Chapter Seven The Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory: From Neo-Marxism to ‘Post-Marxism’ Gérard Raulet
The Institute of Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1924 and celebrated its 75th anniversary between the 23–5th of September 1999. Refounded by Horkheimer in 1949 on his return from exile, it was subsequently directed by Adorno until his death in 1969 and then by one of his pupils, Ludwig von Friedeburg.1 It still expressly claims to adhere to its original conception and is committed to interdis- ciplinary studies of the social state, law and politics, culture and social psychology, while conceding that the general theory advocated by Horkheimer is no longer acceptable.2 In his inaugural lecture of 1931, Horkheimer had set out a way of organising scienti c work that replaced the Marxist primacy of political economy by a ‘social philosophy [Sozialphilosophie]’. This phi- losophy aimed to develop a comprehensive theory of society by integrating multidisciplinary research
1 By director should be understood ‘executive director [geschäftsführender Direktor]’. In fact, the Institute had at its head a three-man directorate. In 1997, this directorate was replaced by a college which elected an executive director for ve years (Ludwig von Friedeburg since 1997). 2 See Dubiel 1994, p. 12. But the ‘crisis of capitalist integration’ has nevertheless prompted the Institute to ‘revive Horkheimer’s inaugural lecture and to reorient its future research in a more general, interdisciplinary direction’ (Dubiel 1994, p. 107).
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(economics, sociology, psychology, philosophy), taking account of the new conditions of reproduction of advanced capitalism, namely, its ability to short-circuit the crisis mechanism by means of state intervention and the new- found weight of ideology and the cultural sphere. The principal idea was that the Marxist critique of ideology did not permit explanation of
the relationship between the economic life of society, the psychic devel- opment of the individual and the changes within the cultural sphere in the narrower sense.3
Objections to the critique of ideology reached a peak in 1944 with Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which Adorno and Horkheimer called into question mod- ern rationality as such. Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action partook of this logic, demanding a communicative regrounding of rationality. In this work from 1981, Habermas engaged in a ruthless revision of critical theory, proposing to release it from the ‘ballast of historical materialism’. Once ‘neo- Marxist’, the Frankfurt school’s critical theory was in the process of becoming ‘post-Marxist’.4
The conjuncture of the 1980s
Following the existentialist wave, which created moderate currents of exchange between France and Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s were marked by two distinct intellectual logics, despite the shared upheaval of 1968: the structuralist vogue in France and the revival of critical theory in Germany. These two currents – embodied in France by Althusser and in Germany by strategies for updating critical theory, on the one hand, and the rising star of Habermas, on the other – seemed impervious to one another, including (and especially) in the Marxist domain. In France, the Frankfurt school was virtually unknown; in Germany, the Althusserian approach circulated only among a limited audience in the form of pamphlets, produced outside tradi- tional publishing, diffused by the student movement. A study of the currents responsible for this marginal diffusion and its impact on left-wing thought in
3 Horkheimer 1972, p. 43. 4 This chapter, which is restricted to the 1980s and 1990s, is extracted from an essay on the evolution and identity of critical theory.
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