Collection—Horkheimer's Fragments on the Sociology of Sociology (ca. 1928-1934)

(+ Adorno's '32 Report on science, industry, & ideology in Borkenau's "Übergang")

André Masson. Réunion d'insectes. 1936.

Introductory Note: ‘The Sociology of Sociology.’

The following collection consists of translations from Horkheimer’s series of fragmentary and essayistic reflections on ‘The Sociology of Sociology’ written between 1928 and 1934. “The Sociology of Sociology” is Horkheimer’s original title for the 1929 fragment later titled “On the History of Sociology from Machiavelli Through Saint-Simon” by the editors of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften. As Gunzelin Schmid Noerr observes in his prefatory editorial remarks on the fragment, ‘The Sociology of Sociology’ is indicative of Horkheimer’s general methodological approach to the critique of the history of bourgeois thought at the time:

The earliest manuscript for “Beginnings of Bourgeois Philosophy of History” [1930] bears the title: “Studies in the History of the Philosophy of History,” which is related to the original title of the following fragment: “The Sociology of Sociology.” Without over-interpreting the stylistic device of circularity shared by the two titles, both can perhaps be considered an indication of Horkheimer’s methodological procedure of turning bourgeois ideologies back upon themselves, so to speak, in order to avoid the alternatives of remaining caught in idealism or becoming caught in dogmatic materialism.

Pace Noerr’s unnecessary qualification, the ‘stylistic device of circularity’ proves, I contend, to be an interpretive key for Horkheimer’s sociological Grundmotiv. The title ‘The Sociology of Sociology’ was assigned to the fragment in the context of Horkheimer’s outline of key-words (translated below) for an unwritten book which served as the horizon for his focused social-theoretical productions of the late 1920s and early 1930s, given the working title: Wissenssoziologie oder Historischer Materialismus?, or: The Sociology of Knowledge or Historical Materialism? When read alongside the 1929 fragment on the history of sociology—as well as the fragment titled “Subjectivism and Positivism as Heirs of Hegelian Metaphysics: Preliminary Remarks towards an Empiricist Theory of Knowledge” (ca. 1931), the unpublished continuation of “Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics” (1932)—the outline for The Sociology of Knowledge or Historical Materialism? suggests that the idea behind the title “The Sociology of Sociology” is not only a ‘stylistic device of circularity’ but a dialectical figure in its own right. Our first clue is that Horkheimer employs the ‘stylistic device of circularity’ to name the introduction to The Sociology of Knowledge or Historical Materialism? rather than the conclusion: “The Sociology of Sociology” is the abbreviation of a problem rather than a stand-in for a solution. The 1929 fragment itself is, as the editors note, “only the formulation of the first part of the first section of the introduction,” breaking off at Saint-Simon, just before the intended culmination of ‘the history of sociology’ in section 1 of the “Introduction”: “savoir pour prévoir…,” shorthand for Auguste Comte’s mission statement for the project of scientific sociology: “savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour pouvoir,” or: “know to foresee; foresee to control.”¹ The rest of the introduction seems to proceed (§2) by developing a conceptual distinction between the two conflicting ‘fundamental attitudes’ [Grundhaltungen] within this project—between ‘savoir’ as comprehensive knowledge in the tradition of philosophy and ‘pouvoir’ modeled on natural-scientific practices of control—and is supposed to conclude in a vaguely titled section (§3) described simply as ‘disposition’—which seems to refer to the basic disposition of the sociologist in confrontation with their object, or modern society itself. The difficulties experienced by the sociologist in conceptualizing modern society reach a head, Horkheimer argues (see below, “On the Sense and Boundaries of a Sociological Treatment of Philosophy [ca. 1930]”), in the problem of metaphysics. Because sociology criticizes metaphysics for ‘ideologically’ denying its socially conditioned character in the name of truth, sociology, so far as it must become its own object of analysis as a moment of the life-process of society, has to reckon with its own social conditionality without surrendering its claim to truth. Horkheimer identifies the return of the metaphysical concept of truth in two, recent, philosophical forms into which sociological thought has developed: Karl Mannheim’s ‘Sociology of Knowledge’ and certain ‘dogmatic’ strains of materialist thought in Marxism. Chapters I-III have the construction of a ‘dialectical schema’ in the thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern which Horkheimer and Adorno will use throughout the 1940s: (I.) “Sociology in the System of Idealism,” or Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge; (II.) “Sociology in the System of Dogmatic Materialism,” or certain schools of orthodox, official, and even left-opposition Marxism; (III.) “Sociology as a Means of Controlling Practice,” or “Living historical materialism.” Though both Horkheimer and Adorno explicitly recognize in a number of writings that the thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern is a misrepresentation of Hegel’s dialectic, let alone the dialectical method more broadly, it is a particularly useful misrepresentation. As I’ve recently suggested in a gloss on Adorno and Horkheimer’s later construction of dialectical schemata, the artificiality of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis construction is precisely what enables them to consciously ward off the temptation of synthetic conclusions, or the temptation to prematurely bring the dialectical movement of thought to an unearned ‘point of repose.’ Here, in keeping with Horkheimer’s preferred dialectical figure of the ‘unabgeschlossene Dialektik’ (inconclusive, unconcluded dialectic; translated occasionally as ‘incomplete’ or ‘open-ended’),² the ‘synthetic’ moment of ‘living historical materialism’ is characterized by the refusal of synthetic closure in either, on the one hand, the metaphysical totality of the meta-metaphysics of Wissenssoziologie (viz., an identity-philosophical metaphysics made out of the sociological relativization of previous metaphysical systems);³ or, on the other, the metaphysical totality Horkheimer suspects in the identity-philosophical presuppositions behind the Lukácsian ‘Subject-Object’ of history in practical proletarian class-consciousness.⁴ Indeed, throughout the following fragments and essays, one of Horkheimer’s core concerns is articulating a critical—both anti-metaphysical and anti-positivist—concept of social totality for the sake of non-dogmatic ideology critique.⁵ (For the preliminary results of Horkheimer’s efforts to this end in the more literary, fragmentary, and diaristic writings produced for, and alongside, the Dämmerung, see: “Notes for Dämmerung (1926-1931)” and “Horkheimer’s Weimar Journals (ca. 1920-1928).”) Thus, “The Sociology of Sociology” encapsulates the problem which drives sociology beyond its jurisdiction—into social philosophy, even metaphysics—in an effort to become adequate to its own concept as ‘the science of society.’ In the fragments and essays below, Horkheimer traces this movement back to its ultimate cause in the demand for social science as a means of social domination among the early bourgeoisie, exemplified by Machiavelli, and to its proximate cause in the collapse of the Hegelian system, an event which animates and haunts the genesis of ‘scientific sociology’ in 19th century France and Germany. In other words, ‘the sociology of sociology’ coincides with ‘the history of the philosophy of history’ to the same extent the historical separation between ‘social philosophy’ and ‘scientific sociology’ becomes a problem for each—for sociology in its claim to comprehensiveness and for philosophy in its claim to concreteness. This is the negative identity of scientific sociology and social philosophy Horkheimer will present in his 1931 inaugural lecture on assuming directorship of the Institute for Social Research (ISR), “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Task of an Institute for Social Research.”

However one may draw the boundary between social philosophy and the specialized discipline of sociology—and I believe a great deal of arbitrariness would be unavoidable in any such attempt—one thing is certain. If social-philosophical thought concerning the relationship of individual and society, the meaning of culture, the foundation of the development of community, the overall structure of social life—in short, concerning the great and fundamental questions—is left behind as (so to speak) the dregs that remain in the reservoir of social-scientific problems after taking out those questions that can be advanced in concrete investigations, social philosophy may well perform social functions (such as that of transfiguring and mystifying reality), but its intellectual fruitfulness would have been forfeited. The relation between philosophical and corresponding specialized scientific disciplines cannot be conceived as though philosophy deals with the really decisive problems—in the process constructing theories beyond the reach of the empirical sciences, its own concepts of reality, and systems comprehending the totality—while on the other side empirical research carries out its long, boring, individual studies that split up into a thousand partial questions, culminating in a chaos of countless enclaves of specialists. This conception—according to which the individual researcher must view philosophy as a perhaps pleasant but scientifically fruitless enterprise (because not subject to experimental control), while philosophers, by contrast, are emancipated from the individual researcher because they think they cannot wait for the latter before announcing their wide-ranging conclusions—is currently being supplanted by the idea of a continuous, dialectical penetration and development of philosophical theory and specialized scientific praxis. (…) [T]his situation can be overcome to the extent that philosophy—as a theoretical undertaking oriented to the general, the “essential”—is capable of giving particular studies animating impulses, and at the same time remains open enough to let itself be influenced and changed by these concrete studies. The eradication of this difficulty in the situation of social philosophy thus appears to us to lie neither in a commitment to one of the more or less constructive interpretations of cultural life, nor in the arbitrary ordainment of a new meaning for society, the state, law, etc. Rather—and in this opinion I am certainly not alone—the question today is to organize investigations stimulated by contemporary philosophical problems in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration to undertake in common that which can be carried out individually in the laboratory in other fields. In short, the task is to do what all true researchers have always done: namely, to pursue their larger philosophical questions on the basis of the most precise scientific methods, to revise and refine their questions in the course of their substantive work, and to develop new methods without losing sight of the larger context. With this approach, no yes-or-no answers arise to the philosophical questions. Instead, these questions themselves become integrated into the empirical research process; their answers lie in the advance of objective knowledge, which itself affects the form of the questions. In the study of society, no one individual is capable of adopting such an approach, both because of the volume of material and because of the variety of indispensable auxiliary sciences.⁶

What is to be done? Horkheimer concludes his 1933 talk “On the Problem of Prediction in the Social Sciences” with an allusion to Marx’s “Introduction” to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [1843/44]:

[S]o far as the structure of society increasingly transforms in the direction of more uniform organization and planning, social predictions [Voraussagen] will acquire a higher degree of certainty. The more social life loses the character of the blindness of natural occurrence and society undertakes preparations to reconfigure itself as a rational subject, the more social processes will lend themselves to being predicted with determinacy. The contemporary insecurity in sociological judgments with respect to the future is only a mirror image of contemporary social insecurity in general. Therefore, the possibility of prédiction does not depend exclusively on the refinement of methods and the skill of sociologists, but just as much on the development of their object: the structural transformations of society itself. It is far from being the case that prédiction is necessarily easier for the realm of non-human nature relative to society; in fact, prédiction becomes easier to the very degree its object is less subordinated to mere nature and the more it is subordinated to human freedom. True human freedom cannot be equated with either unconditionality or mere arbitrariness, but is identical with the control of nature inside and outside of us through rational decision-making. To bring us to the point where this state of affairs becomes characteristic of our society is not just the task of the sociologist, but of the forward-driving forces of humanity as a whole. Thus, the sociologist’s endeavor to arrive at exact prédiction transforms into the political striving to realize a rational society.

Though Horkheimer seems to have abandoned his plans for The Sociology of Knowledge or Historical Materialism? by the fall of 1933, “On the Problem of Prediction in the Social Sciences” concretizes the key-words for the third and last outlined chapter—

III. Sociology as a Means of Controlling Practice

• Science and Society

• (Synthesis!)

• Living historical materialism

—in the “Marxian conceptual figure of abolition through realization.”⁷ The problem implicated in the stylistic circularity of “The Sociology of Sociology” in 1929 is explicated in the Marxian chiasmus of 1933: you cannot make sociology a reality without abolishing it; you cannot abolish sociology without making it a reality.

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Translator’s Note. Thanks to Carson Welch (X: @car_so_n_ ; bluesky: @carsonw.bsky.social) for collaborating last summer on the translations of Horkheimer’s “Preface” to the first issue of the ZfS and the “Prefatory Remark” to Mandelbaum and Meyer’s “Theory of Planned Economy”!

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Contents.

On the relation between the object of interest and the object of cognition in sociology (Fragment) (ca. 1928)⁸

On the History of Sociology from Machiavelli Through Saint-Simon (Fragment) (1929).⁹

Pareto and the “Frankfurt” School of Sociology (1929).¹⁰

On the Sense and Boundaries of a Sociological Treatment of Philosophy (ca. 1930).¹¹

Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics (1932).

• Introduction by Alfred Schmidt (1971).¹²

• Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics (1932).

• Subjectivism and Positivism as Heirs of Hegelian Metaphysics: Preliminary Remarks towards an Empiricist Theory of Knowledge (Fragment) (ca. 1931).¹³

On The Concept of “Social Research” [Foreword to ZfS V.1, No. 1] (1932).¹⁴

On the Problem of Prediction in the Social Sciences (1933).¹⁵

Prefatory Remark: Towards a Theory of Planned Economy, by Kurt Mandelbaum and Gerhard Meyer (1934).¹⁶

Letter to Albert Einstein on the Category of Causality (1935)

T.W. Adorno: Report on Franz Borkenau, Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild. (1932)¹⁷

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André Masson. Summer divertissement. 1934.

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On the relation between the object of interest and the object of cognition in sociology (Fragment) (ca. 1928)

Sociology is concerned with society. But when asked what society itself is, it has no answer to give—or, rather, it gives such a variety of answers that no clear answer arises. This distinguishes it from physics, which it so likes to emulate. Physics is a science proper, and sociologists have endeavored for decades to prove the same of their discipline. Society is an object of its own kind. It displays a distinctive kind of lawfulness and requires a specific kind of research. However, even with respect to its simplest determinations, opinions diverge widely.

The reason is easy to recognize. The uniformity of an object always corresponds to uniformity of interest. For the grazing herd, the meadow forms a single pasture for feeding. Every animal which belongs to the herd sees the meadow through the same eyes. Likewise for bees in a swarm, it appears the same to each, but in an image which is structured quite differently from that of the herd. To the extent that the interests of human beings differ in shape, the objective world appears differently to them as well.

Were the interests of individuals as similar to one another as they may seem to be in other biological species, at least from an outside perspective, then individual and social differences could be left out of consideration in the description of the human way of life, to which science also belongs. Were this the case, the constantly recurring morphological development of human living relations would suffice for an understanding of human reactions;¹⁸ however, conscious and unconscious interests have become so differentiated that neither the image of the world nor its sedimentation in science are uniform any longer. Some features and, thereby, some divisions of science are linked to the interests of all humanity. Some correspond merely to the situation of certain groups, whether of the large social classes or much smaller strata in a similar living situation, such as the scholars of a certain country. Such distinctions in interests which arise directly in the present-day process of making a living for oneself are further complicated by distinctions in world-conception, conditioned in turn by psychological types. These types, too, emerged in connection with the social process of making a living for oneself; indeed, they are distributed in a character-typical way among individual social groups, but in most cases their roots lie not in the economic practice of the present, but in a more or less distant past.

Establishing the necessary relationship between interest and object does not signify that the object first arises from the interest. This would be an idealistic misunderstanding. When the wildlife of field and forest distinguish between edible and inedible plants, friendly and suspect noises, protective and dangerous locations, whereas the impressionistic painter perceives the same landscape as a constellation of surfaces and planes of color, each of these structures is co-conditioned by the natural instincts of the wildlife or the socially induced [instincts] of the painter, but are not created by them. Otherwise, the subjects could not be in error. But their perceiving can be more or less faithful; it is not free, but has an independent content. It is the same for science. The interests of its authors participate in the structure of its object, and not just the conscious interests, or those consciously directed towards material benefit, but every form of attention, no matter how sublime, which arises from the historically developed constitution of the drives. But interests do not create the object. In science, there are true and false judgments.

At least in recent centuries, physics had a uniform object, because it was driven by the thinking of a bourgeoisie which, though highly differentiated, was aligned on the grounds of a shared practice of life; indeed, one may wager the admittedly crude formulation that the strongest of the shared interests of the determining European social strata have found their expression in the natural sciences as much as in puritanical morality. Even the doctrine of society possessed a relatively uniform object in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was a physics of the social body. This same development of trade and industry, under the aspect of which the analysis of each and every natural thing had some significance, was also the aim of the investigation of the social organism. This was carried out in the service of legislation which advanced bourgeois activities and was supported by the administration concerned with such advancement. The doctrine of society was a part of the art of government.

When considering present-day sociology, there is at first glance no such organizing interest. It seems as if it were unconcerned with any aims, but only pursuing the eternal laws which have dominated human relationships through all times. Apart from a priori speculations about human relationships in general, ethnological research into so-called primitive peoples also seems to proceed from the thought that one could make some contribution to the principles of socialization in general. At a first glance, each researcher’s choice seems to be determined by their own private inclinations; on closer inspection, certain categories which are presently fashionable emerge as central aspects of their work. Thus, distinctions (or oppositions) such as those of culture and civilization,¹⁹ community and society,²⁰ pre-logical and rational thinking,²¹ and many others have played a more important role in recent times. A number of academic differences of opinion which have developed can be traced back to subtle discrepancies in perspective and conceptual meaning. They were, however, not so deep that a certain commonality was not fundamental for all scientific discussions. Society, which could not be defined uniformly, was at least considered to be independent, possessing laws of its own, a greatness overpowering to the individual, which could be explored in the most varied directions as an object in itself. Modern sociology [Soziologie] is distinguished from the doctrine of society [Gesellschaftslehre] of Hobbes and Spinoza by virtue of its lack of trust in the rational transformability of its object.²² So far as there is a uniformity of its object, it lies in the negative: nothing may be changed, or in any event changed quickly; rather, the object [Gegenstand] of society must be considered an object of research [Forschungsobjekt] for neutral, unprejudiced science. It is not organized by general, vital need.

It is much the same with experimental psychology. Its object is the psychic life of the human being, but has no uniform determination for either the soul or for the human being. […]²³

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André Masson. Le Jardin saccagé. 1934.

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On the History of Sociology from Machiavelli Through Saint-Simon (Fragment) (1929)

[MHGS, Bd. 11. — Editorische Vorbemerkung:] This fragment is the beginning of an introduction to a planned text, never completed, under the working title: The Sociology of Knowledge or Historical Materialism? [Wissenssoziologie oder Historischer Materialismus?] The title of the second booklet, ‘On St. Simon,’ was apparently added by Pollock on a later occasion and merely describes the content of a portion of the text in this booklet. Since this second title does not reflect the content of the first booklet, the assigned date, Winter 1929/30, seems to be less reliable than that of the first booklet. Two enclosed sheets and the cover sheet of the first booklet provide information regarding the anticipated structure. It can be reconstructed from the keywords on those sheets as follows:

Sociology of Knowledge or Historical Materialism?

Introduction: The Sociology of Sociology

1. On the History of Sociology

• (savoir pour prévoir…)

2. The Two Fundamental Attitudes:

• (a) Philosophy, Interpretation of Meaning (Sinndeutung)

• (b) Natural Science (Means of Controlling Practice)

3. Disposition.

I. Sociology of Knowledge—Sociology in the System of Idealism

• Critique of Mannheim’s book

• Sinndeutung

• The turn away from the materialistic Hegel

• (bourgeois society!)

• St.-Simon, Comte, Marx, Lukacs

• Orthodox Marxism

• Question of cognition

• (Totality!)

II. Sociology in the System of Dogmatic Materialism

• Sociology as Explanation,

• Crossing of boundaries,

• Immanent necessity of development towards Socialism

Excursus: The Crisis of Marxism

III. Sociology as a Means of Controlling Practice

• Science and Society

• (Synthesis!)

• Living historical materialism

According to this overview, the following text consists of only the formulation of the first part of the first section of the introduction. The greater part of the text was written in Horkheimer’s own hand. Other passages are in Pollock’s handwriting, presumably written as Horkheimer dictated. Why the text remained a fragment is not immediately apparent. It contains a historical-materialist outline of the emergence of sociology from the spirit of capitalism [die Entstehung der Soziologie aus dem Geist des Kapitalismus]. The doctrine of society of the early bourgeoisie, for Horkheimer, is borne by the illusion of the identity between the interests of the bourgeoisie themselves and the interests of universal humanity. It is clear from the way in which the position of the planned text is defined in opposition to Karl Mannheim that the thesis is not meant to be associated with the relativism of the sociology of knowledge. The essay “A New Concept of Ideology?”, published 1930, can be considered a partial execution of the project sketched here. The notes in this text on Machiavelli are obviously based on the first chapter of the “Beginnings of Bourgeois Philosophy of History,” which was first published in 1930 but had been extant in the form of a typed manuscript as early as the summer of 1928. The earliest manuscript for “Beginnings of Bourgeois Philosophy of History” bears the title: “Studies in the History of the Philosophy of History,” which is related to the first title of the following fragment: “Sociology of Sociology.” Without over-interpreting the stylistic device of circularity shared by the two titles, both can perhaps be considered an indication of Horkheimer’s methodological procedure of turning bourgeois ideologies back upon themselves, so to speak, in order to avoid the alternatives of remaining caught in idealism or becoming caught in dogmatic materialism.

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When Machiavelli undertook the first systematic investigation of social processes in the modern era, he was not guided by philosophical intention. The unfolding of civil, bourgeois intercourse required the protection of a powerful centralized authority, and Machiavelli hoped that knowledge of the regularities in the life cycle of peoples would prepare the way for such a government. His analyses of past social movements were supposed to serve as the basis for “foreseeing future events by applying the same means as the ancients, or, if such are not to be found, devising new ones suited to the pattern of the events which occur.”²⁴ He had “something useful” in mind.²⁵ The science of politics owes its emergence neither to the pure love of truth nor speculative enthusiasm for any form of state, but to the practical purposes of the domination of human beings in the interests of expansion of trade and industry. It was meant to serve as a weapon as much for the suppression of the common people as for the struggle against the privileges of the nobility, which stood in the way of the unification of power. Its doctrines, the propositions about the behavior of determinate social groups, about the effect of various religions, about about the conditions for the continued existence of forms of government, which Machiavelli acquired through study of the past and present, were subject to the criterion of success or failure in political practice. Hardly any science has come to life with more precise knowledge of its meaning and its service than the science of the ordered experience of society. For Machiavelli, this knowledge 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.”²⁶ During the Renaissance, the same conviction also directly conditioned the development of a new concept of causality and of the exact natural sciences.²⁷

The extent to which Machiavelli considered it self-evident that the conditions of growth for civil (or bourgeois) industriousness were also those of the common good is expressed in his concept of virtù, which encompasses 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 [Klassenzweck] hallows all means for Machiavelli, it is only because, subjectively, it does not appear to be one at all, but rather as the concern for humanity, concern for the creation of the greatest communal existence [Gemeinwesens]. The immediate goal which Machiavelli had in view, deliverance from the class struggles of early capitalism through strong government, could only be decided in the political sphere. Thus, the selection of materials and the mode of evaluation in his science are also, and entirely, determined by political considerations. The study of society in the epoch of emergent absolutism is essentially the science of politics. In those countries to which greatest economic influence shifted following Machiavelli’s death, this first goal was realized to an unprecedented extent.

Under the protection and support of powerful governments governments, the economic power of the bourgeoisie grew stronger; eventually, mercantilist patronage developed from a driving force of bourgeois progress into an impediment to it, and the costly dominion of absolutist rule became an unbearable burden. Literature on social problems transformed from the art of politics into critical investigations of the essence of governments and the theoretical foundations of economic freedom. In the new science of interest-psychology, in the bold designs of a Kulturgeschichte, and in the great systems of political economy, philosophers and economic theorists of the eighteenth century thoroughly investigated the life of society and with their findings justified the demand for political and economic liberation by the Bürgers. For these writers too, the selection of material and the mode of evaluation were clearly determined by the historical situation of the bourgeoisie, and for their thought too, bourgeois interests and the progress of humanity coincide without qualification; in fact, the dissolution of feudal ties and the unfettering of free competition, which were initiated in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and radically realized in the age of the French Revolution, were thought by them a powerful unfolding of the productive forces and, thus, a gain for the whole of society. The darker side of this process, the terrible misery of the newly emerging proletariat, found expression not only in the great, mostly backward-facing social utopias through Morelly, but even the literature of the enlightenment is preoccupied by the opposition of poverty and wealth; indeed, it is the immediate impetus for the struggle among its most important representatives. But to them it seems that social suffering would have to disappear, or could at least be alleviated somewhat, through a reform of government and legislative acts for the complete liberation of the economy. Bourgeois private property is criticized, but, even to Rousseau himself, its abolition [Abschaffung] seems impossible: in the present and future, it remains the foundation of every tolerable and tolerant order of society. “It is certain that the right to property is the most sacred of all the rights of the Bürger, and, in some respects, more important even than freedom itself.”²⁸ Aside from solitary thinkers such as Meslier and Boissel, the scientific preoccupation with social questions leads to the reconfiguration of government and the introduction of economic freedom. These were the most progressive solutions put forward at the end of the eighteenth century, the equivalent of the call for stronger government rule in Machiavelli’s Italy, torn apart as it was by civil war.

With the victory of this new order in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, it became apparent that the fulfillment of its political demands, the long-dreamed-of efficacy of freedom, allowed misery to persist. Whereas Adam Smith could still consider economic doctrine as political economy, as part of the art of government, Saint-Simon experienced the powerlessness of making political changes in the face of the misery of the greater part of human beings. Saint-Simon discovered that the root of social happiness and unhappiness was not to be sought in the political, but in the underlying economic constitution of society. The interests on which all human beings must ultimately agree and whose realization is their common cause are the interests of economic livelihood and well-being; their satisfaction is the sole measure of governments, of all social institutions and concerns in general. Political science, indeed politics in general, must become the science of the best economic order of society, just as government must be transformed from an instrument of political oppression into the highest economic authority of society united in a community of labor [Arbeitsgemeinschaft]. With complete clarity, Saint-Simon recognized “production” as the foundation of the all of human coexistence and made the bettering of of their existence dependent on the more purposive configuration of economy, which became the highest and most fundamental principle of social activity. But a purposive configuration in whose service? Blinded by the opposition between the feudal administration of the Restoration period and the needs of industry, he takes up this problem of highest importance much too lightly. Industry, for him, is a great whole, and all working people are “producteurs” who belong together. The bureaucratic economy of the Bourbons and all feudal idlers must be abolished, the deciding economic power entrusted to large-scale farmers, manufacturers, merchants, and bankers, with the learned experts positioned at their side. Then, society will become one, single, great factory which works for all and for which all work. The purposiveness of the economy will consist in the proper handling and fruitfulness of the production process itself. When it is run properly, the satisfaction of the material Lebensinteressen of the whole is at its peak. It is impossible for unfettered industrialism not to brilliantly provision for all those involved in it, right down to the unskilled laborer. Greater profits for capital mean higher wages for workers. The spiritual and corporeal existence of the poorer class can only be bettered by means which promise to increase the enjoyment of the richer class—that is, by increasing the power of the economic rulers. Abolishing private property would be as impossible as the thought is absurd; one must be incentivized to invest in the production of useful objects, thus facilitating the welfare and prosperity of society. None of his predecessors in the study of society subordinated their work more passionately to the service of the common welfare than Saint-Simon. None were more firmly convinced that the rise of the bourgeoisie was identical with progress for humanity. But support for this belief is weak. The dogma of the solidarity of interests between rich and poor in modern industry…²⁹

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Pareto and the “Frankfurt” School of Sociology (1929).

At an earlier time this “memento mori” addressed to mankind as well as the individual, was always a torturing thorn and, as it were, the high point of medieval knowledge and conscience. The counter dictum of a more recent time: “memento vivere” frankly still sounds quite timid, lacks full-throated power and almost has something dishonest about it. For mankind is still tied to the memento mori and betrays it in its universal historical need: despite the most powerful beat of its wings knowledge has been unable to tear itself loose and attain freedom, a deep feeling of hopelessness has remained and has taken on that historical colouration by which all higher education and culture is now surrounded in melancholy darkness. [..] [T]he origin of historical education [Bildung]—and its inner, quite radical contradiction with the spirit of a “new age,” a “modern consciousness”—this origin must itself in turn be historically understood, history must itself dissolve the problem of history, knowledge must turn its sting against itself—this threefold must is the imperative of the spirit of the ‘new age’ if it really does contain something new, mighty, original, and a promise of life.

— Nietzsche, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.”³⁰

[MHGS, Bd. 11. — Editorische Vorbemerkung:] In this presentation, Horkheimer focuses on the theories of his Frankfurt University colleagues, Gottfried Salomon and, in particular, Heinz O. Ziegler, both of whom were collaborators and students of Franz Oppenheimer, who also taught at Frankfurt. Neither the occasion nor intended purpose of the work are known; it is possible that this was a presentation to a small circle of colleagues. Here, Horkheimer discusses the changes to the concept of ideology in the field of sociology as opposed to the Marxian conception of the same. Thus, the brief presentation of Salomon and Ziegler’s contemporary reception of Pareto is directly related to the 1930 essay “A New Concept of Ideology?,” in which the same problem is taken up at greater length with a focus on Karl Mannheim’s Wissenssoziologie.

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For a long time, Pareto’s extensive work in sociology was ignored in Germany. As late as 1926, Salomon could still declare, in his introduction to the German edition of Bouquet’s outline of Pareto’s sociology, that Pareto’s work was little known in Germany and, further, that the objective of publishing the outline was “to stimulate discussion of this singular work here as well.”³¹

The manner in which Pareto’s theories have been received in German sociological literature is characteristic of the intellectual situation in Germany today. Whereas the name Pareto is rarely mentioned in Oppenheimer’s monumental work,³² which contains no presentation of his sociological doctrines—despite dealing with countless theoreticians of lesser significance—, Pareto’s doctrines play a central role in the work of Oppenheimer’s two most noteworthy students and collaborators. Insofar as one may speak of a Frankfurt School of sociology, as did Oppenheimer in his lectures at the London School of Economics, this school of thought is a part of the Pareto school. Yet, their reception of Pareto is rather idiosyncratic. Little remains of Pareto’s basic positivist orientation in Salomon, and nothing of it whatsoever in Ziegler.

What has been adopted is almost exclusively Pareto’s fundamentally anti-Marxist attitude, which involves the unmasking of the course of history as a senseless struggle of “elites” and the defamation of most theories as ‘derivations’ of this struggle in Pareto’s sense, or, as they are called today, ‘ideologies.’³³ At one of the seminar courses at Davos, Salomon expounded to any who would listen that his struggle is with naive belief in science and history.³⁴ The extent to which he then pursued intentions similar to Ziegler’s metaphysical turn, which will be discussed below, remains to be examined. In any case, his emphasis seems to lie more on the theory of “elites”:

Standing in disbelief, the opponents of socialism apply the Marxist doctrine of ideology to Marx himself and his disciples. Natural law and philosophy of history, emancipation and eschatology of the proletariat—are rejected. The logic of social history, dialectics, is exposed as dogma of faith and illusion, as is the logic of human actions, revolutionary praxis. In history there is no development, but only accident; what rules is not the lawfulness of mass movements, but of leadership [Führertum]. With the renunciation of moralistic sermons, the power is presented which, through utilization of human materials and the application of permanent forces of human nature, expresses itself well beyond changes in the form of government. This new ‘Machiavellianism’ is ‘Disillusionism’ with history and reason.³⁵

If Salomon says that “the anti-Marxist and Machiavellian position and the claim to power of the ‘intellectual elite’ have found complete expression” in Pareto’s theory,³⁶ this holds for Salomon’s own as well. Ziegler distinguishes between the naive believers in history—such as Dilthey, Troeltsch, and Mannheim—who write historical sociology of culture, and representatives of a naturalistic, generalizing sociology—including, above all, Pareto, Nietzsche (in Germany), Scheler (with reservations), and, finally, Salomon and himself. Salomon is said to have attempted “placing this theory of ideology at the center of sociology.”³⁷

The basic thoughts of Ziegler’s ‘Ideologienlehre’³⁸ can also be traced directly back to Pareto. In his treatise on the subject, he seeks to use Pareto’s works to elucidate “the basic formulation of the problem of the doctrine of ideology and its basic concepts.”³⁹ He says of his own presentation: it is “in large part an independent elaboration of thoughts which are only implicit in Pareto and this outline (of Bousquet’s).” What it is, exactly, that Ziegler sees as an “independent elaboration” may be demonstrated by means of an example he has himself singled out: he contends that social events must be seen “as an eternally uniform struggle for power,”⁴⁰ in which professed goals are merely disguises for the will-to-power which is ultimately decisive. Any attempt to attribute a higher significance to one’s own program, in the sense that its fulfillment would be the ultimate purpose of all social development, amounts to a mere “ideology of justification,” whether the claim is made by the struggling bourgeoisie or the struggling proletariat. Evolutionism is said to make social classes into bearers of ideas, “which are required to actualize an incomparable meaningfulness of historical uniqueness,” and thus makes history into the mere development of ideas.

“In opposition to this, the naturalistic doctrine of power, in connection with a critical doctrine of ideology, sees in this metaphysics of development itself only another derivation, disguise, and justification of the constant struggle for power. The ideological aspect of the derivation resides precisely in this.”⁴¹

In a note, Ziegler indicates that he has, in particular, undertaken a “principal expansion of the concept of ideology” here, since Pareto himself provides no theoretical formulas for the critique of evolutionism. Through this addition, which even recognizes “development” as ideology, it becomes possible to grasp the concept of ideology “as an immanent category with respect to all social events.”⁴²

Ziegler’s critique of Pareto’s sociology is not uninteresting. He even approximates the derivation of Pareto’s doctrines through a materialist approach. For example, he says Pareto’s “formalistic social-mechanics, which fundamentally excludes any development, any concept of development,” should be viewed as “an expression of the defensive position of a bourgeoisie whose ideology of progress has been snatched from their grip by the ascent of a new class strata, and so becomes disillusionistic [desillusionistisch] and turns against any belief in history, turning against development and progress towards “the cycle of all events.”⁴³ More than anything, Ziegler accuses Pareto of arguing too naively. His Machiavellianism is said to have been “deeply” naive,⁴⁴ and his denial of any development “all-too-naive,” since everything remains qualitatively equivalent in Pareto. Furthermore, Pareto is said to have understood the human psyche in a “naively rationalistic” way through his theory of the “instinct des combinaisons” under the spell of Assoziationspsychologie.⁴⁵ In any case, Pareto was not a positivist in the old sense of the term,⁴⁶ but was “caught in the absolute validity-claim of reigning knowledge.” Despite its hypothetical character, his sociology assumed a position in the common front against all metaphysics, and it was precisely in this that Pareto’s ideological borders were to be sought. Ziegler finds a “crucial weakness” in Pareto’s doctrine of ideology because Pareto “cannot formulate the problem of correspondence at all, since he recognizes only the norms for objectivity in logical and experimental science as his points of reference and as his standard for evaluating the ideological; for him, all ‘correspondence’ lies in correspondence to these norms, and, from this perspective, all other behavior becomes ideological.”⁴⁷

Ziegler’s truly original turn begins only at this point. He follows Nietzsche’s saying that knowledge must turn its sting against itself,⁴⁸ and places the greatest emphasis on consequences which can be drawn from a radical critique of naive belief in history.⁴⁹ In overthrowing all false gods, the doctrine of ideology can “clear a path once more to the uncovering of authentic essentialities [Wesenheiten].”⁵⁰ In the West, a strong school following of Pareto’s has made this task into “the central problem of a doctrine of society,” but in Germany, too, the doctrine of ideology, “by expanding Marxist categories,” has been established in order to undertake it. If historicism has “‘secularized’ all authentic metaphysical thinking with respect to the philosophy of history,” it must be countered that it has itself inadmissibly absolutized the historically conditioned. “The historicizing of absolute content and the absolutization of merely historical phenomena creates the ideological situation typical of modernity.”⁵¹ The struggle must therefore be directed against both belief in history and historicization [Vergeschichtlichung]. It is “the philosophical task of a doctrine of ideology to radically dismantle these false absolutizations [Verabsolutierungen], which is only possible if the historical sphere as such is deprived of its metaphysical significance and thus reduced.”⁵² Therefore, the doctrine of ideology ought to become “the centerpiece of every general sociology.”⁵³ It should no longer be understood as a philosophy of history, as Marx is purported to have understood it, but should serve to overcome Marx’s “metaphysicizing of the merely historical.”⁵⁴ The intent to reform the Marxist concept of ideology is here expressed much more openly than it is in Mannheim.

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André Masson. Insecte, Espagne. 1934.

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On the Sense and Boundaries of a Sociological Treatment of Philosophy (ca. 1930).

[MHGS, Bd. 11 – Editorische Vorbemerkung:] Given several characteristic turns of phrase, it may be concluded that this text is the draft of a lecture, the original occasion and audience for which cannot be determined. In addition, there are hardly any indications of its date. The most significant indication is an allusion in the text to a formulation of Martin Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? Lecture, the first edition of which only appeared in print at the end of 1929. From this, it may be deduced that Horkheimer’s lecture was unlikely to have been written before late 1929. Several passages and words are inserted with square brackets in the typed manuscript, probably because they were not meant to be recited in the lecture itself. [...] In terms of content, the lecture stands in close relationship to the note “On the Right of Sociological Interpretation” (1928). In both, the concern is with the consequences of a sociological analysis of philosophy for philosophy itself, in the course of which the claim to absoluteness of contemporary metaphysics, especially that of Max Scheler’s, is presented as the counterposition and attacked accordingly; in both, Horkheimer employs the quasi-juridical procedure of Kant’s critique of reason, which Horkheimer repurposes into the basis for launching a critique of ideology, which, crucially, is not to be confused with the necessary demonstration of the social conditionality of intellectual constructs. In his publications from the time, Horkheimer will once again take up this problem in his 1930 essay on Karl Mannheim’s Wissenssoziologie.

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In the prevailing manner of expression, the question of “Sociology and Philosophy” is posed in a manner reminiscent of the conception of cognition [Erkenntnis] as a filing system for drawers and cabinets, or, better still, as a map—as if it were a question of determining boundaries, a geographical question so to speak, such as that which was asked about psychology at the turn of the century. But at the present time, when the role of science in social life is transforming in connection with profound transformations of the social structure itself, the grounds for establishing such rules of demarcation have become all too fragile. As of today, we are not yet capable of presaging with any precision the general results at which this utterly non-autonomous process of the so-called ‘crisis of science’ will arrive and come to a relative standstill, but what is certain is the basic ideas [Grundgedanken] once authoritative for the validity of decisions regarding the classification, division, and identification of the various domains of cognition have been shaken to the core. Thus, confronting the unified science of life that has gradually been constructed from the most diverse origins, fixed distinctions between organic and inorganic, body and soul, nature and spirit, have begun to lose their weight; the theory of consciousness is undergoing a radical reconfiguration; and, last but not least, the concept of natural law, upon which the systematic classification of the sciences was almost exclusively oriented until just a few decades ago, has come to be considered problematic. More than a few of these conceptual distinctions which previously served as the ground for the separation of specialist disciplines appear today, on the basis of the present state of research, only poor answers to a philosophical manner of posing the question that has itself become questionable.

The widespread attention the problem “Sociology and Philosophy” presently attracts does not turn on a question of demarcation [Grenzfrage] alone, but concerns a much more significant issue. The above-mentioned theoretical difficulties are by no means irrelevant, but the problem can be provisionally described without immediately becoming ensnared in them. One could formulate the question with something like the following: to what extent can the sociological treatment of philosophical statements result in justified arguments against the content of the philosophical propositions which have been interpreted sociologically? The question is disconcerting: whether in philosophical discussions, in journals, or at conferences, it is often the case that philosophical considerations are less and less countered on purely philosophical grounds, but are engaged on a different level entirely. As soon as a philosophical view, a metaphysical conviction comes to light, even if the result of genuine labors and the effort of real force of thought, it is just as quickly subject to sociological evaluation that it perceives as external and extraneous. Sociological evaluation is regarded as an expression of social groups whose members are no closer to philosophy than those of other groups; a variety of political functions are ascribed to the new philosophical doctrine that its author never considered, even some he may very well reject or struggle against. It seems not unimportant to arrive at some clarity about the justified meaning and indeed the boundaries of the sociological treatment of philosophy.

First, I would like to say something of the relation between modern metaphysics and the sociological investigation into the conditionality of metaphysics as such, then turn to the question of the ideological function of philosophy. To the first point: it is necessary for us to make a short remark on the distinction between the role of philosophy in the present and the role it played just some forty or fifty years ago. Anyone who would grasp the core of the dominant intuitions from the second half of the nineteenth century does not even need to look to the philosophical works of the time. The most superficial study of the dominant consciousness in that period is sufficient for the discovery that the investigation of natural reality was considered the essential organ of truth-finding. In fact, neo-Kantians and positivists alike inherited the legacy of idealism, as they thought the unity and lawfulness of nature the product of a methodical process of reification, or to be more precise, of ordering. They emphasized, as [Hans] Cornelius does even today, the necessary share of such ordering functions in the construction of the world of experience. But their true achievement appeared to these schools themselves as a formal theory of cognition. When they insisted on the identity of logic and metaphysics, this was conscious opposition to material ontology, in opposition to every metaphysics that sought to become more than just the analysis and grounding of the most advanced sciences of natural reality. Hermann Lotze himself, the first to speak out against such efforts with words about the boring “sharpening of knives,”⁵⁵ explains in true Kantian fashion that metaphysics must seek out the grounds “which enable us to follow the basic concepts of natural research with complete confidence throughout the whole realm of their dominion, and which determine the boundaries of this realm at the same time.”⁵⁶ Whoever would learn the aspects under which the content of experience becomes decisive for theoretical consciousness must turn towards the individual sciences themselves, which is where they prove themselves as such. The pathbreaking researchers of the time were guided by great and, if you will, metaphysical motives. However, these rarely emerge into the light of day, though they are contained within each of their individual investigations. All weight was laid upon the investigation of actual connections in space and time. For this reason, the absolute rejection of positivism in modern philosophy has yet to touch on what is actually decisive about it. Any actual confrontation with the determinative intuitions of the nineteenth century can and must be pursued only in areas where firm decisions can still be reached. We will not reach the true image of the philosophical viewpoint of this era from the contested questions of the logical and epistemological schools, nor from the meager superstructure of formalistic ethics which was draped over their restrained and restricted systems, but rather from Kirchoff, Helmholtz, Darwin, those works into which the strongest intellectual energies from mathematical natural science, physiological school-psychology, and bourgeois historiography were poured. Professional philosophy, the domain of specialists, was largely restricted to ex post facto systematics of methodology; the true vehicle for the discovery of truth was, even according to the spirit of the professional philosophers, the investigation of nature and society.

The present emergence of an elaborate, material metaphysics independent of the sciences which claims to be that which is essential about cognition, indeed to be cognition proper, stands in opposition to the concealed metaphysical concept inherent to the investigation of empirical reality. However, even this opposition seems to be gradually losing its relevance. In Germany, as the most progressive intellectual endeavors have begun to concentrate on specialist areas once again, the problem of a metaphysics that, in opposition to metaphysics past, asserts its autonomy nevertheless determines our intellectual situation. Rather than providing a general definition of metaphysics, I will recall only a few more well-known examples of metaphysical themes and the kinds of questions it poses: “Geist and Life,”⁵⁷ “Religion and Philosophy,”⁵⁸ “The Hierarchy of Values,”⁵⁹ “History as Becoming-Man [Menschwerdung],”⁶⁰ “The Primordial Ground of Being,”⁶¹ “Why is there anything at all and not nothing?”⁶² Investigations of such objects are distinguished by the following two features: (1) the essential beings [Wesenheiten] to which they refer are neither conditioned nor subject to change, but are supposed to bestow sense and significance to the events which transpire in space and time; (2) no decisions about the truth of metaphysical statements can be reached through empirical research into natural and social events, as metaphysical statements are “autonomous” with respect to both. Specialized scientific research has to do with “objectified” and manifoldly conditioned beings [Seienden]; therefore, the questions it poses are conditioned and contain manifold theoretical pre-decisions. Metaphysics, to the contrary, seeks to engage directly with sense-giving Being [Sein] itself, with Being that never manifests in objective-objectifying experience,⁶³ but at most “protrudes” into it, or is the ground of experience instead.⁶⁴ Of course, metaphysics rarely considers itself an ‘objectifying experience,’ and believes itself much freer of presuppositions than science tout court. According to its own standpoint, metaphysics may perhaps expect to receive some impulses and confirmation from the study of the manifold processes of nature and society, but in any event has nothing to fear from them.

Individual researchers, logicians included, could nevertheless still reply to the modern ontologist with the characterization Kant coined in his prize essay on metaphysics about an ontologist past:

But as to that which is the true business of metaphysics, namely to find, for the concept of what lies beyond the realm of possible experience, and for the extension of knowledge by means of such a concept, a touchstone for whether they are indeed real, that is something the bold metaphysician might well-nigh despair of, if he does but understand the demand that is made upon him. For if he advances beyond his concept, whereby he can only think objects, but cannot confirm them by any possible experience, and if that thought is but possible, which he arrives at by so framing it that he does not contradict himself therein; then whatever the objects he may please to think up, he is sure that he cannot run into any experience that refutes him, since he will have thought up an object, e.g., a spirit, of precisely such a description that it absolutely cannot be an object of experience. For that not a single experience confirms this idea of his, cannot injure him in the least, since he wanted to think a thing according to determinations that put it beyond all bounds of experience. Thus such concepts can be quite empty, and the propositions assuming objects thereof to be real can therefore be utterly erroneous, and yet there is no touchstone available to discover this error.⁶⁵

How could it be the case that such endeavors, which concern themselves with the eternal determinations of Being, have to defend themselves against ‘sociological analysis’? Should metaphysics not simply regard them with indifference? Sociology is the doctrine of society; it researches the structure of human relationships as they are shaped by the mode of the general life-process, i.e., in the process of the self-preservation of society for any determinate epoch. Sociology doesn’t just presuppose, but in fact believes it has proven that in each epoch there are given laws and tendencies which are beyond the arbitrary discretion of the individual but can nevertheless be derived from the totality of relations of social life.

Particularly when it comes to bourgeois society, and in opposition to the idealistic concept of the free, abstract, self-determining human being, sociology has shown that the individual is thoroughly conditioned by overarching social processes. Many actions which seem completely arbitrary appear, from a sociological point of view, as functions of the social system within which the bearers of these actions are integrated. Practitioners of history may doubt that economic crises, wars, and revolutions can ever be presaged [vorhersagen] with any degree of determinacy; sociologists, however, may reply by pointing out that the relatively poor success of past prognoses made about earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in an older science constitutes no argument against the lawfulness of such events nor the possibility of correct predictions [Voraussagen] in the future. Therefore, it is the task of a scientific sociology to comprehend the expressions of the life of society as uniformly as possible. Accordingly, sociology has shown not only the production of machinery and means of subsistence, the drafting of legal codes, the construction of schools, Zeitungspalästen (newspaper palaces), and theaters, but even the development of scientific, philosophical, and religious intuitions are interwoven in form and content with the general order of social events. This means they cannot be understood outside the context of the fundamental living conditions of a determinate society. I believe I can dispense with examples here altogether. However simple and widely recognized this universal fact may be, this is precisely where the conflict between sociology and metaphysics first begins.

The scientific researcher tends not to be much affected by the analysis of the social function of their theories, nor by the assertion of social conditionality; in the end, they are concerned with the correctness of their theories, and this is only decided within their own field. But because and insofar as metaphysics has the unconditioned for its theme, it believes it must reject any attempt to conceptualize its method of cognition, and especially its content, as conditioned; for conceptualizing it as conditioned, grasping its content in determination by moments of the social process, would mean explaining that which is primary, namely Being-as-such, with that which is secondary and derived from it, namely spatio-temporal events—and rejects this explanation all the more decisively the more it assumes the confluence of its true Being with higher spiritual Being. Scheler recognized this conflict and, out of the greatness of his grand cosmopolitan outlook and with his extensive knowledge of the sociological conditionality of philosophy, dealt with it in depth. Scheler concedes the dependency of all cognition, even that which concerns the unconditioned itself, and believes in the transitoriness of determinate insights, but nevertheless removes the ideas struck upon in that cognition from historical change. In this way, his ontology acquires a totally static, unhistorical character while he has nevertheless become capable of engaging in sociological analysis uninhibited. Of course, the assertion of metaphysics to make contact with the concrete becomes more improbable still once it consists in such a static conception of its own objects. Despite its constant assurance that it has to do with living Being, as opposed to science, such metaphysics may never progress beyond the attempt to render the conditionality of its statements unto a decision about their correctness. Metaphysical categories tend to be not only abstract, but also typically transcendent to any controls, and therein may lie the root of the rejection of the sociological treatment of such designs.

Now to move on to my second theme: the question of ideological function. If you would, permit me to speak of metaphysics and, in general, its role as a cultural moment in society. To be so undisturbed by social life in a determinate epoch entails not just a determinate stage of the development of technology, a determinate level of skill which makes human beings capable of living in the prevailing mode of production, but also determinate legal notions, moral, metaphysical, religious intuitions, those without which coexistence at the given stage of society would be unthinkable. No historically emergent forms of society are harmonic systems in a state of equilibrium, but are relatively stable boundary constructions of a continuous social dynamic; they encompass the conflicts and contradictions of peoples, classes, groups with contending interests and representations. In the process of perpetuating or changing the relations between these groups, so-called cultural factors play a significant role: they strengthen or weaken equilibrium, and so belong to the conservative, reformative, or explosive tendencies of the system.

It is a fitting task for science to investigate the role of culture for determinate historical epochs. The greatest critical historiography has never really been able to avoid this, but attacking the problem systematically is the concern of sociology. According to sociology, the tendency to conceal the above-mentioned contradictory, dynamic character of society and to make the social system appear harmonious–even stable, enduring, eternal–is indeed relevant when it comes to the social role of dominant cultures in law, morality, metaphysics, and religion, when, in actuality, this system contains contradiction. The creation and consolidation of the feeling of the eternity, the correctness, or at least the meaningfulness of a contradictory form of society for all parties alike is as much a function of the culture of the ancien régime as the philosophy of Rousseau that struggled so bitterly against it. If one were inclined to use the expression “ideological,” which has become a generalization, even meaningless, in a remotely incisive sense, such that it could serve a scientific sociology, then it would have to designate precisely this particular function of culture in the social process. In application to metaphysics, this has significant consequences.

If one were to assert that the ideological function can only correspond to its so-called spiritual-intellectual, or even just to its philosophical and ideological, contents—this would mean forcibly maintaining the separation of spirit and nature, of higher and lower culture, which is already outdated in many fields, including sociology itself.⁶⁶ Apparently, scientific theories which are correct and well-ordered according to their determinate context doubtlessly play the same role in this respect as do wrong ones. So, the principle of the struggle for existence in nature might serve the glorification of antagonistic forms of life in human society regardless of findings which attest to its correctness. This is true not only of theories and ways of formulating questions [Fragestellungen], but also political institutions (such as equal voting rights), the manner in which people encounter one another in the public sphere, politeness, customs in general, sport, the way in which people furnish their residences, and much, much more—all of this is in equal measure the object of the sociological investigation of its ideological function in the play of social forces. The distinction between spiritual and non-spiritual moments proves wholly irrelevant in relation to this, and metaphysics is no exception. However, while the sociological investigation of other cultural factors such as those listed above occasionally appears incredibly difficult and the outcome of such investigations just as uncertain, there is at least one element of the social significance of metaphysics which lends itself to immediate determination. So far as it opposes the real existence [realen Dasein] of human beings in society with the higher significance of ideal being [idealen Seins]; so far as it understands history on the basis of a unified “meaning,” or even declares the actual events of history a meaningless hit et nunc, perhaps as “crude facticity,” unimportant compared to an abstract Being which it describes as ‘essential’ [wesenhaft] and ‘concrete’—then it is evidently and eminently suited to the strengthening or reinforcing of harmonizing tendencies. This determination of ideological function as that which covers up the contradictory character of society deviates on a number of points with the customary conception of this concept in philosophical circles.⁶⁷ Firstly, the problem of ideology is typically understood as a problem of origin. The social conditionality of thoughts and of so-called spiritual or intellectual events in general is accordingly designated as “ideological.”

Here again, the question of the above-mentioned metaphysics of the unconditioned arises, and, to be sure, it does warrant important sociological investigations. Spiritual events in general are conditioned in a manifold of ways: biologically, individually, psychologically, and sociologically in a narrower sense. In order to understand “objective spirit,” one must first investigate the social conditions of its emergence, its maintenance, its propagation, and above all its social conditionality. Conflict with the contents of a metaphysics of the absolute must not prevent sociology from this. To us, however, this determination of the concept of ideology—ideological = socially conditioned—appears both too broad and too narrow. Too broad, because it applies in equal measure to all intuitions and theories; too narrow, because it regards only the so-called spiritual-intellectual functions as the bearers of ideology, whereas the ideological apparatus of society is evidently much more extensive. Second, and this is crucial, the prevailing linguistic usage seems to support the opinion that the sociological investigation of a proposition can take the place of the examination of its objective correctness, or, in other words: that the investigation of social conditionality has something to do with its truth. But the incorrectness, the wrongness, that should accompany characterizing something as “ideological” is not precisely not its self-evident conditionality, but its harmonizing transfiguration of contradictions.⁶⁸

Therefore, there are two answers to the disconcerting question posed at the outset regarding the consequences of sociological analysis for philosophy. First: so far as it is intrinsic to the very meaning of metaphysics of the unconditioned to fundamentally and in principle deny its own conditionality, its dependency on the social life-process in matters of both form and content, it is in fact in contradiction with sociology, since the latter conceives of metaphysics as a social product. Second: proof of the ideological function of determinate philosophical theories is itself a question of fact—one of eminent sociological import, indispensable for any understanding of the social process. However, this does not relieve us of the objective assay of the assertions of metaphysics themselves. At the risk of standing alone in this, I would make one closing remark: many of the metaphysical ideas which have emerged in the last decade seem particularly suited for ideological evaluation by virtue of their content, which excludes all empirical controls and abstracts from the distinctions of real life. In terms of pedagogy: they are no obstacle to the intellectual attitude which would rather close its eyes to the social and historical life of actual human beings. As philosophy too must prove itself through the fruitfulness of its constructions for the comprehension of actuality as a whole, the knowledge of such sociological consequences cannot be wholly useless for it.

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André Masson. Les insects matadors. 1936.

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Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics (1932).

In its essential aspects, idealism thus became social philosophy with Hegel: the philosophical understanding of the collective whole in which we live—and which constitutes the foundation for the creations of absolute culture—is now also the insight into the meaning of our own existence according to its true value and content. Let me consider this Hegelian perspective for a moment longer. The current situation of social philosophy can be understood in principle in terms of its dissolution, and of the impossibility of reconstructing it in thought without falling behind the current level of knowledge.

—Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research” [1931]⁶⁹

Having confidence in rigorous, conscientious thinking on the one hand, and being conscious of the conditionality of the content and structure of cognitions on the other—far from being mutually exclusive, both attitudes are necessarily of a piece. The fact that reason can never be certain of its perpetuity; or that knowledge is secure within a given time frame, yet is never so for all time; or even the fact that the stipulation of temporal contingency applies to the very body of knowledge from which it is derived—this paradox does not annul the truth of the claim itself. Rather, it is of the very essence of authentic knowledge never to be settled once and for all. This is perhaps the most profound insight of all dialectical philosophy. As Hegel puts it in the Encyclopaedia, “modesty of thought, as treats the finite as something altogether fixed and absolute, is the worst of virtues; and to stick to a post which has no sound ground in itself is the most unsound sort of theory… [Such modesty] is a retention of this vanity—the finite—in opposition to the true: it is itself therefore vanity.”⁷⁰ In another passage Hegel claims that it is the dialectic “which again makes this mass of understanding and diversity understand its finite nature and the pseudo-independence in its productions, and which brings the diversity back to unity.”⁷¹ For Hegel, this is not just a fragment in the unfinished history of human beings, but already achieved in Absolute Spirit. Hegel himself falls prey to the same delusion as the Enlightenment that he so bitterly attacks: he applies the dialectic only to the past, fancying it something against which his own position is somehow inured. Hegel is also guilty of taking a historical moment in his thinking and making it into something eternal. But since he took reality to be a representation of the Idea, he also had to use his philosophy quite literally to deify and worship the political basis upon which it arose, i.e., the pre-revolutionary Prussian state. This stance of humility before the existing was the false “modesty” of his own thought.

—Horkheimer, “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History” [1930]⁷²

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Introduction by Alfred Schmidt (1971).

All social philosophy, as long as it still propounds a few principles as its final conclusion, (...), remains very imperfect; it is not the bare conclusions of which we are in such need, but rather study; the conclusions are nothing without the reasoning that has led up to them; this we have known since Hegel; and the conclusions are worse than useless if they are final in themselves, if they are not turned into premises for further deductions.

— Engels, “A review of Past and Present, by Thomas Carlyle, London, 1843,” [1844].⁷³

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 accomplishments of ‘The Frankfurt School.’ Thus, in disputes with analytically-oriented social scientists, the alternative Empirie-Spekulation, long known to be flawed, is always restored because, among other reasons, the younger representatives of dialectics have evidently not yet succeeded in adequately presenting their relation to philosophy, particularly Hegel’s. Renewed study of the early writings of Horkheimer, the real founder of the ‘School,’ could be of great benefit in this task, as these writings, in keeping with the tradition initiated by Marx, combine, through the adoption of dialectics, the most incisive critique of Hegelian idealism with—what is even more timely for us today—that of the methods of the Geisteswissenschaft. One thing is certain: that these writings are far less vulnerable to the adversarial accusation of being “philosophically” hostile towards science than later works by the Frankfurters, which were, of course, written under rather different circumstances.

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. This critical reflection, which refuses to capitulate before the limits imposed by the division of labor in sociology as a specialist discipline, could naturally—as the controversies with Adorno have shown—be misunderstood as an empirically indemonstrable “worldview sociology.” There can be no question of this—especially in the case of Adorno, who was always concerned with redeeming empiricism’s claim to “concrete” knowledge through self-reflection. Given this situation, it is advisable today, as we have said, to take a second look at Horkheimer’s earlier works. Primarily for two reasons. First, the weight which is given to the empirical relative to the theoretical (which unlocks the former’s significance) is expressed in these texts more starkly than in many of the school’s later publications; this stems from the above-mentioned critique of idealism. Second, these 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.

This volume brings together three works which are crucial for an adequate understanding of Horkheimer’s basic conception. “Die Anfänge der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie” appeared for the first time as a book through Kohlhammer in 1930; the largely unknown essay “Hegel und das Problem der Metaphysik” was originally a contribution to the Festschrift für Carl Grünberg zum 70. Geburtstag, which was published in 1932 in Leipzig by CL Hirschfeld, and subsequently in the Grünberg Archiv; the study “Montaigne und die Funktion der Skepsis” belongs to a later period of Horkheimer’s work, published in 1938 in Paris by Felix-Alcan in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Volume VII, Double Issue 1/2. (The text printed here corresponds to that in Vol. II of Horkheimer’s Kritische Theorie. Eine Dokumentation, published in 1968 by S. Fischer Verlag.) Needless to say, a short introduction can hardly cover the historical-philosophical problematic outlined in the following works, let alone discuss it. Nevertheless, a few, particularly essential points may be indicated for the reader, especially readers who are just beginning their study of Horkheimer’s work.

As different as the three works are in their thematic focus, they form a substantive unity insofar as their author is concerned with something in each case which has become historical, and which he never depicts in the manner of contemplative historicism, in the form of “once-upon-a-time” as Benjamin said, but which he examines on the basis of a passionate partisanship towards the spiritual and social needs and struggles of his—and, mutatis mutandis, our—present situation. Horkheimer (and this is a characteristic for his writing on the whole) never presents his own thoughts in codified form, as if detached from the objects of his interests, but always through the critical, decidedly present-minded appropriation of historical materials. In this way, he always examines the history of philosophy under the aspect of a philosophy of history. This volume is a paradigmatic demonstration of what a history of philosophy written according to the principles of historical materialism should resemble with regard to its method. On this model, a historical materialist history of philosophy would not consist of an abstract, identical, ready-made schema of interpretation (as is often enough the case in contemporary Marxist literature), but would arise transformed, enriched in its content, from out of the object it “presents.” Let us briefly discuss the consequences of Horkheimer’s concept of history for the activity of cognition [Erkenntnis]. Once the implementation of knowledge is grasped as a derived (and co-determinative) moment in the conflict of society and nature, it becomes impossible to develop a “theory of knowledge” [or epistemology] (Erkenntnistheorie) which imagines it can decide once and for all on the nature of the subject-object-relation in isolation from the historical course of the world:

[The] intellectual life of individuals is bound up with the life process of the social body of which they are a part and which determines their activity. Reality is not a solid object, nor is consciousness a blank mirror which (...) could either be fogged up by the hot air of the ignorant or the malicious or polished by those who possess knowledge. On the contrary, the whole of reality is identical with the life process of humanity, in which neither nature, nor society, nor the relation between the two remain unaltered.⁷⁴

However, the fact that cognition expresses no unchanging reason within things, but, as a moment of the social whole is itself subject to Hegel’s “Furie des Verschwindens,” does not, as Horkheimer demonstrates, provide grounds of justification for abstract relativism, but instead for the necessity of dialectical philosophizing: “Having confidence in rigorous, conscientious thinking on the one hand, and being aware of the conditionedness of the content and structure of cognitions on the other—far from being mutually exclusive, both attitudes are necessarily of a piece. The fact that reason can never be certain of its perpetuity; or that knowledge is secure within a given time frame, yet is never so for all time; or even the fact that the stipulation of temporal contingency applies to the very body of knowledge from which it is derived—this paradox does not annul the truth of the claim itself. Rather, it is of the very essence of authentic knowledge never to be settled once and for all. This is perhaps the most profound insight of all dialectical philosophy.”⁷⁵ For Horkheimer, what followers from this insight is not only the critique of any prematurely “meaning-making” metaphysics in which subject and object are identified, but also the critique of any attempt—however sophisticated its “materialist” camouflage—which results in the “pantheistic promotion of history to the status of an autonomous, unitary, substantial being,”⁷⁶ whereby the alienation of producers from their product is not conceptually grasped but merely transfigured.

As the belief that historical facts are grounded in a supra-individual spirit is abandoned, so too the methodological separation of the natural and human sciences proves to be questionable:

Empirical research of historical processes [i.e., Marx’s theory, A.S.] is directed at their most accurate possible description and, ultimately, the knowledge of their laws and tendencies, just as in research into the various domains of extra-human nature: the thought of an underlying, spiritual principle, which would have to be highly abstract by necessity, is completely foreign to it. Among all of the sciences of dead and living nature, it is not the case that one genus (Gattung) which aims at mere “correctness” whereas the other aims at pure “truth,” that physics aims at mere practice whereas history, anthropology, sociology aim at insight into a higher actuality. Neither the logical structure of the concepts sought nor the claim to validity establishes a fundamental distinction between the two groups of sciences, (…)⁷⁷

The separation of nature and history must itself be derived from the historical life-process of human beings. So long as this remains caught in mere nature, a critical-“explanatory” method is more appropriate than an “understanding” one—because it thinks through changing practice, “active humanism”⁷⁸ that advocates a more rational world.

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Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics (1932).

What is rational, is actual;

And what is actual, is rational.⁷⁹

This infamous proposition from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right presents the two faces of Hegel’s thinking. The first part expresses that any unconditioned which essentially consists solely in the Idea (or is “only concept, principle of spirit and heart”) cannot be distinguished from a chimera. The conviction that the philosophical genre of history “has only to grasp what is and what has been, and remains all the more true the more it keeps to what is given” places Hegel in the lineage of the enlightenment philosophers to whom he is typically, and radically, opposed.⁸⁰

Though he decidedly rejects any vision that distances itself from earthly being, his doctrine is, nevertheless, a metaphysical system. His overcoming of the traditional distinctions between this world and the next, finitude and infinity, between civitas terrena and coelestis, mundus intelligibilis and sensibilis, salvation history and secular history,⁸¹ does not proceed in the spirit of the this-worldly, secularizing enlightenment. Certainty in knowledge [Wissen] must not be restricted to the cognition [Erkenntnis] of psychic and physical phenomena, as with “natural light” in d’Alembert; it does not receive its justificatory ground and goal from the active life of human beings, but must generate justification and the meaning of life from out of itself. The second part of the proposition formulates, in classical manner, the sanctioning of the course of the world through pure thought; for “what is actual, is rational” means: everything is in order. By restricting revelation to experienceable actuality, Hegel elevates givenness to revelation; secularizing the divine, he deifies the world. The designation of ‘actuality’ is branded a “name in the emphatic sense.”⁸²

But how is this metaphysical transfiguration [Verklärung] possible without contradicting the second part of the proposition? How can pure thought provide justificatory grounds for any cognition for which there is no experience, if, according to Hegel’s own conviction, the Idea is true only insofar as it presents itself objectively? The answer arises from the concept of unconditional cognition as constructed in German idealistic philosophy.⁸³ This concept is formulated in such a way that the principle of the identity of subject and object appears as a necessary presupposition for the existence of truth.⁸⁴ As is well known, Kant’s successors believed they had simply developed his thought that the subject can only know itself with complete adequacy. So far as the subject is bounded by another being, all of our knowledge remains, according to them, a mere patchwork. We can accordingly never be certain that, short of a complete cognition of the whole, the fragmentary knowledge we now imagine we possess will not change in content or even be totally destroyed. The self-cognizing subject must, according to the idealist point of view, be thought of as identical with the absolute: it must be infinite. In opposition to every kind of positivist philosophy, German Idealism tries to ground individual knowledge in cognition of totality. For this idealism, the claim made by partial knowledge to unconditional validity can only be salvaged if knowledge of totality can be realized.

Hegel’s system is everywhere determined by this presupposition. Hegel does not undertake the transfiguration of that which exists [das Bestehende] by means of some isolated, otherworldly thought-content, but on the basis of his concept of cognition itself. Hegel, the great empiricist, whose insights into historical, sociological, and psychological facts have preempted the most important results of the systematic and methodical labors of science for a century on so many occasions, and which can still point the way for empirical research today, knew too much about the conditionality and transience of those eternal essences which have arisen in the history of philosophy to simply select one or several from among them.⁸⁵ But he insists that either no certain knowledge is possible at all or that there is knowledge of the whole in the sense of self-cognizing of the all-embracing, all-being, self-identical subject. In correspondence with this thought that all knowledge is self-knowledge of the infinite subject which is identical to itself, logic is supposed to disclose the concepts which are necessarily co-posited in the judgment of identity, i.e., which belong as determinative aspects to the idea of this unity. Guided by these abstract “categories,” Hegel interprets nature and the human world, dividing history according to stages through which this self-knowledge unfolds. This cognition is only realized in the highest creations of spirit, in the state and in culture; this knowledge consists in the elaboration of the total content of nature and the human world, articulated according to the system of categories presented in the logic. This is the concept of cognition for the system of identity by virtue of which Hegel establishes the rationality of the actual.

His struggle against “abstract identity,” and against Schelling, does not, in truth, refer to the principle itself, but to its contentlessness as a mere summary negation of all distinctions. In identity, according to Hegel, the distinctions must not simply be negated, but must be “sublated” [aufgehoben], in the double sense of the word. Identity must be thought of as the conceptual unity of those contradictions whose overcoming yields identity as a result, i.e., as the unified philosophical system of the world with the full wealth of its content. But the doctrine of the absolute identity of subject and object is fixed from the beginning and is everywhere the point of orientation. That differences and tensions are reinterpreted as “contradictions” in this philosophy results from conceiving them as thoughts of the all-encompassing and all-identical subject. The dialectical self-movement of the concept rests essentially on the fact that every conceptual determination which is not ultimately measured against the idea of the completed system of self-cognition fails to satisfy its own conceptuality. The result (absolute identity) is preempted from the beginning, and no single decisive step taken in the logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit could be conceived in the absence of this presupposition.

The categories which are derived from the principle of identity form the measure by which true actuality is distinguished from merely “accidental” existence. These categories give definition to that reason which grounds actuality in the last instance; it is this reason to which Hegel refers by contrast to the determination of the meaninglessness of the individual and the suffering of creatures, and which makes it possible for him to speak of the latter as mere “semblance” [Schein]. Using the magical means of the idealistic concept of knowledge, Hegel turns knowledge of the world into cognition of God, avoids the equation of cognition with positive science, distinguishes between accidental and necessary events, and selects out the facts which are essential from those which are “worthless” existence [“faulen” Existenz].⁸⁶ This concept enables Hegel to teleologically ground the later events of history on earlier historical conditions and to justify the less-than-sublime actual causes of events, though he is not closed off to recognizing them as such by means of the equally less-than-sublime image of the cunning of reason, which uses the former as a tool. The doctrine of identity enables him to trivialize “base and untrue existences” in the realm of philosophy without philosophy having to abdicate its claim to encompass “the actual” on this account.⁸⁷ This doctrine gives a metaphysical shape to the enlightened meaning of his assurance that only that which presents itself objectively should be considered valid by subjecting the given to a selection according to the criterion that “existence is in part appearance and in part actuality.” By cognizing the transient as transient, the philosopher imagines he simultaneously abolishes [aufzuheben] his object; progression within the system essentially consists in the fact that all of the joys and sufferings of individual human beings, poverty and wealth, and indeed all of the real contradictions of the earthly world, are marked by the reconciling sign of the “mere” finite.⁸⁸

The significance of the Hegelian system for the philosophical situation of the present lies, above all, in the reckless clearness with which metaphysics has been chained to the idealistic mythos of the unity of thinking and being. If we are identical with no “absolute” spirit, if “being” [“das Sein”] does not come to coincide with either one human being or with a supra-individual subject, if time has not yet ripened the possibility of complete knowledge of all that is essential, then, according to Hegel, we are not left with mere fragments of a metaphysics but with no metaphysics at all. Metaphysics wants to ground the scientific investigation of factual connections and, therefore, be a knowledge of actuality which is nevertheless independent of it. Metaphysics is, according to Hegel, completely inseparable from this dogma. If knowledge of identity is crossed out, then his claim to philosophical presentation of a true order of the world would likewise fall away, and only the empirical side of his work would remain, for which alone he numbers among the greatest historians and social scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But even this side of his work changes in significance when detached from the metaphysical whole. It contains the record of the existential struggles of human beings, the falls of individuals and downfalls of whole peoples, of wars and revolutions, as well as the cognition of the lawfulness inherent to each of these events, the investigation into the inner grounds of the preservation of society despite its anarchistic foundations—all of this labor of the spirit becomes, once detached from its metaphysical significance as the self-knowledge of the eternal and essential, the manifold-conditioned and transient expression of the lives of human individuals. Along with the cunning of reason, which is supposed to stand behind the struggle of human interests and the nature of the social satisfaction of needs, the belief that the objective of this cunning, cognition, constitutes the most significant, highest, and self-grounding goal of the world process—disappears. For Hegel, this belief stands or falls with the questionable doctrine of the essential equivalence of cognizing spirit and actuality.⁸⁹ The temple of his system is erected on the blueprint of the logic, furnished by identity, and this is what distinguishes his system from the ordinary dwellings of science: whoever rejects this plan also rejects the built structure as a whole. The negation of the doctrine of identity marks knowledge as the manifold-conditioned expression of the life of determinate human beings.⁹⁰ Having foregone the transfiguration, one foregoes its content. This consequence is, according to the principles of the Hegelian philosophy itself, unavoidable.

It might seem as if, following the negation of the dogma of identity, a partial metaphysical claim of the system remained, akin to those partial claims Hegel afforded to previous philosophical interpretations of the world. For Hegel, each philosophical system was supposed to contain the absolute idea at a determinate stage of its development, and, indeed, contain it whole and undivided, even if not fully unfolded: in the history of philosophy, there is “one idea in the whole and in all of its members, just as in a living individual, one life, one pulse, beats through all of its limbs.”⁹¹ One might even think that, according to Hegel’s own point of view, his work remains a mirror of the whole of truth in the same way every genuine philosophy does, even if the grounding metaphysical principle warranted the contradiction by later philosophers.

But this line of thought overlooks two things. First, “belief in the world-spirit,” from which perspective Hegel contemplated the history of philosophy, was no mere feeling for him, but a conviction indissolubly linked to the now-disputed idealistic grounding principle; further, the assurance that the true idea is contained within the system as a whole could be of no use to us if we did not already possess the guiding thread which enabled us to discover it. But this indispensable guiding thread, the system of categories derived in the logic, cannot be acquired without recourse to the thought of identity. One must “recognize these pure concepts in what the historical shape contains,”⁹²—“in order to recognize its progression as the development of the idea in empirical shape and appearance in which philosophy arises historically, one must, of course, already have knowledge of the idea to bring to it [viz., the history of philosophy].”⁹³

Having abandoned his basic viewpoint, it follows that what can still be maintained from the Hegelian system is neither the unity of the system nor the stage-like character of its doctrine, neither an indwelling, self-positing necessity of the entire history of spirit nor the organic composition of its domains: none of this can be separated from the identity thesis in the determinate frame of his philosophy without fundamentally changing the meaning of his concepts. If we set aside the dialectical method as such (which, of course, is also transformed in its significance by the fall of the grounding dogma), then what remains as its result is only the individual, the fragment that withstands the progression of science, and even this presents itself only as the knowledge of determinate, transient human beings, lacking the finish of being a thought of the world-spirit.

Hegel himself made this fact visible. His work is grounded on the conviction that either no metaphysics is possible or only the completed system of the spirit which recognizes itself in its externalizations is possible. If knowledge and object, thinking and the actuality which is thought do not prove identical in the progression of their determination, if thinking is always to be conceived as it appears empirically, namely as the thinking of determinate, individual human beings, then the absolute claim is forfeit and space is cleared for scientific cognition of the particular. Even the cognition of “transcendental” presuppositions does not transcend such knowledge, for it is not concluded and is, therefore, subject to radical changes in structure.⁹⁴ Metaphysics, on the contrary, is concerned with timeless truth.

The assertion of identity is, however, merely an article of faith. We know of unities of the most varied kinds in the most varied of domains, but the identity of thinking and being is nothing but an “orthodoxy” of philosophy,⁹⁵ and the same goes for the unit of each of the moments presupposed in it: e.g., the unity “of” thinking, “of” being, “of” history, “of” nature, etc. The thinking of various human beings may agree; by no means should this be viewed as a superior, unified process, as it has been in idealistic philosophy. There is no such thing as “thinking” per se, but only the determinate thinking of a determinate human being, which is certainly co-determined by the situation of society as a whole. Social research permits no final decision in favor of either an individual or holistic dynamic for events, as one might expect from a metaphysically-oriented philosophy; instead, concrete analyses are required for the determination of the relatively individual and more comprehensive factors which are effective in each case. Speaking of self-thinking being has no meaning either. “Being” [Sein] in this sense is no unity which would continue to exist, somehow, regardless of all else, but a mere index [Hinweis] of a multiplicity of beings [Vielheit von Seiendem]. Hegel himself rightly equated “Being” in this general sense with Nothing, but did not realize that each systematic step of his own philosophy is secretly oriented towards such abstractly held generalities. In this respect, “history” is no different from “thinking” and “being.” There is no essentiality [Wesenheit] or unified power which could bear the name ‘history.’⁹⁶ The world-spirit is so little the author of historical events that it functions only as an artistic device in the presentation of the philosopher. All of these totalities—through which the great totality, the Subject-Object, is determined—are utterly vacuous abstractions, not the animating soul of the actual [Seelen des Wirklichen] as Hegel believed. In the philosophy of criticism, they were made intelligible as “tasks;” Hegel, however, hypostasized them.

The doctrine of identity has long since collapsed, and, with it, the edifice of the Hegelian philosophy. But it is all too easy to forget all that lies buried beneath it. With the dissolution of the formative fundamental principles of his philosophy, the most fruitful of its methodological and material thoughts have been freed from its dogmatic substratum, but at the same time, metaphysics in the sense of an autonomous knowledge of the truly actual, independent of the empirical sciences, has become questionable. Failing to recognize this would mean misunderstanding the greatness of Hegel’s achievement. So long as the doctrine, developed on the best grounds by German idealism, of the necessary connection between validity of the dogma of identity and the possibility of non-temporal truth, which metaphysics strives for, is not refuted, the fate of Hegelian metaphysics must not be viewed as that of just any other metaphysical system, but rather as the fate of metaphysics itself. With the “absolute” philosophy, which ignores the distinction between cognizing subjects and the incompleteness of knowledge; along with the philosophy of spirit, which was to conceive or interpret that which has being [das Seiende] from the vantage of the “one,” true spirit—metaphysics is over. Even the philosophy that refers to such a whole as a fundamental heuristic, as provisional knowledge, and solely for the sake of partial interpretation has lost its weight, since this whole, be it “spirit” or “history” or “being,” is not. It matters little whether the unity with which metaphysics is concerned is grasped in its being or in its becoming: every distinction which arises between these notions in the course of their refinement and deepening nevertheless depends on the same dogmatic presupposition.

The endeavors of mathematical natural science to develop a system are not affected by this. Even if one imagines this kind of system has been created, it would remain a tool of determinate human beings, an abstract schema for calculation, which has proven itself reliable in certain respects and is reliant on renewed confirmation in the present. Whichever paths exact research may take to acquire concepts which offer summary overviews, and whichever logical structures these concepts may have, they remain independent of the dogma of identity—unless, that is, they lay claim on timeless, metaphysical validity, as a number of naturalistic philosophers had done in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is not natural science, but naturalistic philosophy which is confronted by the same difficulty as metaphysics: it must either assert (if in contradiction to its own principle) self-enclosed self-cognition or it must give up its claim to timeless, subject-independent truth.⁹⁷ Since the overthrow of Hegel’s universal system, which had already drawn the conclusion from the development of metaphysics that any knowledge [Wissen] must be of totality, cognition has shed the last remnants of its sacred character, and while it has retained its human character, it has done so in a modified sense. The human being is neither posited opposite the Godhead or in its place, but is taken precisely as we experience it in the progressive sequence of observation, external and internal. This experience can no longer be interpreted from the point of view of a supreme unity.

All critique of absolute philosophy is exposed to the objection that the critique itself is nothing other than that which it was supposed to strike. The attack on the universal interpretation of the world is in the present opposed not only by the high regard metaphysics has come to be held in as of late, but also by the assertion that the would-be attacker always has a metaphysics of their own lying in ambush. Only this metaphysics is an impoverished, vacillating, inconsistent one that dwells undeveloped in the attacker’s thoughts. The objection does in fact indicate a series of difficult tasks, the exploration and solution of which is itself a crucial task for the present. But the above line of thought is not affected by it in the slightest. Here, metaphysics is meant in a completely determinate sense, in which it is distinct from empirical research as well as from theory, which we find in the grand designs of Western metaphysics. In those systems, it was characterized as the endeavor to ground empirical investigation of factual connections by means of a knowledge of actuality that transcends empirical givenness. To whatever degree the facts may be preformed through the most manifold theoretical and extra-theoretical conditions, however much dogmatism there may yet be in the individual investigations of the so-called hard sciences, however far removed its experiments often are from its own presuppositions and conditions, empirical theory, even in this sense, is no metaphysical doctrine. Gestalt laws, statistical regularities, mathematical systems of axioms, and the empirical determination of historical events—these may or may not be right, may or may not advance our work in the most diverse ways, but only when they are positioned in a new, more comprehensive context do they enter into the service to metaphysics.

The significance of metaphysics, as it is meant here, consists in providing grounds of justification for the individual. This grounding is as different from engaging the individual adequately through artful use of the methods of scientific procedure as it is from the explanation of causes. Rather, this grounding operation derives the individual being as a necessary one from the thought of a higher unity, or, at least, asserts that the world is organized in such a way that, under certain presuppositions, the content of the past, present, and future could, in principle, be substituted for the individual, made necessary in its place. The individual is not grasped as a given event, whose conceptual nexus, whether it appears as necessary constraint or as artifice at any one point in time, is subjectively co-conditioned in each case, but is regarded as an appendage of a self-enclosed whole with its own inner logic, reason, and meaning. Unsatisfied by the the stray, bounded nature of the few regions in the experienceable world which could be called meaningful—as well as the problematic character of the laws of nature—metaphysics is convinced of an independent, general order of being [Seinsordnung]. On that basis, the fragmentary manifoldness we know, whether understood statically or dynamically, is not merely grasped from a purposive point of view, but is supposed to be seen from the independent, primordial ground [Urgrund] of the world, even if only to judge that fragmentary manifold as contingent appearance by the measure of one’s idea of such a primordial order. This conviction is still authoritative wherever cognition of the ground of being is viewed as a developing process or is deferred until the end of time. Wherever this conviction dominates thinking, whether expressed or unexpressed—especially where such a goal is considered the self-evident, supreme driving force of all striving for knowledge, but also where it influences the orientation of investigation, or even just the coloring of its concepts—there we may speak of metaphysical concern.

Renunciation of this concern affects the basic character of our concepts and judgments as a whole. Thinking loses the sense of an unio mystica with being. Thinking is split into a multitude of processes of variable origin and performance. And these processes also retain their property of being facts, even as they to participate in the construction of knowledge which includes these processes themselves. States of affairs, gestalts, laws, and systems—and not just isolated “sensations”—exhibit factual character in the sense that they lack a universal, “necessary” connection with one another, even one which may reside within individual facts themselves. The consequences of this have yet to be revealed in their full scope.

Empiricism is one thing, metaphysics another. Despite all of Hegel’s efforts to achieve an all-encompassing, unified construction, despite the impossibility of comprehending the role of contradiction within his system without overcoming the system itself, Hegel’s determination of conceptual differentiations loses none of its force in many cases. Metaphysics did not blind him to empiricism, and, in some cases, even sharpened his eyes. According to Hegel, metaphysics cannot construct the content from out of itself, but depends on the ordering activity of empirical research, “and without the growth of the empirical sciences for themselves, philosophy could not have made any progress beyond the ancients.”⁹⁸ It is also entirely possible to present the results of empirical research in a mode unique to philosophy, such that the life of the object is expressed in each of its aspects. But lacking belief in identity, even a science presented according to the basic principles of dialectics, just as with any scientific system in which “the cold, progressive necessity of the thing itself”⁹⁹ seems to be determinative, remains in many respects a conditioned fact of our lives.

With metaphysics, the philosophy of spirit becomes untenable so far as it takes the facts of historical life for the expression, however “dialectically,” of a fundamentally spiritual process. To speak of the course of history as, in essence, spiritual conflict not only transfigures it, but also directly entails the avowal of its identity. Spirit is that which is truly actual: the essence, the substance. The empirical point of view, on the other hand, that historical facts are the result of constellations of the most diverse kinds, by no means precludes handling them with the fewest possible concepts, nor from developing these constellations from these concepts in the course of presentation; it does, however, contradict both the belief that facts are created by an independent, spiritual force and the subordination of scientific work to the goal of cognizing this essence.

Empirical research of historical processes is directed at their most accurate possible description and, ultimately, the cognition of their laws and tendencies, just as in research into the various domains of extra-human nature: the thought of an underlying, spiritual principle, which would have to be highly abstract by necessity, is completely foreign to it. Among all of the sciences of dead and living nature, it is not the case that there is one genre which aims at mere “correctness” whereas the other aims at pure “truth,” that physics aims at mere practice whereas history, anthropology, sociology aim at insight into a higher actuality. Neither the logical structure of the concepts which are sought after nor the claim to validity establishes a fundamental distinction between the two groups of sciences, unless, that is, one opposes history as mere selective description to every “theory,” as in the Southwest Neo-Kantian School.¹⁰⁰ But even this approach—aside from the fact it is entirely incommensurate to the actual research procedures in every field of contemporary science—could not rescue the thesis of an independent, spiritual development supposed to take place within history. Even if “Spirit” were capable of recognizing itself in nature or history, even if “Spirit” were more than a questionable abstractum, it would nevertheless not be identical with reality.

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Subjectivism and Positivism as Heirs of Hegelian Metaphysics: Preliminary Remarks towards an Empiricist Theory of Knowledge (Fragment) (ca. 1931).

[MHGS, Bd. 11. — Editorische Vorbemerkung:] Though the title, which has been proposed by the editor, is meant to characterize the frame of the following text, its significance only becomes clear when both the narrower and broader context for its creation are recognized. This text is the unpublished continuation of the essay “Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics,” which appeared in the 1932 Festschrift for Carl Grünberg—hence the assigned date: [1931?]. As material in the Nachlass proves, this text was developed as part of a more comprehensive, projected work, the beginning of which was not preserved, but also, most likely, was largely unwritten. The Nachlass contains a typed manuscript with pages numbered 34 through 56, interspersed with a number of handwritten corrections, and is therefore evidently only a partial section, the beginning of which is missing. Page 34 opens with a philosophical-historical bridge from theories of history and the state in the work of French and English enlighteners to Hegel’s Philosophy of History. The two pages which follow develop the enlightened-materialistic features of Hegel’s approach. The subsequent pages, which number through 51, seem to function as the basis for a copy-edited text (which has not survived), and which was published separately as the essay “Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics.” The final section of the manuscript, pages 51 through 56, contain the text printed below, dedicated to the critique of epistemological subjectivism. Although the manuscript as a whole contains a number of references to themes from Horkheimer’s lectures and seminars, judging by the style of composition, it is less likely to be a lecture transcript than a fragment of a text meant for publication.

The plan of the text is approximately outlined in a sheet enclosed with the manuscript, which contains the following keywords regarding the demarcation of non-orthodox Marxism from Hegelian and post-Hegelian metaphysics:

I. From Philosophy to Science: The Transition to Historical Materialism, or the Meaning of the Collapse of the Hegelian System.

• All of the reasons which attest that if there is an absolute truth, it can only consist in the form of a total system in the Hegelian sense, i.e.: show the impossibility of the system given its immanent presuppositions. Mannheim thus withdraws from the affair by saying the system cannot be had yet, but will receive it in an even higher fashion. The superstition that the truth consists in coincidence of subject and object. The concept of totality (even for Lukács). Metaphysics, intuition of essences, and science. Grounding of materialism. Marxism is not only the sole sociology, but also the sole philosophy. Marxism has displaced philosophy, and Mannheim wants to reverse this. Why positivism is so unsatisfactory. Materialism can be completed either in the direction of a dogmatic metaphysics or in the direction of the laws of motion of society. Excursus on the relapse of orthodox Marxism into metaphysics (immanently necessary laws). Concept of society. Society as subject contra individual.

II. Non-Contradictory Presentation of Historical Materialism:

• (a.) What is.

• (b.) What is to be done.

At the bottom edge of the page, there are additional sentences in Horkheimer’s own hand: “Bad positivism posits only the ‘I’ as ‘actual’ and says ‘this is what empiricism consists of.’” This note apparently describes the central thought of the following text. Its context, as shown by the above keywords, is the critique of various forms of contemporary idealism. The names Karl Mannheim and Georg Lukács are mentioned. The part of the source text which is incorporated into “Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics” also contains critical notes on these authors, which, however, have been deleted from the published version. They have therefore been included here:

[1] The essay [“Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics”] says of the dissolution of absolute idealism into scientific empiricism:

“If knowledge and object, thinking and thought actuality do not prove identical in the progression of their determination, if thinking is always to be conceived as it appears empirically, namely as the thinking of determinate, individual human beings, then the absolute claim is forfeit and space is cleared for scientific knowledge of the particular.”

Horkheimer considers a further alternative, as the typescript shows, in the relapse of Hegelian-Marxist metaphysics into bad mythology, such as he finds in Lukács. The manuscript of the source-text continues:

“This state of affairs has been thoroughly confirmed by the latest attempt to make Hegel’s philosophy of history timely again. Lukács asserts that the concrete truth of the present can only be seen by those who are capable of creating the future; he too links the cognition of totality to a ‘Subject-Object,’ albeit that of the practical class-consciousness of the proletariat in distinction from absolute spirit; he too, therefore, adheres to identity as the presupposition of the possibility of ‘truth’ and makes such a supra-individual unity the bearer of knowledge and events at the same time. Indeed, it is certain: without it we do not have the capacity to comprehend either the Hegelian or any other perspective on being which would be more than a description, as faithful as possible and conscious as possible of its own principles and conditions, of what we experience, and more than the progressive, theoretical uncovering of the structure and context of our experience.”

In the last paragraph of the published essay, Horkheimer relates his thesis of the incompatibility of empiricism and metaphysics to a form of “philosophy of spirit” which “takes the facts of historical life for the expression, however “dialectically,” of a fundamentally spiritual process.” The corresponding paragraph in the typescript of the source-text begins with a reference to a spirit-philosophically guided sociology. He then concludes, alluding to Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, as follows:

“Though sociology is concerned with spiritual processes, it is by no means ‘more philosophical’ than physics, regardless of whether the study of these processes is conducted in a specialized discipline of its own, as in the case of Wissenssoziologie, or not. It is an old belief, but not a true one, that historical events originate from spirit. However the task of sociology as a specialist discipline might be determined, to the extent it presupposes the comprehensibility of cultural processes on the basis of purely spiritual or psychic processes, or equates the investigation of social developments with intellectual history, it will have lost its ground with the disintegration of Hegelian metaphysics.”

This clarifies the expression “metaphysically oriented sociology” which appears in the beginning of the text printed below, which begins where the last quotation ends: the expression targets any sociology which follows Mannheim (or can be found in Mannheim)—and, certainly, any which follows Max Scheler (or can be found in Max Scheler).

Alongside to the spirit-philosophical vision of ideas and vulgar materialism—which not treated in the typescript in detail—Horkheimer names subjective idealism, according to which all cognition can be traced back to facts of consciousness of empirical “I’s,” as the third product of the disintegration of Hegelian metaphysics. The text below is a critique of this intuition. The defense against this kind of “solipsism” is less concerned with the critique of a conception attributable to determinate philosophers than it is with possible consequences of the rejection of Hegel’s thesis of identity. The purpose of this critique is apparently the epistemological justification of Horkheimer’s own program of reinterpreting question of the conditions of the possibility of experience, taken up from the transcendental-philosophical tradition, in biological, psychological, and social-theoretical terms. Horkheimer is concerned with an “empirical theory of knowledge” beyond metaphysical pre-decisions about the dependence or independence of “subject” and “object.”

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The demand that metaphysically-oriented sociology become empirical research by no means entails belief in its presuppositionlessness. Empirical knowledge [Wissen], i.e., our knowledge of facts and factual laws, is neither independent of the total situation in which it occurs, nor “pure” of all theory. One of the motives of science is to become increasingly familiar with the subjective and objective presuppositions of determinate cognitions [Erkenntnisse], including the untested pre-decisions they harbor. But even this expansion of our knowledge is itself grounded on the determination of facts; it bears the mark of something found, not that of what is logically necessary in itself. Even where research has devised such brilliant conceptual tools that it might develop and preempt whole fields of events within thought, without being refuted by those events which occur, the confirmation of thought itself remains a fact, and we must be careful not to impute the logical course of thought, the result of which turned out to be right, to the event itself as its active force—under the name of “reason.” This raises the fundamental question for all cognition which has abandoned the identity-thesis: how, then, is the distinction between concept and actuality, between thinking and being, to be grasped? If the concept is not “identical” with the thing [Sache], what, then, is this “thing”? Can we really mean anything aside from, or speak of anything other than, what it is we think—thoughts, concepts, ideas? Aren’t all “natural” things in this world conceptual formations, thought-entities? And if these thought-entities are stripped of their supra-personal reality, their participation in absolute spirit, don’t they evaporate into experiential structures of the empirical ego, which would then remain as the sole extant “reality”? In other words: doesn’t the decision to distinguish thoughts from things lead to the abandonment of the “thing,” to subjective idealism, to solipsism, or at least to agnosticism?

If our thoughts are deprived of “objectivity,” then—it seems—we are locked away within ourselves, because outside of our thoughts we find only the immediately lived sensory shapes, that which is given moment-to-moment, the stuff of which is woven from sensations! Wouldn’t all “things” therefore be facts of consciousness, and the whole world enclosed within the individual ego? Doesn’t the demand to stick to experience lead to a profession of the philosophy of immanence on the model of Berkeley? In fact, with the disintegration of Hegelian metaphysics, the various philosophical points of view which were bound together within his system seem to have freed themselves and regained their independence. Alongside vulgar materialism and the sublime vision of ideas, philosophy was primarily dominated by the belief that all being was egoic [ichhaftes], subjective, or at least that all being was in some sense human.¹⁰¹

But both those who profess the subjectivist conclusions and ground their worldview upon them, and with those who accuse every critic of absolute philosophy of having to draw those conclusions, still proceed entirely in the spirit of metaphysics. They presuppose a concept, in this cause our present notion [Vorstellung] of the self, the subject, the human being, consciousness, etc., is capable of transporting us into the allegedly primordial ground of being,¹⁰² that from which “everything” is supposed to emerge. This belief in intellectual union with such a ground in any sense still suffers from a more or less arbitrary selection of absolutely posited individual contents of knowledge relative to Hegel’s philosophy,¹⁰³ since Hegel considered the whole system of our knowledge as identical with being. The leading confusion rests on the fact that certain component parts acquired from the analysis of processes and things—namely, “sensations”—are considered one-sidedly in their dependence on the composition of one thing in particular—namely, the physiological structure of the individual human being. This dependence is of the highest significance for all branches of research, but by no means provides a ground of justification for the conviction that the material from which the world is constructed exists “in” the individual, “in” the consciousness which accompanies its physical structure, “in” an ego. Rather, it is precisely the task of research to separate out all of the moments in the process under investigation that change from person to person, or even between the processes which play out “in” the person (such as “thoughts,” as opposed to different cases of process).

The epistemological question of what this “in” actually signifies needs not be answered here; it matters only that my own ego, distinct from all other beings, however else it may be grasped, is in any event not to be regarded as a unified Urwesen from which “everything” could now be comprehended following the dissipation of absolute spirit. It is right to say that our knowledge of events everywhere goes back to experiences whose material proves to be “sensations,” or, as Hegel says:

The principle of experience contains the infinitely important determination that human beings must themselves be involved when taking up a given content and holding it to be true, more precisely that they must find such content to be united and in unison with the certainty of themselves.¹⁰⁴

This principle means that what a human being is supposed to let stand in his knowing [Wissen], he has to see himself, knowing [wissen] himself to be present in the process.¹⁰⁵

But this is no ground to judge events as our own thoughts. This was a dogma of philosophers. Thoughts are not “everything,” as little as the ego, reflecting on itself as the author and bearer of thoughts, is “everything” or its “ground.” Genuine philosophy, and not just physics, must renounce the claim to possess such a Weltformel that would encompass the past and the future within itself. To the question—what is truth?—genuine philosophy can yet answer with Hegel, the true is the whole, but for the former, this whole forms no system, no order of unified construction, no “cosmos,” but only the revocable fixation of events, separated into the most diverse domains and points of view, as it presents itself in our knowledge of human beings and animals, society and nature, as much as cognitive processes and the logical structure of their content.¹⁰⁶ This truth is not identical with the states of affairs which are judged under it. Neither the events which transpire inside of a stranger nor the course of the stars are identical with my thoughts about either, even when the expectations I have harbored on the grounds of these thoughts have been totally confirmed. Subjective idealism is just as little compelling as its objective and absolute variants.

From subjectivism, we can, of course, draw out the insight that all material on which our knowledge is grounded is not independent of our biological composition on the whole; for example, it can teach us to distinguish between the objectified, fixed knowledge of things and the relatively immediate life on which we rely as the source of that knowledge. It corrects for the naive belief in the autonomy of “nature.” But even if it replaces this autonomy with the complete non-autonomy, the mere “phenomenality” of events, it has crossed the boundary between knowledge and metaphysics in the direction of the latter. What we know of natural processes, we may rightly call “subjective” to the extent that the influence of this particular knowledge by virtue of our position and by virtue of biological factors of every kind is actually demonstrable, but we may only do so to that extent.

The process of distinguishing between subjective and objective aspects plays out within empirical research itself, is grounded on the cognition of functional interconnections,¹⁰⁷ and its results in each case only ever have the character of provisional determinations, which must always be retested, and not an ultimate necessity. Precisely this decision to take the most practicable conceptual apparatus as the present shape of the truth,¹⁰⁸ on the one hand, and to expose it to constant new probings, on the other, typifies the empirical perspective in opposition to metaphysics. It does not evaluate the theoretically mediated image of a contradictory world as “ideology,” but as correct knowledge. Despite its readiness to alter its theories by the on the grounds of, and by the measure of, experience; although it sees the cognition of “tendencies” as its primary task—it renounces the attempt to present the relation between “history,” “being,” and “truth,” this configuration of generalities, as the essential. In the empirical theory of knowledge, this relation appears as the distinction between our fixed conceptual order and the progression of events, as the fundamental inconclusiveness [grundsätzlichen Unabgeschlossenheit] of our knowledge or the progression of experience itself, but certainly not as the “immanence” of all events to the individual subject of cognition.

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On The Concept of “Social Research” [Foreword to ZfS V.1, No. 1] (1932).

The name “social research” [Sozialforschung] does not claim to draw new lines of demarcation on the map of science, which, today, appears very questionable in any case. Investigations into the most diverse subject-areas and levels of abstraction are held together in social research by the intention that they should advance the theory of contemporary society as a whole. This unifying principle, according to which the individual investigations must be carried out with unconditional empirical rigor, yet with a view to a central theoretical problem, distinguishes the social research this journal would serve from mere factual description as much as from theoretical construction which is alien to the empirical. Social research strives for cognition [Erkenntnis] of the course of society as a whole and, therefore, presupposes that underneath the chaotic surface of events there is a conceptually tractable structure of effective powers to be known.¹⁰⁹ In social research, history is not the manifestation of mere arbitrariness, but rather a dynamic ruled by laws, the knowledge of which is therefore science.¹¹⁰ Of course, this depends in a particular way on the development of other disciplines. To be capable of reaching its goal, which is comprehension of the processes of social life according to the level of insight possible in each case, social research must concentrate a range of specialized sciences on its problem and endeavor to evaluate them for its purposes.

The journal attempts to help with the fulfillment of this task. The Journal of Social Research draws the factors determinative of the coexistence of human beings in the present—be they economic, psychic, social in nature—into its field of work. Building off from the preliminary findings of the individual disciplines, it distinguishes itself from philosophical contemplation by, among other things, seeking to make thinking fruitful for its ends, which, from a logical perspective, may still contain unilluminated problems; it is convinced, in principle, of the inconclusivity of cognition.¹¹¹ However, the handling of so-called ideological [weltanschaulicher] and philosophical questions is in no way beyond of its remit, because it is not belonging to a determinate subject, but importance for the theory of society, which determines the choice of its objects. Social research does not coincide with sociology as a specialized science, because, like sociology, it aims at the problem of society, but it also finds its objects of research in non-sociological domains. However, what sociologists have, in the interest of their science, accomplished or stimulated in economic, psychological, and historical fields themselves corresponds entirely to the concept meant here. Given the affinity between sociology and the efforts of the journal, sociological problems in the narrower sense will also be broached in the essays. Expressions of agreement or opposition to sociological theories of the present must, however, yield to discussions of the matters at hand, even where there is the greatest respect for the achievements of others.

Among the subproblems of social research, the question of the connection between individual cultural domains, their dependence on each other, the lawfulness of their transformations, is foremost. One of the most important tasks in answering this question is the formation of a social psychology that meets the needs of history. To promote this will be one of the journal’s special tasks. In addition to the more general theoretical treatises on philosophical, psychological, economic, and sociological problems, individual investigations into concrete questions of present-day society and economy will be carried out. To the extent these studies are distinct from mere descriptions, in that they seek to comprehend the phenomena dealt with in their historical context, they will often be hypothetical in character. This particularly applies to the preliminary findings of the investigations of the Institute for Social Research, which are to be communicated in this journal. Some will prove false, but the prospect of future correction must not prevent the attempt to apply the tools of the various sciences to the problem of present-day society and its contradictions and thus to comprehend the processes important for the functioning and transformation of social life in way that corresponds to presently achieved knowledge. Although the journal is primarily focused on a theory of the historical course of the present epoch, it nevertheless requires historical investigations, which may extend to the most diverse epochs, both in order to understand the present and to test and develop theoretical tools; in connection, of course, with the relevant problematic. Likewise, research into the future direction of the historical course of society, so far as they are connected with the problematic of the present, must not be left out. Thus, for example, knowledge of present-day society is impossible without the study of the tendencies within it driving towards planned regulation of the economy, and the problems connected to this which play an important role in economic, sociological, and cultural-historical literature today, require special attention.

Social research is distinguished from all intellectual enterprises which aim at the greatest possible generality and most comprehensive view in that it aims at present-day human actuality. In so doing, it will not be able dispense with summary conceptual formations and theoretical presuppositions of all kinds, but, in opposition to broad currents of present-day metaphysics, its categories do not exclude further illumination or contradiction through empirical research. As little as comprehensive conceptual summaries can be dispensed with in scientific work, they must never conclusively preempt or take the place of the problems to be solved. Commitment to scientific criteria also separates social research methodologically from politics. It must assert the independence of its claim to knowledge against all ideological and political considerations. This does not mean believing any scientific step is free from historical conditioning, nor that knowledge is considered to be sufficient and consequenceless in itself. But however much history may play a role in all theory, the findings of research will have to stand the test of theoretical criteria if they are to prove themselves in actuality.

The Institute for Social Research is indebted to the publisher C.L. Hirschfeld. By making possible the appearance of the journal despite the difficult conditions of today, he has not only promoted its new goals but also ensured that some tasks of the Gründberg Archive can continue to be fulfilled. The journal can be considered a continuation of its work in more ways than one.

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André Masson. Les Magiciens. 1936.

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On the Problem of Prediction in the Social Sciences (1933).

[English Abstract:] Every science utilizes judgments which embody prediction of the future: this is so, not only in the construction of “abstract types” and laws (prévision) but also of concrete predictions (prédiction) which are implicated in such laws. Hypothetical and categorical judgments mutually influence each other in the progress of science. [Horkheimer] argues in opposition to the traditional conception, that scientific prediction is less difficult and more reliable in such fields where human freedom plays a role, than in nature external to man. Sociological prediction will thus become more perfect the more readily social events lose their blind and mechanistic character, and the more they become the works of a rational condition of free man.

[Extended reproduction of a contribution for discussion at the XI. International Sociological Congress in Geneva, October 1933.]

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It was a fortuitous turn of events that the question of sociological foresight (prévision) furnished the basis for this discussion, if only because it reveals in unambiguous terms that sociology is also a participant in the general crisis of culture. The possibility of such foresight [Voraussicht] is the touchstone of every science of reality. The viewpoint according to which, in the historical situation of the present, the diversion of such great intellectual energy to sociology can only promote the enterprise of introducing intellectual order to the past but cannot be of any help for shaping the future—this would entail a rather negative judgment about any such scientific enterprise.

As far as I am aware, the theses that have been presented here today do not dispute the fundamental possibility of presaging [Vorhersagen]; indeed, a significant number of participants in this congress have identified concrete phenomena about which, in their opinion, predictions [Voraussagen] can be made with a fairly high degree of probability for success. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the prevailing conception is characterized more by a skeptical reserve than the self-confidence which animated modern science in its beginning; even most of the positive answers place greater weight on the limitations of scope and degree of certainty of the prévision than on its reliability.

In light of the experiences of sociology, as well as political economy [Nationalökonomie], in recent decades, and particularly in the last few years, this reserve is easy to understand. In many cases—many cases in which the systematic scaffolding of categories in modern social-scientific systems, constructed with great skill by contact with the development of social reality, have been brought to bear upon that same social reality—sociologists and political economists proved at best a step ahead of the general consciousness of the same social events. In fact, in a number of these cases, the reverse happened: groups of people who based their views on a totally different foundation from the prevailing approaches of sociology and political economy, and who moreover sharply opposed these approaches, made assessments that turned out to be justified where the experts in both fields erred. It is hardly surprising, then, that so many of the same experts today tend to cautiously circumscribe the possibility of making such statements about the future, rather than profess their adherence to determinate theories of society.

Against this, I would here like to insist on the conception that even today the goal of science is the cognition of processes in which the dimension of the future is necessarily involved. Given the above-mentioned mood, it may not be entirely useless to foreground the positive against the backdrop of such skeptical reservations: namely, to show that prévision is no exception to the majority of logical and scientific-theoretical categories; that its character, the significance of its application, its possibilities, the degree of probability it might reach depend not merely on the cleverness and industriousness of sociologists, but just as much on the structure of social relations in their epoch. An unhistorical treatment of the problem of presaging [Vorhersage] presupposes a static relation between science and its object—in this case, between sociological theory and social processes. In contemporary philosophy, this point of view has long since been overcome: philosophy has even dispensed with the ahistorical opposition between subject and object, and recognized that these two poles of the activity of cognition, in their dynamic relations, are themselves involved in the historical process. The possible determination of the future at any given time—which, I repeat, is surely one of the aims of any scientific theory of society—depends, therefore, on the development of social relations as a whole.

To explain this in a few words, I will start with the distinction made by the secretary of this congress, Professor Duprat, in his ‘Introduction à l'étude de la prévision sociologique’¹¹²: the distinction between “prévision” and “prédiction,” between foresight [Voraussicht] and prediction [Voraussage]. Natural science knows both of these types of judgment: both prévision, which refers to “abstract types,” and prédiction, which refers to “concrete facts or events.” Any theory which would claim modern science could only generate prévisions but not prédictions in this sense—and the above-mentioned article could easily be so understood—would indeed be in error. For it is precisely at prédictions that natural science, and all science in general, ultimately aims. The “abstract types” in the sense of prévision are laws, and, as such, always have the form of a conditional. They state that whenever determinate conditions are given in reality, determinate events must occur. Thus, for example, it is a natural-scientific prévision that gold always dissolves when it is immersed in aqua regia, but not when it is immersed in dilute sulphuric acid; other prévisions might refer, to provide another example, to the fact that certain kinds of iron change their form when a force of a determinate magnitude has been exerted upon them. These apodictic and certain statements are certainly mere prévisions: for they say nothing about when or whether the required conditions will ever be given. On this point, I agree with Mr. Duprat.

But one cannot therefore conclude from this that, on such grounds, concrete predictions about the future, such as those essayed by Marx, are impossible or of marginal scientific standing. Laws are not the aim of scientific activity, but only its aids; in the end, it always comes down to passing from abstract formulations of laws to concrete existential judgments,¹¹³ and, in the field of the natural sciences on the whole, these judgments involve not only the past or present, but encompass the future as well. Thus, the hypothetical propositions in the examples provided only acquire their real significance when they are made about an existing substance in a determinate case: “This, here, is gold.” This statement—provided the hypothetical law in question is generally known—necessarily includes the assertion that this piece of metal does not dissolve in diluted sulfuric acid, but does in aqua regia. The experimenter in the lecture hall makes the prédiction: “I will now throw the golden clump into this acid, and it will not dissolve; I will then throw it into this other acid, and it will dissolve.” The general proposition about the change in the form of iron when subject to determinate forces also constitutes the presupposition for a prédiction. It manifests, for example, in the calmness with which a train conductor lets the machinery of his express engine roar onto a new bridge, knowing “it will not break, for it is made of a certain sort of iron, one which could bear a much greater load still.” Such existential judgments are, as we have said, crucial in natural science, indeed in all science. In each case, they include statements about every dimension of time. In making the simplest observation about things in nature, a prédiction has simultaneously been made: “This is chalk” predicts it will make marks on this blackboard. “This is a cherry” predicts you can eat it. “The thermometer is dropping below zero” predicts water will freeze. The past, present, and future of the object under assessment are implicated in each proposition; this is also due to the fact that the moments of perception need not coincide with with the temporal structure with the perceived event.¹¹⁴ Of course, in the transition from abstract formulations of laws to concrete propositions about actual things, we lose absolute certainty. It may turn out that the yellow piece of metal wasn’t gold at all, that the bridge breaks because of imperfections in the iron, that the cherry was belladonna, or even that water preserves its liquid state below zero as a result of certain atmospheric conditions. However correct this may be, I only wanted to point out here that the meaning of abstract propositions can only be fulfilled concretely, the meaning of every prévision can only be fulfilled in prédictions. If the significance of abstractions is not subject to control, or, under certain conditions, changed through the course of their continuous, practical application, then they must necessarily become alienated from reality and, ultimately, not only purposeless but even untrue.

The application of the foregoing to sociology is obvious. The statement that crises necessarily arise under a free-market economy, and just as necessarily under economic monopolies which sharpen these crises, is a prévision. The view according to which these conditions do in fact obtain at present, that we do in fact live in such an economic system, already contains the prédiction that even if these crises are temporarily interrupted, they will not be remedied in the long term. This is a historical prognosis [Prognose] concerning the self-abolition [Selbstaufhebung] of the liberal economy and the intensification of its social contradictions.¹¹⁵ The theory itself is not our the topic of discussion; by referring to it, I sought merely to show how in sociology, the two types of judgment, prévision and prédiction, necessarily coincide. The meaning and truth-content of a hypothetical prévision, i.e. the theory, in this case is the doctrine of the connection between the economic system and crisis, depends on its historical fulfillment, just as, conversely, the theory guides our perceptions, concrete existential judgments, and our practical activity in general.

However, in the application of my methodological line of thought to sociology, I expect to encounter a series of objections of principle. I will single out and answer only one of them: doesn’t the possibility of prédictions in my natural-scientific examples stem simply from the fact that whoever makes the statement is in a situation to create the conditions which are necessary for the law to take effect? Only insofar as the chemist is determined to throw the gold into aqua regia can he predict it will actually dissolve; only insofar as I actually want to write with chalk is my prediction about white lines on the blackboard valid. In other words, prédiction about nature refers to arbitrary experiment, and, since there are no experiments in sociology, the sociologist must refrain from making such statements. By now, I believe, you will have already noticed that the objection concerns only special cases and not the principle of the matter itself. The locomotive driver with his engine running at full speed is not conducting an experiment, for he does not have such control over the forces of nature that he could bring the train to a screeching half before the bridge, and yet he can declare: “It will not break.” —As water in nature will freeze below a certain degree entirely without our intervention. [Responding to the objection:] No, there are vast expanses of our cognition in which we do not—and cannot—simply say “in the event that these conditions are given, that will happen,” but say instead: “these conditions are given now, and, therefore, the expected event will occur whether our will does or does not play a role.” In purely logical terms, the objection is therefore irrelevant.

These considerations are, nevertheless, relevant for sociology. It is indeed incorrect to say that prédiction is only possible if the occurrence of the necessary conditions in question depends on the one who presages,¹¹⁶ but the prediction [Voraussage] will nevertheless be all the more probable the more the relations which condition the outcome depend on the will of human beings—that is, the more the predicted effect is not the product of blind nature but the effect of rational decisions. Because sociology has to do with social processes, one might think that its predictions must therefore be more accurate than those of any other science, since society itself consists of acting human beings. On the basis of similar considerations, Giambattista Vico, in opposition to Descartes and his school, declared history to be a true science. If we have since learned that it is even more difficult to make predictions about contemporary society than about non-human nature, this does not prove, in principle, that Vico was wrong. Rather, these predictions are so imperfect because social processes are in no way the products of human freedom, but only the natural byproducts of the blind work of antagonistic forces. The way in which our society maintains and renews its life is more comparable to the course of natural mechanism than to purposeful action. The sociologist therefore confronts the reproduction of society as an essentially alien event. He is impacted by it, and is also in some way involved, but his task is to accept it as an observer, record it, describe it, and, if possible, explain it. Social processes are of course generated by the mediation of persons, but they are nevertheless lived as disconnected, fateful events. Good and bad economic cycles, war, peace, revolutions, periods of stability appear to human beings as natural events—just as independent of them as good and bad weather, earthquakes, and epidemics. One ought to try to explain them, but making predictions about them is correctly considered too bold.

This state of affairs is neither eternal nor appropriate to the stage of development of human forces today. In the present, we are witnessing the most varied attempts to subject social processes to human planning. Perhaps one day this epoch will be seen as the transition from a merely natural, and therefore poor, functioning of the social apparatus into the conscious coordination of social forces. In any case, you will surely agree with me that the lack of dependence of social events upon a unified will is not inevitable, but is based on specific structural properties of the current social condition. Indeed, with respect to our problem, we can formulate the following law: so far as the structure of society increasingly transforms in the direction of more uniform organization and planning, social predictions [Voraussagen] will acquire a higher degree of certainty. The more social life loses the character of the blindness of natural occurrence and society undertakes preparations to reconfigure itself as a rational subject, the more social processes will lend themselves to being predicted with determinacy. The contemporary insecurity in sociological judgments with respect to the future is only a mirror image of contemporary social insecurity in general.

Therefore, the possibility of prédiction does not depend exclusively on the refinement of methods and the skill of sociologists, but just as much on the development of their object: the structural transformations of society itself. It is far from being the case that prédiction is necessarily easier for the realm of non-human nature relative to society; in fact, prédiction becomes easier to the very degree its object is less subordinated to mere nature and the more it is subordinated to human freedom. True human freedom cannot be equated with either unconditionality or mere arbitrariness, but is identical with the control of nature inside and outside of us through rational decision-making. To bring us to the point where this state of affairs becomes characteristic of our society is not just the task of the sociologist, but of the forward-driving forces of humanity as a whole. Thus, the sociologist’s endeavor to arrive at exact prédiction transforms into the political striving to realize a rational society.

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André Masson. Fiançailles d'Insectes. 1934.

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Prefatory Remark: Towards a Theory of Planned Economy, by Kurt Mandelbaum and Gerhard Meyer (1934).

Due to the inability to rationally regulate the production and distribution of the necessary means of life at its present-day stage of development, humanity is compelled to exist at an immeasurably lower level of material and spiritual culture than would be possible on the basis of its treasure trove of raw materials and high technical abilities. Not only the misery of the vast majority of humanity, but also the danger of new wars, each of which surpasses the previous in horror, arises from the fact that the economic apparatus created by human beings in the previous epoch has now outgrown them. That human beings today cannot subject economic relations—i.e., their mutual relationships in the production and reproduction of social life—to meaningful regulation, corresponding to the degree of insight attained in other domains, cannot be explained solely on the basis of theoretical impotence. Rather, the presence of political economy [Nationalökonomie] as a self-enclosed, specialized discipline, which is increasingly less determined by problems posed to society as a whole, expresses a deeper-lying fact of the matter—namely, that present-day power relations are opposed to regulation for the sake of the majority of human beings.¹¹⁷ It is a question of praxis, the solution to which will form the content of history lying immediately before us. The happiness of future generations depends on its resolution.

But while theory alone cannot solve the problem for itself, the intellectual efforts which are guiding the struggle for, and the induction and shaping of, a rational economy, nevertheless form a necessary moment of forward-driving praxis. This applies not only in view of the fact that the developmental tendencies of the present-day form of society are to be researched, but also, in conjunction with this, that and how planned economy is possible is to be proved as well. In this connection, it is important to build on the great experience that humanity is currently gaining with experiments in economic planning; above all, the manner in which the problem is posed and the terminology must continue to refer to them. The following essay presents theoretical preparatory work for such a concrete analysis of extant or demanded economic planning. It would outline the fundamental possible forms of and tasks for adequate economic planning. Necessarily linked to this task, given the state of specialist discussions, is a critique of liberalistic objections. If such a critique is given space here, this does not occur in the belief that these objections formed a particularly important factor in the relevant decisive social disputes. Liberalistic economic theory, whose arguments also played a large role in intra-socialistic controversies, is at present no longer decisive for the politics of any large country. Some of its representatives even claim it has not actually been applied in the past either. But certainly neither is it to be expected that this will occur in the future.

“Laissez faire, laissez passer” was, in fact, in earlier centuries a progressive motto of industry against the tutelage of French absolutism and the land-owning class in England. The point of view, valid only for that time, that the unfettering of private initiative, the disregard for any social regulations which would best serve the welfare of the whole, the opinion that the interests of individual economic subjects must coincide with the happiness of the generality, is, at the moment, exclusively a metaphysical dogma, when European society, at the very least, is on the precipice of decline as a consequence of clashing economic interests. To the extent it is retained as a thema probandum, it continues to guide the formation of pseudo-scientific methods and problems. The representatives of deceive branches of industry and many practical politicians who formerly belonged to liberalism, have, however, overlooked the inner affinity of this harmonious metaphysics, which itself overlooks social distinction, with the totalitarian conception of the state—a likeness, which, as is to be demonstrated in another essay of this issue, makes it easy to find the ideological transition from liberalism to capitalistic statism. The liberalistic dogma—that free competition on the basis of the economic and psychic inequality of human beings must lead to the best possible economic state—is so false that this principle often had to be curtailed in the past so that the horror which it has always meant for wide strata on all continents from the beginning would not become disastrous for the system as a whole. The basic demand of liberalism—the free initiative of the entrepreneur, the private disposal of society’s economic means—can only be maintained today by a monstrous expansion of the state’s sphere of power, so that the praxis of the totalitarian conception of the state currently represents the actual consequence of liberalistic economics, a consequence which many of its adherents have already drawn. In the following essay, the refutation of the evidentiary bases cited by today’s liberalistic theorists against conscious control of economic processes occurs in view of the fact that not only the impotent liberalistic current, but rather the factual representatives of the present-day form of society in its current phase still use these arguments against necessary reorganization. At present, human beings in no way have to choose between a liberalistic economy and a totalitarian state order, since the one necessarily transitions into the other, precisely because the latter best fulfills the liberalistic demand of the former, furthering the existence of private disposal of the most important forces of social aid. Rather, human beings have to choose between the individualistic moment, which in its present shape obviously means satisfaction for vanishingly few individuals, and another goal of liberalistic theory: namely, the life of the generality, which, in fact, could today coincide with the happiness of all individuals, but this urgently demands a transformation of the economic system. Some non-economists are deceived through the incorrect coupling-together of the two principles under the single title of ‘liberalism’ that not only the principle of entrepreneurial initiative but also this fundamental principle of general happiness, freedom, and justice that has passed over from liberalistic theory into another camp, albeit the opposite one.¹¹⁸ The real liberals, according to their preference for one principle or the other, will increasingly have to commit themselves further to one of the two groups struggling with the other to maintain or transform the existing form of society. The following economic-theoretical contributions to the theory of planned economy also play a role in this process of clarification.

Letter—Re: The Dialectical Principle in Liberalism (1934).

[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Paul Oppenheim, 10/19/1934.]¹¹⁹

What you wrote is also part of the particularly pleasant news. It shows me that you again attentively worked through this year's second issue. It gave me some personal pleasure that even the word “dialectical” flowed from your pen. I am in complete agreement with you when you say that liberalism is justified to the extent that one of its specific components expresses the tendency to be opposed to a limitation on freedom that is not objectively substantiated. Yet it is precisely the immeasurable suppression of the opportunity for the majority of people to develop freely that has again and again provided the incentive to restrict the liberal economy. It seemed to people much too high a price to pay for the freedom to engage in business, which was literally earned in battle for one part of society in the eighteenth century, with freedom per se. Naturally, in the course of history the “dialectical” principle was also operative in the concept of liberalism, so that its components came into conflict with one another. While both instances of freedom cited above were at least pointed in somewhat parallel directions in certain historical periods of the middle class, today they are hopelessly divergent. The current realization of the totalitarian state is a desperate attempt, doomed to failure, to hold together by force the conflicting moments that can be reconciled in a more developed form of society. It appears to me more and more doubtful that there is actually any real prospect at all of creating a more rational situation. A collectivism that always proclaims only the futility of the individual versus the sanctity of the community signifies, in any case, a romantic reversion to a less developed stage than liberalism, insofar as the true sense of community is to be found in the development and in the happiness of the individual. But maybe this old individualist is already coming into conflict with the defender of the collective psyche, and this topic is already on the agenda for our next meeting.

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Letter to Albert Einstein on the category of causality (1935).

[Excerpt from: Max Horkheimer to Albert Einstein, 2/20/1935.]¹²⁰

Esteemed Herr Einstein!

My thanks for the conversation, [...] are certainly belated. I wished, however, to send them along with the recently published issue of our Zeitschrift, which you will receive today in print. I believe it will give you some insight into our Institute’s area of interest. In addition, I have enclosed a prospectus of our work in English. Perhaps these will give you the impression that our group endeavors to continue and advance the good traditions of the so-called Geisteswissenschaften, so far as they have been formed in Germany and France, in an independent mode and, therefore, one not unworthy of your good will. The efforts of the Zeitschrift to discuss fundamental questions will no doubt show you why we would like to make a contribution to remedying the confusion over the problem of causality which has taken hold in sociological and political-economic circles. Since physicists, as in the case of Eddington, are not wholly innocent of the prevailing unclarity either, the right word from you could have a singular impact. The distinction between the meaning of causality as a determination of regularities, which seems to be precluded in light of the present state of physics, and causality as a theoretical category could contribute significantly to advancing questions of principles of sociology. It is likely that you have no notion of the extent to which vagueness prevails in these matters at present. I recall asking you to write the remarks you made concerning causality down on a sheet of paper and to send them to me. Upon saying farewell, you said you couldn’t make any promises. But what if you kept one you didn’t make regardless? In any event, I can make you an unqualified promise of my own: namely, my sincerest gratitude and that of my colleagues as well.

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André Masson. Le Conciliabule. 1933.

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T.W. Adorno: Report on Franz Borkenau, Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild. (1932)

[Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild. Studien zur Geschichte der Philosophie der Manufakturperiode. Franz Borkenau. Paris: Librarie Félix Alcan, 1934. Pp. xx-559.]

Borkenau’s work presents an attempt to derive fundamental concepts of bourgeois thinking, so far as the category of nature appears determined through them, in their genetic dependency on the social forms of early capitalism, and, at the same time, comprehend them functionally as an expression of class interests, more precisely according to the divergent interests within and between the emerging bourgeois, feudality, monarchist absolutism, and the mediate social strata. The objective scope of the work is defined somewhat by the concepts of manufacture, natural law, natural right, rationalistic ethics, and English empiricism—all of these in their essential relatedness to the 17th century. Where the material of the work is concerned, it largely coincides with that of Groethuysen;¹²¹ yet, its particular significance and topicality lies precisely in opposition to the approach Groethuysen employs. The method of the book corresponds greatly with that of Lukács in “History and Class Consciousness” (which, incidentally, should be made explicit in the text itself). This is to say that spiritual formations are conceptualized as thoroughly dependent upon a social actuality which is represented as totality (see, in particular, the introduction to the section “Die neue Moral und die neue Theologie”).

The category of totality has crucial consequences for the book: positively, that the social method productively reaches beyond isolated treatment of individual phenomena and (with Hobbes, as well as Jesuit Molinism) uncovers connections which have escaped both mainstream political history and Geistesgeschichte; negatively, that the category of totality is expressed in the derivation of all phenomena of the theory in question from a preconceived outline of social actuality, without as a matter of principle measuring the ideological content of the theory against and according to its truth-content. Instead, the sole criterion which is applied is an in-itself problematic concept of the “progressiveness” of theories, which is essentially oriented on the basis of what extent 17th-century theories were successful in encompassing the sensible manifold under rational, universal lawfulness, with the result that the empiricist elements of the 17th century—in many cases traceable to the structures of feudal society—are not done justice to. “Classical rationalism” one-sidedly becomes the sole bearer of philosophical development and the book’s sympathies lie with Descartes and Pascal; the dualism between empiricism and rationalism in 17th-century philosophical consciousness is left undeveloped except in “sociological” terms, i.e., according to which specific social groups specific theories belong to. Yet, an objective interpretation of the foundational rupture in that period in the history of philosophy is precisely what is urgently required. Such tendencies in historical interpretation speak to a certain “idealism” of the author, which is expressed more strongly still in the structure of his analyses. Under the form of a socially predetermined, a priori necessity for the emergence of each theory, the variety of standpoints are systematically deduced from class relations with a bindingness that makes the diversity of philosophical systems appear as a diversity created by design.

Despite its materialist content, the form of Borkenau’s thinking remains idealistic in the Hegelian sense: that is, class relations are explicated in theories according to their concept, and, if there were no philosophical theory to speak of, would have to be deducible from knowledge of the structure of society. Thus, a kind of identity-principle prevails between theory and society, which, though the foundational relations are the converse of Hegel’s, retain the Hegelian standpoint of systematic stringency regardless. It goes without saying that this approach is not without hardening towards “worthless existence” [faule Existenz].¹²² So, for example, Jansenism and Cartesianism are in equal measure reduced—in my opinion for the sake of the [book’s] theory—back to a single class, the empirical existence of which is open to doubt and for which Borkenau has even coined the name: “the Gentry.” From the existence of an official-aristocratic strata between the manufacturing bourgeoisie and absolutism, rationalism is to be deduced; then, it turns out that the proponents of the theory in question in large part belong to the high nobility; finally, to this the reply is offered, quite rightly, that what matters is not the origin of its proponents but its function as a theory. If, however, the social strata which promote the theory remain as abstract and undetermined as “the Gentry,” then their function cannot really be intelligible either.

The functional standpoint is not maintained with consistency, but in a number of passages replaced by sleight of hand with a biographical one, and one which is not completely convincing. So, for example, in the case of Althusius—for the sake of a preconceived contrast with Hugo Grotius, and to challenge Gierke’s standpoint, Althusius is supposed to be exposed as anti-democratic, something that the description of his political dependency on the House of Orange is, in some obscure way, supposed to facilitate. Similar constructions may be found in the chapter on Gassendi. To satisfy the sociological schema that assigns Libertinism and Jesuitism to court nobility, Borkenau reads Gassendi not so much as an advanced critic of Descartes, but as a latecomer from the Middle Ages in whose thinking a private piety and a-theoretical, and therefore pre-rationalistic, skepticism are intertwined. It is precisely here that the evaluation of historical sources seems particularly unconvincing.

If despite such deep-reaching reservations, I believe the publication of the work is to be recommended, the following [reasons] are key: first, the way it poses problems of social context and connection in a sphere until now exclusively reserved for the autonomous history of philosophy and science, the greater part of which this work is the first to explore in a Marxist field of inquiry; second, the tremendous erudition in scholarship and knowledge of the historical materials, which might enable positive advances in knowledge even where our interpretations must diverge substantially from Borkenau’s. So, for instance, the discovery of Gibieuf's philosophical achievement, as well as the presentation of Lipsius, seem to have immense import. That the above-characterized deficiencies of the idealistic mode of deduction are only the reverse side of an advantage—namely, an actually constructive power of thinking—hardly needs to be mentioned. However, the greatest achievement of this power of thinking lies elsewhere than Borkenau himself might think. It seems to me a particular advantage of this work lies in that it conducts the immanent analysis of theories in each case from the point of view of their antinomics and employs social analysis wherever contradictions arise which are insoluble for thinking alone (in this, too, following the Lukácsian method).

This method contains the rudiments of an approach which could lead to binding results independent of idealistic totality. Moreover, Borkenau is fully conscious of the ramifications of this method for the Marxist point of view and, in an exceptional excursus,¹²³ argues in polemic against any harmonistic “reflection theory” in the framework of a Marxism for which ideologies are not always “assigned” to underlying social relations but just as frequently endeavor to reconcile the contradictions of social reality in illusory semblance [Schein], for which the structure of these ideologies is necessarily fragile, and, finally, for which the knowledge of ideologies can only be dynamic, i.e., according to what they mean for the class in question functionally, but never in the sense of a sheer structural correspondence.

It is here that Borkenau arrives autonomously at results very close to those of our own working methods. In the end, I would recommend the publication of the work: however, I would also recommend it were published in a form in which the above-mentioned pragmatic unreliabilities (regarding the Gentry, Gassendi, Althusius, etc.) would not be the responsibility of the Institut, but solely that of the author, i.e., if the work were published “with the support of the Institut für Sozialforschung,” but not as one of its official publications. Should this not be possible, however, I believe the publication can nevertheless be considered justified. This is because the problems identified here do not stem from a lack of knowledge of the objective material, but from the over-interpretation of this material alone, and therefore open up a whole discussion of their own. The one question which remains is whether we should get involved with the publication of a work whose basic methodological structure diverges so far from our own convictions.

But I believe that we can nevertheless regard the differences which unquestionably exist as compensated by the basic attitude [Grundhaltung] of Marxist investigation and the abundance of its results. I would add to this the consideration that in an area so completely unilluminated by Marxism as the intellectual history of the 16th century, it might be difficult to define the terrain otherwise than through Borkenau’s idealistic liberality. The opening question of the founding of central bourgeois ideologies is unquestionably highly topical.

Before publication, I recommend: cuts, particularly in the passages that arrange the details of political history in a convoluted relationship to theory (the individual moments about Hobbes’ relation to absolutism and democracy; above all the digressions about Gallicanism in France). I imagine these cuts being very substantial, and would be happy to talk them through in detail with Herr Borkenau. Further, I would strongly recommend a revision in linguistic form [Sprachform]. In its present shape, the book bears the characteristic stylistic markings of a ‘Konzept’ for long stretches. And it seems to me unconditionally necessary that the conflicts which emerge with Borkenau’s philosophical claim are presented with the same rigor which he objectively brings to bear on historians of philosophy.

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André Masson. Tolède aux chrysalides (Toledo con crisálidas). 1935.

1. Cf. Franz Oppenheimer:

[The] goal [of] scientific synthesis [is] to lay bare the cause or causes of the present crisis, and to detect, if possible, the way out of it. This is the task given to social science and social philosophy by the founder of scientific sociology, Auguste Comte: "Savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour prévenir.” Ours is the task of bending into the service of Mankind and Humanity the last and by far most dangerous elementary force, that force that is set free in the process of social development. What are all the so-called “Acts of God,” all inundations, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and so on, compared with the devastations brought about by war, revolution and economic exploitation? Our culture is whirling in the maelstrom of irrational forces: they must be brought under control.

In: “Foreword to a Venture in Scientific Synthesis.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 1, no. 1 (1941): ii–vi. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3484195.

For Comte’s relationship with Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonians, see: Mary Pickering. “Auguste Comte and the Saint-Simonians.” French Historical Studies 18, no. 1 (1993): 211–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/286964.

2. Horkheimer, “On the Problem of Truth” [1935]:

The open-ended materialistic dialectic does not regard the “rational” as completed at any point in history and does not expect to bring about the resolution of contradictions and tensions, the end of the historic dynamic, by the full development of mere ideas and their simple consequences. It lacks the aspect of the idealistic dialectic which Hegel described as “speculative” and at the same time as “mystical,” namely, the idea of knowing the ostensibly unconditioned and thereby being oneself unconditioned. It does not hypostatize any such universal system of categories. To attain the “positively rational,” it does not suffice to resolve and transcend contradictions in thought. It requires the historical struggle whose guiding ideas and theoretical prerequisites are indeed given in the consciousness of the combatants. But the outcome cannot be predicted on a purely theoretical basis. It will be determined not by any firmly outlined unity such as the “course of history,” the principles of which could be established indivisibly for all time, but by human beings interacting with one another and with nature, who enter into new relationships and structures and thereby change themselves. The resolution of contradictions in subjective thought and the overcoming of objective antagonisms can be closely intertwined, but they are in no way identical. In a particular historical period, a free society in the sense of the free development of the individual and in the sense of free enterprise on the basis of inequality will be conceptually and actually full of contradictions. The resolution in terms of ideas occurs through the concept of a differentiated higher form of freedom. It has a decisive voice in the real overcoming, but in no way coincides with it and predicts the future only abstractly and inexactly. Since the logic of the open-ended dialectic allows for the possibility that change will affect the entire present content of the categories, without therefore considering the theory formed from it as any less true, it corresponds exactly to the Hegelian conception of the difference between dialectic and understanding without overlaying it with a new dogmatism. “The Understanding stops short at concepts in their fixed determinateness and difference from one another; dialectic exhibits them in their transition and dissolution.” To be sure, the first is immanent in the second; without the definition and organization of concepts, without understanding, there is no thought and also no dialectic. But the understanding becomes metaphysical as soon as it absolutizes its function of preserving and expanding exist- ing knowledge, of confirming, organizing, and drawing conclusions from it, or the results of that function as the existence and progress of truth. The revolutionizing, disintegration, and restructuring of knowledge, its changing relation to reality, its changes of function resulting from its intertwinement with history, fall outside the thought processes which traditional logic, whose theme is understanding, comprehends. Taken by itself, it leads to the erroneous concept of a detached thought with fixed, eternal, and autonomous results. Nietzsche said that a great truth “wants to be criticized, not worshiped.” This is valid for truth in general. He might have added that criticism includes not only the negative and skeptical moment but also the inner independence that does not let the truth fall but remains firm in its application even ìf it may sometime pass away. In the individual, the process of cognition includes not only intelligence but also character; for a group, not merely adaptation to changing reality but the strength to declare and put into practice its own views and ideas.

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), 209-211. Emphasis added.

3. Cf. Horkheimer, “A New Concept of Ideology?” [1930], In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 133-134.

4. See below, the “Editorische Vorbemerkung” to “Subjectivism and Positivism as Heirs of Hegelian Metaphysics: Preliminary Remarks towards an Empiricist Theory of Knowledge (Fragment) (1931?).”

5. In these efforts, Horkheimer’s critical reconceptualization of totality is much closer to Sartre’s late conception of ‘totalization without a totaliser’ in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) than Horkheimer ever did admit or ever could have admitted.

6. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 8-10.

7. From Gunzelin Schmid Noerr’s “Editorial Afterword” to MHGS, Bd. 2 [link]

8. “3. Das Verhältnis von Interesse- und Erkenntnisgegenstand und die Soziologie.” in: Max-Horkheimer-Archiv [MHA], Na [800].

And: “[Zersplitterung und Einheitlichkeit der gegenwärtigen Soziologie] (um 1928?),” in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 11: Nachgelassene Schriften 1914-1931. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), 166-170.

Tentatively dated “1928” by the MHGS editors given its inclusion in the ‘Philosophischen Tagebuch’ of the years 1925-1928 and its thematic unity with other texts on sociology Horkheimer produced at the time, such as “Über Sinn und Grenzen einer soziologischen Behandlung der Philosophie” (1930?) in: Ibid., 209-220

9. “Zur Geschichte der Soziologie von Machiavelli bis Saint-Simon (Fragment) (1929).” In: MHGS, Bd. 11 (1987), 189-195. Author’s translation.

10. “Pareto und die “Frankfurter” Soziologische Schule” (1929). In: MHGS, Bd. 11 (1987), 196-201. Author’s translation.

11. “[Über Sinn und Grenzen einer soziologischen Behandlung der Philosophie] [1930?],” In: MHGS, Bd. 11 (1987), 209-220. Author’s translation.

12. 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.

13. “[Subjektivismus und Positivismus als Erben der Hegelschen Metaphysik. Vorbemerkungen zu einer empirischen Erkenntnislehre (Fragment)] [1931?],” In: MHGS, Bd. 11 (1987), 221-229.

14. Max Horkheimer, “Vorwort.” In: ZfS, Vol. 1, No. 1/2 (1932), i-iv. Translated in collaboration with Carson Welch (Summer 2024)

15. Max Horkheimer, “Zum Problem der Voraussage in den Sozialwissenschaften.” In: ZfS, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1933), 407-412. Author’s translation.

16. Max Horkheimer, “Vorbemerkung des Herausgebers. [Zur Theorie der Planwirtschaft, von Kurt Mandelbaum and Gerhard Meyer.]” In: ZfS, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1934), 228-230. Translated in collaboration with Carson Welch (Summer 2024)

17. “Gutachten zur Arbeit Franz Borkenau. Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild [1932] (Typoskript-Durchschlag im Theodor W. Adorno Archiv)” In: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel. 1927-1969. Band I: 1927-1937. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 552-557. Author’s translation.

18. “the constantly recurring morphological development of human living relations”: [die stets wiederkehrenden morphologischen Entwicklung der menschlichen Lebensverhältnisse]

19. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] In the specific German tradition since the eighteenth century, understood as an opposition between “internal” and “external,” “higher” and “lower” values; with O. Spengler’s Decline (1918), ‘civilization’ came to function as the designation a stage of decline for ‘culture’ nearing its end.

20. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] Allusion to Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Berlin, 1912).

21. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] An opposition emphasized above all by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.

22. “by virtue of its lack of trust in the rational transformability of its object”: [durch den Mangel an Zutrauen zu rationalen Veränderlichkeit ihres Gegenstandes]

23. End of manuscript.

24. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Niccolo Machiavelli, Vom Staate, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. I. (München 1925), S. 120.

25. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Machiavelli, Vom Fürsten, in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. II. (München 1925), S. 61.

26. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 101.

27. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Vgl. [Ernst] Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, (Leipzig, Berlin 1927), S. 126f.

28. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Rousseau, ‘De l’economie politique’ (Artikel der Encyclopédie), in: Œuvres complètes, Bd. 1 (Paris, 1836), S. 596. (German translation by MH)

29. Manuscript breaks off.

30. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life [1874], translated by Peter Preuss (Hackett, 1986), 44-45.

31. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] [George] H. Bousquet, Grundriß der Soziologie nach Vilfredo Pareto, Karls-ruhe 1926, S. 1.

32. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] System der Soziologie, 4 Bde., Jena 1922-35.

33. Cf. Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936]: “Pareto blurs the distinction between the key economic groups and their cultural functionaries and replaces it with secondary distinctions such as those between political and nonpolitical functionaries, and in so doing ruins his concept of conflicts among elite groups (which is unhistorically developed in any case) as a potential instrument for understanding the whole age; were it not for this failing, this concept would have otherwise quite usefully lent itself to characterizing these cultural agents of the bourgeoisie and their doings.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 84.

And: Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research” [1931]: “In the face of this situation of social philosophy, however, ladies and gentlemen, we must be permitted to characterize its shortcomings. Contemporary social philosophy, as we have seen, is in the main polemically disposed toward positivism. If the latter sees only the particular, in the realm of society it sees only the individual and the relations between individuals; for positivism, everything is exhausted in mere facts [Tatsächlichkeiten]. These facts, demonstrable with the means of analytic science, are not questioned by philosophy. But philosophy sets them more or less constructively, more or less “philosophically” over against ideas, essences, totalities, independent spheres of objective Spirit, unities of meaning, “national characters,” etc., which it considers equally foundational—indeed, “more authentic”—elements of being. It takes the discovery of certain unprovable metaphysical preconditions in positivism as grounds for outdoing positivism in this regard. The Pareto school, for instance, must deny the existence of class, nation, and humanity due to its positivistic concept of reality. In contrast, the various viewpoints which maintain the existence of such entities appear simply as "another" world view, “another” metaphysics, or “another” consciousness, without any possibility of a valid resolution of the matter. One might say that several concepts of reality are involved. It would be possible to investigate the genesis of these different concepts, or to which kind of innate sensibility or social group they correspond; but one cannot be preferred to another on substantive grounds.” In: Ibid., 7.

34. “naive belief in science and history” [der Wissenschafts- und Geschichtsgläubigkeit]

35. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Salomon, ‘Einleitung,’ in: Bousquet, l.c., S. 7f.

36. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 11.

37. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ziegler, ‘Ideologienlehre,’ in: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Bd. 57, Tübingen 1927, S. 698.; vgl. also [Gottfried Salomon’s] essay. ‘Historischer Materialismus und Ideologienlehre’ [in: Jahrbuch für Soziologie Bd. 2, Karls-ruhe 1926, S. 386ff.]

38. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 657-700.

39. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 661.

40. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 681.

41. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 686.

42. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 681.

43. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 665f. — Comparable statements may be found in Salomon’s ‘Introduction’ to Bousquet, S. 10f., which Ziegler explicitly cites.

44. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 685.

45. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 672.

46. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] According to Salomon, Pareto is a “radical positivist, i.e. anti-metaphysician”; vgl. Bousquet, l.c., ‘Introduction,’ S. 6.

47. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 698.

48. “that knowledge must turn its sting against itself”: [daß das Wissen seinen Stachel gegen sich selbst kehren müsse]

49. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 699.

50. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 700.

51. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 693.

52. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 694.

53. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 658.

54. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 660.

55. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Metaphysik [(1879), Leipzig 1912], S. 15.

56. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Ibid., S. 603.

57. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] This opposition was emphasized in “Lebensphilosophie,” above all that of Henri Bergson; in Germany, above all that of Ludwig Klages.

58. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] The program of establishing complementarity or parity between religion and philosophy, going back to Hegel, was represented among Horkheimer’s contemporaries in various forms by figures such as Max Scheler and Paul Tillich.

59. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] Formulation of Max Scheler’s; vgl. z.B. Abhandlungen und Aufsätze (1915), unter dem Titel Vom Umsturz der Werte in: Gesammelte Werke Bd. 3, Bern, München (5)1972, S. 63.

60. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] Possible allusion to Oswald Spengler, who addressed this theme, among others, in the introduction to Decline of the West (Wien, Leipzig 1918).

61. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] Formulation of Max Scheler’s? Cf. second to last footnote above.

62. [MHGS Ed. Fn.:] Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Freiburger Antrittsvorlesung vom 24.7.1929), Frankfurt am Main (9)1965, S. 22.

63. “objective-objectifying experience”: [sachlich-objektivierenden Erfahrung]

64. “protrudes”: [hineinragt]

65. English from: Henry Allison and Immanuel Kant. “What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? (1793/1804).” In: Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, edited by Henry Allison and Peter Heath, translated by Gary Hatfield and Michael Friedman. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 400-401.

66. “spiritual-intellectual”: [geistigen]; “ideological”: [weltanschaulichen]

67. “covers up the contradictory character of society”: [Verhüllung des widerspruchsvollen Charakters der Gesellschaft]

68. “harmonizing transfiguration of contradictions”: [harmonisierende Verklärung des Widerspruchs]

69. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 2-3.

70. (fn. 51: Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, Being Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. W. Wallace (Oxford, 1971), pp. 22ff.)

71. (fn. 52: Hegel's Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. W. Wallace (Oxford, 1975), p. 278.)

72. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 362-363. Translation modified.

73. In: Marx and Engels, Collected Works. Volume 3. (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 456-457.

74. Horkheimer, “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History,” [1930]. 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), 360-361.

75. Horkheimer, “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History.” [1930]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 362.

76. Horkheimer, “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History.” [1930]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 374-375.

77. Horkheimer, “Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics” [1932]. See author’s translation below.

78. Horkheimer, “Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism” [1938] Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 307-308.

79. Quoted from: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part I: Science of Logic. Translated and edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 33-34.

80. [Schmidt Ed. Note:] Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, IX, 12—quoted from the edition organized “by a society of friends of the immortalized one,” the page numbers of which are also included in Glockner’s Jubiläumsausgabe.

81. “salvation history and secular history”: [Heilsgeschichte und unheiligen Geschichte]

82. [Schmidt Ed. Note:] Encyclopedia, §6.

§6. On the other hand, it is just as important that philosophy come to understand that its content [Inhalt] is none other than the basic content [Gehalt] that has originally been produced and reproduces itself in the sphere of the living spirit, a content turned into a world, namely the outer and inner world of consciousness, or that its content is actuality [die Wirklichkeit]. We call the immediate consciousness of this content experience. Any sensible consideration of the world discriminates between what in the broad realm of outer and inner existence [Dasein] is merely appearance, transitory, and insignificant, and what truly merits the name ‘actuality’. Since philosophy differs only in form from the other ways of becoming conscious of this content that is one and the same, its agreement with actuality and experience is a necessity. Indeed, this agreement may be regarded as at least an external measure of the truth of a philosophy, just as it is to be viewed as the highest goal of the philosophical science to bring about the reconciliation of the reason that is conscious of itself with the reason that exists, or with actuality, through the knowledge of this agreement.

In the Preface to my Philosophy of Right, p. XIX, the following statement can be found:

What is rational, is actual;

And what is actual, is rational.

These simple sentences have seemed striking to some and have been received with hostility even by those who would not want to be regarded as lacking in philosophy, let alone religion. It will be unnecessary to turn to religion for support for these sentences, since its doctrines of the divine governance of the world express the above propositions only too clearly. With regard to their philosophical meaning, however, we may presuppose that the reader is sufficiently educated to know [wissen] not only that God is actual—that he is what is most actual, indeed that he alone is what is truly actual—, but also, insofar as the merely formal difference is concerned, that existence [Dasein] in general is partly appearance and only partly actuality. In ordinary life, we may accidentally call every idea, error, evil, and the like, actual, as well as every concrete existence [Existenz], crippled and transitory though it may be. But even for someone possessing an ordinary sensitivity, a contingent concrete existence [Existenz] will not be deemed to deserve the emphatic designation of being actual; a contingent concrete existence has no greater value than something that is possible and which may just as well not exist as exist. But when I spoke of actuality, it should have been evident in what sense I am using this expression, since I treated actuality in my more extensive Logic, too. There I directly distinguished it not only from what is contingent (which, after all, exists as well), but also and more specifically and precisely from existence [Dasein], concrete existence [Existenz], and other determinations. —The notion of the actuality of the rational seems immediately to come up against two objections: one, that ideas and ideals are nothing more than chimeras and philosophy a system of such phantasms, and the other that, conversely, ideas and ideals are much too exquisite to be actual, or again too impotent to acquire for themselves the status of something actual. But the severance of actuality from the idea is popular particularly with that kind of understanding which takes the dreams of its abstractions for something true, and which insists pretentiously on the ‘ought’ which it likes to prescribe especially in the sphere of politics—as if the world had been waiting for this to learn how it ought to be, but is not. Were it as it ought to be, what would the precociousness of such ‘ought’ come to? When its ‘ought’ is directed against trivial, superficial and transitory objects, arrangements, situations, and so forth (that is to say, what may perhaps be of relative importance to certain circles for a period of time), then this understanding may indeed be right to find many things that are not in accord with universal and correct standards. Who would not have enough good sense to see much around him that is indeed not as it should be? But this cleverness is in the wrong when it fancies itself to have the interest of the philosophical science at heart with such objects and their ‘ought’. Philosophical science deals solely with the idea which is not so impotent as to demand that it merely ought to be actual without being so and, hence, it deals with an actuality of which those objects, arrangements, situations, etc., are only the superficial exterior.

In: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part I: Science of Logic. Translated and edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 33-34. Italics in original.

83. “unconditional cognition”: [unbedingten Erkenntnis]

84. “the principle of the identity of subject and object”: [der Satz der Identität von Subjekt und Objekt]

85. “conditionality and transience”: [Bedingtheit und Vergänglichkeit]; “eternal essences”: [ewigen Wesen]

86. Translated as “worthless existence” by Sibree in the “Introduction” to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History: “This Good, this Reason, in its most concrete form, is God. God governs the world; the actual working of his government—the carrying out of his plan—is the History of the World. This plan philosophy strives to comprehend; for only that which has been developed as the result of it, possesses bona fide reality. That which does not accord with it, is negative, worthless existence [faule Existenz]. Before the pure light of this divine Idea—which is no mere Ideal—the phantom of a world whose events are an incoherent course of fortuitous circumstances, utterly vanishes.” In: Lectures on the Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree (London: George Bell & Sons, York St., Covent Garden, and New York; 1894), 38.

Cf. Adorno, “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel”: “Just as in Hegel “foul” existence is separated from the real that is rational, so despite everything the idea inevitably remains χωρίς from reality, set apart from it, in that reality is also “foul” existence.” In: Hegel: Three Studies. [1963] Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen with an introduction by S.W. Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro (MIT Press, 1993), 129.

87. [Schmidt Ed. Note:] Encyclopedia, §135, “Zusatz”:

The relationship of the whole and the parts is untrue insofar as its concept and reality do not correspond to one another. The concept of the whole is that of containing parts [Teile]; if then, however, the whole is posited as what it is in terms of its concept, if it is partitioned [geteilt], then it thereby ceases to be a whole. Now, to be sure, there are things that correspond to this relationship, but these are also, precisely for that reason, merely low-level and untrue concrete existences [Existenzen]. In this connection generally, it should be remembered that, if one speaks of the untrue in a philosophical discussion, this should not be understood as though nothing of this sort concretely exists. A bad state or a sick body may, nonetheless, exist concretely; but these objects are untrue for their concept and their reality do not correspond to one another. —The relationship of the whole and the parts, as the immediate relationship, is generally the sort of relationship that very readily suggests itself to the reflecting understanding and that it thus frequently makes do with, even when much more profound relationships are in fact at issue. Hence, for example, the members and organs of a living body are not to be considered merely as its parts, since they are what they are only in their unity, and by no means do they behave indifferently towards this unity. These members and organs first become mere parts in the hands of the anatomist who has to deal no longer with living bodies but with cadavers. This is not to say that such dissection should not take place at all, but that the external and mechanical relationship of the whole and the parts does not suffice to know organic life in its truth. —This is the case to a much higher degree in the application of this relationship to the spirit and the formations of the spiritual world. If in psychology one does not speak explicitly of parts of the soul or the spirit, the representation of that finite relationship nevertheless underlies the treatment of this discipline by the understanding, insofar as the diverse forms of the spiritual activity are enumerated and described, one after another, solely in isolation as so-called particular powers and faculties.

In: Encyclopedia. Part I: Science of Logic. Translated Brinkmann & Dahlstrom. (2010), 202-203.

88. [Schmidt Ed. Note:] Encyclopedia, §6.

89. “essential equivalence”: [Wesensgleichheit]

90. “manifold-conditioned expression of the life of determinate human beings”: [vielfältig bedingten Lebensäußerung bestimmter Menschen]

91. [Schmidt Ed. Note:] Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, XIII, 41.

92. [Schmidt Ed. Note:] Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, XIII, 43.

93. [Schmidt Ed. Note:] Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, XIII, 44.

94. “not concluded”: [nicht abgeschlossen]

95. “orthodoxy” [“Lehrmeinung”]

96. Cf. Horkheimer, “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History,” [1930]: “A fully developed explanation, the sustained recognition of the necessity of an historical event can, for those of us who take action, become a means of introducing reason into history. However, regarded “in itself,” history has no reason, nor is it an “essence” in the usual sense; it is neither “Spirit” before which we must genuflect nor “power,” but rather a comprehensible collection of events resulting from the social life processes of human beings. No one is called into existence or is killed by “history.” It neither confers tasks nor executes them. Only real human beings act, overcome obstacles, and are able to succeed in reducing individual or general suffering, which either they themselves or the powers of nature have created. The pantheistic promotion of history to the status of an autonomous, unitary, substantial being is nothing other than dogmatic metaphysics.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 374-275.

97. “self-enclosed self-cognition”: [sich abgeschlossene Selbsterkenntnis]

98. [Schmidt Ed. Note:] Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, XV, 283.

99. [Schmidt Ed. Note:] Phänomenologie, II, 8.

100. Viz., of Hermann Lotze, Wilhelm Windelband, and Heinrich Rickert.

Cf. Jeremy Heis, "Neo-Kantianism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = [https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/neo-kantianism/].

101. [menschliches Sein]

102. “primordial ground of being”: [Urgrund des Seins]

103. “absolutely posited individual contents of knowledge”: [absolut gesetzten einzelnen Wissensgehaltes]

104. Hegel, Encyclopedia, (§7). In: Encyclopedia. Part I: Science of Logic. Translated Brinkmann & Dahlstrom. (2010), 35.

105. [Horkheimer’s Fn.:] Encyclopedia (§38). In: Encyclopedia. Part I: Science of Logic. Translated Brinkmann & Dahlstrom. (2010), 79.

106. In full: “Auf die Frage, was die Wahrheit sei, kann sie zwar immer noch mit Hegel antworten; das Ganze; aber dieses Ganze bildet bei ihr kein System, keine zur Einheit konstruierte Ordnung, keinen “Kosmos,” sondern die jeweils in die verschiedensten Gebiete und Betrachtungsweisen zerspaltene, widerrufliche Fixierung von Geschehnissen, so wie sie in unserem Wissen um die Menschen und Tiere, um Gesellschaft und Natur, ebenso wie um die Erkenntnisvorgänge und die logische Struktur ihres Inhalts selbst sich darstelle.”

107. “the cognition of functional interconnections”: [die Erkenntnis von Funktionszusammenhängen]

108. “the present shape of the truth”: [gegenwärtige Gestalt der Wahrheit]

109. “conceptually tractable structure of effective powers”: [Begriff zugängliche Struktur wirkender Mächte]

110. “mere arbitrariness”: [bloßer Willkür]; “dynamic ruled by laws”: [Gesetzen-beherrschte Dynamik]

111. “the inconclusivity of cognition”: [der Unabschließbarkeit der Erkenntnis]

112. [Horkheimer’s Footnote:] Revue internationale de Sociologie, 1932, Nr. III-IV.

113. “passing from abstract formulations of laws to concrete existential judgments”: [von den abstrakten Gesetzesformeln zu konkreten Existenzialurteilen überzugehen]

114. “the moments of perception”: [die Abschnitte der Wahrnehmung]; “the temporal structure with the perceived event”: [zeitlichen Struktur des wahrgenommenen Geschehens]

115. “the self-abolition of the liberal economy”: [die Selbstaufhebung der liberalistischen Wirtschaft];

116. “who presages”: [der vorhersagt]

117. “presence”: [Vorhandensein];

118. “coupling-together”: [Verkoppelung]

119. Horkheimer to Paul Oppenheim, 10/19/1934. 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), 51-52.

120. Max Horkheimer to Albert Einstein, 2/20/1935. In: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 15: Briefwechsel 1913-1936. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995), 320. Author’s translation.

121. [cf. Bernhard Groethuysen, Die Entstehung der bürgerlichen Welt- und Lebensanschauung in Frankreich, 2 Bde., Halle 1927-1930; von Adorno in der Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung besprochen, vgl. jetzt Adorno GS 20.1, S. 204-211]

122. [Hegel, Werke, ed. Moldenhauer/Michel, Bd. 12: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Frankfurt a. M. 1970, S. 53]

123. Adorno: “Naturrecht und Gesellschaftsvertrag,” S. 23 f., cf. auch ibid. S. 54