of conformism, which is already identical with it today, as much as by reason or autonomy, which is, in fact, what happens in great bourgeois philosophy. I well know that you, too, want to see the moment of autonomy preserved in conformism. But why make [autonomy] a mere moment, when it is the essential one!
If you could agree with me on this point, then the other side of your above-mentioned contradiction would transform: the immediate identity of particular and universal interest. It changes from the sheerly immediate into a mediated one. Mediation is, according to Hegel, the same as thinking.32 The direction of the transformation we both have in view is determined by the fact that in the future the universal interest will be known as the one in which the particular is actually sublated—that is, that the ideology of today will become the reality of tomorrow. The abstractness of such expressions (as opposed to the formalism of sociological categories) disappears immediately when one takes them in connection with the theory to which they necessarily belong. The coincidence of which we speak is brought about by the socialization of the means of production and the abolition [Abschaffung] of classes and is ever-renewed by the active participation of individuals in administration.33 The mediation of thinking is expressed socially in the functioning of such administration. I know very well that there are extremely difficult problems here; just think of the famous theory of the first and second phases. You will say this is just where the problem lies.
I cannot concede that the activity of human beings in shaping their [social] relations after the disappearing of the conditions that inhibit their development can essentially be described as the choice between tyranny and conformism. Particularly in the beginning, not a few needs must, of course, be pushed aside, and coercive violence cannot be dispensed with. But the pushing-aside of one need behind another—for example, that of immediate enjoyment behind conditions of universal security—only contains the irrational moment inherent to the concept of conformism if the society itself is irrational. I believe we should do everything to ensure this is made apparent and that bad [social] relations of the present, wherever they may exist, do not acquire the illusory semblance [Schein] of rightness and eternity.
It would seem particularly worrisome to me if the concept of conformism in a future society included the idea that the individual should hold themselves back from critique in order to avoid causing unrest. Certainly you would not claim that the distinction between the declared enmity towards the new, which is directly connected to previous power relations, and the expression of critical thinking in a society without fixed social antagonisms is not a principal, but only an arbitrary one. The intuition that human beings tear each other apart merely as a consequence of the application of their intellectual abilities, even when the structure of their material interests no longer splits them into hostile groups, but drives them to cooperation, is one that corresponds more to the Pareto Schools’ social psychology than to ours. It seems to me to contradict all historical experience. Up to now, ideas have been directed according to the rule of interests, and not interests according to ideas. So far as true interests could not penetrate into the consciousness of the dominated classes, it was due precisely to those inhibiting [social] relations, the disposing of which is the beginning of a new order. If we expect that the relation between ideas and interests in the future will undergo determinate alterations, we certainly do not mean this in the sense that it is merely wrong and impossible ideas which confuse interests. It would be a terrible mistake if we were to believe that those today who persecute and murder anyone who is suspected of having a critical stance, that the critique of the persecuted arose merely from so-called destructive modes of thinking. In truth, wherever such persecutions take place, it revolves around material contradictions, the real overcoming of which is the condition of progress. Precisely because the rulers (as opposed to the first phases of the liquidation of old relations) must suppress the existence of social tensions, they advance the ideology that critique is betrayal, but since this no longer suffices, they must to resort to cruder accusations. Where the existence of social tensions is confessed, one has no need for such lies, and where they have been overcome, critique appears as an essential moment of spirit and false critique as an error from which humanity will barely be able to escape, not merely in social, but also in natural-scientific domains. I will leave aside the possibility of dangerous group-formations on the grounds of biological distinctions between the young and the old, or between the sexes. I believe that the social struggle for life and death, which arises from these distinctions, coincides with primitive stages of social development, to which [society] will certainly not revert under the conditions of the highest development of the productive forces.
Do not believe that I am optimistic with regard to the near future. Quite the contrary. But this is does not turn on the assessment of chances moment to moment, but, rather, on the decisive concepts of theory, which should be immanent in every practical step and by means of which we make reality intelligible to ourselves. It is not the concept of spontaneous collectivism in general, but its position in theory, on which our perspectives diverge. Likewise with the concept of planning. I confess this word is very unattractive to me. It stems from a linguistic field in which leadership, Wehrfreudigkeit, sociability, and, lastly, the Volksgemeinschaft are at home. These words, which are all the more neo-German the older origins they have, bear on their foreheads the inscription that they want to Germanize what is left of critical thinking. Apart from this, there is something else to so-called economic planning. The respective preparation and implementation of the production-program is certainly an essential element of future social activity. But to determine this society through the isolated concept of the economic plan appears extremely disconcerting to me, especially today. I can think up a liberal society which, with respect to certain social forms with planning, is a paradise by comparison. I have always opposed the tacit alteration of the idea of a rational society, which coincides with that of the association of free human beings and is more precisely determined by virtue of critical theory, into the concept of planned economy, precisely out of fear of an extremely dangerous shift in accent. The significance of economic problems, which I would at least like to minimize, is variable. It takes on another position in the present than in the course of the transition, and, in turn, [another position] in the transition than in the society we imagine as unfolded reason. This problem is touched upon in two contributions Marcuse and I have made to the new issue of the Zeitschrift. They are entitled: “Philosophy and Critical Theory.” The main theme is the dispute with the economistic misunderstanding of some of [critical theory’s] adherents. I am curious [to hear] what you have to say about this.
The delay in the new issue—it will probably not be published until the end of January—is partly due to a circumstance that will also be of interest to you. As you know, Mr. Wiesengrund wrote a disputation of the sociology of knowledge a few months ago on the occasion of Mannheim's last book. We could not publish it in its original form because it was too long, and we asked Mr. Wiesengrund to shorten the article. The shortened form was then typed and should appear in this issue. Since Mr. Wiesengrund had shown Mannheim his work in its original shape, I thought it was right that he should now make the shortened version available to him, at least in [the stage of] proofs. In my letter to Mr. Wiesengrund I added that I would be prepared to change individual passages that Mannheim considered particularly harsh or misleading, if we thought Mannheim's reasons were sound. I have now read from a letter from Wiesengrund that Mannheim did not suggest any alterations, but expressed the wish to publish a response in our journal. This message has caused me serious embarrassment. You know that our Zeitschrift, unlike other humanities journals such as Liebert's, is not a platform for discussion. We have repeatedly stated, for example in the penultimate issue, that on the one hand we should report on every kind of professional achievement in our fields and critically evaluate the most diverse theoretical trends, but that on the other hand we wanted to hold onto certain theoretical ideas. This seems to us, in view of the universal intellectual perplexity, one of the most important tasks of a philosophically-oriented journal. In accordance with this view, we were happy to give Neurath, for example, a word about his study of social living conditions. On the other hand, we had to refuse to print the extensive reply he sent in to my essay on positivism. The same applies to our relations with our friend Landsberg. His thoughts on race-problems are regularly published. On the other hand, I advised him to publish elsewhere any comments he might have on my “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology,” in which his book was critically discussed. We have acted similarly in all such cases, and we could not have changed our principle in the case of Mannheim either.
However, a refusal in this case would have been particularly difficult for me. I know that Mannheim’s access to the majority of our journal's readers does not come easily, as a result of the general situation. There are no social-scientific organs in the German language that are possibly read in the same circles. Moreover, I do not want to break off the critical dispute with Mannheim, which I consider important and fruitful, and, instead of an ongoing discussion, brings about a personal misunderstanding that does not. The problem was, as you see, not simple. I unconditionally support the thoughts of Weisengrund’s critique. They spring from the same basic theoretical stance which we have tried to develop in all of our articles. There is not the least substantive difference between us with regard to his arguments. Nevertheless, the reasons connected to the general situation I have just pointed to have inhibited the printing of the article. This is the basis for the delay of the new issue. I have not written Mannheim himself about the matter, but I would be curious to learn your own view on it.
Now I have spoken about many things, and a number of the questions in your letter remain unanswered. You have above all touched on the problem of the process of nature and dialectics. To what you have said about this, I have no objection. Whether what you call the simplest formulation of the essence of dialectics is sufficient seems doubtful to me at the moment. I think at least the concept of the “whole,” which, according to Hegel, constitutes truth, is part of it. To this I would add the reminder of the reversal of concepts into their opposites. Dictatorship can pass into reason or sink into mere tyranny, just as conformism can form a moment of reason or of slavery. It really comes down to the whole. But the simplest formulations are ultimately always makeshift and, therefore, awry; their value relates to the purpose for which they are deployed.
§9. Re: Planned “Reformation and Revolution” Project.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to M. Butler, 4/2/1938.]34
We are also planning to bring out a volume on “Reformation and Revolution”, written by Dr. H. Meyer—Lindenberg on the basis of previous studies conducted by the Institute. Dr. Meyer—Lindenberg has been a member of the Institute for several years, and is at present Professor of Political Science at the University of Bogotá. The book contains a sociological analysis of the relationship of Martin Luther to the peasant revolts of the early sixteenth century. The Institute gave Dr. Meyer—Lindenberg a grant which enabled him to spend most of 1936 working in various German archives, especially in the Tyrol. The material which he collected there has given him some new insights into the social background of the German peasant movement. The manuscript has been written in German, and will be translated into English within the next few months.
§10. Notes for a Socio-psychology of T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to K. v. Hirsch, 4/7/1938.]35
Dear Käte, I'm really pleased that you are giving more careful thought to my suggestion that you work with us. Of your suggestions, the one having to do with Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom seems to me the most feasible right now. We didn't review the book. Since it had already come out in 1926 in a private printing, it would in and of itself be too late for a review, because in principle we have to limit ourselves to books from the last two or, at most, the last three years. There could be no objections to a short article. What I have in mind is neither a summary of its content nor a critical analysis but perhaps a sociological gloss on the book's reception. It would be extremely interesting to show the reason for its extraordinary success. Naturally, the concurrent satisfaction of a yearning for adventure and of political and sexual curiosity has an immediate effect on the reader. Yet, if I'm right, the author's undoubtedly very commanding personality seems to be the deeper reason: mystical metaphysics and cynicism, generosity and bloodthirstiness, rebellion and discipline are united and provide the material for a myth on a terrain of imposing geographic dimensions. I believe that the analysis of this book's reception could reveal similar socio-psychological impulses in the general public that are also important for the rise of other commanding personalities. Other than the reviews and biographies that have appeared about the author, you will certainly have some other source materials for guidance. The man who is probably best informed about this is Winston Churchill. Didn't he largely share the plans for an Arab empire that Lawrence cherished? Naturally, I know much too little about these things to be able to participate in the discussion. If you're able to decide on an essay along the lines described above, it would result in a welcome contribution for us. But should some biographies of the author have appeared in the past few years, which I believe I vaguely remember, you could present your ideas in the form of a review article of these publications in case you decide not to write an essay.
§11. The Critique of Revolutionary Sociology.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 5/4/1938.]36
The new issue will probably only come out next month. It will appear as a double issue. I have an essay in it on Montaigne and the function of skepticism that betrays all too clearly the traces of the disjointed time I had available to work in the past few weeks. You'll find several observations in it on the problem of conformism. I gave much thought to our oral and written debates. More and more it appears to me that our differences can be attributed to the meaning of universal concepts for theory. In my view they have real validity only in the context of a theoretical whole whose relationship to specific historic interests in the situation at issue is continuously monitored. Social changes in the present are, therefore, already so decisive for theory because every development in the relationship of the interest that animates theory to the constellations of social reality can make a revolution in the theoretical conceptual structure necessary. This has been incisively demonstrated in recent times precisely for the concepts relevant to the ideas of conformism, such as solidarity, discipline, party, state, and so on. It is an integral part of the dialectical method to complete this process of a revolution in the conceptual structure so that the critical interest in the liberation of mankind (which in this epoch is identical with the tendency toward the abolition of social classes) always finds adequate expression, corresponding to the most progressive state of knowledge, in theory. This is where you can find one of my primary reservations about sociology. It certainly adapts its conceptual structure to reality. To this extent it is beyond reproach. But the principle of these changes remains opaque, and—to the extent it becomes transparent—I do not care to identify with it. Not the dialectical development of the relationship between freedom and reality but increasing experience and intelligent perspicacity should—if I'm correct—form the basis for the evolution of sociology. Nonetheless, in the critical theory of history, which is my own concern, the adjustment of perceptions to more incisive observations and the elimination of contradictions in the context of a basically unchangeable subject do not play the same role as in the natural sciences, whose course apparently is exclusively governed by such moments. They are not part of theory in its precise sense but of the appropriate disposition of the material. The continuation of the theory of history must, according to the idealist conception, be consciously reconciled with specific ideas and, according to the materialist conception, with a specific praxis. In any case, it is not sufficient to adapt the idea to growing insight or the author's changing theoretical interests or to academic demands, however significant or justified such factors may be. I am completely in agreement with sociology to the extent it is to be considered as a discipline in the positivistic sense and confronts the erroneous notion that it is itself a theory of history. Yet to the extent it apparently tends to assume the function of such a theory of history and allows theoretical thought to congeal into “science” I can't go along with it. I will offer no opinion on the extent to which obviously self-conscious dialectic can today play any role in the academic enterprise. I only know that it's one of the most urgent tasks in which we're all interested. I don't dare speculate on what Mannheim would say to such methodological considerations. In view of his extremely sophisticated thinking he is perhaps inclined to limit sociology critically in the sense indicated above. In doing so the claim to a sociological “diagnosis of the era,” as he conceives it, can also be spared misunderstanding. I haven't written him yet. I'd be happy to follow your suggestion and talk to him about the problems raised in Wiesengrund's critique as well as several others. Since, in view of the circumstances described above, it's already difficult for me to write a letter like this one, which you will perhaps share with Mannheim along with my regards, I'd be happy if he were to open the debate, perhaps in response to Wiesengrund's essay or to my own essays. Unfortunately, this year I don't expect to get to Europe to discuss with you the questions that occupy all of us.
§12. Application of the “Egoism”-essay: the problem of compassion.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Hans Mayer, 11/21/1938.]37
I read your letter of October 28th with great interest. No doubt you will understand what I mean when I say that, at present, the greater part of my day is spent issuing or tracking down affidavits and corresponding correspondence such that I have hardly any time left over for my own work and for substantive letters. My work must take a back seat to the cares of the day. I have most recently only authored a short essay against Siegfried Marck, which you will be able to read in the next issue. There is a fairly extensive plan for the book [viz., on dialectical logic], but in the coming weeks I could not possibly think of furthering it. I hope to dedicate the whole of January to its actualization. The Büchner book is good. It is evident that he put intensive work into it. Even Herr Löwenthal is very enthused about it, and, for all of his aversion to the prevailing fashion of grand biographies, this says quite a lot. Its fundamentally social-scientific foundation and theoretical conception set it far apart from what we have grown accustomed to from this branch of literature today. For reasons indicated above, I cannot get into details at this moment, but hope to do so once you are here.
I consider the thought of writing an essay on compassion [Mitleid] an outstanding one. But: “gare”!38 The problem is an extremely subtle one. One must be careful not to dissolve the category social-scientifically. Compassion is by no means mere ideology, but has much to do with impulses which very really strive for a better future. Perhaps the isolation of compassion from positive human relationships is, in certain respects, a product of decay. But neither Streicher’s love of canaries nor Wagner’s Parsifal speak against human goodness towards animals. It would be important to demonstrate the necessity of nuancing in the historical analysis precisely on this point. For the moment, four characteristic kinds of behavior towards animals come to mind: the purely sado-masochistic, as identified in the “Egoism”-essay; the regressive, which says eia and bebe to babies and miau to cats; the condescending, which gives animals fantastical names and whistles the melodies from The Magic Flute to birds; and, finally, that of natural politeness, which consists, for example, in the fact that even when one has nothing else to do, one nevertheless cannot bring themselves to disturb a sunbathing cat, but rather allows it to rest.
§13. Marxism and Method.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer (and Adorno) to Hans Mayer, 3/23/1939.]39
As I have already written to Mr. Brill, there have been several discussions about your reaction to the work “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” We even have the intention to publish some of it in the magazine and hesitate only because space is so terribly limited. However, I think it is time for me to finally write you something substantive about it myself. In advance, I would like to say both Wiesengrund and the rest of us are sincerely impressed with the seriousness with which you have engaged the work. There are probably, today, not many people who comprehend how much these seemingly remote things concern us. The following annotations correspond to the common standpoint of both Wiesengrund and myself.
The “sociological approach” belongs to an academic enterprise whose end we do not mourn. We are not curious about what comes out of the assignment of styles and other “general moments” to “social givens.” We should be thankful to the Nazis for saving us from further Habilitationsschriften of this kind, some of which we had to observe just before the curtain fell. The individual work of music does not serve as an example of a sociologically-interpreted style, but as an object of analysis. It is not to be understood by the sum of technical plus biographical plus historical plus sociological plus explanation. The categories supposedly stemming from specialist fields receive their respective, apposite meaning according to the structure in which they enter into each individual analysis. The social content of Beethoven’s music is not illuminated by the sociology of German society of his time.
The most salient of your theoretical objections is that the fetish chapter of Capital, or the antithesis of use-value and exchange-value, has been arbitrarily adopted in isolation and that, as a result, a rigid music-sociological schema has been made out of it, with disregard for other, essential aspects of Marxian analysis, in particular the theory of circulation. To this, we would only like to remark, as far as the Marxist formulation of the question is concerned, that we believe, in fact, Marx’s analysis of the commodity-form is not merely one among many other equally valid aspects (as a pluralistic sociologist would have it), but rather that “the commodity” is the category which illuminates the whole of society like a spotlight. If one can rightly go so far as to determine the concept of ideology essentially by the fact that, for reasons of necessary social semblance,40 the capitalist attributes surplus value not just to ‘v’ [viz., variable capital], but rather to ‘c’ [viz., constant capital], to congealed and not to living labor, then it follows that this aspect is, at its innermost, identical with the critique of reification, and I believe it would not be too difficult to show that Capital is dominated by the theory of reification right down to its most intimate economic details. One can be assured of this even without recourse to the passages from Feuerbach and Hegel that you have cited, and which are not unknown to us.
To start with circulation in principle would immediately bring about the danger of the very psychologism to which [starting from the category of] labor is in principle opposed. This same consideration determines the particular orientation of ‘labor’ to the problem of mediation. We are very conscious of the demand for economic mediation; just as we are of the immense difficulties that stand in the way of this. To replace it, however, with an intellectual-historical [mediation] of the kind you propose would mean falling behind the essay’s approach to the subject matter and adopting psychological-historical explanations wherever political economy fails to deliver. We prefer to leave the gaps in mediation like blank spots on a map, and to present the problem as an objective, social one.
It seems to me that you have not perceived this clearly. Your detailed argumentation always comes down to the [claim] that the facts observed in the essay are actually nothing new, and nothing which would require categories such as fetishism and regression, but are, to the contrary, rather old and, in a certain sense, harmless phenomena. The partially venerable age of the musical horrors of the present is never disputed; it is expressly pointed out several times over. It seems to me, according our conception as a whole, that, in a certain sense, not all that much has changed in the entire course of the bourgeois phase.
What has changed could be described as a reversal of quantity into quality, and this is where I see your misunderstanding. The distinction consists in the fact that while the cult of voice, of sheer virtuosity, of inspiration, of so-called sensual euphony and all sorts of similar things which are unique to the whole epoch of more developed bourgeois music, today a decisive transformation has taken place in that these very moments are no longer really enjoyed, one might almost say no longer really understood, but rather that what is apperceived and enjoyed about them is really their mere reflection by the ruling enterprise. What is decisive about the current state of affairs is not outward appearance and superficiality, nor even the worship of success in the olden style, but rather, and precisely, the process of substitution which the essay—in my opinion, quite successfully—attempts to describe through the thesis that exchange-value is consumed in the stead of use-value.
You, however, argue as if we numbered among those advocates of taste, which we ourselves consider to be liquidated, and as if we were indignant about those means of excitation, when what is really being said is that what excites today is not is not the spontaneous excitation, but rather only its quantified deformation. But it is precisely the content-derived specification of this thought which forces us to insist on the categories of fetishism and regression, and not to replace them with [categories which are] less binding, and to that extent more “tasteful”. In the case of the “Regression of Listening,” the accusation is not the philistine wisdom that today one only hears beautiful pieces, but rather that in the reification of music into “beautiful pieces,” these cease to be so and turn into something entirely different and completely abstract. Your dispute, to become truly productive, would have to measure itself against this fact and not content itself with resistance to its well-known, first part.
The thesis on Toscanini is also misunderstood (to emphasize something concrete). The argument is not that “too beautiful is not beautiful”, but rather that beauty itself is becoming contested. A true interpretation (as Kolisch and Wiesengrund have most last formulated it) requires an X-ray photograph of the work under consideration, i.e., that it releases the epitome of the latent, constructive relationships contained in the work. What Toscanini does is never such a realization of the text. Moreover, Toscanini’s so-called “fidelity to the work” is nothing new. As far as I can see, he is not the one who abolished the kiss-curls of the pianist and the ostentatious romantic.
With stylistic categories as vague as that of “objectivity,” it is impossible to get a hold of his much more specific ideal of music-making, which presents as a strange mixture of the elan of the primitive conductor and an exactness of functioning and in no way as absolute objectivity. When you, in connection with these matters, speak of a “healing process” that is ascertainable today and in this world, I would like to ask you, to remain in the realm of music, with Lohengrin: “Elsa, mit wem verkehrst du?” In the end, you have an organ for what this “healing process” is all about here and elsewhere. It concerns nothing less than struggle against bad individualism, which abolishes the individual in the Hegelian sense; here, ‘healing’ admits [the individual] into the labor camp of false collectivity, i.e. that collectivity which is supposed to precede the realization of freedom. It is always incomprehensible to me that some people who are as close to us in social conviction as you are, so long as they are the least bit dependent on the established science of art, fall for such dubious categories again and again. It is precisely because it drives such innocence out of the seemingly remotest areas that I attach such great significance to Wiesengrund’s activity in our circle. Since you evaluate Wiesengrund’s “radicalism” positively at the outset of your remarks, you should incorporate something of this radicalism into your own way of thinking, instead of accepting it in the abstract and falling prey to the predominant opinion and, on occasion, to the manipulation of culture in concrete cases. It seems impossible to me to speak of processes of healing and symptoms of degeneration and at the same time benevolently recognize such radicalism.
As far as your thesis […] about “nothing but economic categories” is concerned, it seems to me that there is a misunderstanding on your part, as you take the significance of economic categories within the framework of Marxist theory to be specifically confined to economic science, which must therefore be “mediated’ by categories from other sciences, whereas the essence of the Marxist method is precisely in dismantling all the cover-ups which are reflected in the mediating concepts of the other bourgeois sciences by recourse to the production process itself. If Wiesengrund’s work has any fundamental flaw, it is that it is too little economic, i.e., that the economic categories used in it are too little differentiated to achieve exactly what is expected of them, though I think there are at least a few attempts made in this direction, for example, in the excursus on the significance of monopoly for musical adaptation. If you have detected something of this deficiency, you nevertheless interpret it as a sign of the reverse, i.e. you think that differentiation can be achieved by the incorporation of extra-economic categories, whereas in truth the more extensive differentiation of the economic [categories] themselves on its own would have the force to dismantle the cover-up concepts of intellectual history.
With regard to the critical character of music, dissonance, and related matters, there is one final misunderstanding. I believe you will come to see for yourself upon re-reading this essay, and other music-theoretical works of Wiesengrund’s, what I mean. Certainly no one can say he “simplified” the cases of Berg, Stravinsky, and Bartok. However, we are of the view that however necessary critical differentiation is in individual cases, on the whole, musical production today – with the exception of very few auteurs (among which we would also include certain pieces of Stravinsky) – is itself completely indifferent to them. Wiesengrund explained this to me in great detail through technical arguments, and I myself believe, of course, that such technical configurations are in the final analysis positions of social truth. For we are old-fashioned enough to insist that there is only one truth, and that a statement such as “one can be an exemplary composer, but write music that does not withstand the test of social theory” itself does not withstand the test of social theory.
You mean, in opposition to Wiesengrund’s fanaticism and dogmatism, to represent the healthy, more balanced standpoint of intellectual history. But, as is the case with any ‘healthy’ standpoint, it easily lends itself to becoming a pretext for continuing to use well-worn cliches and coming to the rescue of the opinion of the well-educated philistine, which I’m sure you don’t approve of. It seems to me particularly disastrous that this attitude is sometimes served by the very methods and concept-formations which, as far as their own meaning is concerned, are meant for the contrary. With regard to many of the details under discussion here, I have said nothing, in the first place because I do not feel competent enough to do so myself, and in the second place because the discussion may perhaps be continued in a more appropriate manner at a later date. What I can tell you right now is that I myself have learned, in discussing your objections with Wiesengrund, more than a few music-theoretical things, and for which I am also grateful.
§14. Critique of Durkheim.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Hans Mayer, 11/13/1939.]41
Dear Mr. Mayer: Congratulations on coming up with the good idea to analyze Durkheimianism. You'll be tackling an urgently necessary task to the extent you don't only pillory Durkheim's exaggerations, which have already been sufficiently attacked by methodologically stricter colleagues of this chief rabbi of sociology, but truly take to task the idea of a sociological “science.” I consider concepts such as social pressure, decline, and so on to be exaggerated, and they are apparently so dogmatic that every German PhD student can recite them by rote. It would be much more important to clarify the sociological claim that there are experts for issues relating to social life-therefore, specialists not in political economics, history, or even philosophy but in sociology. Such experts would, for example, explain suicide on the basis of social facts instead of vice versa, which at least would have a certain relationship to reality. Quite a few current positivist sociologists remind one strongly of those psychologists who appear as experts in the sphere of intimacy and do not even shrink from passing judgment on hatred and love simply because some poor rich women regularly report on the misery of their marital life. There are no experts in this. Usually it's even somewhat difficult for psychologists to grasp the worries of more ordinary people, that is, people like you and me. Nonetheless, one may in no way reject sociology and psychology per se. I know many scholars in these fields whom I most deeply respect and admire. What seems unbearable to me is only the process of detaching these fields from dialectical theory in the delusion that there could be experts for all possible fundamental questions related to human life without having a whiff or the least notion of any other issues.
§15. Marx’s 18th Brumaire and The Civil War in France: Models for Critical-Theoretical Historiography.
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 11/21/1945.]42
Personally, I think that historical studies have to be treated in a very pragmatic way if they are to serve the purpose of the book [viz., Paul Massing’s Rehearsal]. There should be constant cross-references to pertinent problems. We must not forget that certain classical studies like The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, or The Civil War in France had a direct relationship to the problems of the days in which they were written, and that the theoretical significance was made explicit so to speak in every line. The Epigones developed a kind of historiography in which the cross-references became more or less schematic, monotonous, and conventional. [...] You should see to it that Massing’s work [...] is concise and in continuous contact with our actual points of interest.
Notes: Revolution and Rhetoric in Horkheimer’s Essais Matérialistes
Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew for the Uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances attending the second edition of the eighteenth Brumaire!
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.
Consideration of this world-historical necromancy reveals at once a salient difference. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society. The first ones knocked the feudal basis to pieces and mowed off the feudal heads which had grown on it. The other created inside France the conditions under which free competition could first be developed, parcelled landed property exploited and the unchained industrial productive forces of the nation employed; and beyond the French borders he everywhere swept the feudal institutions away, so far as was necessary to furnish bourgeois society in France with a suitable up-to-date environment on the European Continent. The new social formation once established, the antediluvian Colossi disappeared and with them resurrected Romanity-the Brutuses, Gracchi, Publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality had begotten its true interpreters and mouthpieces in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants and Guizots; its real commanders sat behind the counter, and the hogheaded Louis XVIII was its political chief. Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer comprehended that ghosts from the days of Rome had watched over its cradle. But unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and battles of peoples to bring it into being. And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman Republic its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to maintain their passion on the high plane of great historical tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution. When the real aim had been achieved, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.
Thus the resurrection of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in imagination, not of fleeing from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not of making its ghost walk about again.
— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852]43
The importance of symbols is clearly evident in Rienzo's early-bourgeois revolt. The importance he set on his own clothing and pageantry is typical. “When going to the cathedral on the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, he sat on a high battle horse, in green and yellow velvet clothing, a shining steel scepter in his hand, with an escort of fifty spearmen; a Roman held the flag with his coat-of-arms over his head; another carried the sword of justice before him; a knight scattered gold among the people, while a solemn procession of cavalerotti and Capitol officials, of commoners and nobility, preceded or followed. Trumpeters blared from silver instruments and musicians played silver hand drums. On the steps of St. Peter's the cardinals greeted Rome's dictator by singing the Veni Creator Spiritus.”44 Drawing on the first biography, later portrayals describe how he returned to Rome in order to meet the papal legates after his campaign against the barons. He “rode with his retinue to St. Peter's, got from the sacristy the precious, pearl-embroidered dalmatic with which the German Emperors were crowned, and put it on over his armor. So with the silver crown of a tribune on his head and scepter in hand, while the trumpets blasted, he entered the papal palace like a Caesar, presenting a half-frightening, half-fantastic sight before the astonished legates, and he scared them into silence with grim, curt questions.”45 The Pope wrote with indignation to the Emperor about Rienzo's pagan inclinations. “Not satisfied with the office of rector, he insolently and unashamedly usurps various titles. … In contrast with the mores of the Christian religion and in accordance to pagan customs, he has worn various crowns and diadems and undertaken to pass foolish and illegal laws in the manner of the Caesars.”46 The ceremony on August 1, 1347, in which he had himself knighted and, in the presence of many dignitaries including the papal vicar, cleansed himself of all sins in the ancient bathtub of the Emperor Constantine, certainly had its origins in medieval customs. But on the other hand, Cola presented himself as a man of the people: as a democratic measure he abolished the use of the titles Don and Dominus, which he reserved for the Pope, prohibited the use of aristocratic coats-of-arms on houses, and the like.47 The tremendous emphasis he placed on symbolism in connection with his own person can therefore not be explained solely in terms of tradition. It was based on the necessity of establishing himself as the new, emotionally recognized authority. Similarly, the handing of flags to delegations was essential to this leader: “On August 2, Cola celebrated the Feast of Italian Unity or the alliance of the cities, at the Capitol. He handed the envoys large and small flags with symbols and put gold rings on their fingers to signify their marriage with Rome.”48
This symbolism is connected with the endeavor to reintroduce old customs and to refurbish the glory of antiquity in general. However much such leaders portray themselves as revolutionaries and innovators, it is not in their nature to rebel against the existing order and to squeeze from the situation whatever is historically possible for human happiness. They experience themselves as executors of a higher ancient power, and the image that inspires them bears more features of the past than those of a better future. The psychic structure underlying this behavior among leaders and followers has been extensively described by Fromm. “In the name of God, the past, the course of nature, or duty, activity is possible (for this type of character), not for the sake of the unborn, the future, the still powerless, or simply happiness. The authoritarian personality draws his strength for active behavior from reliance on higher powers.”49 The masses which those leaders particularly relied upon due to their miserable situation and their lack of integration into a rational work process evinced a chronically underdeveloped psychological state that was both authoritarian and rebellious,50 and that bore hardly a trace of independent class consciousness.51 Despite the leader's efforts to incite the people to rebel against the prevailing conditions, he never intended to destroy the masses’ disposition toward mental dependency or their blind faith in authority. The propaganda of the leader does not combine the critique of the authorities that must be toppled with any tendency toward unrestricted rationality. While the old system contained the masses with the help of irrational ties, it is not immediately replaced by a society that truly represents the general interest, though bourgeois ideology asserts as much. The more legitimate authorities are toppled or at least attacked by the spread of freedom, the more strongly the need is felt to glorify the authority of the new rulers with reference to older powers that are untainted by the present dissatisfaction. The living “conjure up anxiously the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from their names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time honored disguise and this borrowed language.”52
From an early age Cola was attracted to the idea of the old Romans. It is reported how, long before taking power, “a fantastic smile used to play” around his mouth “when he explained ancient statues or reliefs or read inscriptions from marble tablets scattered all around Rome.”53 Later he justified himself to the Pope by asking what harm could be done to faith by his revival of the Roman titles together with the ancient rites.54 His choice of holidays is based on old dates and celebrations; his entire behavior is guided by the idea of restoring the Roman Empire. He speaks of “Rome's sacred soil,”55 and seeks to place his entire program, as it were, under the aegis of his nation's glorious past. By thus surrounding himself with the aura of ancient forces, he places himself under the protection of a strong present power. “He feels that he is executer, renewer, deepener, carrier of Boniface VIII’s imperial tendencies, and yet—as Clement VI writes—he wants to be just a servant and helper of the Pope and declares himself ready to abdicate immediately, if the Pope so wishes.”56 Cola always professed his loyalty to the Pope and acted in his name. Of course, he also regards himself as commissioned not only by these old and present forces, but directly by God as well. “He believes God has, by calling him, led the Roman people out of the darkness of tyranny, i.e., of the barons, into the light of freedom, peace and justice, and delivered Rome, the domina gentium, sanctissima urbium (mistress of the nations, most holy of cities) … from tribute, transforming it from a robbers' nest to its original nature.”57 “The people regarded him as a man chosen by God.”58 Although he and his like seek to offer the masses the spectacle of a freedom movement, at the same time they adopt the pathos of absolute obedience to higher truths and thus present the example of a submissiveness which is to be emulated by their followers’ loyalty to the leaders and to the bourgeois forms of life. As much as the whole world must tremble before them in fear, they themselves display the image of fear of still higher and supreme beings. Their role in society is revealed in their psychology: they defend the strata of property owners both against old, restrictive privileges that are burdensome to the whole society and against the lower class's demands on the new system. Consequently, their desire for freedom is both abstract and relative. Dependency is merely changed, not abolished. The progressive moment is expressed with greater purity and less restraint in the works of writers who represented the age than among political leaders. Philosophy and poetry reflect both the critique of the present and the more radical desire for a society without oppression; the ambivalent and idolatrous speeches of the politicians evince the brutality of the bourgeois order.
— Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era” [1936]59
§1. The “Egoism”-Essay (1936): Program and Problematic
By late 1936, “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era” (1936) had become the centerpiece of the Essais Matérialistes. (Adorno: “It will certainly form the core of the work.”)60 Horkheimer even began to consider it a substitute for “Materialism and Morality,” one of the two complementary essays from 1933 (alongside “Materialism and Metaphysics”) in which Horkheimer had first professed the militant materialist theory that would form his own self-conception—and shape the general orientation of ‘critical theory’ more broadly—throughout the 1930s, if not also the 1940s. The “Egoism”-essay became something of a program all its own. Horkheimer envisioned a series of future collaborations about themes raised in the essays, including specialized studies of historical material on the Reformation and the German ‘wars of liberation’ (~1807-1815).61 Shortly after finishing his first and final draft of the “Egoism”-essay, Horkheimer, in a letter to Katharina von Hirsch (6/5/1936), suggests the essay be read as a preliminary study for a materialist theory of modern rhetoric. He writes:
I've hardly ever been as eager for your opinion of an essay as this one. In terms of structure it is a monstrosity. Namely, the theme of the essay, that is, the particular kind of historically operative horror of more recent times, is treated in the beginning and closing sections, both of which are very brief. But the disproportionately large middle section attempts to reveal the socio-psychological mechanisms that determine this horror on the basis of some characteristic popular rebellions during this historical period. These movements, the “exceptional circumstances,” are then used in a similar manner as the keys to so-called normal periods, just as certain affective phenomena in psychology can lead to an understanding of the total personality. The main section, which is documented with a lot of necessarily second- and third-hand historical material, is, therefore, presented in a style entirely different from the more objectively significant introduction and conclusion. The seams become all too visible. On the other hand, a whole series of thoughts are worked into this essay that it will perhaps be possible to pursue later in a much more fundamental and systematic manner. Among them are the beginnings of a theory of bourgeois leadership, of the crowd, of the function of speeches, of symbols, and so on, all themes that are not directly related to the primary topic but that could be noted apropos of the historical explanations. The whole thing is titled “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung. Zur Anthropologie des bürgerlichen Zeitalters” and will be about five printed sheets long.62
Through the remainder of 1936, Horkheimer makes several attempts to give the problematic he’s identified fuller articulation—namely, the dynamic configuration and reconfiguration of authority, speech, and the masses in modern politics. He does this in three supplements to the “Egoism”-essay, collected above:
A “Postscript” on Donald Greer’s (1935) book on the statistical interpretation of the incidence of terror in the French Revolution for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (ZfS).
“The Function of Speech in Modernity,” a ‘luncheon’ lecture delivered to an association of American historians in mid-October.
Three “Lectures on Authority and Society,” written late 1936 and delivered through May 1937 at Columbia University as part of the ISR’s collective, interdisciplinary seminar on the topic.
Beyond authority, speech, and the masses, there are two further elements of the problematic which are crucial for Horkheimer’s reflections on modern revolutions: cruelty and anthropology. For the remainder of this introduction, I want to focus on these categories—cruelty because of the relative neglect of Horkheimer’s theorization of the role of terror in modern revolutions in the reception of early critical theory; anthropology because of the importance the critique of philosophical anthropology for the self-conception of the ‘first generation’ of the Frankfurt School.
a) Cruelty (and the Terror)
In a letter to his friend, the psychoanalyst Karl Landauer (1887-1945), Horkheimer underlines the importance of the terror in the “Egoism”-essay, describing it as an exploration of “the problem of the leader” and “the concept of historically efficacious cruelty.”63 Terror, in Horkheimer’s account, is the unconfessed enjoyment of the cruelty of the virtuous projected onto their victims.64
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.65
The historical effectiveness of cruelty as it takes the form of revolutionary terror is the focus of the “Postscript,” which, though less than two pages in length, is a singular methodological document: in it, Horkheimer derives theoretical criteria from the “Egoism”-essay and applies them to the problem of distinguishing between revolution and counter-revolution, or, more specifically, between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ terror as alternating moments in modern revolutionary movements. It is the alternation or even coordination of these types of terror in modern revolutionary politics, Horkheimer explains, which makes the distinction between ‘revolutionary’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ tendencies, between revolutions and counter-revolutions, so difficult in the first place. The argument Horkheimer advances in the “Postscript” is that the distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ terror is a distinction like that between, to use a phrase of Machiavelli’s, cruelties well or poorly used: cruelties are well used if done at a stroke, out of necessity for securing oneself, and to the evident benefit of one’s subjects; cruelties are poorly used “which, though few in the beginning, rather grow with time than are eliminated.”66 In the initial distinction Horkheimer sets up, the ‘rational’ kind of terror is used primarily against external threats as a means of deterring the enemy to secure the revolutionary movement, whereas the ‘irrational’ is used primarily against the internal threat of wavering commitment in the revolutionary movement itself. Horkheimer’s conceptual innovation lies in restoring to this formal distinction its social content. The conventional, and purely instrumental, distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ terror indexes the rationality of cruelty according to its effectiveness in achieving the end of civic welfare—for instance, in the interests of rising bourgeoisie through a centralized state, as Horkheimer interprets Machiavelli’s concept of virtù.67
As Horkheimer argues at length in the “Egoism”-essay, the telos of the bourgeois revolutionary—from Rienzo to Robespierre—is to foment the uprising of the masses against “feudal” fetters on society on behalf of the general public for the sake of securing the conditions of the economic exploitation of the majority, a contradiction which, in the course of the revolution, will necessitate the ‘irrational’ kind of terror. This is particularly evident in Horkheimer’s treatment of Robespierre.68 According to Horkheimer, if Robespierre’s “blindness to this contradiction” from the outset of the French Revolution explains his fall (“Robespierre discovered too late that he could not carry on his revolutionary policy without concessions to the lower classes…”), his dawning awareness of this contradiction in the course of the revolution explains both the intensification of the ‘irrational’ terror to suppress the demands of the revolutionary masses and Robespierre’s symbolic performance of ascetic morality.69 In Robespierre’s case, this basic contradiction at the heart of popular bourgeois revolutions between, as Horkheimer condenses in the “Postscript,” the realization of happiness for a specific class strata and the elevation of the whole of society into that state in which all may enjoy in equal measure the goods of culture develops into, in one moment, a state-enforced morality of renunciation for the masses70—and, in the next, the terror after Thermidor for the most revolutionary elements of the revolution who refused to be reformed.71
Through Horkheimer’s analysis of Robespierre as a case study of the pathological social formation of the character of the bourgeois revolutionary, the radicality of his short “Postscript” to Greer’s book becomes clear. In it, Horkheimer sets out to explain the social crisis which calls for the distinction between cruelties well used and cruelties poorly used, between rational terror and irrational terror, in the first place through a history of class antagonisms which propel modern revolutions. Through this, he evaluates the instrumental criterion of the bourgeois revolutionary which allows us to distinguish between cruelties well and poorly used—namely, the use of the state as an instrument to achieve the welfare of civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]—under the eudaimonistic criterion by which bourgeois revolutions are, and will be, judged by the masses they rely upon and suppress in equal measure—namely, “the possibility of universal happiness.” In “The Rationalism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy” (1934), Horkheimer even entertains the idea of “an enlightened, indeed even a revolutionary despotism,” since “[t]here is no unconditional standard against which to judge this relation [across] various periods” and “rational justification of any action can ultimately be related only to the happiness of human beings.”72 Rather than concluding his “Postscript” with a justification of the ‘rational’ terror, Horkheimer distinguishes between two kinds of revolutionary movements in modernity: the one, driven by “groups which are oriented towards a solidaristic society”—”solidaristic” meaning, for Horkheimer throughout the 1930s and 1940s, socialistic—who lack the motivation to call for a renunciation of drives, and the other, driven by groups which are oriented towards those who identify the well-being of society as a whole with the flourishing of the bourgeoisie (“the role of the bourgeois leader as a functionary of the property owning strata”),73 and thus come to demand we “recognize the eternal necessity of impoverishment and the renunciation of drives.” The latter, Horkheimer repeatedly remarks, need not be characterized as villainous puppet-masters manipulating the masses from above with lies—a kind of social criticism Horkheimer rightly criticizes, in both “The Function of Speech in Modernity” and the lectures on “Authority and Society,” for being too “rationalistic” to explain or immunize against the cruelties of modern mass movements. Horkheimer writes of Machiavelli in the unpublished fragment “On the History of Sociology from Machiavelli Through Saint-Simon” (1929):
For Machiavelli, [the science of politics] rests on a double conviction: trust in the strength of his class and certainty that its flourishing and well-being are in accord with that of society as a whole. The former coincided with the belief in the power of man to assert his goals against fate, “Fortuna”—trust in the future of individual industrial entrepreneurs, merchants and bankers and trust in the ascendancy of the class to which they belong are one and the same. Both find expression in Machiavelli’s declaration of human freedom and rejection of the old point of view that “the world is so completely governed by divine providence and ‘Fortuna’ that human prudence can erect nothing against it.” During the Renaissance, the same conviction also directly conditioned the development of a new concept of causality and of the exact natural sciences. The extent to which Machiavelli considered it self-evident that the conditions of growth for civil (bourgeois) industriousness were also those of the common good is expressed in his concept of virtù, which contains both the entrepreneurial spirit of the individual and the prosperity of the whole. All of the terrifying means he recommended—hypocrisy, perjury, cruelty, murder, and mass murder—were in the objective interests of the bourgeoisie in establishing a strong national government, with as wide an embrace as possible, which, by means of unified administration, could guarantee their protection both internally and externally. But if this class-purpose hallows all means for Machiavelli, it is only because, subjectively, it does not appear one at all, but rather as concern for humanity, as the creation of the greatest communal existence [Gemeinwesens].74
Thus, Horkheimer ends his “Postscript,”: “As the right theory of society explains rational terror, it also protects against irrational terror, which has always, in all times, been the more terrible.” In Dämmerung (1934), written under the pseudonym of Heinrich Regius, Horkheimer writes that the persistence of the terror in the aftermath of socialist revolutions is not, when properly understood, an argument against them and for the status quo, which, if not perfect, is at the very least ‘peace.’ Instead, the terror which follows socialist revolutions is, in fact, another argument against the status quo they struggle to overthrow:
Such Is the World: Activity in a proletarian party has the abolition of exploitation for its goal. But the strengthening of this party is the mediate cause of increased pressure on the ruled class and the remorseless fight against all that are suspected of sympathy with it. The closer the decision comes, the more terrible the repressive measures of the ruling class. Civil war, toward which the party is driven in the historical dynamics, is fraught with all the abominations on earth. If the old order is victorious, terror and endless dread begin. For those seriously concerned with improving society, there has never been a way out of this dilemma. The act through which help is to come is condemned to increase misery. If the most cynical member of the ruling class reproaches the ascetic revolutionary for having caused untold suffering, he isn't really wrong. Such is the world.75
A decade after the last of the aphorisms for Dämmerung were written (ca. 1931), Horkheimer condenses the aporia of socialist struggle into two formulae in “The Authoritarian State” [1942]: “The revolutionary movement negatively reflects the situation which it is attacking”; “Whatever seeks to extend itself under domination runs the danger of reproducing it.”76 In a letter to Adolph Lowe (1/4/1938), Horkheimer writes this response to Lowe’s worry that the “Eastern problematic” (viz., in Russia) has shown that life in a post-revolutionary socialist society consists in a choice of the individual’s conformist renunciation of their interests for the sake of social welfare or the tyrannical domination of particular interests in the stead of universal ones:
I cannot concede that the activity of human beings in shaping their [social] relations after the disappearing of the conditions that inhibit their development can essentially be described as the choice between tyranny and conformism. Particularly in the beginning, not a few needs must, of course, be pushed aside, and coercive violence [Zwangsgewalt] cannot be dispensed with. But the pushing-aside of one need behind another—for example, that of immediate enjoyment behind conditions of universal security—only contains the irrational moment inherent to the concept of conformism if the society itself is irrational. I believe we should do everything to ensure this is made apparent and that bad [social] relations of the present, wherever they may exist, do not acquire the illusory semblance [Schein] of rightness and eternity.77
Throughout Horkheimer’s reflections on the problem of cruelty in modern revolutionary movements, the distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ terror does not have the purpose of justifying the former against the latter. Rather, the distinction redoubles the criticism of the world in which either kind of terror seems necessary or inevitable at all: the terror can only be ‘rational’ in an irrational world. Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” derived from the need of the bourgeois revolutionary to preach the virtue of renunciation to the masses whose happiness they promise and deny:
Under Savonarola a whole system of informants was organized in order to make all kinds of moral transgressions impossible. The bonfire of the “vanities” is well-known. Under his influence and that of his followers, items incompatible with the conversion of the masses were burned: powder boxes, make-up and other cosmetics, as well as chess and other games, harps, etc. On a great bonfire before the Signoria, undesirable books also found a place: “The works of Boccaccio and Petrarch, Morgante and other battle descriptions, as well as magic and other superstitious writings; finally immodest statues and paintings, the pictures of beautiful Florentine ladies from the hand of excellent painters and sculptors and precious foreign fabrics with unchaste depictions.” An anti-intellectual tendency asserts itself in all these popular uprisings. This tendency is closely connected with the fact that the masses were not yet capable of an independent political stance that aimed to meet their own interests and had to internalize their wishes by the roundabout way of fetishized persons and ideas. Max Weber stressed the rationalistic trait of the bourgeois mind, but irrationalism is from the start no less associated with its history.78
The commune’s reply to the petty-bourgeois bonfire of the vanities is the burning of the guillotines. In his drafts for The Civil War in France (1871), Marx tells us that when the communards set the guillotines aflame, this inspired such fear among the ruling class that the latter’s reflex was to accuse the Commune of the very terror they so desperately desired to bring down upon it:
The Commune, having made inquiries consequent upon private information, found that beside the old guillotine the “government of order ” had commanded the construction of a new guillotine (more expeditious and portable) and paid in advance. The Commune ordered both the old and the new guillotines to be burned publicly on the 6th of April. The Versailles journals, re-echoed by the press of Order all over the world, narrated the Paris people, as a demonstration against the bloodthirstiness of the Communards, had burnt these guillotines!
Horkheimer draws two lessons from this phenomena. First, the terror of bourgeois revolutionaries from early modern times through the eighteenth century is the model for the bourgeois terrorism of the fascist in the present:
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 forbidden 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.79
Second, as he writes in the final paragraph of the “Postscript,” there is another kind of revolutionary from age of bourgeois uprisings—Müntzer among the peasants instead of Luther in the lap of princes,80 Claire Lacombe among the enragés instead of Robespierre before the Assembly81—who creates a pattern for the anti-fascist of today:
As the groups which are oriented towards a solidaristic society no longer recognize the eternal necessity of impoverishment and the renunciation of drives, the introversion [Verinnerlichung] of material demands, and idealistic morality, they are also free of ressentiment, free of the subjective grounds from which the terror derives. They stand in another relation entirely towards political and criminal justice [Justiz] than the one to which the terror is so closely connected. One of the primary roots of cruelty is despair over the possibility of universal happiness [allgemeinen Glücks]. The groups which consciously seek to bring this about by virtue of their social existence, for all of their resolve and resistance, have no psychological need for the spectacle of blood and misery. The stronger the belief in the emancipation of humanity, the less the desire for sacrificial victims.
b) Critique of Anthropology
Already in his debut philosophical publication, “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History” (1930), Horkheimer seems to deny the possibility of a philosophical anthropology tout court: “A philosophical anthropology, i.e., a doctrine of a particular human nature that consists of definitive pronouncements about some immutable concept of human essence that is untouched by history, is thus impossible.”82 However, in his “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” (1935), Horkheimer distinguishes between unproductive and productive criticism of philosophical anthropology, arguing that the only productive criticism of philosophical anthropology is one that is able to account for the fact that “[i]ndividual anthropological concepts tend to be both correct and incorrect, since they [posit] the contents that are abstracted from history into an idea and elevate them to the level of ‘true’ conditions of existence.”83 As he writes in a letter to Lowe (10/23/1936) about the “Egoism”-essay: “I do not orient myself on the basis of a philosophical anthropology; I even consider one impossible. When it comes to this discipline, as with so many others, I believe it is not the science itself, but only its critique which can be legitimate.”84 With this, we have the first moment of the critique of philosophical anthropology: the critical, genetic reconstruction of certain ahistorical anthropological categories which are hypostases of historical determinations of human beings.85 Horkheimer presents the second moment in the claim that the basic problem with all philosophical anthropology is that its search for the essential conditions for human existence ‘avoids the anthropological question par excellence’:
[Philosophical] anthropology finds itself in danger of striving for too much or too little. It asks for and seeks a definition of human nature that extends from prehistory to the end of humanity, and it avoids the anthropological question par excellence, namely: how can we overcome an inhumane reality (since all human capacities that we love suffocate and decay within it)? Insofar as the first question can be posed meaningfully, its answer depends not only practically but also theoretically on every advance made in the second.86
Therefore, the critique of philosophical anthropology not only involves genetic reconstruction of the process by which “the meaning of all anthropological categories is changed in their very foundations concomitantly with great historical transformations,”87 but conscious participation, in practice or theory, in one of these ‘great historical transformations’ oneself. This is, in fact, how the “Egoism”-essay ends. Having defended the counter-canon of “hedonistic psychologists” since the time of Aristippus and Epicurus—such as Nietzsche, Mandeville, Helvétius, and Sade—who “investigated the [morally] despised drives for themselves and raised them to consciousness without rejection or minimalization” such that “these forces lost their demonic power” by enlightenment,88 Horkheimer distinguishes them as “prophet[s] of Epicurean gods” from the type of human being whose existence they prophesied:
By their own existence these psychologists seem to point out that the liberation from ascetic morality with its nihilistic consequences can bring about a human change in the opposite sense than internalization. This process sublates internalization; it does not cast the people back to the previous psychic stage, as it were, as if that first process had never taken place, but raises them to a higher level of existence. But those thinkers have contributed little to making it a universal reality; that is mainly the task of the historical persons in whom theory and historical practice became a unity. In them the mechanisms of bourgeois psychology, both as determining forces of their life and as theoretical object, are less important than their world-historical mission. Insofar as humanity, with their help, 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. According to Aristotle's aesthetic theory, the sight of suffering in tragedy causes pleasure. People become purer by satisfying this drive, the pleasure in empathy. The application of Aristotle's theory to the modern age seems to be problematic; it has been reinterpreted and “moralized,” even by Lessing, in the sense of idealistic morality. Catharsis through dramatic plays, through play in general, presupposes a changed humanity.89
In one of the letters Adorno and Horkheimer exchange on the “Egoism”-essay, Horkheimer writes (5/14/1936) of the essay’s subtitle, “Zur Anthropologie des bürgerlichen Zeitalters”:
I would have preferred to write: ‘On the Doctrine of the Bourgeois Human Being’ [‘Zur Lehre vom bürgerlichen Menschen’], but refrained from doing so out of tactical considerations. I would have liked the motto to be: “Mais tout cela sera balayé” [“But all this will be swept away”], — A[ndré] Gide. Alas, this was out of the question.90
In the following year, Horkheimer will claim, in a letter to Hans Mayer (12/17/1937), a second “motto for much of what I have written”91—namely, Marx’s definition of criticism in the famous Letter to Ruge (Kreuznach, September 1843):
[W]e do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one […] Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past.92
Read together, Horkheimer’s ‘mottos’ from Gide and from Marx distinguish the critical theory of society from philosophical anthropology’s “desire to provide a foundation for action by way of insights into human nature,” or its desire to “provide the grounds for meaning and an eternal purpose” in the process:
A theory free from illusions can only conceive of human purpose negatively, and reveals the inherent contradiction between the conditions of existence and everything that the great philosophies have postulated as a purpose. The unfolding of human powers, which these days have atrophied, is thus a motif that goes back even further than the humanism of the Renaissance. However, this motif does not need to assume the mystical character of an absolute principle. The corresponding will to the realization of a better society finds an endless number of stimuli in contemporary conditions.93
This is the second moment of the critique of philosophical anthropology: if philosophers have always interpreted the human being, the point, Horkheimer argues, is to change it.
§2. The Fate of the “Egoism”-essay: Speculation, Variation, and Self-critique
a) Speculative Annotations for a Theory of Rhetorics (1946)
The idea of a fundamental-systematic treatment of the topics of the “Egoism”-essay remained a desideratum for Horkheimer through the ISR’s Studies in Prejudice series in the late 1940s. Upon receiving early drafts from what would later be published as Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman’s Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949),94 Horkheimer replies to Löwenthal (7/5/1946) that his ‘most urgent philosophical efforts’ have returned to ‘the problem of language’ he first examined in the “Egoism”-essay a decade prior:
Two installments of the Agitator are now on my desk. I am very happy with them. They look like notes and drafts to a great book on our own line, and I am sure this is what it will finally be. So far my thoughts centered mainly around the problem of language which you bring up at different points [...]. At this moment I am not able to go into any details, but I think that this is the deepest layer of the whole problem. The root of fascist agitation is the fact that there is something rotten in language itself. To develop the whole problem from here would be the final form of a classical theory on the subject. The rottenness I have in mind is not so much the artistic inferiority which you mention [...], but a phenomenon which is expressed in Jewish religion by the verdict against trying to call God by His name and by the story of the Tower of Babel. The corruption of language seems also to be expressed in the legend of the Expulsion from Paradise, where all creatures had been named by Adam. We must beware of the idea that the fascist use of language is something radically new in our society. You will remember that I repeatedly made the remark that the distrust of the peasant against the city dweller with his mastery of language was partly justified. This distrust is an element of anti-Semitism itself, and the Jew who manipulates language so easily is not free from guilt in the prehistory of what you explain as the fascist handling of language. Here, too, the Jew is the pioneer of capitalism. It is very good to keep the various categories of public addresses apart as you do in your typology of oratory. On the other hand, we must also remember their basic identity in the present form of society. If you remember “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung,” you will find that, not to speak of political propaganda, I have even described the link which ties fascist agitation to the sermon. There are even much deeper connections than those which I traced in that study. An analysis of the phenomenon of loquacity and eloquence will certainly lead to new insights. Think of Luther's word: “Ich halte, der Kaiser rede in einem Jahre nicht so viel, als ich an einem Tage.” The affinity between language and sophistics belongs to the topic of the city dweller which I mentioned above. Rhetoric has been developed in the closest connection with the art of the lawyer who can defend either side. But here, too, there is a deeper element which links this problem with the basic corruption and the philosophical problem of language. It is Luther again and in this case against the jurists who exclaims: “Habe ich Euch weiß gemacht, ich kann Euch wohl wieder schwarz machen, daß Ihr wie leidige Teufel sollet sehen.” (Both Luther quotations are taken from Grisar, v. 2, p. 599 and p. 661.) There are many things which I would like to add but I have to close this letter. I just want to mention one other point which partly refers to my above remarks. In a well established way you use socialism as a point of reference whenever the radical opposite of the fascist point of view comes up. I know very well that you are aware of the problems involved here. But what I want to say is that we have to show the prehistory of fascism in certain vicissitudes of socialist propaganda itself. Again I want to say that I am most happy with the two installments. They show me more than anything else how closely your topic is related to my most urgent philosophical efforts.95
Days later, Horkheimer writes Löwenthal again (7/17/1946), as he is “constantly brooding” over the drafts of the Agitator, which, he argues, “demands we try to develop our own ideas” into “an explicit psychoanalytic theory of the agitator and his audience and, furthermore, a philosophical theory of language as the instrument of the devil,” referring to Freud’s Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921) [Group psychology and the analysis of the ego]96 as a model (“not much progress has been made since…”) and Otto Fenichel’s “On Acting” (1946)97 as a contemporary reference point and foil for addressing the psychological dimension of the problem.98 A month later, Horkheimer writes yet another letter to Löwenthal (8/19/1946) enclosing a number of speculative (Horkheimer: “most casual”) annotations on the Agitator as “the basis for an excellent theory of rhetorics.”
[F]ascist agitation could be explained as the distortion and decay of the true bourgeois philosophy: stoicism. The “negative attitude toward all human feelings” is indeed the essence of stoic reason. Bourgeois thinking was always characterized by its antagonism to “idealistic illusions.” The latter ones were upheld mainly as a means of social control. Is this very same symptom not also present in fascism? I know very well that you are aware of it; however, we must bring out the identity of fascist and bourgeois speech in their opposition. […]
[I]t would be tempting to go a little deeper and analyze reason and speech in the democratic process. Just now I am pondering much about the identification of the individual with the powers-to-be [sic] simply by using language—that is to say, with the forms of thinking, classification, administration recognized in reality as it is. The general concepts which we employ in order to integrate (subsume) the predicate—that is to say, the particular, the individual, under a class in which it loses its particularity—represent the collective agencies. Judging is both identifying with these agencies with these words and repeating the process of integration. —All this, however, belongs more in the theory of dialectics than of agitation. […]
One of the most important points in the history of modern rhetoric is the transition of the sermon from Latin to the vernacular, and then its use as a means of leading the masses [Mittel der Massenführung] during the Reformation. Here is the beginning of fascist agitation. Agrippa says (around 1530) in the chapter on oratory: “The German heresies, begun by Luther, are now so numerous that almost every city has its own heresy; and the leaders and originators were only a few years ago so famous for their eloquence and their dexterity that nothing could be added to their fame; now they are heads and leaders of the heretics.” Here you have the transition from Redner to Führer.99 The statesman needs speech to make the content of his policy clear. The reformer leads on the basis of speech alone.100
b) Adornian Variations: Bourgeois Terrorism (1937/38-1952), Triggering the Prevailing Universal (1964/65) and Negative Anthropology (1969)
Though Horkheimer’s ambition to use the “Egoism”-essay as a point of departure for developing a “theory of rhetorics” was never fulfilled, Adorno does give it a unique kind of fundamental-systematic treatment.
First, Adorno’s infamously acidic In Search of Wagner—most of which Adorno wrote in 1937/38, though it would not be published until 1952101—opens with a presentation of the concept of fascism as “bourgeois terrorism” through an analysis of Richard Wagner’s opera Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen (1842) “in conformity with the categories of [‘Egoism and Freedom Movements’]”:
[T]he Roman insurrection is directed against the libertine style of life and not against the class enemy, and it is only logical, if naive, that the resounding political action should be initiated by Adriano’s private family quarrels. From the very outset Rienzi’s revolution aims at integration: when he hears the slogans of the conflicting parties—‘for Colonna!’, ‘for Orsini!’—the motto that he, as the prophet of a totalitarian ideology, hurls back is ‘for Rome!’. As the first servant of the greater social totality, the dictator Rienzi spurns the title of king, just as Lohengrin will later refuse the rank of duke. In exchange of course he is as happy to accept the laurels of victory in advance as he is to bestow them on others. Another stage direction, likewise in conformity with the categories of [‘Egoism and Freedom Movements’], states: ‘Enter Rienzi as a Tribune, wearing outrageous and ostentatious robes.’ Within this historical costume-play we almost perceive some glimmering realization that the true nature of the hero lies in his self-knowledge. Self-praise and pomp—features of Wagner’s entire output and the emblems of Fascism—spring from the presentiment of the transient nature of bourgeois terrorism, of the death instinct implicit in the heroism that proclaims itself. The man who seeks immortality during his lifetime doubts that his achievement will survive him and so he celebrates his own obsequies with festive ceremonial. Behind Wagner’s facade of liberty, death and destruction stand waiting in the wings: the historic ruins that come crashing down on the heads of the defeated Gods and the guilt-laden world of the Ring.102
Adorno’s Wagner resists systematic form, but this paragraph is nothing if not systematic in scope. The categories Horkheimer listed, casually, one after another in 1936—’a theory of bourgeois leadership, of the crowd, of the function of speeches, of symbols,’ etc.—are all gathered up out of the elements of Wagner’s Rienzi and set in motion, the kind of microcosmic modeling of thematic constellations only possible through the micrological method.103
Second, Adorno continues to refer to the “Egoism”-essay as late as his History and Freedom lectures (1964/65), developing Horkheimer’s conception of bourgeois revolution as the self-assertion of particular class interest in the form of a universality—which it must promise the lower-class masses in a first gesture and deny them, with sermons and terror, in a second—into a theory of the different types of social preconditions for the self-assertion of a given particular interest as a universal, world-historical principle. In the case of the French Revolution, the middle class bourgeoisie, despite the general historical tendency, or ‘underlying cause’ [Ursache], towards the decline of the absolutist regime (which had already largely surrendered economic control over production to the bourgeoisie), relied on two further preconditions, triggers or ‘proximate causes’ [Anlässe], for a revolutionary situation to arise in which it might assert itself as the prevailing social universal: the disastrous absolutist mismanagement of the budget and its inability to prevent financial crises, on the one hand, and the uprising of the quasi-proletarian urban lower-class masses in response to economic mismanagement, on the other.
[A]t the time when the Great French Revolution broke out, the crucial economic levers were already in the hands of the middle class. This means that production was already under the control of the manufacturing and the incipient industrial middle class. At the same time, as was pointed out by Saint-Simon, the great sociologist of the day, the feudal class and the groups associated with it in the absolutist system had ceased almost entirely to have any influence over production in the sense of socially useful labour. This weakness of the absolutist system was the precondition for the outbreak of the revolution, and it will be difficult to deny, particularly in the light of more recent research, that what appeared in the self-glorifying accounts of bourgeois historiography to be an indescribable act of liberation was in reality more like the confirmation of an already existing situation. Nietzsche’s dictum in Zarathustra that you should give a push to whatever is already falling is a classical bourgeois maxim. That is to say, it contains the idea that bourgeois actions are almost always of the kind that are covered by the dominant universal, by the universal historical principle that is in the process of asserting itself. And this is connected with the fact that, because all bourgeois revolutions merely make official or de jure something that already existed de facto, they all have an element of illusion, of ideology, about them. This is an insight developed very perceptively for our understanding of the bourgeois freedom movement by Horkheimer in his essay ‘Egoism and Freedom Movements’, which at long last is soon to be made available again. On the other hand, what I have called the great process which led to something like the takeover by the middle class in the French Revolution would not have been conceivable without notorious mismanagement by the absolutist rulers of France. I am thinking here of the intractable problems of the budget and the financial crises which physiocrat reformers such as Quesnay—who as you know was close to Turgot—strove in vain to resolve. Without this specific basis in fact, namely the evident inability of the absolutist regime to align its own understanding of the economy with the current state of the forces of production, things would never have reached the point of revolt, let alone the mass uprisings of the initial phase. During those first critical years the genuine sufferings of the quasi-proletarian urban masses of Paris were the precondition for the revolutionary movement. And to a certain degree these masses spontaneously sustained that movement and contributed to the increasing radicalization of what was essentially a middle-class phenomenon. That such a negative factor was a necessary precondition can also be seen from the contrast with other countries in the same period where bourgeois, liberal and national tendencies established themselves, but without provoking a revolutionary uprising.104
Adorno’s reinterpretation of the “Egoism”-essay, in the thesis that bourgeois revolutions have an ideological moment in their assertion of universality de jure which already existed de facto, for the sake of a distinction between ‘underlying’ and proximate causes, or general historical tendencies and the ‘triggers’ for their realization, is, like Adorno’s earlier reinterpretation of the “Egoism”-essay to develop the concept of fascism as “bourgeois terrorism” in his Wagner, proves the concept of the “Egoism”-essay by going beyond it, through it.
Third, the “Egoism”-essay—together with Horkheimer’s “Remarks” (1935)—would also serve as a constant theoretical touchstone for Adorno’s own reflections on the possibility and problems of philosophical anthropology until the end of his life. In his review of Ulrich Sonnemann’s Negativer Anthropologie in 1969, Adorno claims Horkheimer’s 1935/36 work on philosophical anthropology “was one of the first comprehensive critiques” of philosophical anthropology and recommends Horkheimer’s approach over the “emphatic modesty” of more contemporary anthropology, which, Adorno observes, has “distanced itself from philosophical declamations about man” only to degenerate “into positivist ethnology or sociological ‘cultural anthropology.’”105 As with so many of the unfinished projects of early critical theory, Adorno is left holding the mantle alone.
c) The “Egoism”-essay: A Portrait of the Author as a Drowned Man
By the late 1960s, Horkheimer had himself renounced the historical critique of philosophical anthropology for the sake of a misosophical misanthropology of the end of history.106 This is the conclusion of the late Horkheimer’s radical redefinition of critical theory, which he begins in earnest in the mid-1950s.107 Horkheimer confesses as much in a 1969 letter, in which he insists on the political purity of the “Egoism”-essay as an expression of a “fear of revolutions,” of all revolutions, particularly those with “communist or anarchic principles,” which “would [not] be able to accomplish anything other than hastening the way to a stricter, more totalitarian order.”108 In the rest of this note, I will argue that the late Horkheimer’s standpoint is not just irreconcileable with that of the author of the “Egoism”-essay, but in fact the target of the latter’s assault on the pathological character structure of the bourgeois type of human being under the conditions of “despair over the possibility of universal happiness,” as Horkheimer puts it in his “Postscript on Greer’s Book” (1936). This interpretation of the relationship between the ‘early’ and ‘late’ Horkheimer—namely, that ‘late’ Horkheimer is the kind of pathological case study the ‘early’ Horkheimer would have found a fascinating, if pathetic, confirmation of his criticisms of the ‘spirit’ of the modern bourgeois intellectual—is admittedly almost entirely incompatible with the most highly respected (and deservingly so) consensus in Horkheimer scholarship since the 1980s.
In opposition to the reading popularized by younger, politically motivated readers associated with the late 1960s student movement that the late Horkheimer ‘betrayed’ Marxism, Horkheimer scholarship has increasingly adopted a view championed successively by experts such as Alfred Schmidt—former student of Horkheimer’s who worked closely with Horkheimer himself in the late 60s on editing and translating a number the earlier texts, such as a collection of the Zeitschrift essays of the 30s for republication in the two-volume Kritische Theorie: Eine Dokumentation (S. Fischer Verlag, 1968)—and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr—who assumed directorship of the estate in 1977 and, from 1985 through 1997, would co-edit Horkheimer’s 19-volume Gesammelte Schriften in collaboration with Schmidt. In his editorial ‘Introduction’ to a 1971 publication of three of Horkheimer’s essays which had not been included in Kritische Theorie (1968), Schmidt responds to the reading popularized by the student movement:
In the present-day discussion of the pros and cons of critical theory—which has significantly influenced the self-understanding of the student protest movement, especially in this country—it is becoming increasingly clear how little the history of this theory is a presence even among many of its supporters. The tendency of the prevailing consciousness to reject historical thinking outright as merely archival also prevails among those who need it most desperately. Often, their argumentation is, therefore, significantly weaker than one might expect given the objective achievements of ‘The Frankfurt School.’ […] Whereas Horkheimer sought to indicate the need for strict, facts-based research in confrontation with the empty constructions of the social philosophy of the early 1930s, he found it necessary during the 1950s and 60s to insist on the indispensability of specifically theoretical thinking in view of the supremacy of empirical methods in sociology. […] [T]hese early writings are particularly helpful for historically situating critical theory as a specific interpretation of Marxism which arose under unreapeatable conditions. Keeping this contextualization of these texts in mind, the question of what Critical Theory might mean today, what constitutes its—to some degree—secured set of problems and doctrines, may be addressed more concretely than has been done thus far.109
By the early 1990s at the latest, this view had already gained significant traction in the Anglo-American reception of early critical theory—namely, the view that from around 1930, Horkheimer more or less maintained a single theoretical paradigm of ‘critical theory’ for the rest of his life, emphasizing (or, at worst, abandoning) different elements in response to different historical circumstances.110 From then on, Horkheimer experts have distinguished themselves from more pedestrian enthusiasts and critics of ‘The Frankfurt School’ by developing a more nuanced reading of, as Noerr puts it in his “Editor’s Afterword” to the critical edition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1987]), the latent “internal revisions to Critical Theory” which are “present but not [yet] fully worked out” in the earlier texts, or moments that should be understood as “preconditions” of the “transitions” for the “discontinuities” in his thinking that have been wrongly hypostasized into “‘historical’ periods” in the “over-schematic reception of Horkheimer’s thought.”111 This is precisely the kind of “eloquent cover-up of the contradiction” between theorist and society of Horkheimer accuses Jaspers in his “Remarks on Jaspers’ Nietzsche” (1936). The ‘late’ Horkheimer describes the radical redefinition of ‘critical theory’ as an attempt to recover some truth in the ‘motivations’ beneath or behind the ‘Scientific Socialism’ of his earlier works. The heretic becomes the grand inquisitor.
The nuanced, teleological reading of ‘Horkheimer’s intellectual development’—as a continuous sequence of ‘transitions’ in which a pre-given stock of potentials that were dormant but present in the 1930 ‘paradigm’ are triggered into actualization by certain events in history and developments in science—is a successful hermeneutic strategy introduced by the ‘late’ Horkheimer which has since taken on a life of its own. The earlier Horkheimer’s warning against the idealistic histories of philosophy, which consist either in history of ideas, intellectual biography, or some combination of the two, has yet to be followed in the reception of Horkheimer himself. Rather than defend an alternative interpretation of Horkheimer now, I’d like to motivate one. The “Egoism”-essay makes that particularly easy because it would have to be qualified into nothing to be reconciled to the ‘late’ Horkheimer’s standpoint.
From the early 1930s through the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Horkheimer’s criticism of socialist revolutions was that “socialism clung all too desperately to the heritage of bourgeois philosophy;”112 in his late “Notizen” Horkheimer condemns socialist revolutions for turning their back on “a transition to a higher form of society […], to a higher bourgeoisie,” which was only possible “when bourgeois liberalism was [still] at stake” in “the barbaric beginnings of socialist authoritarianism in the East.”113 In the “Egoism”-essay, Horkheimer criticizes Robespierre because “[h]e speaks of the sad consequences of Epicurean thought with the same disgust as a militant theologian;”114 in his late “Notizen,” Horkheimer defends Tolstoy, since “[s]omeone wrote about Tolstoy that he became devout when he was too old to enjoy life,” from the specter of Lucretius, who held that “[t]he gods vanished with the fear which is, according to Lucretius, their origin,” dismissing the latter as “the child, once it has become an adult and free, gives its own children a religious upbringing because that is expedient.”115 In the “Egoism”-essay, Horkheimer champions the “hedonistic psychologists” who follow Epicurus in pointing towards a possible “liberation from ascetic morality with its nihilistic consequences;”116 in his late “Notizen,” speculates that “[i]f prehistory comes to an end because food, housing and clothing are no longer and nowhere a problem for anyone,” then “the higher, the real history, culture as it is called” will never begin: ”I believe that mankind will only have so-called nobler needs, needs beyond its natural ones, if these remain unsatisfied.”117 The late Horkheimer “mourn[s] the loss of a superstitious belief in a Beyond,” and attacks “the society that gets along without it, [for] every step that brings it closer to paradise on earth will take it further from the dream which makes earth bearable;”118 he mourns the loss of the virtues of the petty-bourgeois who once held their own against big capital and the masses;119 he praises the moralizing, religious function of conscience which transcends contestation through jurisprudence and philosophical critique;120 he praises the unconditional imperatives-from-nowhere of moral philosophy for their unintelligibility;121 he condemns “the liquidation of the sexual taboo” which deprives sex of “the mortal danger which recurred every time the taboo was broken” and thereby “lent sexuality the sublime quality that turned it into love.”122 By so completely betraying its “spirit of materialism,” the late Horkheimer proves the “Egoism”-essay’s relevance for the diagnosis of the most virulent socio-psychological pathologies of the bourgeois type of human being better than the late Adorno’s most sophisticated application of its categories ever could.
In “The Ex-Communist’s Conscience” (1950), a review of The God that Failed (1949),123 a collection of essays by ex- and anti-communist intellectuals recounting their process of disillusionment—including Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender—, Isaac Deutscher makes note of a fleeting moment of self-awareness in Koestler’s pontificating:
[I]t is Koestler who, occasionally, in the midst of all his affectation and anti-communist frenzy, reveals a few curious mental reservations: ‘... if we survey history [he says] and compare the lofty aims, in the name of which revolutions were started, and the sorry end to which they came, we see again and again how a polluted civilization pollutes its own revolutionary offspring’ (my italics). Has Koestler thought out the implications of his own words, or is he merely throwing out a bon mot? If the ‘revolutionary offspring’, communism, has really been ‘polluted’ by the civilization against which it has rebelled, then no matter how repulsive the offspring may be, the source of the evil is not in it but in that civilization. And this will be so regardless of how zealously Koestler himself may act as the advocate of the ‘defenders’ of civilization à la Chambers.
Even more startling is another thought—or is this perhaps also only a bon mot?—with which Koestler unexpectedly ends his confession:
‘I served the Communist Party for seven years—the same length of time as Jacob tended Laban’s sheep to win Rachel his daughter. When the time was up, the bride was led into his dark tent; only the next morning did he discover that his ardours had been spent not on the lovely Rachel but on the ugly Leah.
I wonder whether he ever recovered from the shock of having slept with an illusion. I wonder whether afterwards he believed that he had ever believed in it. I wonder whether the happy end of the legend will be repeated; for at the price of another seven years of labour, Jacob was given Rachel too, and the illusion became flesh.
And the seven years seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had for her.’
One might think that Jacob-Koestler reflects uneasily whether he has not too hastily ceased tending Laban-Stalin’s sheep, instead of waiting patiently till his ‘illusion became flesh’.
The late “non-conformist”124 proves to be one of a type rather than one-of-a-kind. Blaming the polluted revolution from the standpoint of the civilization which he knows polluted it, blaming the unrealized revolution of the terror which prevented its realization, Horkheimer writes in the 1959-1960 “Notizen”:
For an Association of the Clearsighted: One should found an association in all countries, particularly in Germany, which would express the horror of those without affirmative belief in either metaphysics or politics. As a humane practice in insane post-war Europe, the latter would seem impossible to them, and the former galimatias. For those who are appalled by the economic miracle, the mendacious democracy, the bribery trials with Hitler judges, the luxury and the misery, the rancor and rejection of every form of decency, the admiration of eastern and western magnates, the disintegration of spirit, the slide into parochialism of this old civilization, such an association would be a kind of home. They would plot no revolution because it would end in naked terror. But they would nonetheless be the—admittedly impotent—heirs of the revolution that did not occur, these pitiful clearsighted ones who are going into the catacombs.125
In his earlier aphorisms, Horkheimer calls ‘these pitiful clearsighted ones’ by the title they deserve: “Those Who Have Foundered,” of whom he writes:
The deathbed confession of the heretic does not refute a single sentence of his atheistic beliefs. While still of sound body, many men of reason set down that nothing pain and illness might make them say should be given weight. That the truth of a sentence must be sealed by martyrdom is an age-old and infamous invention of the ruling classes. It turned the fear of methods of repression into an argument against the truth of freer spirits. (…) It is a perversion to measure the success of a life by what someone is and has at its end. The relationship between the final condition of a life and the quantity of correct reflection and even of successful acts is totally accidental. It is impossible to infer the whole from the end product. If someone saved a thousand people from drowning and drowned as he saved the thousand and first, one must not conclude: “He couldn't swim for he drowned.” For this same reason, death during the very first attempt is no proof either. In our times, it is less his qualities than blind chance that decides what happens to him.126
The late Horkheimer makes fear of the methods of repression into an argument against the truth of freer spirits—first among them his own. To “the impotent bitterness of those that have foundered,”127 with the author of The Fruits of The Earth, written when he too could still enjoy them, we may say: Mais tout cela sera balayé.
But this certainty—that men have not always been what they are now, allows me this hope—that they will not for ever remain so.
I too, no doubt, have smiled or laughed with Flaubert at the idol of Progress; but it was because Progress was represented as a despicable deity. The progress of commerce and industry, of the arts especially—what an absurdity! The progress of knowledge—yes, certainly. But what really matters to me is the progress of Mankind.
That men have not always been what they are now, that they have slowly made themselves—this, I think, is no longer disputable, in spite of mythologies. If our survey is limited to a few centuries, we recognize in the past men like those of to-day, and are astonished that they have remained the same since the days of the Pharaohs; but this is no longer true, if we cast our eyes back into the abyss of prehistoric ages. And if they have not always been what they are now, why should we think they will always remain so?
Man is in process of becoming.
But there are people who imagine and want to persuade me that mankind resembles that one of Dante’s damned who, despairing because he is condemned to eternal immobility, exclaims, “If I could take only one step forward every thousand years, I should already be on the way.”
This idea of progress has taken root in my mind. It is related now to all my other ideas, or has dominated them.
(Any classical period, by reason of a momentarily acquired equilibrium, may give the illusion of a perfectly accomplished man.) The thought that man’s actual state must necessarily be surpassed, is transporting and is at the same time accompanied by a hatred of anything that may prevent that progress, which may be compared to the Christian’s hatred of evil.
All this will be swept away—what deserves to go and also what does not. For how is one to be separated from the other? You want to seek mankind’s salvation by clinging to the past, and it is only by thrusting away the past, by thrusting into the past all that has ceased to be of use, that progress becomes possible. But you will not believe in progress. What has been, you say, is what will be. I choose to believe that what has been can never be again. Man will gradually free himself from what formerly protected him—from what henceforth enslaves him.128
Horkheimer, “[Aus Vorlesungen über Autorität und Gesellschaft] (1936/37)],” In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 39-68.
Horkheimer, “Die Funktion der Rede in der Neuzeit” (1936). In: MHGS Bd. 12 (1985), 23-38.
Horkheimer, “Nachbemerkung zu Greers Buch.” ZfS, vol. 5, no. 3 (1936), 445—447.
English translation from: Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (Seabury Press, 1978), 105-106.
In: ZfS, vol. 5, no. 3 (1936), 445 - 447. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer’s parenthetical: (Heft 2, Jahrgang 1936, S. 161 ff.)
Horkheimer initially defines “introversion” (Verinnerlichung) in “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936] as follows: “In Savonarola an essential aspect of bourgeois revolts becomes evident. The needs of the mobilized masses are utilized as a motor for the dynamics of the revolutionary process, but the condition toward which the movement tends in terms of the historically attainable balance, i.e., the consolidation of the bourgeois order, can satisfy them only to a very limited degree. This is why it is crucial that the unleashed forces be redirected inwardly and spiritualized [spiritualisiert], as it were, and that this deflection already begin in the course of the movement. The process of “internalization” [Verinnerlichung], which began as early as the Middle Ages, has one of its roots here.” 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), 72-73.
Horkheimer to K. Landauer (10/27/1936). In: A Life in Letters. Selected Correspondence by Max Horkheimer. Edited and translated by Evelyn M. Jacobson and Manfred R. Jacobson (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 75-76.
In: [Die Funktion der Rede in der Neuzeit] [1936]. MHGS Bd. 12. (1985, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag), 23-38. [MHA location: TsD. m.e. Korr. ohne Titel / Aufschrift der Mappe (Sek.): “Oratory in Modern History” / ohne Datierung / MHA: X1.b.] Author’s translation.
Fn. MHGS Bd. 12. Eds.: [Politik, übersetzt von Eugen Rolfes, Philosophische Bibliothek Bd. 7, Leipzig 1912, S. 4,] 1253 a.
English in original.
English in original.
Fn. MHGS Bd. 12. Eds.: [So Chavret, ein Unterführer Calvins; zitiert nach F. W. Kampschulte, Johann Calvin, Leipzig 1899, II. Bd., S. 33 f.]
Fn. MHGS Bd. 12. Eds.: [Luthers Werke, herausgegeben von Buchwald u. a., Berlin 1905, 3. Folge, II. Bd., S. 282.]
Fn. MHGS Bd. 12. Eds.: Vgl. J. Schnitzer, Savonarola, München 1924, II. Bd., S. 682.
Fn. MHGS Bd. 12. Eds.: Meister Eckhart, Schriften und Predigten übersetzt und herausgegeben von Hermann Büttner, Leipzig 1903, Bd. 1, S. 63.
Fn. MHGS Bd. 12. Eds.: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, (München 1931), S. 527.
Fn. MHGS Bd. 12. Eds.: Ebda., S. 531.
Fn. MHGS Bd. 12. Eds.: Ebda., 5. 532.
Cf. Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era” [1936]: “The leadership which channels the people to particular goals and achieves the internalization of the drives which cannot be satisfied in this period employs a specific instrument: the speech at the mass meeting. The politician in the Greek city-state was also mainly an orator and at times exercised functions very similar to those of the modern leader. But in Greek antiquity the speech is presented in the assembly of freemen; the slaves comprise an element that must merely be dominated, not addressed. As much as these speeches also have enthusiastic traits, they largely lack the internalizing, spiritualizing tendency and the call to turn inward that belongs to the essence of modern rhetoric. Antiquity's rationality is admittedly rigid and constrained. Its logic corresponds to a fixed, self-confident upper class; it aims to convey a particular opinion on the state of affairs, not transform the listening public. The change of function of rhetoric that begins with Socrates already heralds the decline of the city-state. In antiquity and to a great extent in the Middle Ages, the lower class is kept under control by physical coercion and command, by the deterrent example of terrible earthly punishments and, moreover, by the threat of hell. The popular address of modern times, which is half rational argumentation, half an irrational means of domination, belongs to the essence of bourgeois leadership, despite its long prehistory.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 75.
Cf. Horkheimer, “Materialism and Morality” [1933]: “This expression, with which he characterizes a dynamic element in the moral phenomenon that points beyond itself to a more rational society, has assumed an unhappy function in modern sociology: it is supposed to prompt people, despairing of this mechanism run amok that is contemporary society, to give themselves over blindly to the particular "whole" into whose realm they have fallen by birth or by fate, regardless of the role it happens to play in human history. But this is an interpretation of the organic phraseology that runs precisely counter to Kant. Instead of pointing toward an era in which human relations will be really governed by reason, it betokens outmoded stages of society in which all processes were mediated simply by instinct, tradition, and obedience. Kant employs the image of the organism in order to indicate the frictionless functioning of the future society; nothing in this suggests the faintest denial of the role of rational thought. Today, by contrast, the image of the organism characterizes a system of dependency and economic inequality, one which can no longer justify itself before the world's expanded critical understanding and which therefore requires metaphysical phrases in order to reconcile people to it. The organism is drawn into the matter in order to rationalize—as an eternal relationship based on blind nature—the fact that certain people make decisions and certain others carry them out, a state of affairs which the growth of all forces has made questionable. Today, as in the time of Menenius Agrippa, suffering human beings are supposed to rest content with the thought that their role in the whole is as innate to them as are the members in the animal body. The obdurate dependency in nature is held up as an example to the members [Gliedern] of society. In contradistinction to this idealist sociology, which believes that it puts an end to injustice insofar as it strives to remove from people's heads the mounting consciousness of that injustice, the Kantian moral theory tends toward a society in which the material arrangements are indeed precisely linked [gegliedert], but in which the possibilities of development and the happiness of the individuals are neither subordinated to a sequence of stages nor surrendered to fate. “That there should be no discord in the body; but that the members may have the same care one for another,” as it says in the New Testament. With Kant, the organism is defined precisely by the concept of ends. Organic events, according to him, always refer to the “causality of a concept,” that is, to purpose and planning.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 28-29.
“Editorische Vorbemerkung,” In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 39. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer to Fromm, 1/21/1936. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 444-446. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer to Hans Honegger, 6/8/1936. In: MHGS Bd. 15 (1995), 557. Author’s translation.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 6/29/1936. In: MHGS Bd. 15 (1995), 577-579. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer and Pollock to Ludwig Marcuse, 8/5/1936. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 602-606. A reply to: Ludwig Marcuse to Horkheimer, 5/18/1936. In: Ibid., 527-530.
Benjamin to Horkheimer, 10/13/1936. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 678. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 10/23/1936. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 692-695. Author’s translation.
“the doctrine of the transition from the domination of human beings to the administration of things”: [der Lehre des Übergangs von der Herrschaft über Menschen zur Verwaltung von Sachen]
Horkheimer to Karl Landauer, 10/27/1936. In: A Life in Letters. (2007), 75-76.
Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 1/4/1938. In: MHGS Bd. 16 (1995), 351-354. Author’s translation.
[Die Vermittlung ist nach Hegel dasselbe wie das Denken.]
“coincidence”: [Zusammenfallen]; “socialization”: [Vergesellschaftung]
Horkheimer to M. Butler, 4/2/1938. In: MHGS Bd. 16 (1995), 420. English in original.
Horkheimer to K. v. Hirsch, 4/7/1938. In: A Life in Letters. (2007), 133.
Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 5/4/1938. In: A Life in Letters. (2007), 136-137.
Horkheimer to Hans Mayer, 11/21/1938. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 509–510. Author’s translation.
French idiom for “take care” or “be careful.”
Horkheimer (and Adorno) to Hans Mayer, 3/23/1939. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 575-581. Author’s translation.
“necessary social semblance”: [notwendigen gesellschaftlichen Scheins]
Horkheimer to Hans Mayer, 11/13/1939. In: A Life in Letters (2007), 160-161.
Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” [1852]. In: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works: Volume 11. Marx and Engels 1851-53. Translated by Clemens Dutt, Rodney Livingstone, and Christopher Upward. (Lawrence & Wishart [Electric Book], 2010), 103-105.
[Fn. No. 33: Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, vol. 2, pp. 321-353.]
[Fn. No. 34: Burdach, Briefwechsel des Cola di Rienzo, vol. 1, p. 449.]
[Fn. No. 35: Ibid. vol. 2, part 4, pp. 112ff.: “non contentus officio Rectoris, varios titulos impudenter et temere usurpavit... christiane religionis mores abiciens ac priscos gentilium ritus amplectens, varias coronas laureasque suscepit ac fatuas et sine lege leges more Cesarum promulgare temptavit”; cf. ibid., vol. 1, p. 31.]
[Fn. No. 36: Cf. Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, vol. 2, p. 320.]
[Fn. No. 37: Ibid., p. 332.]
[Fn. No. 38: Erich Fromm, Studien über Autorität und Familie, Schriften des Institutes für Sozialforschung, vol. 5 (Paris, 1936), pp. 120ff.]
[Fn. No. 39: On the identity of the authoritarian and rebellious character, see ibid., p. 131.]
[Fn. No. 40: A document on the beginnings of this social self-consciousness shortly after Cola's time is the famous speech by a worker in the Florentine uprising, reported by Machiavelli in his History of Florence, p. 811.]
[Fn. No. 41: Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1963), p. 15.]
[Fn. No. 42: Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, vol. 2, p. 308.]
[Fn. No. 43: Cf. Burdach, Briefwechsel des Cola di Rienzo, vol. 1, p. 454; vol. 2, part 3, p. 164.]
[Fn. No. 44: Cf. ibid., vol. 1, pp. 475, 479.]
[Fn. No. 45: Ibid., p. 451.]
[Fn. No. 46: Ibid., p. 450.]
[Fn. No. 47: Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, vol. 2, p. 321.]
Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era” [1936]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 66-69.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 11/28/1936. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 752.
Horkheimer to Adorno, 11/14/1936: “Regarding the question of which chapters to choose, I just told Benjamin that I am very amenable to including the essay on egoism and the freedom movement instead of the essay on (materialism and) morality. On the other hand, I still have some doubts about including the latter essay from the volume on authority. Its style and structure are strongly determined by the goal of providing a fairly academic introduction to the studies that the institute has conducted in this area and will continue to conduct. Should it become evident in the course of translation that the volume would really profit from the inclusion of this essay, we can, of course, still have it translated. Conversely, we should translate my essay on [Egoism and Freedom Movements] as soon as possible and, under certain circumstances, produce a preprint for a French journal. What do you think of that? The fact that I shared the basic ideas of this essay with many people during my last European trip has resulted in a fairly broad dissemination of some of its theories. I had even encouraged some people to carry out specialized studies in connection with my plan. A history lecturer in Geneva (Hermann Meyer-Lindenberg) is collecting material for a book on the Reformation and has made pretty good progress. Ludwig Marcuse was certainly somewhat superficial in his article on Rienzo in one of the last issues of the Tagebuch. He is working on a book about wars of liberation for which I gave him some theoretical perspectives when we talked in Paris.” In: A Life in Letters (2007), 77.
In: A Life in Letters (2007), 65.
Horkheimer to Karl Landauer, 5/1/1936: “Dear Karl! I have just now finished dictating an essay for the second issue of the Zeitschrift, something probably of particular interest to you. It concerns the concept of historically efficacious cruelty and the problem of the leader. The subject matter is accordingly historical and gave me more than a bit of trouble, since I had only six weeks or so for the whole thing. There was a vast quantity of literature that had to be surveyed first.” In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 516. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936]: “To acknowledge cruelty, or to admit to enjoying the cruelty one commits, would completely contradict the necessary mood of this age. A government whose most important instruments used each day include that terror in a negative sense, which offers the most terrible sacrifices to the nihilistic disposition of its own followers and shows a calculated indulgence toward their spontaneous participation, would abolish itself if it were to actually admit this. It dismisses nothing more fervently than the inspirational function of cruelty. Indeed, it has long been part of the business of terror, as it were, to trivially or completely deny it. Calvin praised the mildness of the Geneva city council as they were torturing his opponents at his request, then kept silent about the torture in a report meant for the outraged city of Zurich. “The judge is a sublimated executioner,” Nietzsche says. If that is true, then this state of affairs would give way if the judge really became conscious of it.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 107.
In: Ibid., 101.
Machiavelli: “Someone could question how it happened that Agathocles and anyone like him, after infinite betrayals and cruelties, could live for a long time secure in his fatherland, defend himself against external enemies, and never be conspired against by his citizens, inasmuch as many others have not been able to maintain their states through cruelty even in peaceful times, not to mention uncertain times of war. I believe that this comes from cruelties badly used or well used. Those can be called well used (if it is permissible to speak well of evil) that are done at a stroke, out of the necessity to secure oneself, and then are not persisted in but are turned to as much utility for the subjects as one can. Those cruelties are badly used which, though few in the beginning, rather grow with time than are eliminated. Those who observe the first mode can have some remedy for their state with God and with men, as had Agathocles; as for the others it is impossible for them to maintain themselves. Hence it should be noted that in taking hold of a state, he who seizes it should review all the offenses necessary for him to commit, and do them all at a stroke, so as not to have to renew them every day and, by not renewing them, to secure men and gain them to himself with benefits. Whoever does otherwise, either through timidity or through bad counsel, is always under necessity to hold a knife in his hand; nor can one ever found himself on his subjects if, because of fresh and continued injuries, they cannot be secure against him.” In: The Prince. Translated with an Introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield. Second edition. (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 37-38.
Horkheimer, “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History” [1930]: “A decisive concept in his science is virtù. Much has been written about the meaning of this term, and with good reason, for in fact one touches here upon a very important point in Machiavelli's historical thinking. The notion of virtus has played a decisive role in the history of philosophy. Its nuances in meaning are difficult to demonstrate because the respective meaning of the term can always be grasped only within the context of the entire life relationships of a certain age. In general, its content is best described when one adheres to the following: virtus (virtù, vertu) designates the sum of essential qualities deemed to be desirable and respectable in the social circle in which the notion is used. A man who possesses virtus is a “just man,” a man as he should be. The devotion to the state and the martial enthusiasm embodying the Roman ideal, which left common labor to the slave, was considered to be virtus, just as much as Christian humility later was. For Machiavelli, this notion encompasses the classical qualities of nobility and bravery, but it further contains the modern moment of industriousness and efficiency. Machiavelli detests the noble not only because the latter regards reforms with spite, and generally stands in the way of civic development by thwarting the formation of central governmental authority and of large states, but also because he performs no civic labor. “And to explain more clearly what is meant by the term 'gentlemen,’” he thus states in his Discourses, “I say that those are called gentleman who live idly upon the proceeds of their extensive possessions, without devoting themselves to agriculture or any other useful pursuit to gain a living. Such men are pernicious to any country or republic; but more pernicious even than these are such as have, besides their other possessions, castles which they command, and subjects who obey them.” Whoever wishes to found a republic, according to Machiavelli's words, “will not succeed until he has destroyed” all of the nobles. A state is good, it possesses virtù, if the conditions prevail in it whereby its citizens may develop virtù. They should be confident, strong, uninhibited individuals—which happen to be the very qualities that, under the conditions of that age, were required of a great entrepreneur, merchant, shipmaster, or banker. According to Machiavelli, the common weal depended upon the flourishing of these occupations. The fact that the rise of the bourgeois class in the Renaissance was indeed the condition for great social progress demonstrates his political vision. The full import of what is generally referred to as “Machiavellianism,” in the sense of radical political unscrupulousness, of completely “amoral” action, can only be understood within this context. Machiavelli demands the subordination of all considerations to the goal that appeared to him to be the highest: the creation and maintenance of a strong, centralized state as a condition for civic welfare. If one wished to summarize the content of The Prince and of the Discourses with the phrase “the end justifies the means,” one would at least have to append to this what end is at issue here, namely the creation of the best possible commonwealth. According to Machiavelli, religion and morality should be subordinated to this highest goal of human action. In the service of this goal one may, according to him, employ lies, deception, duplicity, cruelty, and murder.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 321-322.
Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936]: “The French Revolution seems, at first sight, to deviate from the structural similarity of bourgeois uprisings sketched here. The bourgeoisie and the propertyless masses had a common interest in removing the ancien régime. Repeated mass uprisings preceded it, and the conditions brought about by the revolution, despite all setbacks, actually led to an improvement in the general situation in both urban and rural areas in the first half of the nineteenth century. In particular, the “democratization of the land” was achieved to a certain extent by the sale of nationalized properties. Despite the relative community of interest between the wealthy bourgeoisie and the masses, however, contradictions in the overall course of the revolution made themselves felt. From the very beginning, neither the character nor the actions of the great leaders corresponded to a homogeneous interest of the general public, an interest that was not realizable at that time; rather, they corresponded to the interest of the bourgeoisie, and although this was a progressive interest, at the same time it led to the exploitation and oppression of large parts of the population. This contradiction is clearly evident in Mathiez's excellent works on the French Revolution, which explain and defend Robespierre's politics in great detail. He traces the economic difficulties at the time of the revolution essentially to the assignat economy. All social strata that could not match the declining purchasing power of the assignats by raising the price of their own wares fell victim to inflation. They took up the struggle “against the cruelty of ‘laissez faire’ and ‘laissez passer.’” They opposed the right to property with the right to live. Though these urban and rural masses found no significant leaders, in the course of the revolution they finally succeeded in forcing the imposition of general economic controls, most importantly the fixing of maximum prices for grain and other necessary consumer goods. But this regulation, which was wrung from the government only under the strongest mass pressure, also included a wage ceiling. After the bourgeois circles failed in their desperate efforts to maintain a free market situation that was impossible for the poor under inflation, or even a partial market economy, the government fell into a new contradiction with proletarian strata, since it had to impose maximum wages along with maximum prices. Under the given structure of society and the prevailing mode of production, even terror was not enough to foil all the evasions of the food laws. Even though in Paris, for example, at the time when the Hebertists dominated the revolutionary section committees and maximum wages were less rigorously maintained than the laws on food prices, this was out of the question in the cities of the north. “One would be very mistaken,” writes Mathiez, “to imagine that the revolutionary offices showed the same zeal everywhere in applying the maximum food prices. Even in the middle of the terror, city administrations that seemed to be mostly Jacobin were in the hands of the owners.” But quite apart from these inequities, the government had to alienate the masses by the wage policy forced upon it by circumstances.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 88-89.
Horkheimer:
“Robespierre discovered too late that he could not carry on his revolutionary policy without concessions to the lower classes.
“On the eve of his fall, supported by his friends Saint-Just and Couthon, he had convinced the welfare and social security committees in their sessions on 4 and 5 Thermidor finally to implement the Ventôse (February-March) regulations which had until then remained just on paper, through which Saint-Just wanted to expropriate the suspects (the internal enemies) and distribute their property among the poor sans-culottes. This would have created an entirely new class which owed everything to the revolution, because it owed its property to it, and which would defend the revolution. Robespierre had gone beyond democratic policy. He was on the road to a social revolution, and that was one of the reasons for his fall.”
These laws, which posed no threat to the bourgeois order in any case, were never implemented. Nevertheless, Robespierre's uneasiness, which led him to revoke them, was justified. He no longer had the workers' support against the wealthy, who were annoyed by the mandatory price limits. In some cases, the authorities had to resort to prohibitions against workers changing their place of employment; in the countryside, people had to be commanded to work the harvest, and laws against association were passed. “On 9 Thermidor, the Parisian workers, dissatisfied with the new tariffs announced by the city authorities in the preceding days, remained indifferent to the political struggle going on before their eyes. Precisely on 9 Thermidor they demonstrated against the wage limits. … When Robespierre and his friends were being led to execution, the workers shouted to them as they passed: the devil take the maximum!”
Robespierre is a bourgeois leader. Objectively his policy has a progressive content; the principle of society he represented, however, comprises the contradiction to his idea of universal justice. Blindness to this contradiction stamps his character with an imprint of the fantastic, despite all passionate rationality. […] “One did not need a revolution,” Robespierre said in the National Assembly, when confronted with socialist tendencies, “to teach everyone that excessive inequality of wealth is the source of many evils and crimes, but we are, nevertheless, convinced that equality of property is a chimera.” The exclamation “la propiété; que ce mot n'alarme personne” stands at the beginning of the same speech. But if ownership is, for the French Revolution, a human right, still it is part of Robespierre's practice to put his own moderation and poverty in the right light. In general, he surrounded his person with the halo of poverty and virtue as diligently as Cola and Savonarola did theirs with divine grace. When he asserts that he would rather be the son of Aristides who was raised in the Prytaneum at Athens's expense than heir to Xerxes's throne, that is not at all so irrational. But affirmations such as his claim that superfluity was not merely the price of crime but also its punishment and that he wanted to be poor in order not to be are just part of the bourgeois leader's necessary self-glorification. Such conscious display of his own ascetic virtues through his own words and way of life was one of the most important irrational means for magnifying Robespierre's person in the eyes of his followers. Most historians have portrayed his behavior as a purely psychological fact, without understanding it as one of those practices based on the social function of these politicians. […] Robespierre's ascetic attitude does possess a magical character. He uses it as a higher legitimation.
He was not able to do without symbols either. They are integral to his policy and his character. The cockades and flags play a major role in the revolution. It is reported that Marat, on the eve of the uprising on August 10, 1792, rode through the streets of Paris with a laurel wreath on his head, which was certainly not to Robespierre's taste. He criticized all ostentatious behavior; the feasts of reason celebrated by the Hebertists, which were a sharp affront to positive religion, especially disgusted him. But his role as bourgeois leader, which requires displays for the masses, forced him to attend the Feast of the Supreme Being in June 1794, which he presided over and the plans for which he had drawn up with the painter David, or at least approved. When he saw the people in the Tuileries gardens, he cried out enthusiastically: “The whole world is gathered here!” In the course of this ceremony he set fire to the statue of Atheism, which had been erected for this purpose. In the middle of the flame the statue of Wisdom appeared. This defined the symbolic meaning of the event for the organizers and their audience. In truth, the bourgeoisie's struggle against atheism is less indicative of wisdom as a whole than of the wisdom of the government. This society needs a religion as a means of domination because the general interest does not hold it together. The road to the military cemetery, where the National Convention was to listen to hymns and national songs from a mountain built for that purpose, was passed in solemn procession. “The legislative assembly proceeded behind a group of old men, mothers, children, and young girls. Robespierre, in his capacity as President, led the way. He wore Nanking trousers, a cornflower-blue jacket, a belt with the national colors, on his head a hat decorated with a tricolor crest, and in his hand, like all his colleagues in office, a bouquet of grain-stalks, blossoms, and fruit.” What is distinctive of popular leaders here is not the strangeness of the procession, which is often wrongly stressed by portrayals hostile to the revolution, but the compulsion to have such impressive and symbolic rallies, which even Robespierre could not avoid. At the height of its revolutionary development of power the bourgeoisie recalls its earliest revolts. “The brotherhood festivals of the French Revolution in Paris appear truly to be an imitation of the August festival of the popular tribunes of Rome.” As a consequence of the very different political situations in which their class found itself, Rienzo and Robespierre are worlds apart—and yet something in their nature is identical, because the form of society on whose behalf their activity was ultimately brought to bear is one and the same.”
In: Ibid., 89-92.
Horkheimer: “Robespierre shares the Reformers’ hostility to erotic culture. The constant exhortations to moral purity and the associated mania to discover filth everywhere is inseparable from his politics. They see physical and moral filth everywhere. They despise idleness, people of loose morals, and attitudes that favor pleasure and happiness. In his letter to d'Alembert, the Genevan Rousseau lashes out at the theater and declares it an “amusement,” and that if people cannot do without “amusements” they at least ought to be limited to an absolute minimum: “every unnecessary amusement is an evil for a being whose life is so short and whose time so valuable.” When Robespierre's spiritual mentor propagates this hatred of pleasure, he can appeal to illustrious Genevan predecessors. Although Calvin, in contrast with a few of the more radical members of his leadership, was of the opinion that “one must not deprive the people of all delights,” under his rule dance, play, and public and private festivities were either completely forbidden or tied to conditions that virtually amounted to a prohibition. Even theatrical performances with “a good intention” were opposed on grounds of principle by the congregation he headed, even if not by his own initiative. “As could be expected,” a modern study of Robespierre says, “he also used his power to enforce universal morality. Maximilien and Couthon, who often ate together at noon, represented a strong puritanical element on the committee. In October they encouraged the Commune in its striving to break the wave of immorality that had inundated Paris. They obtained an order from the committee to arrest the writer and owner of a theater where an indecent play was being performed.” Certainly, Robespierre is infinitely more positive toward theory and reason than Luther and his followers, both because of the historical progress which had occurred in the interim and because of his role in the left wing of the bourgeoisie. But it is also true that Robespierre was no less exempt from the rule that bourgeois popular leaders lag behind the knowledge of the writers who prepared the way for them. He was very critical of the Enlightenment. “Virtue and talent are both necessary qualities, but virtue is the most necessary. Virtue without talent can still be useful. Talent without virtue is just a misfortune.” In the speech on 18 Floreal 1794, quoted above, he inveighed against the materialism of antiquity and the modern age, especially against the Epicureans and Encyclopedists. After a very idiosyncratic digression into the history of philosophy, he reproaches them for writing against despotism and then accepting pensions from it, and for penning books against the court and dedicating them to kings. Robespierre criticizes the materialist philosophy for “making egoism into a system, and understanding human society as a war of treachery, success as the measure for right and wrong, honesty as a matter of taste and decorum, the world as the property of clever scoundrels.” He plays off Rousseau against Voltaire's circle, which of course very much hated the Genevan moralist. But the harsh depiction of the world rejected by Robespierre corresponded more accurately to reality than did his own belief that after the bourgeois order is consolidated, justice will depend on the return to virtue. This idealism, however, is inseparable from Robespierre's historical task. With his fall, this view showed its deficiency compared with the spirit of materialism which he so disdained.” In: Ibid., 94-95.
Horkheimer: “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.” 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.” 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.” 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.” In: Ibid., 103.
Horkheimer, “The Rationalism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy” [1934]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 250.
Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 97.
In: “Zur Geschichte der Soziologie von Machiavelli bis Saint-Simon” (Fragment) (1929) MHGS, Bd. 11. (1987), 191-192. Author’s translation.
English translation in: Dawn and Decline (1978), 108. Cf. “A Discussion About Revolution,” which contains Horkheimer’s infamous formulation: “Bourgeois criticism of the proletarian struggle is a logical impossibility.” In: Ibid., 40-41.
Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State” [1942], Translation by Peoples' Translation Service in Berkeley and Elliott Eisenberg. Telos Spring 1973, No. 15 (1973), 5-6.
Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 1/4/1938. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 354. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936], In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 86-87. Translation modified.
In: Ibid., 101.
Horkheimer, “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History” [1930]: “[A]ctual suffering, of which utopias are the reflex, is doubtless conditioned by the same process that would permit deliverance from it. However, nothing contradicts the task of true philosophy more than the wisdom that rests content with ascertaining this necessity. History has realized a better society out of an inferior one, and in its course it can bring about one that is even better—this is a fact. But it is also a fact that the course of history passes over the suffering and misery of individuals. Between these two facts there exists a series of demonstrative associations, but no justifying meaning. These philosophical considerations rule out any condescending dismissal of attempts that aim to achieve a utopia instantly and to introduce absolute justice on earth. In Germany at the time of Thomas More, one man, himself spurned by the English chancellor, began such a project. It was hopeless from the start, and his means were totally insufficient. This man was Thomas Münzer. He did not want to wait for an interminable sequence of suffering to pass before Christianity became fully realized. He proclaimed that even Christ had not been patient with injustice on earth, appealing to Christ's words themselves rather than to theological interpretations of them. The patience of idealism was foreign to Thomas Münzer. The insight and knowledge of scholars and of experienced politicians concerning the complicated and protracted conditions required for even the most minuscule amelioration of social ailments could never satisfy this contemplative man of wisdom. Whoever demands forbearance with respect to suffering and death, inasmuch as they are contingent on human institutions, must consider that the prevailing forbearance toward the historical process is one of the main reasons why such waiting is necessary in the first place.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 373-374.
See footnote 51, above.
Horkheimer, “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History” [1930], In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 333.
Horkheimer, “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” [1935], In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 162.
Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 10/23/1936. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 694-695. Author’s translation.
See Horkheimer’s definition of ‘criticism’ as genetic-reconstructive in “The Social Function of Philosophy” [1940]: “In philosophy, unlike business and politics, criticism does not mean the condemnation of a thing, grumbling about some measure or other, or mere negation and repudiation. Under certain conditions, criticism may actually take this destructive turn; there are examples in the Hellenistic age. By criticism, we mean that intellectual, and eventually practical, effort which is not satisfied to accept the prevailing ideas, actions, and social conditions unthinkingly and from mere habit; effort which aims to coordinate the individual sides of social life with each other and with the general ideas and aims of the epoch, to deduce them genetically, to distinguish the appearance from the essence, to examine the foundations of things, in short, really to know them.” In: Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Max Horkheimer. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and others. (Continuum, 2002), 270.
Horkheimer, “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” [1935] In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 160.
In: Ibid., 171.
Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936], In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 108-109.
In: Ibid., 109-110.
Horkheimer to Adorno, 5/14/1936. In: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927-1969. Band I: 1927-1937. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. (Suhrkamp, 2003), 141-143. Author’s translation.
[BW Bd. I ed. Fn.:] Quote from André Gide’s Les nouvelles nourritures (1935), S. 140. Three pages before [the passage Horkheimer references], Gide writes: »Moi aussi, parbleu, j'ai pu sourire, ou rire avec Flaubert, devant l'idole du progrès; mais c'est qu'on nous présentait le progrès comme une divinité dérisoire. Progrès du commerce et de l'industrie; des beaux-arts surtout, quelle sottise! Mais ce qui m'importe c'est le progrès de l'Homme même.« And, following the passage Horkheimer planned to use for his motto, Gide says: »Ce qui mérite de l'être, et aussi ce qui mériterait de ne pas l'être. Car comment séparer ceci de cela? Vous voulez chercher le salut de l'humanité dans le rattachement au passé, et ce n'est qu'en repousser le passé, qu'en repoussant dans le passé ce qui a cessé de servir, que progresser devient possible. Mais vous ne voulez point croire au progrès. ‘Ce qui a été, c'est ce qui sera,’ dites-vous. Je veux penser que ce qui a été, c'est ce qui ne saurait plus être. L'homme se dégagera peu à peu de ce qui le protégeait naguère; de ce qui désormais l'asservit.« In: Ibid., 143.
Horkheimer to Hans Mayer, 12/17/1937. Life in Letters (2007), 121-124. For the full exchange with Mayer, see: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 297-305; 333-337.
Marx’s to Ruge (Kreuznach, September 1843): “For although no doubt exists on the question of “Whence,” all the greater confusion prevails on the question of “Whither.” Not only has a state of general anarchy set in among the reformers, but everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no exact idea what the future ought to be. On the other hand, it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one. Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it. Now philosophy has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is that philosophical consciousness itself has been drawn into the torment of the struggle, not only externally but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be. Therefore I am not in favour of raising any dogmatic banner. On the contrary, we must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their propositions for themselves. […] Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal. As far as real life is concerned, it is precisely the political state—in all its modern forms—which, even where it is not yet consciously imbued with socialist demands, contains the demands of reason. And the political state does not stop there. Everywhere it assumes that reason has been realised. But precisely because of that it everywhere becomes involved in the contradiction between its ideal function and its real prerequisites. […] [W]e do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to. The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. […] Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work […] It is a matter of a confession, and nothing more. In order to secure remission of its sins, mankind has only to declare them for what they actually are.” In: “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,” MECW, vol. 3 (1975), 133-145.
Horkheimer, “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” [1935], In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 156-157.
For the original publication, see: Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator. (Harper & Brothers, 1949). Recently republished by Verso: Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator. Introduction to the Verso Edition by Alberto Toscano. (Verso, 2021)
Horkheimer to Leo Löwenthal, 7/5/1946. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 744-745.
Sigmund Freud, Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. (Macmillan, 1955)
Otto Fenichel. “On Acting.” The Tulane Drama Review 4, no. 3 (1960): 148–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/1124853. First Published in: Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XV (1946), 144-160. Reprinted.
Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 7/17/1946. In: MHA [Max Horkheimer Archive], Na 1 Nachlass Max Horkheimer, 548 - Korrespondenzen mit Leo Löwenthal (und Umgebung, unter anderem Franz Neumann, Henryk Grossmann, Herbert Marcuse und Karl August Wittfogel), Band 17 (unter anderem mit Herbert Marcuse) (p. VI.19, 159-388). (1946). S. 327-329. English in original.
Horkheimer’s emphasis.
Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 8/19/1946. In: MHA, Na 1 Nachlass Max Horkheimer, 548 - Korrespondenzen mit Leo Löwenthal (und Umgebung, unter anderem Franz Neumann, Henryk Grossmann, Herbert Marcuse und Karl August Wittfogel), Band 17 (unter anderem mit Herbert Marcuse) (p. VI.19, 159-388). (1946). S. 210r-214v. English in original, with the exception of the third excerpt quoted here, which is the author’s translation.
See Adorno’s 1963 “Preface”: “In Search of Wagner was written between autumn 1937 and spring 1938 in London and New York. It is intimately bound up with Max Horkheimer’s essay ‘Egoism and Freedom Movements: On an Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era,’ which appeared in 1936, as well as with other writings emanating from the Institute for Social Research during those years.” In: In Search of Wagner (1991), 9.
Adorno, In: In Search of Wagner, Translated by Rodney Livingstone (Verso, 1991 [1952]), 13-14.
On the ‘micrological’ method: “The method of my book is micrological. There is no fundamental principle, no comprehensive analysis of the works, no summarizing or conclusions, but the book proceeds immediately to the observation of individual elements and is committed to the close interpretation of details and minute characteristics, which is directed towards an understanding of the whole... I hoped to push from the innermost elements of the aesthetic structure outwards towards broad philosophical and social connections, which otherwise would remain cultural chatter without substance.” In: Baragwanath, Nicholas. “Musicology and Critical Theory: The Case of Wagner, Adorno, and Horkheimer.” Music & Letters 87, no. 1 (2006): (qtd.) 54. (Translation adapted from Barone's commentary to Adorno, ‘On the Score of Parsifal,’ 389)
See, for example, Adorno’s 4th Lecture, “The Concept of Mediation” (11/19/1964). In: History and Freedom. Lectures 1964-1965. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Translated by Rodney Livingstone. (Polity, 2006), 34-36.
Adorno, Zu Ulrich Sonnemanns “Negativer Anthropologie”. In: Gesammelte Schriften. (ed.) R. Tiedemann, Vol. 20.1 (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 262-263. Author’s translation.
See the late “Notizen,” specifically those titled “Small Talk,” “Against Philosophy,” “Evil in History,” “Instinct of Self-Preservation,” “Enlightenment and Religion,” “The Course of Philosophy,” “Without Illusion,” and “Antinomies of Critical Theory.” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 155; 162; 167-168; 181; 235; 238-239.
See Note III on the Late Horkheimer’s ‘Return to Kant’ in my previous post on the relationship between Kant and critical theory in Horkheimer’s work.
Horkheimer to Georg Heintz, 7/14/1969: “Thank you most especially for sharing with me your reservations about revolution. At the time of National Socialism in 1936, when the fall of the German regime was the only hope, I documented with historical references my fear of revolutions in my essay on egoism and freedom movements (“Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung”). Today I can’t imagine that a revolution in the so-called developed countries, whether it held to Communist or anarchic principles, would be able to accomplish anything other than hastening the way to a stricter, more totalitarian order. I am well aware of the things that could be said against my reservations, and I ask that you do not assume that the rotten state of current conditions determines what I think and do. My reluctance derives from the suspicion that the despair you characterized as a ‘revolution into nothingness’ might only lead to a repetition of something even worse.” In: A Life in Letters (2007), 359-360.
Alfred Schmidt, “Introduction.” In: Max Horkheimer. Anfänge der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie. Hegel und das Problem der Metaphysik. Montaigne und die Funktion der Skepsis, edited with an introduction by A. Schmidt (Fischer Bücherei, 1971), 5-8. Author’s translation.
For variations on the ‘phase’ reading or : Hauke Brunkhorst, “Dialectical Positivism of Happiness: Horkheimer’s Materialist Deconstruction of Philosophy,” in: On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives. Edited by Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonss, and John McCole. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 67–98. Jürgen Habermas, “Remarks on the Development of Horkheimer’s Work,” in: Ibid., 49–65. And: Alfred Schmidt, “Max Horkheimer’s Intellectual Physiognomy,” in: Ibid., 25-47.
Noerr: “Which especially important theoretical implications and, in particular, internal revisions to Critical Theory, present but not fully worked out in the text, are significant for its interpretation? This will also involve clarifying where Dialectic of Enlightenment is to be located in the development, in particular, of Horkheimer's theoretical thinking. However useful it may be to divide Horkheimer's development into “historical” periods, such an approach risks hypostatizing those periods. An overprecise diagnosis of discontinuities in the author's thought obstructs perception of the transitions within it, and therefore of the preconditions of those discontinuities. This account should therefore be seen as a counterweight to an often over-schematic reception of Horkheimer's thought, its identity, and its changes. The discussion will therefore take account of a number of shorter pieces written in the 1940s which are thematically related to Dialectic of Enlightenment.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. [1947] Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott (SUP, 2002 [1987]), 219.
Adorno and Horkheimer: “But to recognize power even within thought itself as unreconciled nature would be to relax the necessity which even socialism, in a concession to reactionary common sense, prematurely confirmed as eternal. In declaring necessity the sole basis of the future and banishing mind, in the best idealist fashion, to the far pinnacle of the superstructure, socialism clung all too desperately to the heritage of bourgeois philosophy. The relationship of necessity to the realm of freedom was therefore treated as merely quantitative, mechanical, while nature, posited as wholly alien, as in the earliest mythology, became totalitarian, absorbing socialism along with freedom. By sacrificing thought, which in its reified form as mathematics, machinery, organization, avenges itself on a humanity forgetful of it, enlightenment forfeited its own realization. By subjecting everything particular to its discipline, it left the uncomprehended whole free to rebound as mastery over things against the life and consciousness of human beings. But a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory’s refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify. It is not the material preconditions of fulfillment, unfettered technology as such, which make fulfillment uncertain. That is the argument of sociologists who are trying to devise yet another antidote, even a collectivist one, in order control that antidote. The fault lies in a social context which induces blindness. The mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves constantly create, finally becomes itself a positive fact, a fortress before which even the revolutionary imagination feels shamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1987]), 32-33.
In “Mind, Art and the Bourgeoisie,” Horkheimer reverses his earlier position on socialist revolutions: “The time for a transition to a higher form of society where freedom is coupled with justice, to a higher bourgeoisie, in other words, which would contain the earlier one within itself, is long since gone, and the barbaric beginnings of socialist authoritarianism in the East took cognizance of these intellectuals only during the very first phases, when bourgeois liberalism was at stake there as well.” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 180.
Cf. Horkheimer, “Permanent Education”: “The freedom of all men is that of the citizen who can develop his abilities, much as Goethe already envisaged it. The founders of modern socialism did not consider that those abilities themselves are part of the bourgeois form of production, of science and technology which society needs in its growth and its struggle with nature. Fundamentally, they were idealists and believed in the self-realization of the absolute subject. By way of Hegel, they returned to Fichte as the metaphysician of the French Revolution. But freedom is not an end but a transitory means as the animal that is man adapts to the conditions of its existence. The purpose of its education is probably nothing but reproduction under conditions of minimal resistance. All systems are false, that of Marx no less than Aristotle's—however much truth both may have seen.” In: Ibid., 197-198.
Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 53.
Horkheimer even claims that the Lucretian atheism of the child relishing their freedom from their parents and religious upbringing is the equivalent of the revolutionary bourgeoisie’s exhortations following the revolution for their followers to return to religion, the opposite of his thesis in the “Egoism”-essay. See his late note titled “The Truth of Religion”: Someone wrote about Tolstoi that he became devout when he was too old to enjoy life. But religion as consolation means more than might occur to a minister. It is not the truth of religion that dawns on the person in need, it is the need that constitutes its truth, not only individual, but social need as well. Since the decline of antiquity, the history of religion has had a dear structure. Phylogenetically, it followed the ontogenesis of the religious consciousness of a child from a good bourgeois home. After the world was first experienced in religious categories, the way monks and parents wanted it, doubt set in as growing knowledge came into conflict with those categories. The gods vanished with the fear which is, according to Lucretius, their origin. The townsmen had to earn their livelihood, obedience alone was no longer a reliable guidepost, they had to deal with the world themselves, and interest in the here and now intruded between the firm rule governing life in this world, and the expectation of life in the next. Just as the child, once it has become an adult and free, gives its own children a religious upbringing because that is expedient, so, after every revolution, the bourgeois encourage the dependent masses to persist in their religious faith. If today, need constitutes the truth of religion, its state is no worse than philosophy’s. Philosophy also consoles, and even when its attempts to reconcile religion and science, or to at least assure the former an undisputed existence alongside the latter, failed, there was at least the consolation that there is none. Wherever reason tries to rationalize the expression of hope or despair, as with Kant’s possible postulate or Hegel’s negation which finally must derive its force from the idea of a truth that can no longer be negated; where it reveals itself, as it were, either as means or end—the one implies the other—where it believes it overcomes reflection by reflecting upon itself; where it re-interprets expression as truth which is always the case when it does more than merely function—it becomes consolation, like religion. It is not only the sexual impotence which the above-mentioned Tolstoi critic had in mind that stands in need of consolation. From youth on, in many respects and at many times, everyone is old and impotent.” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 177-179.
“Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 109-110.
In “Philosophy of History, a Speculation,” Horkheimer defends scarcity as the basis for the formation of needs which transcend reality, reversing his criticism of Huxley at the time of the ‘Theory of Needs’ Seminar (1942): “There has always had to be an insufficiency of some sort lest ideas degenerate into cliches. And here we come to the core of the question concerning the substance of mankind, the actual speculation about the philosophy of history. If prehistory comes to an end because food, housing and clothing are no longer and nowhere a problem for anyone, will the higher, the real history, culture as it is called, begin, or do the movies and the stars in the countries that have arrived show the kind of regression that will then set in? I believe that mankind will only have so-called nobler needs, needs beyond its natural ones, if these remain unsatisfied. Perhaps I am wrong. That would mean that the idea is not tied to a lack, love for justice not to prevailing injustice, magnanimity not to misery and power. The very existence of non-human nature which man could care for without therefore being threatened by it presupposes a fraternal longing which could hardly be understood, were it not for the suppression among men. Even the violence which inheres in education really loses its ground when everything is available and misery at an end. It seems that regression is the only goal of progress. As long as there is suffering that progress can alleviate, however, that very thought is infamous.” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 189.
Horkheimer “Liquidations,” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 222-223.
Horkheimer, “Small Ethics,” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 214.
Horkheimer, “Theory of Conscience,” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 208.
Horkheimer, “On Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 198-199.
Horkheimer, “On the History of Sexuality,” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 191-192.
“For Non-Conformism: That society is moving from liberalism which was characterized by the competition of individual entrepreneurs toward the competition among collectives, corporations, commercial and political alliances and blocs is an insight that need not lead to conformism. The importance of the individual is waning but in theory and practice, he may critically intervene in this development. Using up-to-date methods, he can contribute to the creation of collectives that are out-of-season, which can preserve the individual in genuine solidarity. The critical analysis of demagogues would be a theoretical, the union of men who psychologically, sociologically and technologically see through them, a practical element of non-conformism in the present.” In: Dawn and Decline (1978),
Horkheimer, “On the History of Sexuality,” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 166.
From Dämmerung (1934), English translation in: Dawn and Decline (1978), 57-58.
In: Ibid., 57.
English from: André Gide, Fruits of the Earth. Translated by Dorothy Bussy. (Secker & Warburg: London, 1949), 242-243.