The Politics of Unreason : The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism

602 Pages·2017·1.89 MB·English

by  Lars Rensmann

THE POLITICS
OF UNREASON
SUNY series, Philosophy and Race
Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-W hiting, editors
THE POLITICS
OF UNREASON
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND
THE ORIGINS OF MODERN ANTISEMITISM
LARS RENSMANN
SUNY
P R E S S
An original version of chapter 8 of this book first appeared as
“Guilt, Resentment, and Post-Holocaust Democracy: The Frankfurt
School’s Analysis of ‘Secondary Antisemitism’ in the Group Experiment
and Beyond,” in Antisemitism Studies Vol. I, 1 (April 2017), pp.4–37.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
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Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Names: Rensmann, Lars, author
Title: The politics of unreason : the Frankfurt School and the origins of
modern antisemitism
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Series:
SUNY series, philosophy and race | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438465937 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781438465951 (e-book)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
1. Introduction 1
How the Frankfurt School Has Shaped
the Study of Modern Antisemitism
2. From Odysseus to Postliberal Subjectivity 29
Revisiting Freud and the Civilizational Genesis
of Social Domination
3. Loving to Hate 65
The Antidemocratic Syndrome and the Social
Psychology of Modern Authoritarianism
4. Objectifying the Other 145
The Ideology of Antisemitism as False
Projection
5. The Societal Origins of Modern Antisemitism 215
Judeophobia and Critical Social Theory
after Marx and Weber
6. Power, Desolation, and the Failed Promise
of Freedom 275
Rereading the “Elements of Antisemitism”
7. The Politics of Paranoia 321
From Totalitarian Antisemitism to Political
Mobilizations of Judeophobia in Democracies
8. Guilt, Responsibility, and Post-H olocaust
Democracy 359
Interpreting “Secondary” Antisemitism
vi Contents
9. Why Critical Theory Matters 391
Antisemitism, Authoritarian Politics, and
Human Dignity in the Global Age
Notes 421
Bibliography 539
Index 571
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been a long time coming. The project orig-
inated more than twenty years ago, when I was a young
graduate student of political science and political theory at
the Free University of Berlin. Back then, I wrote my mas-
ter’s thesis on the Institute for Social Research—commonly
referred to as the Frankfurt School, or Critical Theory with
capital letters—and antisemitism. My early research led
to the publication of the German book Kritische Theorie
über den Antisemitismus (Argument Verlag, 1998), which
to my surprise was widely received and found a positive
academic echo. I subsequently published articles on the
subject, and the Frankfurt School’s work also played an
important role in shaping the theoretical framework of my
PhD thesis and second monograph on antisemitism and
democratic political culture, Demokratie und Judenbild
(VS Verlag, 2004). While my primary academic research
interests shifted to other issues and areas of political sci-
ence and political theory, I always intended to return to my
early work on the Frankfurt School and antisemitism—
revisit my research, pick up important threads, close gaps
and rethink lose ends, and finally add a comprehensive
English volume on the subject.
In its ideational origins, The Politics of Unreason can
be traced even further back: namely to 1992, when I had
just graduated from Luther College in Iowa. I had the
unique opportunity to visit one of the founding fathers of
Critical Theory in the twentieth century and a member
viii Acknowledgments
of the “inner circle” of the Institute for Social Research:
Leo Löwenthal.
Löwenthal had escaped from Nazi persecution to find
refuge in America, where he continued his academic
career at prestigious institutions of higher learning.
Responding to a letter I had written to him, Leo was so
incredibly generous to invite me, the twenty- two- year-
old student, to come to visit him, the ninety-o ne- year-
old professor, in Berkeley—where he taught sociology
at the University of California since 1956—and to stay
at his home. So I did, and we spent days talking about
Critical Theory—an experience I will never forget. In my
conversations with Leo, for the first time I fully grasped
the Frankfurt School’s rich historical and philosophi-
cal trajectories and Critical Theory’s potential as a liv-
ing tradition that can be relevant in the contemporary
world. Leo Löwenthal passed away just half a year later,
before I could visit him again. But much of my academic
work is inspired by him, from my first theoretical mus-
ings to my later work on the Frankfurt School, political
sociology, the radical right, and authoritarian politics of
resentment; and so is this book in particular—in which
Leo’s academic research and theorizing play a major role.
In this study, Löwenthal’s contribution to the Frankfurt
School’s thinking about the “antisemitic question” is
attributed the central place in the scholarly canon it thor-
oughly deserves. For him, as he told me then, the prob-
lem of antisemitism remained a pressing concern of our
time. The book is, like my first one almost two decades
ago, dedicated to the memory of Löwenthal, one of the
great intellectuals of the twentieth century.
While in recent years some new studies have been pub-
lished that address the relationship between the Frankfurt
Acknowledgments ix
School and the problem of antisemitism, including path-
breaking contributions by Jack Jacobs and Eva- Maria
Ziege, The Politics of Unreason is the first systematic
study of the Frankfurt School’s research on and theories
about antisemitism in English. Considerable parts of
this book’s research go back to my original study, which
still also largely serves as the conceptual and theoretical
backbone, and several chapters have been translated from
German before being thoroughly reworked, revised, and
supplemented.
The book is greatly indebted to many friends, col-
leagues, and institutions that took part in its production.
First and foremost, Kizer S. Walker took a very promi-
nent role: he translated several chapters of the German
book, which found their way into five newly designed
chapters of The Politics of Unreason. I had the great
pleasure to work with Kizer Walker on this manuscript,
without whom this book would simply not exist. Kizer
is not just an outstanding scholar of Jewish and German
Studies, and an expert on Critical Theory, antisemitism,
and German philosophy. He is also an amazing transla-
tor, the best one could imagine, a fact from which this
work greatly benefited. Kizer spent hundreds and hun-
dreds of hours on this book project, for which I will never
be able to thank him enough.
My wonderful colleague and cherished friend Jennet
Kirkpatrick is the only person who, apart from the copy
editor Pat Hadley-M iller, read and tirelessly discussed
with me every chapter and every line of the manuscript.
In 2009, when we were both still teaching at the Univer-
sity of Michigan, Jennet and I started a working group
with weekly meetings to discuss each other’s research,
and we have been meeting every week since then, though