THE ESSENTIAL FRANKFURT SCHOOL READER Edited by Andrew Arato & Eike Gebhardt Introduction by Paul Piccone CONTINUUM • NEW YORK 11'l~ --·.. :~'.·.······,.. ; I·. Contents 1985 The Continuum Publishing Company 370 Lexington Awnue. New York. NY 10017 Copyriaht 01982 by The Continuum Publishing Company "Preface vii AU rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, ./General Introduction Paul Piccone ix stored in a retrieval system. or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic. mechanical, photocopying, recording. or otherwise, without the written permission of Part I Political Sociology and The Continuum Publishing Company. Critique of Politics Printed in the United States of America Introduction by Andrew Arato 3 IJIIrvy of Coupes Cataloala.1n Publlcadon Data Main entry under tide: The End 26 TIle Essential Frankfurt school reader. ~ of Reason Max Horkheimer Changes in the Structure of OripnaUy published. New York: Urian Books, Political Compromise Ono Kirchheimer 49 State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations Friedrich Pollock 71 ~:~y-Addmses, essays, 1ec:tures. :l.,.:~seience-Addre_s. essays, 1ec:tum. The Authoritarian State Max Horkheimer 95 1ec:tum. Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda Theodor W. Adorno 118 Some Social Implications of 82-8063 Modem Technoloa,y Herbert Marcuse 138 AACR2 Notes' 163 ConftlilS partn Esthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism Introduction by Andrew Arato 185 Introductory note by Eike Gebhardt Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian Walter Benjamin 225 Preface The Author as Producer Walter Benjamin 254 On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening Theodor W. Adorno 270 Commitment Theodor W. Adorno 300 Knut Hamsun Leo Lowenthal 319 Notes 346 PartIn A Critique of Methodology Introduction by Eike Gebhardt 371 The critical theory of the Frankfurt School is no longer a stranger to an On the Problem of Truth Max Horkheimer 407 English-speaking audience. Several volumes of Adorno, Horkheimer A Note on Dialectic Herbert Marcuse 444 and Benjamin have recently been published, not to speak of the The Sociology of Knowledge already available works of Marcuse, Neumann, Kirchheimer, low­ and its Consciousness Theodor W. Adorno 452 enthal and Fromm. There is a significant semiofficial biography of the On Science and Phenomenology Herbert Marcuse 466 school by Martin Jay as well as a whole range of treatments both The Method and Function of an sympathetic and hostile in the recent books of Russell Jacoby, Wil­ Analytic Social Psychology Erich Fromm 477 liam Leiss, Trent Schroyer, Susan Buck-Morss, George Lichtheim, Subject and Object Theodor W . Adorno 497 Zoltan Tar, Perry Anderson, Philip Slater and Alasdair Macintyre, Notes 512 and in the journals Telos, New German Critique and Social Re­ Biographical Notes 528 search. Bibliography 530 In this context, the purpose of our anthology is threefold. (I) We Index 542 want to concentrate on the social theories of the School, usually Acknowledgements 559 interpreted from the point of view of the somewhat later socia­ philosophical synthesis, impressive but far less flexible, that correctly goes under the name of "critique of domination" and "critique of instrumental reason. (2) We want to correct some widespread miscon­ ceptions about the political and intellectual purposes of the School, as well as refute the myth of a single, unified critical theory of society. At least eight authors are, therefore, represented in the volume. (3) We want both to introduce undergraduate students of sociology, political science, philosophy and intellectual history to critical theory, and to provide advanced students as well as working scholars with a number of hitherto untranslated or inaccessible texts. Almost no selection from an easily available source is therefore reproduced. These three criteria have served as our guiding prinCiples of selection. For rea­ vii /82 Polilica/ Sociology and Critique of Politics 34. Roben A. Brady. "Policies of National Manufaclurin& Spitzenverbiinde." in political Scienct QuoNtrl)' • LVI, p. 537. 35. Tht Thought alld CharaC1U of William Jamts. ed. R. B. Percy. Deslon 1935. II, p. 265. 36. Ibid .• p. 3 IS. Esthetic Theory and Cultural 37. Ibid.• p. 383. Criticism 38. Democrocy in America. transl. H. Reeve. New York 1904, p. 584. 39. Quoled in E. Mims. The Majority of the Peoplt. New York 1941. p. 152. 40. See for example Oswald Spengler, Man ond Technics. New York 1932. p. 96f.. and Roy Hehon. "'The Anti-Industrial Revolution." in Harpers. December 1941. pp. 65ft. 41. In National Socialist Gennany. the ideology of blood and soil and the glorification of the peasant is an integral part of the imperialistic mobililation of industry and labor. 42. For examples of the degree 10 which this physiological individualization has been utilized see Changes in Machinery and Job Requirements in Minnesota Manufacturing /93/-36. Works Projects Administration. National Research Project. Report No. 1-6. Philadelphia. p. 19. The Concept of Culture'" 43. See Max Horkheimer. "The End of Reason:' above. The concept of culture is significantly ambiguous in normal usage. 44. Henry James...Democracy and Its Issues." in Lectures and Miscellanies. New More often than not, "culture" is represented as the sum total of York 1852. p. 47f. activities that possess the aura of intellectuality or spirituality, that is, the arts and the sciences. But there is also an important usage especial­ Iy, but not only. in the social sciences that defines culture as the ensemble of those intersubjective traditions, meanings, values, in­ stitutions, rituals, customs and typical activities characteristic in space and time of a given social formation. The ambiguity has been noticed by the Frankfurt School even if the brunt of their critical concern focuses on culture in the first sense. I The two concepts of culture may in fact be related to one another. In the history of sociology and social theory, no one did more to elaborate a comprehensive and dynamic concept of culture than the tum-of-the-century German thinker Georg Simmel. 2 Drawing heavily, if implicitly, on Hegel and Marx, Sirnmel defined all culture as human self-creation in the context of cultivating things, or self-cultivation in the process of endowing the things of nature with use and meaning. However, for Simmel, the self-cultiva­ tion (. 'sub jective culture' ') of individuals and the cultivation of things (' •objective culture") by ensembles of individuals are neither parallel nor harmonious. He postulated a gradually and linearly increasing *First four sections by Andrew Arato; last section by Eike Gebhardt. 185 InlTOduCfion 187 186 ESfhefic Theory and CIi/lUral Crificism s division of labor as the red thread of history that leads not only to the dom and inequality of class rule. Thus, Marx located culture in the powerful growth of objective culture, but also to the corresponding narrow sense in terms of mental labor, whose pretensions he one-sidedness, deformation and overspecialization of individuals, criticized. He also had a concept corresponding to the more general i.e., to the crisis of subjective culture. True "subjective culture" was concept of culture, for which he used the terms' 'mode of production" to Simmel the cultivation of the whole personality, and although this or "social formation" interchangeably. We will follow one of his is ambiguous in his work. Simmers restriction of the achievement of usages and refer to "culture" in general as social formation. totalization to the great cultural "forms," art. philosophy, theology, The concept of mental labor marks the limits of the Frankfurt historiography, and science, did imply the highly privileged and concept of culture, both in the narrow sense of "high" culture and 3 also in its popular and mass substitutes. At times the passionate hatred philosophically preferable nature of some human activities • i.e., what Marx more than fifty years before had called' 'mental work ... Thus, of critical theory toward what Marcuse called "affirmative culture" Simmel systematically related culture in the narrow sense of intellec­ (i.e., the mode of "high" culture that in spite of its utopian anticipa­ tual self-cultivation and culture in general, the objectification and tions suppresses its relationship to the social life process) surpassed externalization of all human activities. He defined the relationship of that of Marx: the two in terms of an increasing split that he called the "tragedy of culture ... The products of art and science owe their existence not merely to Marx wrote nothing on "culture" as such. Indeed, his meth­ the effort of the great geniuses that created them. but also to the unnamed drudgeries of their contemporaries. There is no docu­ odological remarks on the dependence of "superstructure" on the ment of culture which is not at the same time a document of "base" (and in particular the forms of consciousness on the contradic­ barbarism.6 tory structure of a mode of production) have generally been inter­ preted by Marxists as reason enough to disregard the "epiphenome­ Thus wrote Walter Benjamin in a 1937 text reproduced below. But lest na" of culture. However, much of Frankfurt cultural theory begins we assign the argument to his lonely and idiosyncratic position within with one singularly fruitful distinction of Marx's: that between mental (or without) the School, let us quote from Adorno in 1966: and manual labor . In distinction to almost all bourgeois theories of the division of labor (including