Critical theory : selected essays

313 Pages·1972·15.18 MB·English, German

by  Horkheimer, Max

CRITICAL
THEORY
Selected Essays
MAX HORKHEIMER
TRANSLATED BY
MATTHEW J. O'CONNELL AND OTHERS
CONTINUUM • NEW YORK
2002
The Continuum Publishing Company
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017
The essays in this volume originally appeared in book form in the collection
Kritische Theorie by Max Horkheimer, vols. I and II,c 1968 by S. Fischer Vcrlag
GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.
English translation copyright • 1972 by Herder and Herder, Inc., for all essays
except "Art and Mass Culture" and "The Social Function of Philosophy," which
originally appeared in English in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechan-
ical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission
of The Continuum Publishing Corporation.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Horkheimer, Max, 1895-1973.
Critical theory.
Translation of: Kritische Theorie.
"Essays from the Zeitschrift fur Soaalforschung"—Pref.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: Seabury Press, [1972]
Includes bibliographical references.
Contents: Introduction by Stanley Aronowitz—Notes
on science and the crisis—Materialism and metaphysics— [etc.]
1. Philosophy—Addresses, essays, lectures.
I. Title.
B3279.H8472E5 1982 193 81-22226
ISBN 04264-0083-3 (pbk.) AACR2
(previously ISBN 0-8164-9272-7)
CONTENTS
PREFACE V
INTRODUCTION BY STANLEY ARONOWITZ Xi
NOTES ON SCIENCE AND THE CRISIS 3
MATERIALISM AND METAPHYSICS 10
AUTHORITY AND THE FAMILY 47
THOUGHTS ON RELIGION 129
THE LATEST ATTACK ON METAPHYSICS 132
TRADITIONAL AND CRITICAL THEORY 188
POSTSCRIPT 244
THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 253
ART AND MASS CULTURE 273
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PREFACE
I HAVE always been convinced 'hat a man should publish only
those ideas which he can defend without reservation, and I have
therefore hesitated to reissue these long-out-of-print essays from
the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung. These early philosophical ef-
forts would require a more exact formulation today. More than
that, they are dominated by economic and political ideas which
no longer have any direct application; to relate them properly
to the present situation requires careful reflection. If I have
nonetheless agreed to a reissue, it has been with the hope that
the scholarly men who urged it upon me and who are aware of
the problems created by the long interval since the original pub-
lication will help prevent any ill results. Men of good will want
to draw conclusions for political action from the critical theory.
Yet there is no fixed method for doing this; the only universal
prescription is that one must have insight into one's own re-
sponsibility. Thoughtless and dogmatic application of the criti-
cal theory to practice in changed historical circumstances can
only accelerate the very process which the theory aimed at de-
nouncing. All those seriously involved in the critical theory,
including Adorno, who developed it with me, are in agreement
on this point.
In the first half of the century proletarian revolts could plau-
sibly be expected in the European countries, passing as they
were through crisis and inflation. The idea that in the early
thirties the united workers, along with the intelligentsia, could
bar the way to National Socialism was not mere wishful think-
ing. At the beginning of the national barbarism and especially
at the time of its terrible sway, the desire for freedom was
identical with rebellion against those interior and exterior forces
V
PREFACE
which had in part occasioned the rise of the luiur* murderers,
in part called for it or at least allowed it. Fascism became re-
spectable. The industrially advanced, so-called developed States
(to say nothing of Stalinist Russia) went to war with Germany
not because of Hitler's reign of terror, which they regarded as
an internal affair, but from motives of power politics. Policy
both in Germany and abroad was at one in agreement on the
Eastern strategy, and therefore hatred of fascism was identical
with hatred of the ruling cliques.
Since the years after World War II the idea of the growing
wretchedness of the workers, out of which Marx saw rebellion
and revolution emerging as a transitional step to the reign of
freedom, has for long periods become abstract and illusory,
and at least as out of date as the ideologies despised by the
young. The living conditions of laborers and employees at the
time of the Communist Manifesto were the outcome of open
oppression. Today they are, instead, motives for trade union
organization and for discussion between dominant economic
and political groups. The revolutionary thrust of the proletariat
has long since become realistic action within the framework of
society. In the minds of men at least, the proletariat has been
integrated into society.
The doctrine of Marx and Engels, though still indispensable
for understanding the dynamics of society, can no longer ex-
plain the domestic development and foreign relations of the na-
tions. The impulses that motivate me today as they did in the past
are no less opposed to the obviously inconsistent claim to apply
aggressive concepts such as class domination and imperialism to
capitalist countries alone and not to allegedly communist ones as
well, than they are to the correlative prejudices of others. Social-
ism, the idea of democracy realized in its true meaning, has long
since been perverted into an instrument of manipulation in the
Diamat countries, just as the Christian message was perverted
during the blood-bath centuries of Christendom. Even the con-
demnation of the United States' fateful invasion of Asia con-
tradicts the critical theory and is for Europeans a case of going
along with the crowd, unless those who condemn it also con-
vi
PREFACE
demn the terrible raids men make upon one another with the
Connivance of the hostile great powers.
In this world, things are complicated and are decided by many
factors. We should look at problems from different aspects, not
from just one alone. Only those who are subjective, one-sided and
superficial in their approach to problems will smugly issue orders or
directives the moment they arrive on the scene, without considering
the circumstances, without viewing things in their entirety (their
history and their present state as a whole) and without getting to
the essence of things (their nature and the internal relations be-
tween one thing and another). Such people ar° bound to trip and
fall.
The man who thus insists on the need for political thinking is
not a democratic parliamentarian, but Mao Tse-tung in his
active period. He appeals in turn to Lenin's maxim: "In order
really to know an object, we must embrace, study, all its sides,
all its connections and 'mediations.' "l Narrow-minded agree-
ment with nationalisms just because they use Marxist slogans
is not preferable to applauding the might of their opponents.
The fearful events which accompany the trend to a rational-
ized, automated, totally managed world (including revolts
within the military or infiltrations into disputed territory and the
defense against these) are part of the power-bloc struggle in an
age when all sides have reached the same technological level.
The age tends to eliminate every vestige of even a relative au-
tonomy for the individual. Under liberalism the citizen could
within limits develop his own potentialities; his destiny was
within limits determined by his own activity. That all should
have this possibilty was what was meant by the demand for
freedom and justice. As society changes, however, an increase in
one of these two is usually matched by a decrease in the other;
the centralized regulation of life, the kind of administration
which plans every detail, the so-called strict rationalization
prove historically to be a compromise. During the National So-
1. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, ed. by Stuart Schram
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968).
vii
PREFACr
cialist period u was aiready clear that totalitarian government
was not an accident but a symptom of the way society was
going. The perfecting of technology, the spread of commerce
and communication, the growth of population all drive society
towards stricter organization. Opposition, however despairing,
is itself co-opted into the very development it had hoped to
counteract. Nonetheless, to give voice to what one knows and
thereby perhaps to avert new terror remain the right of a man
who is still really alive
Not a few of the impulses which motivate me are related to
those of present-day youth* desire for a better life and the right
kind of society, unwillingness to adapt to the present order of
things. I also share their doubts about the educational value of
our schools, colleges, and universities The difference between
is has to do with the violence practiced by the young, which
plays into the hands of their otherwise impotent opponents An
open declaration that even a dubious democracy, for all its
defects, is always better than the dictatorship which would in-
evitably result from a revolution today, seems to me necessary
for the sake of truth. Despite her adherence to the Russian Rev-
olution, Rosa Luxemburg, whom so many students venerate,
said fifty years ago that "the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin
have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than
the disease it is supposed to cure."2 To protect, preserve, and,
where possible, extend the limited and ephemeral freedom of
the individual in the face of the growing threat to it is far more
urgent a task than to issue abstract denunciations of it or to
endanger it by actions that have no hope of success. In totali-
tarian countries youth is struggling precisely for that autonomy
which is under permanent threat in nontotalitarian countries.
Whatever the reasons offered in justification, for the left to help
the advance of a totalitarian bureaucracy is a pseudorevolution-
ary act, and for the right to support the tendency to terrorism
is a pseudoconservative act. As recent history proves, both
tendencies are really more closely related to each other than
2. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution/Leninism or Marxism?
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 62.
viii
PREFACE
to the ideas to which they appeal for support. On the other
hand, a true conservatism which takes man's spiritual heritage
seriously is more closely related to the revolutionary mentality,
which does not simply reject that heritage but absorbs it into a
new synthesis, than it is to the radicalism of the Right which
seeks to eliminate them both.
This book is offered as a documentation. In my view, the re-
jection of idealist philosophy and the acceptance, with histori-
cal materialism, of the termination of man's prehistory as the
goal to be striven for was the theoretical alternative to resigna-
tion in the face of the terror-marked trend to a totally managed
world. Metaphysical pessimism, always an implicit element in
every genuinely materialist philosophy, had always been con-
genial to me. My first acquaintance with philosophy came
through Schopenhauer; my relation to Hegel and Marx and my
desire to understand and change social reality have not oblit-
erated my experience of his philosophy, despite the political
opposition between these men. The better, the right kind of
society is a goal which has a sense of guilt entwined about it.
Since the end of the War, however, the goal has become ob-
scured. Society is in a new phase. The upper stratum is typically
represented no longer by competing entrepreneurs but by man-
agements, combines, committees. The material situation of the
dependent classes gives rise to political and psychological
tendencies which are different from those of the earlier prole-
tariat. Individuals, like classes, are now being integrated into
society. In such circumstances, to judge the so-called free world
by its own concept of itself, to take a critical attitude towards it
and yet to stand by its ideas, and to defend it against fascism,
Stalinist, Hitlerian, or any other, is the right and duty of every
thinking man. Despite its dangerous potential, despite all the
injustice that marks its course both at home and abroad, the
free world is at the moment still an island in space and time,
and its destruction in the ocean of rule by violence would also
mean the destruction of the culture of which the critical theory
is a part. To link these essays with my own current position on
these matters is one motive for their reissue.
ix