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Max Horkheimer and The Family of Man

Horkheimer’s increasing ambivalence about the militantly radical nature of prewar Critical Theory manifested, among other ways, in his reluctance to be called a “permanent exile.” “During our stay in America,” he insisted, “most us were exiles with regard to fascist Germany, but certainly not with regard to democratic states like the USA and postwar Germany.” He very clearly demonstrated his revised estimation of the value of what Marxists had traditionally denigrated as “bourgeois democracy” in 1958, when he introduced Edward Steichen’s traveling exhibition of photographs called The Family of Man to a Frankfurt audience. Horkheimer was determined to promote to the German public the liberal democratic values he had come to appreciate, if with nuanced qualification, during his years in America. Tellingly, the philosophical touchstone of his analysis was Kant rather than Marx, and he defended cosmopolitan humanism against the prioritization of cultural, class or national difference. More precisely, he saw in the concrete images of the exhibition—and here there was no trace of the Bilderverbot he so often invoked in other contexts—a happy mediation of difference and universalism.

Not surprisingly, Horkheimer’s 1958 introduction provided welcome ammunition for current art historians seeking to reverse the long-standing dismissal of Steichen’s exhibition by a wide range of critics—from Roland Barthes, Jacques Barzun and Susan Sontag to the editors of October magazine—all of whom damned it as “photographic ideology.” But when read in the context of another essay Horkheimer wrote a year earlier, “The Concept of Man,” which was far less sanguine about abstract humanism or the crisis of the modern family, his defense seems more of a tactical maneuver than a reflection of a wholesale retreat from his earlier position. Or, perhaps better put, the unresolved tension between the two pieces may be said to reflect the Frankfurt School’s postwar struggle to adapt to new circumstances in which the Marxist intransigence of their earlier years was tempered by a recognition that democratic ideals and universalist humanist values were more than mere window dressing for class domination.¹

If only I knew a better term than humanity, that poor, provincial term of a half-educated European. But I don’t.

Max Horkheimer, “Humanity,” (1957–8)²

With no special fanfare or extended justification, the distinguished authors of the ambitious overview of twentieth-century art, Art since 1900, all stalwarts of the influential journal October, refer disparagingly to Edward Steichen’s “blockbuster exhibition of postwar photographic ideology, ‘The Family of Man’ at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955.”³ The context for this casual dismissal is an argument about the transfiguration of prewar avant-garde and social documentary photography into a vehicle for consumer capitalist advertising and fashion in the so-called New York School, which rose to prominence in the postwar era. Having absorbed the critiques of Steichen’s show leveled by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Alan Sekula, John Berger, Abigail Solomon-Godeau and a host of lesser commentators, the book’s authors echo their scorn for The Family of Man as an ideological exercise in sentimental humanism in the service of Cold War propaganda and the middle-brow visual culture typified by Life magazine.⁴

Given the now widespread disdain for the triumphalist American culture of the 1950s, their offhand characterization of the show is not surprising. But it has its cost, as the authors of Art since 1900 were oblivious to a burgeoning resistance to the conventional wisdom that sought to restore at least some of the once-glittering reputation enjoyed by the exhibition when it was first seen by millions around the world in the 1950s. Eric Sandeen’s 1995 Picturing an Exhibition began the advancement of a more nuanced, forgiving, even positive estimation of the political intentions, aesthetic achievements and popular impact of The Family of Man, and this momentum carried into later essays by Blake Stimson, Fred Turner, Sarah E. James, Gerd Hurm and others.⁵ In this revisionist effort, unexpected ammunition has been supplied by the recent rediscovery of a forgotten text by the Frankfurt School’s leading figure, Max Horkheimer, that accompanied the show when it opened in that German city in 1958.⁶

What are the implications of Horkheimer’s delayed insertion in the debate? Can remembering his intervention help counter the still powerful grip of the negative characterization of the exhibition as little more than an exercise in “photographic ideology”? Does his enthusiasm for the exhibition in the specific context of a postwar Germany struggling to move beyond its recent Nazi past and deal with its divided present translate into a more general legitimation of its cultural import and political effect, which can be useful today? Or does the more general attitude of the Frankfurt School toward humanism—which Horkheimer expressed in an essay called “The Concept of Man” just a year before his introduction to the exhibition—suggest a less comfortable fit between his position and that of those seeking to rescue entirely The Family of Man from the charge of photographic ideology?⁷

The occasion for Horkheimer’s talk—the exhibition’s opening on October 25, 1958, at Frankfurt’s Amerika-Haus, an institution funded by the American government—was hardly auspicious for the full display of his critical skills. Having recently returned to Germany to reestablish the Institut für Sozialforschung, with support enabled by his mutual trust with the enlightened US high commissioner for Germany, John H. McCloy, Horkheimer understood his public mission as a reeducator of Germans, especially youth, in the democratic values he had learned in exile.⁸ Although in private he maintained many of the darkly pessimistic sentiments and intransigent radicalism he and Theodor W. Adorno had expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment—a work, it should be noted, that remained out of print and absent from public discussion until pirated editions began to be circulated in the 1960s—in public, he was determined to play a constructive role in weaning Germany from the pathologies that had led to the Third Reich.⁹ In the context of the Cold War, where Horkheimer increasingly came to discern similarities between Stalinism and Nazism, it was clear that he had no hesitation about siding with the West, despite its many defects.¹⁰ Horkheimer in fact sought to retain his naturalized American citizenship even as he returned to Europe to live out the remainder of his life. For all his dismay with the culture industry he had witnessed firsthand in exile, he did not hesitate to consider himself an ambassador of the liberal democratic values, however imperfect their actual implementation, he had also absorbed during his sojourn in America.

Horkheimer began his introduction to the exhibition by stressing what he saw as its implicit philosophical point d’appui, which he argued tied together American and European, most notably German idealist, thought. Here, though, his touchstone was not Hegel, and certainly not Marx, but rather Immanuel Kant, who shared with American philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey a strong belief that the individual human being should be treated only as an end and never as a means. If there were a difference between the two traditions, it lay in the additional American assumption, derived from the immigration of people from many different backgrounds, “that there are close ties of kinship between all members of the human race, that there is a brotherhood of mankind.”¹¹ This was a lesson that only an elite of educated Europeans had learned, because of the poison of national enmities.

To make his point, Horkheimer cited the hopeful words of Francis Lieber, whom he identified simply as “a German professor who emigrated to America in the last century”¹² to the effect that nationalism might someday be replaced by a single global community. “The Family of Man,” he then argued, “illustrates this way of thinking; indeed it is representative of all the forces that are now counteracting the severe cultural shocks and regressive movements that have occurred in Europe in recent years. In this context it is eminently constructive.”¹³ Once again turning to Kant to spin out his argument, he evoked the philosopher’s celebrated essay of 1784, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,”¹⁴ claiming it provided a model not of the world as it was, but as it might be: “Humanity for Kant was not an entity, a living instance of which had to be found, indeed, not even a form with a content, but a posit that, in connection with other philosophical ideas, underlies much of the historical work of individuals and peoples.”¹⁵ An “idea,” we should understand, meant in Kant’s special vocabulary a purely theoretical concept to which no corresponding object could be given in sense experience and for which no synthetic a priori judgment, no cognitive claim, might therefore apply. By invoking it, Horkheimer was making clear what he saw as the regulative, counterfactual, even utopian quality of the notion of a unified humankind. As had Kant, he hoped that it might serve as a telos of human practice rather than a description of what was destined to occur.

However, because it spoke in the vaguest terms about humanity, Horkheimer went on, Kant’s model was far too abstract. Steichen’s exhibition happily provided a corrective to Kant’s abstract notion, and it did so by drawing on photography’s power to represent concrete differences rather than generic identities, the real motley variety of the world rather than a single model of human essence. But, because of the way in which the exhibition had been organized, he said, it transcended the irreconcilability or incommensurability of those differences. On the level of everyday life, it seemed to suggest, people in all cultures faced the same challenges and sought the same solutions. Without intention, the curators “were obeying, possibly without being fully aware of it, an inner logic of the whole, of the way these pictures interact and address one another, which gives them in their entirety a meaningfulness that is difficult to ignore.”¹⁶ By showing similarities and the interrelatedness of apparent opposites, the exhibition “tells us that individual human beings within a group and one community of people in relation to another should support each other rather than torment each other and work together to the best of their ability to bring about a world constitution based on reason with which everyone can be satisfied.” Thus, the philosophical and visual ideals are ultimately the same, even though the abstract idea of what Kant would have called “perpetual peace” could not actually be shown as such.

That admirable desideratum was anticipated instead through the way in which the exhibition enabled emotional identification with people of different backgrounds. Mimetic empathy was a path, Horkheimer observed, to the love that binds people together. In that effort, photographs—in fact, images in general—were needed to supplement the abstractions of theoretical concepts:

Even Plato’s Eros force, uplifting the spirit to eternal ideas, needed the knowledge of ephemeral things in order to achieve infinite knowledge, which, for him, is the meaning of all human existence. That is why thought needs the image, that is why the image can lead us to people and things, that is why the image has the valuable and not infrequently also dangerous power that thought alone cannot exert.¹⁷

Unlike cinema, photographs allow you to linger with details, discover the unexpected, and disclose the unfamiliar. “Indeed, this is what the exhibition has in common with real artists: it provides us with a new way of looking at things that we will never forget, of however little practical use it may be.”¹⁸

Horkheimer finished his introduction to the exhibition by returning to the question of identification. He noted that there was an important exception to the mimetic empathy aroused by Steichen’s selection of photographs that appears in those depicting what he called, once again following Kant, “radical evil.”¹⁹ Because the exhibition thwarts such identification in at least two cases—he does not specify the images or spell out exactly how they do so—it “insists on the consciousness of the freedom and the responsibility of the individual. It sides with human beings yet at the same time does not absolve them of guilt. It inspires tolerance of weakness, but not of barbarism.”²⁰

With these remarks, Horkheimer was clearly identifying with those who shared the exhibition’s goals and ratified its methods for achieving them. But for a student of his oeuvre, much in this introduction will seem very surprising. Unlike other critics of a scientistic version of Marxism, such as his erstwhile colleague Erich Fromm, he had always resisted the lure of a humanist alternative suggested in Marx’s 1844 Paris manuscripts.²¹ His evocation of Kant rather than Hegel or Marx, endorsing what Michel Foucault came to call Kant’s “empirico-transcendental doublet” of the individual and humanity,²² was in tension with what are normally taken to be the primary philosophical inspirations for Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Nor do we find any indication of his life-long fascination with Schopenhauer, whose illusionless pessimism he could still call in 1961 “the philosophic thought that is a match for reality.”²³

Perhaps because of its Kantian perspective, the introduction underplays the persistent power of intermediate identifications, whether with class, gender, nation, religion, or status group, which resist, for good or for ill, abstract homogenization on the level of the whole or the isolated singular. Rather than uncritically celebrating the American cult of individuality, as he seems to in his paean to the exhibition, Horkheimer had long harbored doubts about its darker side. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, he and Adorno had bitterly remarked that

the decay of individuality today not only teaches us to regard that category as historical but also raises doubts concerning its positive nature … In the autonomy and uniqueness of the individual, the resistance to the blind, regressive power of the irrational whole was crystallized. But that resistance was made possible only by the blindness and irrationality of the autonomous and unique individual.²⁴

In the chapter entitled “The Rise and Decline of the Individual” in his 1947 Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer bemoaned the survival of the ideology of individual self-preservation at a time when there no longer seemed a coherent self to preserve. “The dwindling away of individual thinking and resistance, as it is brought about by the economic and cultural mechanisms of modern industrialism, will render evolution towards the humane increasingly difficult.”²⁵

But nothing of these bleak assessments of the weaknesses of the bourgeois humanist notion of the individual remained in his introduction to The Family of Man. Additionally, Horkheimer glossed over one of Kant’s most fateful moves from “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” which would have been inconvenient to foreground in this context: the philosopher’s unsentimental justification of social conflict or what he called “asocial sociability” as the hidden mechanism of progress toward the goal of a cosmopolitan order of federated states. Instead of stressing the functional value of social strife, even violence, as had Kant, Horkheimer short-circuited the indirect process by which the ultimate pacification of social existence might be achieved. Unlike Hegel, who stressed the role of dialectical negation expressing the “cunning of reason,” and Marx with his valorization of the class struggle, he moved quickly from the still imperfect present to a more utopian world constitution based on reason.

But perhaps most unexpected of all is Horkheimer’s valorization of the power of images, photographic or otherwise, to give concrete meaning to the abstract yearnings expressed in philosophical language.²⁶ After his return from exile, Horkheimer came increasingly to identify with his Jewish roots, often invoking the taboo on graven images, the Bilderverbot, in Exodus 20:1–7 as a still potent reason for Critical Theory’s distrust of positive utopian fantasies.²⁷ Adorno would also frequently cite the same source in his characterizations of a doggedly negative dialectic, refusing all higher affirmative sublations.²⁸ They likewise invoked the Bilderverbot in the other direction, as explanation for their distrust of attempts to give realistic aesthetic form to the experience of the Holocaust.²⁹ Although often extolling the virtues of mimetic similarity rather than conceptual subsumption as a way to avoid the domination of otherness, they were deeply suspicious of the ways in which it could slide into denigrating mimicry, a pattern they had witnessed firsthand in the Nazi mockery of Jews.³⁰ In his introduction, however, mimesis is firmly on the side of empathetic identification alone.

The anomalous character of this text in Horkheimer’s thinking in this era is even more apparent if we compare it with another essay written at virtually the same time, his 1957 “The Concept of Man.”³¹ Impatient with the incessant pious chatter about the “crisis of man” in the postwar era—a phenomenon trenchantly probed by the American intellectual historian Mark Greif in his recent The Age of the Crisis of Man³²—Horkheimer argued that “the word ‘man’ no longer expresses the power of the subject who can resist the status quo, however heavily it may weigh upon him. Quite differently than in the context of critical philosophy, to speak of man today is to engage in the endless quest for an image of man that will provide orientation and guidance.”³³ The abstract appeal to “man,” whether anthropological or existential, is a deception designed to distract attention from the contradictory social realities that still smolder beneath an alienated totality that remains irrational to the core.

Rather than upholding the virtue of empathetic identification with individuals, “The Concept of Man” repeats the bleak characterization of the fate of individuality in the modern world that Horkheimer had lamented in earlier works written in the shadow of the Holocaust, such as Dialectic of Enlightenment or Eclipse of Reason: “The factors in the contemporary situation—population growth, a technology that is becoming fully automated, the centralization of economic and therefore political power, the increased rationality of the individual as a result of his work in industry—are inflicting upon life a degree of organization and manipulation that leaves the individual only enough spontaneity to launch himself onto the path prescribed for him.”³⁴ Any appeal to personal “authenticity” is thus ideological, an “empty well from which those who cannot achieve their own private life, their own decisions and inner power, fill up their dreams.”³⁵

Significantly, Horkheimer bemoaned the ineffectiveness of the contemporary nuclear family in resisting these tendencies, an argument that drew on the empirical work the Institute had done on the crisis of the bourgeois family in the 1930s.³⁶ Because children were becoming ever more directly socialized by society, particularly by the seductions of consumerism, they could not develop the interior strength needed to reject its conformist blandishments. The family was no longer a “haven in a heartless world,” defended by a nurturing mother, where an experience of childhood happiness might serve as a spur to critical reflection about its denial in later life.³⁷ Instead, the family’s integrity had been eroded, so that it now functioned only as a porous shield against the penetration of commodification and the modern media. Ironically, the seemingly progressive entry of women into the labor force, Horkheimer worried, had had its costs: “The principle of equality is penetrating even into the family, and the contrast between private and social spheres is being blunted. The emancipation of woman means that she must be the equal of her husband: each partner in the marriage (the very word ‘partner’ is significant) is evaluated even within the home according to criteria that prevail in society at large.”³⁸ Such equality was a sinister expression of the exchange principle in bourgeois society in which everything qualitatively different was rendered quantitatively fungible.

Mentioning the erosion of the traditional family lamented by Horkheimer in “The Concept of Man” raises the larger question of the symbolic function of the family in Steichen’s exhibition, which operated on two levels: the repetition of parallel images of happy nuclear families in different cultures and the metaphor in the title implying that humanity as such should be seen as one giant family. Many critics of The Family of Man excoriated it precisely for its tacit affirmation of the patriarchal, heteronormative nuclear family of the 1950s as a model of the family tout court. From our perspective today, at a time when families come in so many different varieties and the appeal to “family values” has turned into a coded way to decry those developments from a conservative perspective, it is easy to mock the homogenizing effect of the images in the exhibition.

Defenders of the exhibition, however, have contended that a tacit distinction was at work behind the depiction of the ideal family, which ironically mirrored criticisms made by Horkheimer’s own colleagues at the time in their classic study The Authoritarian Personality.³⁹ Mindful of the ways in which fascism had been welcomed by personalities trained to obey tyrannical fathers rather than absorb maternal love, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality had argued that such families produce a child who “can apparently never quite establish his personal and masculine identity; he thus has to look for it in a collective system where there is opportunity both for submission to the powerful and for retaliation upon the powerless.”⁴⁰ Unprejudiced “democratic” characters, in contrast, “received more love and therefore have basically more security in their relationships to their parents. Disagreements with, and resentment against, the parents are openly worked out, resulting in a much greater degree of independence from them. This independence is carried over into the subject’s attitude toward social institutions and authorities in general.”⁴¹ It was this version of the family, so champions of the exhibition have argued, that Steichen tacitly hoped to foster.

Although Horkheimer too favored this version of the family, he feared in “The Concept of Man” and elsewhere that it was in danger of disappearing even in ostensibly democratic countries such as the United States. This anxiety was not, however, apparent in his introduction to the exhibition. Instead, he contented himself with vague assurances that the images exhorted people to “support each other rather than torment each other and work together to the best of their ability to bring about a world constitution based on reason with which everyone can be satisfied. And that this constitution is possible.” This was clearly not the occasion, he must have reasoned, for sour pronouncements about ubiquitous threats to the type of nonauthoritarian family he thought necessary to realize that utopia.

What about the exhibition’s more general evocation of “man” as a kind of extended family? In his introduction, Horkheimer turned to the American “melting pot” experience as the source, to cite his words once again, of the healthy “awareness that there are close ties of kinship between all members of the human race, that there is a brotherhood of mankind.” Unlike Roland Barthes, with his bitter question, “But why not ask the parents of Emmett Till, the young Negro assassinated by the Whites what they think of The Great Family of Man?,”⁴² he did not pause to ponder how pervasive that awareness actually might be in the racially divided America of his day. Instead, he optimistically asserted that through the magic of empathetic visual identification, the viewer, and here he is talking to the citizens of Frankfurt, “can even see himself in the native in the jungle.”⁴³ Whether or not the reverse was just as likely to be true is not a question he felt compelled to pose. Nor did he voice any concern about the gender implications of evoking universal “brotherhood” as the model of familial solidarity or think twice before invoking the stereotype of non-Westerners as “natives in jungles.”

In response to these absences, recent defenders of the exhibition’s intentions have pointed to Steichen’s acknowledgment that the title had, in fact, been suggested by his brother-in-law, poet Carl Sandburg, who had traced it to various speeches by no less an admirable figure than Abraham Lincoln.⁴⁴ The distinguished pedigree of the phrase, they contend, points to its implications not only for racial equality but also for women’s suffrage, which Lincoln had explicitly championed. So, by tacitly endorsing the rhetoric of the human family and not foregrounding his anxiety over the crisis of actual families, Horkheimer, the inference might be drawn, was actually supporting the inclusivist agenda pursued by Steichen.

There is, however, another pedigree for the metaphor, which Horkheimer himself had in fact noted elsewhere with alarm. In his study of “Authoritarianism and the Family Today,” which appeared in 1949, he had noted that the Nazis had employed the rhetoric of the nation as a collective family, which had meant not only the suppression of class and other social differences but also the creation of dangerous pseudo-biological kinship distinctions that served to stigmatize alleged outsiders as racially inferior. Extending the boundaries of the putative family to the species was admittedly designed to avoid such in/out group distinctions, but it tacitly perpetuated them when it came to the domination of other animals, who were treated as not part of the family of man. Horkheimer, indebted as he was to Schopenhauer, was, in fact, an earlier critic of the instrumental treatment of animals.⁴⁵ But none of this anxiety about the ambiguous implications of humanism and the family metaphor was evident in his introduction to the exhibition.

Nor did Horkheimer ponder the limits of understanding more general human relations in familial terms. Not only have patriarchal analogies been easily abused in antidemocratic defenses of monarchy—for example, Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, famously the target of John Locke’s ire—but paternalist rule in general was in tension with the right of an allegedly “immature” subaltern to full autonomy. Spousal violence and child abuse were, after all, lamentably widespread practices, rarely protested until recently.⁴⁶ The metaphor of brotherhood as idealized human interaction, even when extended to mean siblings in general, was also vulnerable to the charge that it forgot the ability of brothers, at least since Cain’s assault on Abel, to become rivals, indeed deadly ones. If humankind were really a family, might it not just as well be a dysfunctional one? Think, for example, of the house of Atreus—or even the family of Antigone, that epitome of sibling love, who was, it must be remembered, the daughter/sister of Oedipus, not exactly a model of filial piety.

More fundamentally, the extension of kinship to embrace the entire species, while plausible on some attenuated genetic level, ignores the powerful distinctions between endogenous and exogenous groupings that underlay the incest taboo so fundamental to human civilization. Politics, it might be said, is the art of learning to live with exogenous others, who may be marriage material, but until the knot is tied, are anything but kin, loving or otherwise. At best they may be recognizable neighbors in a tightly knit community, but they are more often anonymous strangers within the borders of a more capacious and impersonal society or a fortiori aliens outside its borders. If politics means anything, it means dealing impersonally with rivals and adversaries, as well as friends, both genuine and of convenience, who are not in any meaningful sense bound to us by the affective ties of family. A political community, as we know, is more imagined than real, the inclusivity of its members premised on the exclusion of those outside its boundaries. We may owe temporary hospitality to strangers should they come to our shores seeking succor—Kant thought it was the one binding law of a cosmopolitan world order⁴⁷—but not permanent domicile in the way we might to family members. Toleration of otherness and respect for what makes us all human does not mean absorbing the stranger into our family, no matter how extended we might construe it. Moral duty does not rest on ties of affection and indeed might at times contradict them, and it is impossible to build a healthy polity on emotional grounds alone. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt once remarked, “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this very reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.”⁴⁸

All of these considerations were absent from Horkheimer’s introduction and did not surface to derail his enthusiasm for the familial metaphor underlying Steichen’s exhibition. But before we dismiss him too quickly as yet another Cold War apologist for “photographic ideology,” it would be wise to pause with his self-evident motivation, which helps explain the difference between his response and that of Roland Barthes to the exhibition. In a Germany still struggling to move beyond the insidious ideology of racial hierarchy and ethnic exclusion that had brought such a ruinous outcome, it was necessary to swallow whatever qualms one might have about the potential costs of overly abstract humanist universalism and the implications of extending the metaphor of a family from the nation or race to the species. At a time when Martin Heidegger’s elevation of Being over humanity as the central focus of philosophy posed a danger to the hope of making a clean break with the Nazi past, it was important to remind Germans that Kant still remained relevant and that his thought might be compatible with liberal American intellectual traditions as well. Against the existentialist insistence that essentialism was an outmoded philosophical concept that transformed one contingent set of conditions into a dubious universality of reductive sameness, it was healthy to remember the critical work that the concept of essence might do when it is transformed from an eternal truth into a normative potential to be realized historically.⁴⁹

In contrast, Roland Barthes could draw on the very different lessons a Frenchman might have learned from the negative effects of an overly abstract humanism, which had lost its appreciation of the value of cultural difference and historical variation in its zeal to carry out its alleged “civilizing mission.” These lessons, as Stefanos Geroulanos has recently shown, were shared as early as the 1930s by many in France who had developed antifoundational negative anthropologies as a result.⁵⁰ Although there had long been religious condemnations of humanism, the innovation of these thinkers was their explicit atheism, which resisted the assumption that all men were the same because they were allegedly created in God’s image. Barthes, it should be noted, made precisely this connection in attacking the putative unity underlying depictions of difference in images chosen by Steichen: “This means postulating a human essence, and here is God re-introduced into our Exhibition: the diversity of men proclaims his power, his richness; the unity of gestures demonstrates his will.”⁵¹ From the perspective of an atheistic historicism, in which any positive philosophical anthropology was a “myth” grounded in the secularization of religious universalism, the exhibition could only be ideological, and Horkheimer’s defense of it a mystifying exercise in false consciousness.

From Barthes’s perspective, it is thus easy to see why the exhibition might warrant dismissal as ideological—as indeed it also might, as noted, from that adopted in many of Horkheimer’s other writings. But before we then conclude that this dismissal is the last word and reject the recent attempts at rebuttal, we need to put a little pressure on the vexed concept of ideology itself. When casually used, “ideology” is a term of opprobrium, suggesting false consciousness and mystification, either deliberate or not, and is implicitly opposed to the nobler ideals of truth, scientific knowledge or at least critique. It is understood to reflect either the interests of a group that employs it for its own partial ends, masking and/or justifying its power, or the unconscious reaction to collective psychological stress that generates ideology as a dubious way of relieving that stress (for example, through scapegoating). As such, it acts as a distorting mirror or refracting filter through which reality is prevented from revealing itself in its unmediated and naked form.

But in addition to the explicitly negative connotation of the word that draws on a positive alternative more often implied than forcefully defended, there is a more complex, dialectical alternative that acknowledges the latent critical function of ideology as well. Take, for example, the classic example of Marx’s characterization of religion as the opiate of the masses. The paragraph in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction,” where this famous formulation appears, begins with the acknowledgment that “religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Marx then says that critique, which was the methodological basis of historical materialism, “has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower.”⁵²

It is worth recalling these familiar lines to remind us that critiques of ideology may well depend on acknowledging the discontent, albeit in mediated and distorted form, generated by intolerable and unjust conditions, and the desire to relieve those conditions, that is harbored in even the most insidiously consolatory ideological formations. Returning to our main concern, it lets us recognize that we need not reduce our response to a culturally complex phenomenon like The Family of Man to either a simple-minded dismissal or a defensive celebration. In other words, even if its detractors had a point in decrying its inadvertent ideological function, the exhibition can also be credited with possessing a critical potential—the “protest against real suffering” that Marx saw in religion—that also demands recognition.

Thus, even if Barthes is right to see a religious source of the humanist faith in a shared human essence, it is possible to acknowledge that origin not merely to unmask and debunk it, but rather to recognize that critical protest against an unjust status quo often appears, as Marx himself conceded, in the garb of religion.⁵³ If we take Horkheimer’s interpretation of the exhibition as less a celebration of the present than a challenge to make a different and better future, his endorsement of an essential human condition as normative rather than descriptive, and his adoption of perpetual peace as the telos of history in a Kantian counter-factual, regulative ideal with practical intent, we can discern the utopian impulse lurking beneath the surface of what may appear as unabashed Cold War ideology. Even if Horkheimer’s introduction should be situated in the larger context of his work, which provides ample ammunition for those who lament The Family of Man’s complicity with a problematic status quo, we can still honor his intention to read the exhibition against that grain and inspire a still volatile post–Nazi Germany to work through the unresolved issues of its recent past. Insofar as many of these issues still, alas, remain exigent in the twenty-first century, new sets of eyes can still profit from the experience of viewing Steichen’s “blockbuster exhibition of postwar photographic ideology.”