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ОглавлениеPreface to the 1996 Edition
I arrived in Berkeley for the first time in August 1968, a twenty-four year old graduate student, invited by Leo Lowenthal to examine his extensive personal archive of materials from the Institute of Social Research. As I spent long hours poring over years of letters and unpublished manuscripts, amassing questions about figures, events and ideas that Lowenthal patiently answered, the world outside was convulsed by a series of cataclysmic events. On the 21st of August, tanks from the Soviet Union and its allies rumbled into Prague, violently ending the experiment in “Marxism with a Human Face” that had so captivated the imaginations of non-doctrinaire leftists earlier that year. Only a few days later as “the whole world was watching,” the Democratic convention in Chicago was disrupted by protestors enraged by both President Johnson’s policies in Vietnam and the likelihood that the party’s nominee, Hubert Humphrey, would continue his predecessor’s sorry course.
On the daily walk from my apartment to Lowenthal’s office, I passed the forlorn, now empty Berkeley campaign headquarters of Robert Kennedy, whose assassination two months earlier had meant the end for many of the hopes that fundamental change might come, in the catch-phrase of the time, by “working within the system.” The Berkeley campus was itself a site for escalating confrontations between students and authorities egged on by a state administration headed by then Governor Ronald Reagan. In the surrounding community, the Black Panther Party was an insistent presence, bearing witness to the still volatile racial tensions that had exploded into ghetto riots after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. that spring.
The pressure of these circumstances was impossible to ignore as I made my way through the treasure trove of documents Lowenthal generously put at my disposal. The Frankfurt School had just begun to emerge into public consciousness as a theoretical inspiration—still, to be sure, only dimly understood—of the New Left here and abroad. Its impact was, in fact, now spreading well beyond the confines of academia.1 When I arrived in Berkeley, one of the main protagonists in the story I hoped to tell, Herbert Marcuse, was in hiding from death threats in Lowenthal’s summer home in Carmel Valley. Only a few months before, during the “events” of May in Paris, student enragés had displayed placards emblazoned with the names “Marx/Mao/Marcuse.” Pilloried by the anti-Communist Right in California, which sought to terminate his contract at the University of California, San Diego campus, Marcuse was also the target of increasingly virulent attacks by the orthodox Left. Despite the principled support he extended to his controversial former student and Communist Party leader, Angela Davis, he was denounced for having abandoned the proletariat as agent of revolution. Marcuse, it soon became evident to me, was equally a source of uneasiness for most of his former Institut colleagues who were alarmed by his outspoken political militancy.
A few months later after a semester back at Harvard, I readied myself to leave for Europe to continue research in Frankfurt and Montagnola, Switzerland. Shortly before my departure in January 1969, I happened to be at a party in New York, where I was introduced to Mark Rudd, the fiery leader of the Columbia student uprising who was soon to embark on the desperate, self-destructive adventure that was called the Weather Underground. When I told him of my dissertation project, he contemptuously responded that Adorno and Horkheimer were craven sell-outs, who had betrayed the revolutionary cause; Adorno’s very change of name from the Jewish-sounding Wiesengrund, Rudd snarled, betokened his cowardice.
Such sentiments turned out to be all too common in the Frankfurt where I settled in early February. A number of university buildings were occupied in an on-going “active strike” that led to improvised courses in Marxist theory and practice. The Sociology Department had been rebaptized “the Spartacus Department” after the militants of the early Weimar years. On January 31st, the Institut für Sozialforschung itself had been taken over by radical students—or so thought its anxious directors, Adorno and Ludwig von Friedeburg, who had called the police to clear the building. Although it turned out to be just an embarrassing misunderstanding (the students were only looking for a place to hold a discussion), the gulf between the current leadership of the Frankfurt School and their unwanted progeny widened still further. The effects were obvious when Jürgen Habermas, still under fire for his imprudent condemnation of “left fascism,” showed me the lock on his office phone to prevent students who might break in from making long-distance calls. Adorno also nervously refused to allow me to tape our conversations for fear that he might leave “verbal fingerprints.”
I left Frankfurt for Switzerland only a few weeks before the unhappy incident in April in which several women belonging to the German SDS interrupted one of Adorno’s lectures by rushing on the stage and baring their breasts, a symbolic act of a patricide that would come to seem a prefiguration of his actual death from a heart attack in August 1969. The beautiful Ticino town of Montagnola, near Lugano, where Horkheimer and Pollock lived in comfortable retirement appeared, to be sure, far removed from the tumult of Berkeley or Frankfurt. I was able to interview them extensively and work on their materials in a far less charged climate than I had found myself in before. But even in such relative isolation, the general global situation seemed filled with an odd mixture of radical promise and reactionary menace. A year later, after I had returned to America to finish my dissertation, Pollock wrote to me that
From this distance, what is happening in the USA looks really pathetic. All these symptoms of disintegration of a “Great Society” (this is meant quite seriously considering the positive elements of American life as measured in terms of other countries) point to no other alternative but the loss of the remaining liberties and the rule of a narrowly materialistic middle class under a ruthless “Führer.”2
Such an apocalyptic vision thankfully never materialized, but recalling Pollock’s alarm along with the other events mentioned above can help remind the reader of this second edition of The Dialectical Imagination of the supercharged context in which the book was originally written and initially received. Although the times may not have been as tempestuous as they were during the battle of Jena of 1806, which famously raged around Hegel as he completed his Phenomenology of the Spirit, I certainly did not find myself in a typically contemplative scholarly setting removed from the pressures of the day.
When the revised dissertation was published in 1973, the hopes and fears of the late 1960s were still potent, the Vietnam War had two more years to run its course, and the New Left was not yet a spent force. The intellectual tradition that became known as Western Marxism was still described in an American anthology of 1972 as an “unknown dimension,”3 which might provide useful ideas for the struggles of the present and future. Translations of its classical texts were only first becoming available at that time (Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness in 1971, for example, and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment the following year), and there was a strong sense of intellectual treasure still to be excavated. Journals like New Left Review, Telos, and New German Critique tumbled over each other in their eagerness to present, explicate and apply ideas that promised to help subvert the status quo.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that certain politically invested reviewers of The Dialectical Imagination were impatient with what they saw as an “elegiac” tone signaled by the claim in the introduction that the School’s historical moment was “now irrevocably past.” They were convinced, the example of the occasional extremist like Mark Rudd aside, that Critical Theory contained resources for the practical struggles of the present and future. In truth, I had never been entirely sympathetic to the more questionable arguments of certain of its adherents.4 Temperamentally unsuited to militant activism, I always maintained a certain skeptical distance from the maximalist tendencies of the New Left and had resisted joining any particular faction of “the movement.”
But The Dialectical Imagination was certainly written with the hope of conveying the palpable sense of excitement and promise I felt in unearthing and trying to sort out so radically unfamiliar and challenging a corpus of work. Although the precise historical moment of the School’s central figures was indeed past (insofar as their major work was clearly behind them and many were no longer alive), it seemed to me that the reception and appropriation of that work still lay very much in the future. The book was written, at least in part, in the hope of facilitating that process, but without inviting the uncritical dogmatism that characterized so many other embraces of Marxist theory.
This expectation became realized beyond my most grandiose fantasies, as the Frankfurt School soon emerged as the focus of intense contemporary as well as historical interest. Ultimately translated into eight languages with a ninth, into Chinese, now imminent, The Dialectical Imagination has been able to play a modest role in introducing the School to an international audience. In particular, the German translation of 1976 helped stimulate a serious historical interest where current controversies had been too heated to permit a detached or scholarly account (indeed at that very moment, the School was serving as the whipping boy of conservatives who blamed the terrorism of the left on its teachings). Written by an outsider with no prior investment in its ideas or personal debts to its members,5 the book seems to have had the virtue of a certain innocence, which allowed both friends and foes of the School to take from it different lessons. Unlike certain later treatments, reflecting a more disillusioned and debunking mood, it luckily avoided what the Germans call Kammerdienerperspektive: the view from below by a servant who washes dirty linen.
Significantly for The Dialectical Imagination’s later fate, the reception of Critical Theory outlived the moment of the recovery and absorption of Western Marxism in the 1970s. The end of this moment betokened a precipitous decline in interest in other figures in its history, such as Karl Korsch, Louis Althusser or Lucien Goldmann, but the Frankfurt School managed to become an enduring fixture in the theoretical landscape of the late 20th century. Although its coherence as a monolithic school may now seem less evident than it did when I first sought to write its history, the general impulses of Critical Theory are still identifiable a quarter century later, even as its work has been hybridized and amalgamated with other theoretical tendencies.
One major reason for the Frankfurt School’s continued relevance is the very richness and variety of the work done under its auspices. If certain figures, such as Marcuse, Horkheimer and Fromm seem less powerful a presence today than they did when I began my research,6 others like Adorno and Benjamin have only increased in importance. As each new translation of their works has appeared, it seems to reach wider audiences. Members once assumed to be marginal, such as Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, have gained a new hearing in the wake of a waxing interest in jurisprudential and legal questions from the Weimar era, an interest piqued in part by the vigorous reception—both on the left and the right—of the controversial jurist Carl Schmitt.7
Another source of the School’s abiding power has been the remarkable quality of work done by its many descendants, and not merely in Europe and America.8 It is now conventional in Germany to speak of a second generation of the Frankfurt School whose most notable members are Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt and Albrecht Wellmer, as well as a third generation, which would include Axel Honneth, Peter Bürger, Oskar Negt, Helmut Dubiel, Claus Offe, Alfons Söllner, Hauke Brunkhorst, Detlev Claussen, W. Martin Lüdke and Christoph Menke. Although in his last years Lukács spawned a “Budapest School” and Galvano della Volpe and Althusser enjoyed large followings for a while, no comparable tradition of thought has managed to renew itself with as much vigor and as little pious repetition as that whose early history this book tried to trace.
There is, however, still another explanation for the dogged survival of interest in Critical Theory, which allowed it to remain potent even after the larger paradigm of Western Marxism lost its momentum: its unexpected fit with the concerns and anxieties of an era whose beginnings were only dimly perceptible, if at all, when The Dialectical Imagination first appeared. It turns out that 1973 was more than the highwater mark in the American New Left’s discovery of European Western Marxist theory in its efforts to challenge bourgeois society; indeed, it can be said to have had a very different significance in initiating another narrative whose end is not yet in sight.
The global recession of 1973 was the first since the end of World War II and was perhaps most dramatically symbolized by the long lines at gas stations precipitated by the sudden rise in oil prices by OPEC. The result, to simplify a complicated process, was a radical restructuring of the world economic system which ultimately led to, or was at least signaled by, the bankruptcy of the “actually existing socialism” of the East and the piecemeal abandonment of the Keynesian-Fordist policies of the West. What David Harvey has called the rise of a new system of “flexible accumulation” meant the growing importance of international finance capital over the increasingly impotent nation state; the globalization of labor markets producing accelerated migration of cheap foreign labor and the weakening of the trade union movement; the compression of time and space through technological innovations; and the blunting of capitalism’s tendency to overaccumulate through the temporal and spatial displacement of demand.9 Although by no means stable and smoothly functioning, the system that began to crystallize in 1973 seems to produce crises that are neither controllable by a conscious steering mechanism (such as state fiscal and monetary policy) nor able to generate a collective social actor, an heir to the Marxist proletariat, able to challenge it from within.
At first glance, such developments might seem to provide little sustenance for a continued interest in the Institut für Socialforschung’s legacy. Neither the traditional Marxist crisis theory espoused by Henryk Grossmann, nor Franz Neumann’s notion of a mixture of monopoly capitalism and a command economy, nor Frederick Pollock’s idea of state capitalism and the “primacy of the political” conform to the new paradigm. Even Claus Offe’s later argument for “disorganized capitalism” may be deficient, if Harvey is right in claiming that “capitalism is becoming ever more tightly organized through dispersal, geographical mobility, and flexible responses in labor markets, labor processes, and consumer markets, all accompanied by hefty doses of institutional, product, and technological innovation.”10
In fact, there is little in the work done by the Institut on economic issues, it has to be admitted, that illuminates the post-1973 restructuring of capitalism.11 It is, however, on the level of its cultural correlate that the rise of the post-Fordist system of flexible accumulation may help explain the Frankfurt School’s staying power. For, if Harvey is right, what has become known as postmodernism is a cultural condition that somehow expresses and reflects—as well as at times resists—the economic changes that can be dated from around 1973. In contrast to many of the other variants of Western Marxism, Critical Theory has found this new climate relatively hospitable, if more so in America than in Germany, where the battle lines between post-modernists and second generation Critical Theorists have been sharply drawn. As questions of political economy and political praxis have been marginalized and those of culture and aesthetics gained center stage, the School’s varied and far-reaching explorations of these domains have stirred renewed interest and controversy.12
It would be mistaken, of course, to reduce the legacy of Critical Theory tout court to a prolegomenon to postmodernism, however we may define that vexed term. Habermas’s spirited defense of the uncompleted project of modernity,13 Lowenthal’s last warnings against “irrational and neomythological” concepts like “post-histoire,”14 and Adorno’s insistence on the distinction between high and low art and partisanship for modernists such as Beckett, Kafka and Schoenberg against the leveling impact of the Culture Industry, all make it plain that in many important ways the Frankfurt School resists wholesale inclusion among the forebears of postmodernism. In fact, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, it may well be the eclectic pastiches of Stravinsky (which Adorno despised) rather than the progressive innovations of Schoenberg (which he generally admired) that can be said to have anticipated a key feature of postmodernist culture.15 The central role of “ideology critique” in Critical Theory is, moreover, relegated to the margins of most postmodernist theory, which lacks—or rather, deliberately scorns the possibility of—any point d’ appui for such a critique, preferring instead a cynical reason, if indeed a reason at all, that attacks all transcendent positions as discredited foundationalism and mocks utopianism as inherently fallacious.16
And yet, in certain respects, the general theoretical trajectory of at least several members of the School’s first generation can be said to have prepared the ground for the postmodern turn and thus found a new audience for its work. Most obviously, their reluctant jettisoning of a triumphalist notion of impending human emancipation, based on a single story of species-wide progress produced by class struggle, resonates with the characteristic postmodernist abandonment of any meta-narrative, especially one culminating in redemption. In fact, the temporalities of the Frankfurt School, the complex narratives they fashioned of rise, fall, and recurrence, were often as mixed and contradictory as those adopted by many postmodernist thinkers. So too, the radical critique of the Western tradition of instrumental, technological rationality, most extensively elaborated in Dialectic of Enlightenment with its dark ruminations about the entwinement of myth and reason, can be seen as potentially consonant with post-modernist suspicion towards all versions of reason.17 Indeed, it has sometimes been taken as such by those in the School’s second generation, like Habermas, who themselves resist precisely that conclusion.18
Adorno’s “negative dialectics” and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction have also earned frequent comparisons because of their common rejection of totalizing philosophies of identity, distrust of first principles and origins, suspicion of idealist ideologies of sublation, and valorization of allegorical over symbolic modes of representation. Although the resolutely Utopian Adorno resisted accepting the repetition without resolution that has been so congenial to the deconstructive temper,19 his “melancholy science” has seemed to some only a small step away from the principled refusal to mourn in Derrida. The multi-faceted defense of a certain notion of benign mimesis both in Critical Theory and the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has also attracted attention, as have certain affinities with Lacan’s critique of ego psychology.20
So too, Michel Foucault’s genealogical history of the body, hostility to normalization and discipline, micrological attention to detail, and fascination with the relations between knowledge and power have been seen as close to the concerns of Critical Theory. Although Foucault famously criticized the Freudian Marxism of Marcuse in his History of Sexuality for assuming a trans-historical norm of libidinal realization, significant parallels have been found in their common questioning of dominant notions of normative sexuality and critique of repressive desublimation.21 Indeed, Foucault himself once admitted that “if I had encountered the Frankfurt School while young, I would have been seduced to the point of doing nothing else in life but the job of commenting on them. Instead, their influence on me remains retrospective, a contribution reached when I was no longer at the age of intellectual discoveries.’”22
A lively battle has also been waged over the contested legacy of Walter Benjamin, in which deconstructionists like Paul de Man, Samuel Weber, Rainer Nägele and Werner Hammacher have sought to read him largely in their terms.23 Derrida himself has been intrigued by Benjamin’s earliest writings, most notably his Critique of Violence, with its still mystical evocation of a notion of divine justice and fascination with primordial violence, as an antidote to the leveling egalitarianism of its human (and humanist) counterpart.24 Benjamin’s complicated debts to French Surrealism have been remembered at a time when the importance of such Surrealists as Georges Bataille for post-structuralism has been widely recognized.25 Although the stubbornly redemptive moment in Benjamin’s thought, as well as his belief in an Adamic Ursprache in which name and thing were one, are hard to reconcile with deconstruction’s suspicion of plenitudinous origins and endpoints, there is sufficient warrant in the tangled web of texts he left behind to place him at least in a tense constellation with these later thinkers.
This is not the place to present a serious analysis of all the parallels and contrasts between Critical Theory and postmodernism their various guises. Suffice it to say that the post-New Left context of reception has been generally hospitable to the continued appropriation of at least certain legacies of the Frankfurt School, which have become powerful “stars” in what Richard Bernstein has dubbed “the new constellation” of contemporary thought.26 As Jean-François Lyotard himself has acknowledged, “when one reads Adorno now—above all texts like Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics and Minima Moralia —with these names [Derrida, Serres, Foucault, Levinas and Deleuze] in mind, one senses the element of an anticipation of the postmodern in his thought even though it is still largely reticent, or refused.”27
What must, of course, also be acknowledged is that Critical Theory has served for some in the new context as a bulwark against what has seemed the most nihilistic, relativistic and counter-Enlightenment implications of certain postmodern theories. Adorno’s anticipatory refusal of postmodernism (to which Lyotard alludes in the remarks cited above) is derived from his stubborn reluctance to give up on the questions of social justice and truth (understood ultimately as “the true society”), or forego any hope for finding a political means to realize them. Many current exponents of Critical Theory, such as the editors of the new journal Constellations, Seyla Benhabib and Andrew Arato, follow Habermas in tenaciously maintaining the viability of the project of modernity as the way to achieve those goals, stripped, to be sure, of its redemptive or Utopian implications.
If, however, one accepts the distinction between a postmodernism of resistance and one of affirmation, then it may be that the former can legitimately be seen as one of the plausible, if unexpected, offshoots of the Frankfurt School, once at least its more orthodox Marxist baggage is thrown overboard. Even those postmodernists who refuse to move beyond the horizon of Marxism, like Jameson, have found at least Adorno, once a “doubtless ally when there were still powerful and oppositional currents,” now “a dialectical model for the 1990s. His introspective or reflexive dialectic befits a situation in which—on account of the dimensions and unevenness of the new global world order—the relationship between the individual and the system seems ill-defined, if not fluid, or even dissolved.”28 What Habermas once called Adorno’s “strategy of hibernation” now looks less like the cowardice the Mark Rudds of a generation ago so scornfully dimissed than a model of radical intellectual survival during an endless political winter.
Ruminations of this sort have become familiar now that the academy has become virtually the last refuge of critical thinking of the type epitomized by the Frankfurt School and the opportunities for its practical realization have virtually disappeared. What was hopefully proclaimed the “long march through the institutions” in the 1960s stalled in the decades that followed, turning into an interminable sojourn without much prospect of—and it often seems no longer much interest in—exiting at the other side. Perhaps only the alarmist Right has taken seriously the paradoxical “success” of the “long march” project, which helped fuel its often hysterical campaign against the alleged specter of “political correctness.” On the other end of the spectrum, the academization of the New Left is just as likely to be bemoaned as an emblem of political exhaustion. Whatever the truth of these interpretations,29 it cannot be doubted that Critical Theory has achieved an unexpectedly secure—perhaps ironically even a canonical—status as a central theoretical impulse in contemporary academic life.
When, in fact, I was recently asked by colleagues in Osaka to edit a two-volume collection of essays by American followers of the Frankfurt School for a Japanese audience, it quickly became clear how central it actually had become. Among the large pool of possible contributors were tenured faculty in philosophy, political science, history, German literature, and sociology departments at Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, Columbia, Rice, Northwestern, the University of Texas, the University of Chicago, the New School, and other leading institutions. Only the occasional exception, such as the independent culture critic and gadfly of the academy Russell Jacoby, proved the rule. The isolation of the Frankfurt School during its initial period in America, documented in this book, was obviously a thing of the past. That peculiarly fruitful, if often painful, alienation from traditional institutional contexts, whose importance for the development of Critical Theory I later attempted to trace in an essay written after The Dialectical Imagination appeared,30 no longer obtained; Adorno’s Flaschenpost, his message bottles thrown into the “flood of barbarism bursting on Europe” have reached many shores in our thankfully less barbarous times. Now the inheritance of the Frankfurt School—and the continuing exploration of its possibilities in the present—can be judged in the full glare of that public sphere of whose vital, if often precarious existence Habermas has made us all so aware, or at least in the significant sub-sphere of it that we call the academic community. That such “success” may well pay tribute to the domesticating power of the cultural apparatus of capitalism cannot be denied, but only those who assume marginality is by itself and in all conditions a self-evident virtue could fail to acknowledge a certain benefit.
The same might be said of the history of the School itself, which has continued to be researched and rewritten by a host of scholars from many different countries. As new archival materials have come to light and the last surviving members have passed from the scene, the story I attempted to tell in this book has gained in complexity and nuance. Comparative research on other dimensions of the intellectual migration from Nazi Germany, rival currents in Western Marxism and alternative 20th-century theoretical traditions have put it ever more sharply into relief. Such scholars as Susan Buck-Morss, Gillian Rose, David Held, Helmut Dubiel, Ulrike Migdal, Alfons Söllner, Barry Katz, Russell Berman, Wolfgang Bonß, Douglas Kellner, Richard Wolin, Miriam Hansen, Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Willem van Reijin, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Stephen Eric Bronner—to mention only some of the most prominent—have fleshed out many of the details of the story and added new perspectives. There is even now a glossy “photobiography” of the School, which provides images of all the relevant figures, along with their life histories.31
The general outlines of the narrative, however, have remained largely intact and so I have resisted the temptation to tamper with the original text of this book, a few factual corrections aside, and integrate all of the new information recently recovered or contend with the flood of new interpretations of the School’s legacy. Although a detailed historical synthesis appeared in 1986, Rolf Wiggershaus’s treatment of the story up until Adorno’s death, which is now happily available in English,32 even its nearly 800 pages cannot do justice to all of the work that has been and continues to be done on the figures and ideas it treats. Having myself attempted elsewhere to address some of the lacunae in The Dialectical Imagination,33 I know how daunting the task now is. It is my hope that the book’s reissue can stimulate as much interest in the years to come as the first edition did nearly a quarter century ago. For if the Frankfurt School has been so successful in transcending its original context and resonating with the very different concerns of the sixties and the eighties, stubbornly surviving to become one of the mainstays of that uncertain and beleaguered amalgam we can call fin-de-siècle socialism, it may still have unexpected things to teach us well into the 21st century.
Berkeley, July, 1995
NOTES
1. It turns out that even royalty was curious. When he was a student at Cambridge, Prince Charles was told to read Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man by his tutor Peter Lazlett. According to one account, “Charles told him he read it ‘with father’ while on a royal tour of Australia, They inspected troops during the day and read about bourgeois mystification in the evening. . . . Charles did not comment on what he had learned.” Bryan Appleyard, “King of a Fragile New Europe?,” The Sunday Times, London, July 22, 1990, p. 6.
2. Friedrich Pollock to Martin Jay, Montagnola, May 13,1970.
3. Dick Howard and Karl E. Klare, eds., The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism Since Lenin (New York, 1972).
4. At the fifth annual Socialist Scholar’s Conference in September, 1969,1 gave a talk entitled “The Metapolitics of Utopianism,” which was published, under a variety of titles chosen by their editors, in Radical America, 4,3 (April, 1970); Dissent, 17, 4 (July-August, 1970); George Fischer, ed., The Revival of American Socialism: Selected Papers of the Socialist Scholars Conference (New York, 1971). It was republished in my collection Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration From Germany to America (New York, 1986). In it, I criticized Marcuse’s totalizing notion of the “Great Refusal” as a kind of aesthetic metapolitics that underestimated the importance of pluralism.
5. It was written before I joined Lowenthal on the Berkeley faculty and was privileged to develop a warm and close friendship with him. For my reflections on his legacy, see my introduction to the Festschrift for his 80th birthday in Telos, 45 (Fall, 1980) and “Leo Lowenthal: In Memoriam,” Telos, 93 (Fall, 1992).
6. They are, however, by no means entirely neglected. See, for example, the recent collections Erich Fromm und die Frankfurter Schule, eds., Michael Kessler and Rainer Funk (Tübingen, 1992); On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, eds. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonß, and John McCole (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Marcuse: From the New Left to the Next Left, eds., John Bokina and Timothy J. Lukes (Kansas, 1994).
7. See, in particular, William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). A debate about Schmitt’s relations to Critical Theory was launched by Ellen Kennedy. See her “Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School,” and the responses by Martin Jay, “Reconciling the Irreconcilable? A Rejoinder to Kennedy,” Alfons Söllner, “Beyond Carl Schmitt: Political Theory in the Frankfurt School,” and Ulrich K. Preuss, “The Critique of German Liberalism: A Reply to Kennedy,” all in Telos, 71 (Spring, 1987). For her reply, see Ellen Kennedy, “Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School,” Telos, 73 (Fall, 1987).
8. See, for example, the discussion of its importance in Latin America in Martin Traine, “Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen” Die Frankfurter Schule und Lateinamerika (Cologne, 1994). In Australia, although inspired by the Budapest School members who emigrated there in the 1970s, the journal Thesis Eleven also shows a strong interest in the legacy of Critical Theory. In Japan, the recently launched journal Ba-Topos plays a similar role.
9. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1989).
10. Ibid., p. 159. Offe’s argument can be found in his Disorganized Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics, ed. John Keane (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
11. For a global critique, see Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1993), chapter 3.
12. For a general survey of the recent reception of Critical Theory and its complex relations to other schools of thought, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Reappraisals: Shifting Alignments in Postwar Critical Theory (Ithaca, 1991). For an analysis that situates the work of Benjamin and Adorno in the now highly contested history of aesthetics, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
13. For my own attempt to discuss his position, see the essays “Habermas and Modernism” and “Habermas and Postmodernism,” in Fin-de-Siècle Socialism and Other Essays (New York, 1988).
14. Leo Lowenthal, “Against Postmodernism,” Interview with Emilio Galli Zugaro, in An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal, ed., Martin Jay (Berkeley, 1987), p. 262. For more on Lowenthal’s resistance to postmodernism, see my “Erfahrungen und/oder Experimentieren: Löwenthal und die Herausfordung der Postmoderne,” in Geschichte Denken: Ein Notizbuch für Leo Löwenthal ed. Frithjof Hager (Leipzig, 1992).
15. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, 1991), p. 17.
16. For a lively debate over these issues, see David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
17. For discussions of these issues, see the essays in Andrew Benjamin, ed., The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (London, 1989), and Harry Kunneman and Hent de Vries, eds., Enlightenments: Encounters between Critical Theory and Contemporary French Thought (Kampen, The Netherlands, 1993).
18. Habermas’s most sustained critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment came in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). In America, it is perhaps in the work of Richard Wolin that Habermas’s critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment and the “Nietzschean,” proto-poststructuralist moment in Critical Theory has been most elaborated. See his The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (New York, 1992). A vigorous defense of Adorno against Habermas has been waged by the English philosopher J. M. Bernstein. See his The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park, Pa., 1992) and Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London, 1995).
19. For a probing comparison, see Bernstein, The Fate of Art.
20. On the question of mimesis, see my essay, “Mimesis und Mimetology: Adorno und Lacoue-Labarthe,” in Gertrud Koch, ed., Auge und Affekt: Wahrnehmung und Interaktion (Frankfurt, 1995). For the comparison with Lacan, see Peter Dews, The Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London, 1987); for a recent reappraisal, see Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass. 1995).
21. See, for example, Paul Breines, “Revisiting Marcuse with Foucault: An Essay on Liberation meets The History of Sexuality” in Marcuse, eds., Bokina and Lukes. Several of the other essays in this collection attempt to resituate Marcuse in the debate over postmodernism.
22. Foucault, “Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse: Who is a ‘Negator of History?,’ ” Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York, 1991), p. 119–120. Foucault once told the author that the French translation of The Dialectical Imagination in 1977 first alerted him to the similarities. Comparing Foucault and the Frankfurt School has become a frequent pastime; see, for example, Axel Honneth, Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, Mass., 1991) and Michael Kelley, ed., Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
23. See, for example, the essays in Benjamin’s Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed., Rainer Nägele (Detroit, 1988).
24. Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell et al., (New York, 1992).
25. See, for example, Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of the Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley, 1993).
26. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical/Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, 1991).
27. Jean-François Lyotard, “A Svelte Appendix to the Postmodern Question,” in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis, 1993), p. 28.
28. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (New York, 1990), pp. 249–252.
29. For my own thoughts on this issue, see “Class Struggle in the Classroom? The Myth of American ‘Seminarmarxism’.” Salmagundi, 85–86 (Winter, Spring, 1990). It has also been argued by Stephen T. Leonard that despite everything, Critical Theory has managed to produce significant practical effects in areas such as critical pedagogy, feminism and liberation theology. See his Critical Theory in Political Practice (Princeton, 1990). See also the earlier collection, Critical Theory and Public Life, ed., John Forester (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
30. “Urban Flights: The Institute of Social Research between Frankfurt and New York,” in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (Berkeley, 1993).
31. Willem van Reijen and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, eds., Grand Hotel Abgrund: Ein Photobiographie der Kritischen Theorie (Hamburg, 1988).
32. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
33. Adorno (Cambridge, Mass., 1984) sought to provide an overview of his career. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, 1984) attempted to situate Critical Theory’s ruminations on the concept of totality in the longer history of Western Marxism as a whole. Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York, 1985) collected my scattered essays on aspects of the Institut’s history, as well as on other emigres such as Siegfried Kracauer. An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal (Berkeley, 1987) was an edition of texts and interviews by Lowenthal.
