On Reading Critical Theory I: Perspectival Distortions.

First in a series on the interpretation of early critical theory (1930s-40s).

Detail from the frontispiece of Christoph Scheiner’s Oculus, hoc est: Fundamentum opticum (Innsbruck, 1620), featuring (upper right corner) a camera obscura with a corrective lens, reversing the inverted image

Perspectival Distortion.

To date, the standard work in both theoretical and historical reconstructions of the development of critical theory is Rolf Wiggershaus’ The Frankfurt School (1994 [1993]).¹ The book has itself become an event in the history of the reception of critical theory. Our focus is on the formative period of ‘early critical theory’—roughly, the late 1910s through the late 1940s—as distinct from the ‘first generation’ of the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’—which Wiggershaus extends through the “caesura” of Adorno’s death in August of 1969:

… Marcuse was not the focus of an institutionally based school of thought. Adorno's death was thus the end of a form of Critical Theory, no matter how disunified it had been, which had uniquely centered on the Institute of Social Research, as its outward form, and on an urge for discovery that had its roots in anti-bourgeois sentiment and in a sense of having a mission to criticize society.²

The uniqueness of Wiggershaus’ history is the comprehensive survey and detailed analysis of previously unavailable archival materials from the ‘inner circle’ of critical theory, many of which were published for the first time within the decades prior to and following the publication of The Frankfurt School. With the publication of the final volumes of Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften, Band 20. I-II: Vermischte Schriften (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986) and Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften, Band 19: Nachträge, Verzeichnisse und Register (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), though there remained and remains much left to publish from the respective estates—particularly in the form of correspondence—, it finally became possible, as James Schmidt (1998) observes, “to begin reconstructing the process” through which works such as the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) were composed.³

In the prevailing interpretation, of which Wiggershaus is perhaps the last great representative, the development of ‘Frankfurt School’ critical theory from the beginning of the 1930s through the end of the 1940s is narrated in the story of the “long farewell” (or the “Abschied”)—that is, of the ISR core’s increasing isolation, institutionally and theoretically, from both empirical social research and from Marxism. It is a testament to Wiggershaus’ integrity as a scholar that, as in the case of Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, his own archival research is so thorough that it undermines the interpretive conventions he adheres to.⁴

As Eva-Maria Ziege argues in her groundbreaking historical and theoretical reconstruction of the ISR’s unpublished “Labor Study” (1943/44), Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie (2009), considerable improvements in both source materials and the state of scientific-historical research since Wiggershaus’ book—along with those of ‘Frankfurt School’ historians such as Martin Jay, Helmut Dubiel, and Wolfgang Bonß—enable, and perhaps even require, a new and critical interpretation of the “long farewell” interpretation itself. The “long farewell” interpretation, Ziege contends, is the effect of “a strong perspectival distortion”: on the one hand, it is the result of the widespread neglect of the ISR’s empirical social research, which, contrary to common misconceptions, drastically increased in the 1940s and even became their central focus;⁵ on the other hand, it is a consequence of the fact that many early interpreters of early critical theory—and, by extension, many readers since—lacked the basic familiarity with Marxian thought they would have needed to recognize the contours of the inner circle’s “secret orthodoxy” in their shared “orientation in Marx’s critique of political economy.”⁶ As Ziege explains, the ISR’s uniquely flexible self-presentation enabled their work to find a much broader readership not despite but because of the misunderstandings it allowed for:

Therefore, the thesis is that, for the Frankfurt School, the Marxist core could sometimes be expressed in the form of a philosophical treatise, and at other times in a sociological analysis of facts; it could remain esoteric or become exoteric. This multiplies the number of possible consumers in the scientific field and opens the way for a broad reception—precisely because it allows for misunderstandings which are, from a scientific perspective, quite productive. Strange as it may sound, many interpreters after 1950 often lacked the requisite knowledge of Marxist paradigms. Too often, constituent parts of the theory are classified as non-Marxist which simultaneously circulate within recognized Marxist paradigms. If one accepts this line of reasoning, which cannot be developed further here, a different explanation of the development of the Frankfurt School must be attempted.⁷

This is the fundamental paradox of the postwar German reception of ‘early critical theory’: on the one hand, scholarship on critical theory has overwhelmingly, particularly since the student movement of the late 1960s, focused on when, rather than if, ‘the Frankfurt School’ broke with Marxism;⁸ on the other, the manner in which this question was posed not only presupposed a lack of familiarity of the history of Marxian thought but reinforced it.

However scientifically productive misinterpretations which adopt a variation of the “long farewell” may once have been, the history of the reception of early critical theory is, nevertheless, the history of an error. The history of the reception of early critical theory since the mid-1980s has been defined by the persistence of the ‘strong perspectival distortion’ despite the unprecedented availability of the very previously unpublished or censored materials from the archives needed to correct this distortion. Though nearly all of the materials published from Adorno and Horkheimer’s estates through their respective archives remain untranslated, the 30+ year lag between archival research and the theoretical conception of early critical theory cannot be attributed to problems of availability alone.

Following Ziege, there are two tasks for any future interpretation of early critical theory: (1) restoring to early critical theory the dimension of empirical sociological research which played a constitutive role in the process of its formation and development through the 1940s; (2) reconstructing the “esoteric form of communication” employed by the early critical theorists in the close study of their previously censored and unpublished texts written continuously throughout that period. As already indicated by Ziege’s critique of prior interpretation of early critical theory, however, there is a third: (3) accounting for the ‘perspectival distortion’ which creates the barriers to the reinterpretation of early critical theory. Within this third task, we can further distinguish between two moments.

The first consists in accounting for the possibility of this ‘perspectival distortion’ by identifying the bases for later, ‘scientifically productive misunderstandings’ of early critical theory given the scientific practice of the early critical theorists themselves. To this end, Ziege draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of scientific autonomy as ‘refractive strength’ or ‘power of translation’—namely, the power of scientific practitioners to reconfigure external constraints and externally posed problems into the language of their ‘scientific field,’ which, under in circumstances of increased scientific heteronomy, may have to be translated ‘back’ into terms legible to those who impose constraints and pose problems from outside.⁹ The ‘esoteric form of communication’ developed by the early critical theorists is a strategy for preserving scientific autonomy for the core Marxian paradigm under heteronomous, even hostile, conditions.¹⁰ To account for the possibility of ‘perspectival distortion,’ then, we will need a broader perspective of the ISR’s activities than is apparent from their publications. We will need to restore these texts as products back to the process of composition from which they were abstracted and which they, if taken in isolation, invariably warp. Ziege writes:

Many of the peculiarities which arise in discussions about the Frankfurt School can be traced back to the narrowness of a certain perspective, which, having been misled by the ISR’s self- and outward-facing-description as a relatively homogeneous group of intellectuals, takes its point of departure in the ISR’s published texts, and thereby abstracts these texts as results from the context of their production and application in the United States through the 1940s. From such a perspective, what Bourdieu once called the “reproductive process of science” presents itself as if it were a kind of parthenogenesis, through which science produces itself as if untouched by society.¹¹

The second consists in confronting the actuality of this ‘perspectival distortion’—its emergence, the history of its development, and its persistence—in what Gillian Rose (1995 [1981]) calls the method of “speculative exposition”: upon recognizing the impossibility of recovering early critical theory by any ingenious ahistorical ‘return,’ its retrieval can only occur through a critical discussion of the intellectual and historical barriers which stand in the way of rereading it.¹² This includes the theoretical framework for ‘critical theory’ today, and within which the majority of interpretive debates about the relationship between critical theory and Marxism still play out, encompassing both non-Marxist returns to and refinements of the spirit of the “interdisciplinary early model of critical theory,” as in Habermas,¹³ and Marxian projects of “putting the critique of political economy back into the critique of society,” following the legacy of the Neue-Marx Lektüre.¹⁴

Even where the dominant interpretations of early critical theory forego intellectual-historical narration, they presuppose the following narrative pattern of argumentation: ‘Deficits,’ as Axel Honneth calls them,¹⁵ are imputed to early critical theory, driving a theoretical development away from empirical social research and/or Marx towards the considered position of the narrator, who relies on the narrative construction to justify their own contribution to ‘critical theory,’ whether this consists in completing or critiquing the “farewell” inaugurated by the early critical theorists. At the core of this framework is the assumption of a necessary separation of early critical theory from empirical social research and/or Marxian social theory that necessarily follows from a theoretical incoherence intrinsic to early critical theory itself. Once the narrator has identified a problem within critical theory which they can plausibly argue was insoluble on its own terms, they may even generously forgive the early critical theorists themselves for failing to appreciate the vanity and absurdity of their collective project in advance. How could they have known? The rest of the narrative writes itself: the narrator need only find one or two documents which seem to constitute confessions of the limits, if not the impossibility, of the original ‘paradigm’ which, the narrator concludes, would only gradually become clear to the early critical theorists themselves. Inevitably, they dissolve into bitter disputes over the irreconcilable differences they could only ignore for so long and confront horrors of world history so incomprehensible that their theoretical hybris must finally be humbled. The pathos of these stories is undeniable, if nothing else about them is.¹⁶

The method of speculative exposition cannot consist in simple juxtaposition of the ‘true’ thought or work to be retrieved with its ‘false’ reception; rather, it reads the false as the index of itself and the true.¹⁷ As Rose explains in the “Preface” to Judaism and Modernity (1993), “the speculative method” converts the difficulties of articulation into the resources of articulation, engaging with seeming incommensurabilities “in order to yield their structuring but unacknowledged third.”¹⁸ Here, Rose’s insistence on the inseparability of the recovery of a misunderstood thought or work with the polemical rectification of errors in its reception allows us to extend Ziege’s insight into the ‘refractive power’ of the esoteric form of scientific autonomy characteristic of the early critical theorists: accounting for the ‘perspectival distortion’ which creates the barriers to the reinterpretation of early critical theory means determining the ‘refractive index’ of distortions between the self-conception of early critical theory, the self-presentation of early critical theory, and the reception of early critical theory. In short, critical correction of misconceptions of a thought or work of early critical theory ought to account for the possibility of that interpretation in the materials themselves while relativizing that interpretation according to the present state of archival materials and the minimal thresholds established by advances in the theoretical reconstruction of those materials. The speculative method of exposition seeks out distortions.

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Test Case 1: The Elimination of “Monopoly” from the Dialectic.

If the “long farewell” interpretation was every a scientifically productive misunderstanding, it has since become an unproductive one.

In “‘Racket,’ ‘Monopoly,’ and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” (2016), James Schmidt argues against Gunzelin Schmid Noerr’s interpretation of the differences between the 1944 Fragmente variant and the 1947 Dialektik der Aufklärung in the “Editor’s Afterword” to the critical edition of the Dialectic (2002 [1987]).¹⁹ Noerr infers that the primary reason for the near-elimination of the language of “monopoly”-capitalism between the 1944 mimeograph and the heavily revised 1947 publication is Adorno and Horkheimer’s qualified acceptance of Pollocks ‘state capitalism’ thesis, which maintained the “primacy of politics” and problems of social administration over the primacy of economics in Marxist theory and the problem of social crises.²⁰ In their attached “Commentary on the Textual Variants (1947 and 1944),” titled “The Disappearance of Class History in ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment,’” Willem van Reijen and Jan Bransen formulate this hypothesis in much stronger terms:

The almost complete elimination of the term “monopoly” from all important passages, and the transformation of “capital” into “economy” and similar terms in most places, are nor sufficiently explained by politi­cal misgivings and considerations alone. Rather—and this is more impor­tant for a theoretical and systematic understanding of Dialectic of Enlight­enment—they show that in the mid-1940s Horkheimer and Adorno, in keeping with Pollock’s analyses, had distanced themselves definitively from a form of Marxism which assumed the primacy of economics. In­stead, the importance of control through politics and the culture industry moves clearly into the foreground.²¹

As Schmidt argues, the posthumously published correspondence and previously unpublished compositions written in preparation for the Dialectic of Enlightenment suggest the exact opposite: namely, that the standard interpretation of the text drastically overstates the influence of Pollock’s state capitalism thesis on Adorno and Horkheimer—not just because of Adorno’s damning criticism of it,²² nor even Horkheimer’s even more damning refusal to defend it,²³ but because Adorno and Horkheimer’s highly selective appropriation of Pollock’s state capitalism thesis was conditioned by their own racket-theory of social domination under monopoly capitalism. If anything, I would argue Schmidt doesn’t take this point far enough: Adorno and Horkheimer’s appropriation of Pollock’s state capitalism thesis is so selective that they seem to adopt Pollock’s language while, in explicit agreement with Neumann’s criticisms, they reject Pollock’s method of presentation,²⁴ his method,²⁵ and his conclusions.²⁶ (One fragment of Horkheimer’s in particular, the incomplete sketch “On the Ideology of Politics Today” [ca. 1942?], contains a particularly pointed criticism of the theory of state capitalism, one which has prompted previous interpreters to attempt—unsuccessfully—to direct the criticism away from Pollock himself.)²⁷ Since the “long farewell” reading is, in much of the secondary literature, inspired at least in part by the first letter Neumann writes to Horkheimer about how Pollock’s state capitalism thesis is “a farewell to Marxism,”²⁸ it is particularly problematic for this interpretation that Neumann will find Horkheimer’s revised “Preface”²⁹ to the ‘state capitalism’ issue of SPSS resonates so strongly not only with his book, Behemoth, but even with that earlier letter Neumann wrote harshly criticizing Pollock’s thesis.³⁰ In opposition to the standard interpretation of the internal division of the ISR in 1941 into two camps—Horkheimer, Adorno, Pollock, and Löwenthal on the one side and Neumann, Kirchheimer, and Gurland on the other³¹—Schmidt reads Kirchheimer’s essay “In Quest of Sovereignty” (1944), originally written in 1942 for an unrealized ISR Jahrbuch on racket-theory Horkheimer still planned through the end of the same year, and concludes that Kirchheimer’s use of the racket-concept demonstrates his proximity to Horkheimer’s deployment and evaluation of the concept in particular.³²

Aside from the posthumous publication of Adorno and Horkheimer’s respective correspondence and previously unpublished compositions, Schmidt notes that “interesting material (…) in Horkheimer’s unpublished correspondence with Löwenthal suggests that the chief motivation for the decision to eliminate many of the occurrences of ‘monopoly’ from the final version of the [Dialectic] were political, rather than theoretical.”³³ Following Schmidt’s lead, through my own research in the digitized Horkheimer Nachlass, I discovered the following. It is an excerpt from a letter Horkheimer writes to Löwenthal very late in the process of revising the text which, in the summer and fall of 1946, still bears the original title of Philosophische Fragmente:

Thank you for your wire concerning the corrections of the Fragmente. The only consideration for combing the manuscript again is a tactical one: Since I believe that developments will be faster than most people foresee, I want to guard against possible difficulties of [sic] traveling in Europe which could result from this publication. The more immediate reason for my desire were the articles from the New York Times which you sent me recently. As you will remember, the author makes the point today that the word “monopoly” in literature is an unmistakably [sic] characteristic of those Europeans who are tending toward the East. Since misunderstandings of our book in this direction would be undesirable in a twofold sense, I think it should be cleared of such expressions as much as possible. Naturally, there is no question of doing a thorough job, but one more check will certainly not do any harm.³⁴

The hypothesis van Reijen and Bransen formulate in order to explain the differences between the 1944 and 1947 textual variants of the Dialectic of Enlightenment can be broken down into two testable claims: (1) the revisions cannot be explained by ‘political misgivings and considerations alone,’ or even primarily; (2) the differences reflect a theoretical development in which Adorno and Horkheimer distance themselves from Marxism over the course of the mid-1940s out of fidelity to Pollock’s state capitalism thesis. To the extent these claims have been tested here against both published and unpublished sources in the archival materials of early critical theory, the thesis is untenable.

1. English translation: Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson (Polity Press, 1994).

German: Rolf Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule. Geschichte, Theoretische Entwicklung, Politische Bedeutung. (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993)

2. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (1994), 653-654.

And: “It has become customary to speak of first-generation and second-generation Critical Theorists, and to distinguish the older Frankfurt School from what has developed from it since the 1970s. This allows us to postpone, at least initially, the question of the Frankfurt School's survival and of its continuity or discontinuity, and makes it easier to put a time-limit on its history which will not be too arbitrary. The time-limit chosen for the present work is the death of Adorno, the last representative of the older Critical Theory who was active in Frankfurt and at the Institute of Social Research.” In: Ibid., 1.

3. James Schmidt: “Over the last decade, the staff of the Horkheimer Archive has, through the publication of Horkheimer's Nachlass and correspondence, made available to those scholars willing to make the effort the resources needed to begin reconstructing the process by which the Dialectic of Enlightenment was written.” In: “Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Social Research Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter 1998), 808.

4. See the “Translator’s Remarks. Remark 1: On Locating the ‘Notizen’ in the Development of Early Critical Theory.” in “Collection: Horkheimer's Fragments d’Essais Matérialistes (ca. 1935/36-1938)” for a short explanation of how Gunzelin Schmid Noerr’s editorial work for Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften undermines his own adherence to conventional interpretation of the “long farewell” to Marxism.

5. Ziege: “In the second phase, from 1940 through 1948, however, empirical research became the focus of the ISR’s work. The perception of the Frankfurt School as a theory-immanent undertaking [theorie-immanentes Unternehmen] is the result of a strong perspectival distortion [einer starken Perspektivverzerrung] which unjustly neglects their empirical research. However, the source material [Quellenlage] has improved considerably since the works of [Martin] Jay, [Helmut] Dubiel, [Wolfgang] Bonß, and [Rolf] Wiggershaus. This also holds for the the state of research on the history of empirical social research and the scientific history of exile today.” In: Eva-Maria Ziege. Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie. Die Frankfurter Schule im amerikanischen Exil. (Suhrkamp, 2009), 156-157. Author’s translation.

6. Ziege on factors which unified the so-called ‘first generation’ of Frankfurt School critical theorists: “All are migrants or refugees, many come from assimilated Jewish families. Hardly any are as closely connected to orthodox Judaism as [Erich] Fromm. All belong to the left in the broadest sense of the term throughout the 1930s, ranging from communists, and in rare cases even anarcho-communists, to members of social-democratic currents. Regardless of this [diversity], however, the inner circle shares an orientation in Marx’s critique of political economy. For the majority, one could even speak of a secret orthodoxy [verschwiegenen Orthodoxie].” In: Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie (2009), 9. Author’s translation.

7. Ziege, In: Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie (2009), 42-43. Author’s translation.

8. Noerr and Ziege (2018): “The process of interpretation and the struggle between interpretations was, as can be seen in many instances, inseparable from the political struggles of the Cold War. In the secondary literature that emerged, various hypotheses were offered and tested to determine the exact timing of Horkheimer’s or Adorno’s departure from the Marxian ‘school core’. While major essays from the Journal for Social Research were still considered Marxist, for some, the first break was renaming the journal in 1939 while others dated this break with the publication of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and others did so with that of The Authoritarian Personality. Whether—and, if so, to what extent—Marxian core elements were still detectable in the reconstituted IfS after 1950 was also a matter of controversy.” In: “70 Jahre,” Zur Kritik der regressiven Vernunft (2018), 10-11. Author’s translation.

9. Ziege: “According to Bourdieu, one of the most visible signs of the autonomy of a scientific field is its ability to refract external constraints or demands, i.e., to bring them into a specific form. The greater the refractive strength [Brechungsstärke] of a [scientific] field becomes with its increasing autonomy, the more it is able to reconfigure external constraints, often to the point of unrecognizability. The decisive index of the degree of autonomy [of a scientific field] is this refractive strength or power of translation. Conversely, the heteronomy [of a scientific field] is essentially demonstrated by the fact that questions which are posed externally are expressed within it relatively unbroken; politicization, according to this model, involves not more, but less autonomy—namely, in that less competent (and, sometimes, completely incompetent) people can repeatedly intervene in the field on behalf of heteronomous concerns without simply being disqualified.” In: Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie (2009), 24-25. Author’s translation.

10. Ziege (2014): “The concept [viz., of the marginality of the scientist in forced exile] is useful also for understanding the Institute of Social Research (ISR) and its innovations in research on antisemitism. For the ISR, three aspects are of specific interest with regard to this approach. First, in the Weimar Republic the majority of associates of the ISR came from assimilated German Jewish families; an orthodox family background was the exception. Second, in the Weimar Republic all of them belonged to the Left, encompassing communists and in rare cases even anarcho-communists as well as Social Democrats. Third, irrespective of these differences, the inner circle shared as a paradigm Marx’s critique of political economy. Perhaps what linked them was a discreet orthodoxy. All of them were more or less influenced by Freud, who introduced the notion of the unconscious into the analysis of the individual and society. A distinct school of Freudian Marxism emerged. Precisely the intense success of differing schools of Freudianism in the United States was a major prerequisite of the success of the Institute of Social Research in this country. Its Marxism, though, was rendered nearly invisible. For the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s, an esoteric form of communication has to be distinguished from an exoteric one. This distinction between what one can formulate explicitly and what one can articulate only very selectively, hoping that those “in the know” will recognize and understand all the same, had been important to Enlightenment thinkers and featured prominently in the thought of Leo Strauss (1899– 1973), who emigrated to the United States in 1932 and argued that contemporary thinkers too needed to maintain this distinction in an age of persecution and dictatorship. At the core of critical theory, philosophical assumptions were presupposed that were nevertheless negligible in everyday research; they remained esoteric. It is possible to conceive of this distinction between esoteric and exoteric, as well as of the process of transcending Marxist orthodoxy, not as a corruption or decline of, let alone a contradiction to, Marxism or critical theory but as the normality of any evolving school. The Marxist core paradigm in fact remained paradigmatic for social thought with the key members of the Institute. Nevertheless other associates did not necessarily share these tenets to the same extent. As Horkheimer defined it in the 1930s, the Institute’s purpose was the development of a theory of society based on the Marxist assumption that the antagonism between labor and capital was the key driving force in the dynamics of society. In 1937 Horkheimer published a famous article entitled “Traditionelle und Kritische Theorie,” juxtaposing traditional and critical theory. It established the term critical theory for the Institute’s specific form of Marxist social theory.” In: “The Irrationality of the Rational. The Frankfurt School and Its Theory of Society in the 1940s.” Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology, Edited by Marcel Stoetzler. (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 275-276.

11. In: Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie (2009), 23. Author’s translation.

12. For Rose’s method of “speculative exposition,” see the the opening of Chapter 1, “The Antinomies of Sociological Reason” in Hegel Contra Sociology (Verso, 2009 [1995 [1981]]), 1-2.

13. See John Abromeit: “In his magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action [1981], Habermas consciously and explicitly places his mature theory within the tradition of Horkheimer’s early model of Critical Theory, while at the same time distancing it from Adorno (TCA2, 374–404). Habermas remained sympathetic to Horkheimer’s vision of an interdisciplinary Critical Theory, which consciously reflected upon its own active role in changing society. Habermas also remained sympathetic to the early Horkheimer’s attempt to bring together philosophical self-reflexivity and empirical social research.” In: “MAX HORKHEIMER (1895–1973).” The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon. Edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 573-575.

14. See Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva, “The Neue Marx-Lektüre: Putting the critique of political economy back into the critique of society,” Radical Philosophy 189 (Jan/Feb 2015), 24-36.

15. For a criticism of Honneth’s “re-transcendentalization” of early critical theory, see “Note I” of “Translation: A Letter On Kant's Apriorism, Horkheimer (1937)” on Substudies.

16. As Ryan Crawford has recently argued, this pathos plays an important role in reinforcing the half-century long canonization of ‘the Frankfurt School’ as “permanent exiles” that misrepresents the self-conception of early critical theorists in their relation to the “Jewish identity,” which has been retroactively imputed to them despite their own responses to the experience of racialization, and to the cultural, political, and intellectual traditions in which they actually considered themselves to be participants. In: Ryan Crawford, 'A contest over titles: The canonisation of the Frankfurt School as ‘permanent exiles’', Radical Philosophy 215, Autumn 2023, pp. 39–56. (pdf)

17. Adorno and Horkheimer (1947): “Thought thus becomes illusory whenever it seeks to deny its function of separating, distancing, and objectifying. All mystical union remains a deception, the impotently inward trace of the forfeited revolution. But while enlightenment is right in opposing any hypostatization of utopia and in dispassionately denouncing power as division, the split between subject and object, which it will not allow to be bridged, becomes the index of the untruth both of itself and of truth. The proscribing of superstition has always signified not only the progress of domination but its exposure. Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is nature made audible in its estrangement. In mind’s self-recognition as nature divided from itself, nature, as in prehistory, is calling to itself, but no longer directly by its supposed name, which, in the guise of mana, means omnipotence, but as something blind and mutilated. In the mastery of nature, without which mind does not exist, enslavement to nature persists. By modestly confessing itself to be power and thus being taken back into nature, mind rids itself of the very claim to mastery which had enslaved it to nature. Although humanity may be unable to interrupt its flight away from necessity and into progress and civilization without forfeiting knowledge itself, at least it no longer mistakes the ramparts it has constructed against necessity, the institutions and practices of domination which have always rebounded against society from the subjugation of nature, for guarantors of the coming freedom. Each advance of civilization has renewed not only mastery but also the prospect of its alleviation. However, while real history is woven from real suffering, which certainly does not diminish in proportion to the increase in the means of abolishing it, the fulfillment of that prospect depends on the concept. For not only does the concept, as science, distance human beings from nature, but, as the self-reflection of thought—which, in the form of science, remains fettered to the blind economic tendency—it enables the distance which perpetuates injustice to be measured. Through this remembrance of nature within the subject, a remembrance which contains the unrecognized truth of all culture, enlightenment is opposed in principle to power, and even in the time of Vanini the call to hold back enlightenment was uttered less from fear of exact science than from hatred of licentious thought, which had escaped the spell of nature by confessing itself to be nature’s own dread of itself. The priests have always avenged mana on any exponent of enlightenment who propitiated mana by showing fear before the frightening entity which bore that name, and in their hubris the augurs of enlightenment were at one with the priests. Enlightenment in its bourgeois form had given itself up to its positivist moment long before Turgot and d’Alembert. It was never immune to confusing freedom with the business of self-preservation. The suspension of the concept, whether done in the name of progress or of culture, which had both long since formed a secret alliance against truth, gave free rein to the lie. In a world which merely verified recorded evidence and preserved thought, debased to the achievement of great minds, as a kind of superannuated headline, the lie was no longer distinguishable from a truth neutralized as cultural heritage.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. [1947] Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott (SUP, 2002 [1987]), 31-32. [Emphasis added]

And: “The self-satisfaction of knowing in advance, and the transfiguration of negativity as redemption, are untrue forms of the resistance to deception. The right of the image is rescued in the faithful observance of its prohibition. Such observance, “determinate negation,” is not exempted from the enticements of intuition by the sovereignty of the abstract concept, as is skepticism, for which falsehood and truth are equally void. Unlike rigorism, determinate negation does not simply reject imperfect representations of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea they are unable to match. Rather, dialectic discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth. Language thereby becomes more than a mere system of signs.” In: Ibid., 18.

18. Rose: “A friend has suggested that I preface this book with an apologia pro vita sua along the lines in which Franz Rosenzweig tried to explain his return to Judaism in his letter to Friedrich Meinecke declining the offer of a university post. This apology from 1920 seems uncannily to converge with the growing tendency nowadays to present theoretical work with a declaration of one’s personal as well as one’s academic qualifications and interests: ‘I’ write ‘as a woman’, ‘as a Jew’, and so on. My trajectory displays no such logic. If I knew who or what I were, I would not write; I write out of those moments of anguish which are nameless and I am able to write only where the tradition can offer me a discipline, a means, to articulate and explore that anguish. Against the self-image of the age, it has been within the philosophical tradition, which for me includes social, political and religious thought, that I have found the resources for the exploration of this identity and lack of identity, this independence and dependence, this power and powerlessness. My difficulty is not addressed in any rejection of that tradition which would settle for only one side of my predicament: lack of identity, dependence, powerlessness, or any account of otherness which theorizes solely exclusion and control. It is this speculative account of experience, which persists in acknowledging the predicament of identity and lack of identity, independence and dependence, power and powerlessness, that has led me to Judaism. Or, rather, it is by working through my difficulty in the ratio and the crises of modern philosophy that I discover myself in the middle of the ratio and crises of modern Judaism. […] I write out of the discovery that both recent philosophy, in its turn to what I name new ethics, and modern Jewish philosophy, in its ethical self-presentations, are equally uncomfortable with any specific reflection on modern law and the state, which they assimilate to the untempered domination of Western metaphysics. Rome haunts the agon between Athens and Jerusalem, but only the imperial Roman eagle has been admitted, while the Rome which invented private property law, the law of persons, and separated it from citizenship is forgotten because it is so familiar. In the eagerness to eschew the metaphysics of subjectivity, recent philosophy and Jewish philosophy lose the means to discern the structuring of our anxiety, the modern mix of freedom and unfreedom in civil society and the state which continues to contour our subjectivity and which cannot be abjured. Having renounced teleological philosophy of history, general philosophy produces in its place the newly purified polarity of reason and ethics, which Jewish philosophy, scared of the charge of Pharisaical legalism, intensifies with its purified polarity of law and love. Philosophy and Judaism want to proclaim a New Testament which will dispose of the broken promises of modernity. I write out of the violence infecting these philosophical purifications which ignore their own preconditions and outcomes. I write out of the feigned innocence of the ‘and’ in Judaism and Modernity. This is my apologia pro vita sua: the only way I can approach my life is by attempting to explore how the difficulties with which I engage may articulate that life. The speculative method of engaging with the new purifications whenever they occur, in order to yield their structuring but unacknowledged third, involves deployment of the resources of reason and of its crisis, of identity and lack of identity. This results in what I call the facetious style – the mix of severity and irony, with many facets and forms, which presents the discipline of the difficulty.” In: Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Verso 2017 [Blackwell 1993]). Emphasis in original.

Cf. Horkheimer’s Letter to Felix Weil, 3/22/1946: “Liberation lies, theoretically and practically, in a movement in which both [terms] are given their due but without continuing to exist groundlessly next to each other.”

19. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. (Stanford University Press, 2002). This, now standard, edition of the Dialectic is translated from the German: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5: Dialektik der Aufklärung und Schriften 1940-1950. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (S. Fischer Verlag, 1987)

20. See Noerr’s “Editor’s Afterword”: “For Horkheimer, the topical application of the racket theory was ro be found in the transfer of traditional class antagonism to the field of international relations, on the one hand, and to institutionally determined antitheses within the classes themselves, on the other. In postliberal capitalism, according to this theory, new forms of conflict conceal the basic contradiction between capital and labor. With state capitalism mecha­nisms have come into being to mitigate the economic crises which earlier had the potential to disintegrate the system. In this way the economic “base” loses its role in supporting the social totality. National Socialism and bureaucratic socialism or, more generally, a new “integral statism,” can no longer be described only in terms of economic basic categories. Political analysis takes on greater importance to the extent that liberalism appears as an historical episode, after the downfall of which society reverts to direct methods of domination no longer mediated via the market. The fundamental economic factors leading to crisis are tending to become controllable by measures of state intervention, which can range from compensatory welfare legislation to overt terror. This new form of the “primacy of politics” does not leave untouched the concept of the political itself, in comparison to its function in general capitalism. (…) The state capitalist “primacy of politics” can be understood as a per­version of the socialist idea of the planned economy which was supposed to replace the anarchy of private appropriation by rational decisions in the generalizable interest of society as a whole. What is expressed in fascism, in especially brutal form, is merely what characterizes democratic state capitalism as well as bureaucratic socialism of the Soviet kind: the end of liberal, legal agencies of mediation under the power politics of competing ruling cliques. These groups take over the now necessary planning of the economic process, whether that process is still democratically legitimized or is already an almost openly planned and organized piracy.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1987]), 234-235.

And: “The political and economic basis for a theory of rackets and of state capitalism was developed within the Institute primarily by Horkheimer and Pollock; dissenting voices were not lacking among their colleagues, particularly those of Neumann and Kirchheimer. Although Horkheimer adhered fundamentally to the thesis, the criticism may have retarded early publication of his reflections on racket theory. Adorno's contribution, too, remained unpublished. These beginnings of the theory were not elab­orated in detail later. They were, however, the decisive factor in the transition from the earlier form of Critical Theory, represented by the essays in the [ZfS] during the 1930s, to an historical and generic critique of instrumental reason, of which Dialectic of Enlightenment is the most im­portant document. But the specific economic and political arguments do not appear, or appear only in rudimentary form, in this book. Never­theless, they provide the background of social theory against which the sci­entific, moral, cultural, and psychological phenomena of the self-destruc­tion of enlightenment were interpreted. Since the authors limit the appli­cation of the Marxian categories essentially to liberalism—which, espe­cially with regard to the, at least partial, achievement of bourgeois free­dom, is presented as a transient episode in a history of power always dom­inated by the law of the racket—it is understandable why those categories are pushed into the background in Dialectic of Enlightenment.” In: Ibid., 236-237.

21. Willem van Reijen and Jan Bransen, “The Disappearance of Class History in ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment.’ Commentary on the Textual Variants (1947 and 1944).” In: Ibid., 251-252.

22. Schmidt: “Adorno was unconvinced by Pollock’s vision of a society that, having transformed the crises that plagued earlier form of capitalism into “mere problems of administration,” could hold out “the promise of security and a more abundant life for every subject who submits voluntarily and completely.” Though he conceded that Pollock might be correct in his pessimistic assessment of the ubiquity of political domination throughout history, he rejected what he characterized as Pollock’s “optimistic” belief that the new order would be any more stable than the one it replaced. He saw such a conclusion as resting on the “undialectical assumption that in an antagonistic society a non-antagonistic economy would be possible.” What Pollock had produced struck him as an “inversion of Kafka”: “Kafka presented the hierarchy of bureaucrats as Hell. Here Hell transforms itself into a hierarchy of bureaucrats” (Horkheimer, Briefe, 54).” In: “‘Racket,’ ‘Monopoly,’ and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” (2016). [Link: https://persistentenlightenment.com/2016/01/12/rackets/ ]

23. Schmidt: “Adorno’s prediction that Pollock’s article would draw fire from Neumann proved correct. Two weeks later Neumann sent Horkheimer a blistering evaluation (much of which would later reappear in Behemoth, his 1942 study of the Nazi state) arguing that the article “contradicts from the first to the last page” the theory the Institute had been developing since its arrival in the United States and that it represented nothing less than “a farewell to Marxism” that “documents a complete hopelessness.” Horkheimer succeeded in placating Neumann and (presumably) Adorno by crafting a Preface to the volume of the Zeitschrift in which Pollock’s essay appeared (an issue that also included contributions from A.R.L. Gurland, Otto Kirchheimer, Horkheimer, and Adorno) by characterizing the articles as offering different perspectives on “problems implied in the transition from liberalism to authoritarianism in continental Europe.” In summarizing what was at stake in this transition, Horkheimer emphasized the political implications of the replacement of independent entrepreneurs by monopolies, a development that he saw as leading to a triumph of ruling elites and “cliques” whose cynical shuffling of ideologies translated “into open action what modern political theory from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Pareto has professed.” In the course of this discussion, Horkheimer managed to avoid (even when discussing Pollock’s article) the use of the term “state capitalism” at all. Neumann was pleased enough by the result to send Horkheimer a letter that praised him for having rendered Pollock’s contribution “completely harmless” by offering a “reinterpretation” of the article that wound up undermining its central argument.” In: Ibid.

24. Horkheimer to Pollock, 7/1/1941: “Naturally, my comments could only be the fruit of a relatively rushed reading; some will simply turn out to be misunderstands. Most urge more concise formulations, less frequent repetitions, others aim toward [guarding against] possible misunderstanding of an excessive sympathy for state capitalism [on the part of the author], and only a few express factual doubts. To formulate a more general wish, it would be for the intertwining and ambiguity of phenomena, the transition of concepts into others, etc. be made more apparent—in short, that everything would appear somewhat less rigidly administrative. And then, the question of style—particularly at the conclusion, where there are too many phrases such as “this and that must happen” and the like, which conceal factual uncertainty. —All of this, however, means only that with more time and quiet, a much more concise, sharp, and charged form might emerge from this [draft]. Do you believe this can happen (here), or is there too little time? I would like to do my part.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 90-91. Author’s translation.

25. See Horkheimer to Neumann, 8/2/1941. Initially, Horkheimer defends Pollock’s method of the construction of ideal types in the following terms: “However much I may object to Pollock’s method myself, I still consider your critique of it misguided. To my mind, ideal types are supposed to perform precisely the function the do in this essay. True, they are acquired through the abstraction and intensification of determinate elements from out of actuality; these are, however, also opposed to actuality. They form utopias—whether beautiful or ugly—against which actuality is measured. Even if you are correct in saying the system Pollock has sketched would no longer be capitalism, which I would rather not discuss right now, he still has the right, in the spirit of the ideal-typical method, to compare social formations [gesellschaftliche Bildungen] of the present with his construction. Such a procedure can be important for the assessment of historical processes, even if one were to disregard the question of the [qualitative] leap [Sprunges]. Indeed, Pollock could even argue, in the spirit of Weber, that his own constructions or constructions like his form the conscious or unconscious presupposition of every discussion of this question.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 115-116. Author’s translation. In response to Neumann’s continued criticism of Pollock’s ideal-typical method, Horkheimer clarifies in a reply dated 8/30/1941: “As far as the ideal type is concerned, I share your view that its application is highly problematic entirely. My remarks were meant only to demonstrate that Pollock’s use does not contradict the original spirit of this method. This says nothing whatsoever, however, of its legitimacy.” In: Ibid., 121. Author’s translation.

26. For example, in the same letter to Neumann of 8/2/1941, Horkheimer starts to defend Pollock from Neumann’s charge of “psychologism” in connection with the relationship between a rise in the standard of living and the predisposition to revolution, but quickly ends in a defense of Pollock’s “psychologism” for its honest expression of difficulties in critical theory, suggesting that “Pollock’s open psychologism is (…) conditioned by the concealed psychologism of the counter-thesis” to Pollock’s own. In: Ibid., 117-118.

27. E.g., Gunzelin Schmid Noerr’s “Editor’s Afterword,” to the English translation of the critical edition of Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott (SUP, 2002 [1987]), 235-235. In a footnote, Noerr writes: “Zur Ideologie der Politik heute (Fragment),” in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 12, … reads like a critique of a positivistically abbreviated reading of Pollock’s theory of state capitalism.” In: Ibid., 280. [Footnote No. 71.] According to Noerr, this ‘positivistic’ approach to the theory of state capitalism would entail “the positivist substitution of historical, political, or psychological laws for economic ones.” In: Ibid., 234. However, Horkheimer accuses Pollock of making exactly this kind of substitution—and specifically of ‘psychologism’—in a letter to Franz Neumann dated 8/2/1941. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 117-118.

28. Schmidt: “Adorno’s prediction that Pollock’s article would draw fire from Neumann proved correct. Two weeks later Neumann sent Horkheimer a blistering evaluation (much of which would later reappear in Behemoth, his 1942 study of the Nazi state) arguing that the article “contradicts from the first to the last page” the theory the Institute had been developing since its arrival in the United States and that it represented nothing less than “a farewell to Marxism” that “documents a complete hopelessness.”” [Neumann to Horkheimer, 7/23/1941. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 103.] In: “‘Racket,’ ‘Monopoly,’ and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” (2016).

29. Max Horkheimer, “Preface.” In: SPSS Vol. 9, No. 2 (1941), 195-199.

30. Horkheimer to Neumann, 7/30/1941. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 109-111.

31. See van Reijen and Bransen: “Since the early 1940s scholars at the Institute for Social Research had devoted themselves with special intensity to analyzing the causes and consequences of fascist rule, with the aim of carrying out extensive research projects. In the course of this work two opposed views emerged. On one side, Horkheimer, Adorno, Pollock, and Löwenthal developed the thesis that National Socialism, as compared to traditional capitalism, represented a new order. While they regarded fascist state capitalism as the most recent outcome of capitalist logic, they believed that this outcome manifested a new quality: the dominance of politics over economics. In his essay entitled “Is National Socialism a New Order?” Pollock, on whose specialist knowledge of economics the other advocates of this view relied, answered this question in the affirmative. On the other side, Neumann, Kirchheimer, and Gurland supported the thesis that the National Socialist economic order was a continuous development of capitalism, so that one could not speak of a new order. This controversy over the primacy of pol­itics or economics in post-liberal capitalism, as authors such as Dubiel and Söllner or Brick and Postone show, impinged deeply on the theoretical self-understanding of the members of the Institute for Social Research.” In: “The Disappearance of Class History,” Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1987]), 248.

32. Schmidt: “But it is unlikely that Kirchheimer would have been inclined to dampen Horkheimer’s enthusiasm for the term. In an article intended for the yearbook, but eventually published separately, Kirchheimer would argue that the more limited legal usage of the term served merely “as a convenient tool for bringing the guilty to account and depriving them of the sympathies of the community at large.” Like Horkheimer, he saw the term’s polemical edge as something worth preserving. “If somebody asks another, “What is your racket?,” he may intend merely to inquire about the other’s professional status, but the very form of the question refers to a societal configuration which constitutes the proper basis for any individual answer. It expresses the idea that within the organizational framework of our society attainment of a given position is out of proportion to abilities and efforts which have gone into that endeavor. It infers that a person’s status in society is conditional upon the presence or absence of a combination of luck, chance, and good connections, a combination systematically exploited and fortified with all available expedients inherent in the notion of private property.” [Schmidt’s footnote no. 18 re: quotes from Kirchheimer’s “In Quest of Sovereignty”: The Journal of Politics 6:2 (1944): 139–176, 160.] And (again like Horkheimer) the one shortcoming he found in the concept was that it failed to clarify what would have to be done to create a society without rackets.” In: “‘Racket,’ ‘Monopoly,’ and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” (2016).

33. In: Ibid.

34. Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 7/17/1946. In: MHA [Na 548], [Korrespondenzen mit Leo Löwenthal (und Umgebung, unter anderem Franz Neumann, Henryk Grossmann, Herbert Marcuse und Karl August Wittfogel), Band 17 (unter anderem mit Herbert Marcuse) (p. VI.19, 159-388) / 1946], S. [327]