The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance Rolf Wiggershaus Translated by Michael Robertson MIT 787 pp. $60.00 Review by David Weininger Featured in BBR March 1995 For all of us who enter the intellectual arena aiming to analyze "the social world"-whether we do so under the auspices of literature, sociology, philosophy, economics or psychology-one question possesses us, and it concerns the relation between theory and practice. What meaning does such "engaged" intellectual work have? Are thought and action autonomous, and have they ever been? Quite simply, what, if any, practical significance does theory have? In the early part of this century, a loose aggregation of intellectuals known as the "Frankfurt School" produced a body of work which was haunted by exactly such issues. Most of its names have by now become familiar to the academic community: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm. While they engaged a dazzlingly diverse group of intellectual disciplines and theoretical approaches, the guiding thread of all of their analyses was the diagnosis of the ruined, pathological world of the early 20th century. Under the triumphant twin shadows of full-blown industrial capitalism and National Socialism, the Frankfurt School asked two familiar questions: How did we get here? and Where does salvation lie? What was so tremendously original about their collective responses was that the answers lay not in political activism or in a revolutionary labor movement, but in such abstruse phenomena as avant-garde art, psychoanalysis, dialectical philosophy, and a messianic religious faith. Their studies-which go under the general name of "Critical Theory"-were among the first which can be properly labeled interdisciplinary, encompassing insights from so many different areas. By the time of their mature works-most notably Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment-the members of the Frankfurt School no longer referred to their work as philosophy, sociology, aesthetics or psychology; it was, simply, "Theory." Rolf Wiggershaus has carefully and thoroughly documented the School's history, from its inception right up to its legacy in scholars who are still active, most notably Jurgen Habermas. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance far surpasses Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination-the only other history of the School to this point-in historical detail and willingness to critically engage the texts at issue. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1924 as a school dedicated to the scientific study of Marxism. Its benefactor was Felix Weil, a wealthy part-time scholar who saw the establishment of the Institute as a compromise between his class position and his leftist sympathies. The Institute-loosely associated with the University of Frankfurt at its inception-became a sort of mecca for German leftists, for whom the study of Marxist political economy and the history of the labor movement could be undertaken at the university level for the first time. Yet it did not begin to assume its mature approach until the appointment, in 1930, of Max Horkheimer as director. Horkheimer, a philosopher by training, was thoroughly steeped in the German tradition through Hegel, and had embraced Marxism only reluctantly. Yet, in his inaugural lecture as director of the Institute, he pointed to the working class as the starting point of all serious social inquiry. He went on to define the task of the Institute in a vague but quite original way: [T]o set up, along with my associates..., a regime of planned work on the juxtaposition of philosophical construct and empiricism in social theory....[To] organize inquiries, on the basis of current philosophical questions, in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians and psychologists can unite in lasting co-operation. To just such an end, he gathered around him a diverse group of scholars to formulate this interdisciplinary approach: Fromm, a Freudian analyst with strong leftist leanings; Friedrich Pollock, a rather orthodox Marxist economist; Adorno, whose doctorate was in philosophy but who at the time was employed as a music critic; Marcuse, a philosopher and former student of Martin Heidegger. Benjamin, who was never a permanent member of the Institute, was perhaps the hardest to classify, for his work encompassed nearly all the humanistic disciplines and many of the social sciences. True to Horkheimer's aim, the first studies under the Institute's name-on the influence of authority on the German working class-were evenly balanced between theoretical speculation and empirical support. Before the Institute could really develop their approach, however, they were forced into exile by the ascendancy of the Nazi Party to power in 1933. The Frankfurt School was doubly damned, being not only "left-wing radicals" but Jewish to boot. Initially scattered throughout Europe in exile, their next permanent base would be Columbia University in New York, with which they formed an association which would last from July 1934 until early 1943. Their financial needs were still met by Weil's endowment, so they were able to remain relatively independent and free to carry out their own work. The School's exile would be a relatively unimportant matter if it did not seem to have a direct bearing on the group's work. While their first studies did indeed aim at a union of empirical and theoretical work, by the late '30s their work was undergoing two profound shifts. At one level, the theoretical was clearly overshadowing the empirical. No longer were questionnaires distributed for gathering data, and no statistics were consulted-the School was drifting heavily towards the philosophical. Either as a cause or as a consequence of this move, Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse were becoming the central proponents of the institute's work. Conversely, their theoretical perspective had darkened considerably. The Marxist orientation gave way and expanded to include such figures as Nietzsche and Freud. The move toward these thinkers expressed a suspicion that beneath the individual's interests lay dangerously hidden forces which were the most important motivating factors in their action. The Critical Theorists extended this thesis, arguing that even the movements in which humanity tried to liberate itself were rotten to the core, and contained the seeds of their own undoing. This viewpoint was given its most forceful explication in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, whose introduction is a micro-model of the tone and style of the group's bitter, resigned thought: In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant....What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men....Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The book goes on to show the Enlightenment's self-ruination in the Odyssey, Sade's Juliette, the culture industry, and most poignantly, modern anti-Semitism. It is a strange, difficult and unique book that combines a number of diverse approaches. One is tempted to call it the first volume in what we now call Cultural Studies. Wiggershaus gives an excellent, thorough guide to this challenging text, and in that respect alone this book fills a large gap in the secondary literature. Additionally, he demonstrates how the book's themes grew out of the group's earlier works and concerns. For example, on the relation between anti-Semitism and capitalism, Wiggershaus points to an early essay by Horkheimer on "The Jews and Europe," whose opening sentences rival those of Dialectic of Enlightenment in sheer drama and conviction: No one can ask the émigrés to hold a mirror up to the world that has produced fascism in the very place in which they are being offered asylum. But those who do not wish to speak of capitalism should be silent about fascism. But Critical Theory was now a long way away from the "union of the theoretical and the empirical sciences" Horkheimer had once advocated. And as for any hope of qualitative change, one would believe that the authors held out for none. After the war, only Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Frankfurt, the others preferring to remain in America. (Walter Benjamin, sadly, never escaped Europe during the war and committed suicide in Spain in 1940.) The tone of their works became, if anything, more melancholy and distressed as they realized that the the culture of German-Jewish intellectuals from which they had emerged was now hopelessly lost. Nevertheless, they both assumed academic posts at Frankfurt and carried on their theoretical work, which-especially for Adorno-was far more oriented towards memory and meditation on the past than toward a diagnosis of the present. This is evidenced in the subtitle of one of Adorno's last books: Minima Moralia: Reflections From a Damaged Life. In it, he lamented the culture destroyed by fascism while attempting to exorcise his guilt at having survived the war. All this he managed to sum up beautifully in one sentence: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." One might just as well cast a skeptical eye toward the Frankfurt School and contend that "To write theory during Auschwitz is absurd." A few months before his death, Adorno was lecturing at the University of Frankfurt when three members of a radical separatist student group rushed the podium, bared their breasts, and "attacked" him with erotic caresses. As he left the stage, angered and humiliated, the women declared that "as an institution, Adorno is dead." This story throws into stark relief the theory/practice distinction which must be invoked in any discussion of the Frankfurt School. The German student movements of the 1960s came to reject Critical Theory precisely because of its sheer unworkability. What value does a critical theory of society have if it contains no implications for immediate revolutionary change? Critical Theory would tell us that thought itself is far more important than what it takes to be token action. Wiggershaus points out that Habermas and younger Critical Theorists, far more oriented toward social action than the members of the Frankfurt School, say much about Horkheimer and Adorno's "political significance" by remaining almost silent about it. It underscores once more what they did: Theory. David Weininger, a graduate of Oberlin College, has previously reviewed Edmund White's biography of Genet for the Boston Book Review. He lives in Cambridge, MA. As for the variants and alterations to "the theory" in the course of this history, the scope of these is so large, and they are so unsynchronized, that a division into phases for the 'Frankfurt School' is virtually impossible. The best we can do is to speak of various tendencies to drift apart: the drifting apart of theory and praxis, of philosophy and science, of the critique of reason and the rescuing of reason, of theoretical work and the work of the Institute, of the refusal to be reconciled and the refusal to be discouraged. From The Frankfurt School &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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