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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Actuality of Critical Theory in the Netherlands, 1931-1994 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0b12z2xk Author Barr Clingan, Nicolaas Peter Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Actuality of Critical Theory in the Netherlands, 1931-1994 by Nicolaas Peter Barr Clingan A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Martin E. Jay, Chair Professor John F. Connelly Professor Jeroen Dewulf Professor David W. Bates Spring 2012 Abstract The Actuality of Critical Theory in the Netherlands, 1931-1994 by Nicolaas Peter Barr Clingan Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Martin E. Jay, Chair This dissertation reconstructs the intellectual and political reception of Critical Theory, as first developed in Germany by the “Frankfurt School” at the Institute of Social Research and subsequently reformulated by Jürgen Habermas, in the Netherlands from the mid to late twentieth century. Although some studies have acknowledged the role played by Critical Theory in reshaping particular academic disciplines in the Netherlands, while others have mentioned the popularity of figures such as Herbert Marcuse during the upheavals of the 1960s, this study shows how Critical Theory was appropriated more widely to challenge the technocratic directions taken by the project of vernieuwing (renewal or modernization) after World War II. During the sweeping transformations of Dutch society in the postwar period, the demands for greater democratization—of the universities, of the political parties under the system of “pillarization,” and of society more broadly—were frequently made using the intellectual resources of Critical Theory. In turn, the development of a progressive, “posttraditional” society in the Netherlands, which appeared to reach its apex in the 1970s, suggested to a number of intellectuals that Habermas’s more sanguine “theory of communicative action” best conceptualized the democratic achievements of modern society and the continuing prospects for the “rationalization of the lifeworld,” through which injustices and social pathologies could be exposed to the scrutiny of critical reason. Critical Theory, then, had an “actuality” that went well beyond academia and had continuing “relevance”—another meaning of the Dutch actualiteit or German Aktualität—for understanding the past and future rationalization of society. There was, moreover, another sense in which Dutch thinkers interpreted the actuality of Critical Theory. In the transnational process of reception, ideas and theories are inevitably shaped by the contexts in which they are taken up. This study begins with the Dutch social democrat Andries Sternheim, who worked at the Institute’s office in Geneva in the 1930s, and shows how tensions arose over the more speculative philosophical premises of Kritische Theorie, as formulated in director Max Horkheimer’s key 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.” These tensions prefigured the later emphases and inflections given to Critical Theory by its intellectual supporters (and detractors) in the Netherlands and reflected, I argue, a “discourse of actuality” with which Habermas’s thought had greater resonance. Although some Dutch intellectuals gravitated towards the earlier arguments of Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, which identified the roots of modern pathologies of social domination in the widespread 1 expansion of “enlightened thought” into forms of “instrumental reason,” these claims were seen by many as overly pessimistic and speculative, particularly in comparison to Habermas’s thought. Habermas argued that Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the “dialectic of enlightenment” had obscured a different form of rationality, made possible only by the rationalization of the lifeworld, namely “communicative rationality,” which had its basis not in the arguably metaphysical, “emphatic” concept of reason to which Horkheimer and Adorno appealed, but rather in the immanent practices of everyday, intersubjective communication. Although Habermas insisted that the telos of mutual understanding, toward which non-strategic communicative practices were oriented, remained a counterfactual ideal, many of his adherents went beyond Habermas in ascribing an empirical actuality to the idea of communicative rationality. Furthermore, even as Habermas’s theory was challenged in the course of the “modernism/postmodernism” debates of the 1980s, Dutch scholars frequently interpreted “poststructuralist” thought in ways that broadened the concept of rationality, rather than pitting one side against the other, as the leading German and French antagonists often did. By putting the ideas of Critical Theory into historical and comparative relief, this reception history goes beyond strictly philosophical studies of the relative validity of the Frankfurt School and Habermas’s competing forms of thought. The Dutch example offers a particularly revealing view into the “actuality” of what Habermas called “the unfinished project of modernity,” as well as its potential limitations. In concluding, however, I follow other scholars of early Critical Theory in arguing that Adorno’s thought in particular may have its own pressing actuality, even as its philosophical premises are considered outdated in the wake of the “linguistic turn.” Against the historical developments of the last decades of the twentieth century—not least in the Netherlands—we might yet have something to learn from Adorno’s thought, even in its most apocalyptic and utopian exaggerations. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………… ii Abbreviations …………………………………………………………………………………… iv Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………….... 1 1. Andries Sternheim, Dutch Marxism, and the Turn from Interdisciplinary Materialism to Critical Theory ………………………………… 19 2. Planning for Freedom: Postwar Protest, The New Left, and the Challenge of Science ………………………………………….. 47 3. Politics in a Rational Key: Habermas and the Actuality of Reason in the Long 1970s ………………………………………….… 80 4. Among the Quarreling Gods: The Dutch Dialogue between Critical Theory and Poststructuralism ……………………...……. 113 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………… 142 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………. 161 i Acknowledgements A number of institutions have supported my career at UC Berkeley. A Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of European Studies allowed me to (re)learn Dutch, an unanticipated move that shaped the trajectory of my scholarly career. My research in the Netherlands was funded by the Department of History, which also provided a year of writing support. A second year of writing was supported by the Graduate Division. Many librarians labored to procure the materials for this study, beginning with James Spohrer, who introduced me to Berkeley’s splendid Dutch Studies collection. Stephen Roeper located, copied, and sent the Horkheimer—Sternheim correspondence and other materials from the Max Horkheimer Archive at the Archive Center of the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main. Librarians at the University of Washington, Pacific Lutheran University, and the University of Amsterdam located innumerable volumes, and the International Institute for Social History provided a wonderful place to work along Amsterdam’s Cruquiusweg. At Berkeley, Martin Jay has been an inspiring and congenial mentor from the beginning. His seemingly boundless erudition, conceptual ingenuity, and scholarly example have left a deep impression on me. With his both judicious and imaginative scholarly approach, he has guided me through the labyrinths of European intellectual history, providing the support and intellectual space to try out new ideas while restraining my wilder speculative flights of fancy. The late Susanna Barrows was a caring mentor at crucial moments in my graduate career and brought her distinctive wit and learning to this project at its formative stages; she is deeply missed. After Susanna passed away, John Connelly generously stepped in to serve on my dissertation committee. He brought a sharp pair of eyes and an ideal combination of encouragement and challenging questions to the project, catching countless errors and proposing alternative perspectives I had failed to consider. David Bates directed a challenging independent study in the Rhetoric Department and has sharpened my sense of how one can read philosophical and theoretical texts. Finally, although our paths regretfully did not cross sooner, Jeroen Dewulf has had a huge hand in shaping the results of this project, which he embraced enthusiastically. He has been a wonderful expert guide to modern Dutch history and language, a generous resource, and a careful reader. I would also like to thank Mabel Lee for her help and sage advice throughout my graduate studies. It is of course a great privilege to study with such an expert on the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory as Martin Jay; it is perhaps less well known that his scholarship has led him repeatedly to the Netherlands, where over the years, he has crossed paths with many of the subjects of this study. Professors Jan Baars, René Boomkens, Josef Keulartz,