The Frankfurt institute at 100: The perspective of a trichotomic critical theory

Since the foundation of the Institute for Social Research

Soon it will be hundred years since the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) was founded in Frankfurt am Main in February 1923. Shortly after its establishment a group of researchers began to form within its ideological and institutional framework, first under the heading of materialist theory and then in connection with a critical social theory, or Critical Theory, also known after World War II under the external but still most famous designation from the city of its origin, as the Frankfurt School. In this article, like the founding documents, I will stick to the most appropriate name, Critical Theory, (the school of Critical Theory), but it should be noted that none of these terms exhaustively describes the research project, as its focus, as will be seen below, cannot be reduced to materialism, nor to criticism, nor even to Frankfurt – whether we are defining the research in general as a research paradigm, or determining the research intent of a group that could be more narrowly defined as the members of the Institute and their collaborators outside the Institute, or more broadly to include like-minded scholars (Jay, 1973; Held, 1980; Wiggershaus, 1986).

Over the many decades since the programme’s definition in the 1930s, critical theory has been a thorn in the side of many power holders. With its social critique of capitalist, Nazi, and Soviet power practices, it would become an indisputable subject of contention in all the influential political regimes of the last century. In the capitalist order it was marginalized and at extreme moments accused of subversion, whereas in the Marxist-Leninist regimes it was rejected and considered a bourgeois ideology (except in the more relaxed years in the 1960s), and under Nazism its supporters had to emigrate (Wiggershaus, 1986).^[2] In terms of content, its focus is well demonstrated by its prominence in discussions about the possibilities of democratic socialism in the period of social emancipation in the 1960s, associated with the student revolts in Western countries and with the reforms aimed at democratic socialism in Czechoslovakia that culminated in the Prague Spring. However, critical theory also maintained a certain reflexive distance from these potentially promising, yet specifically ideologically limited activities, which were eventually suffocated by those in power. The gradual development of critical theory, from its inception to the present day, can be seen as testament to the change in critical thinking about society and the key dilemmas and tensions of the 20th and 21st centuries, according to the influence Marxism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies had on critical theory; along with that of phenomenology, existentialism, feminism, post-modernism, multiculturalism, egalitarian liberalism and communitarianism, post-colonialism, and global studies.

The articulation by a critical theory

Horkheimer’s essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” (Horkheimer, 2002a) and Marcuse’s study “Philosophy and Critical Theory” (Horkheimer, Marcuse, 1937), introduced in Horkheimer’s five-page address, are generally considered to be among the fundamental programme documents of critical theory. Although these studies were not the very first pieces of writing by the group of researchers that gradually assembled around Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research, they introduced the term critical theory at a time when the group was intensely debating the need for a new theory of society. Their immediate publication in 1937 in the Institute’s journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Schmidt, 1970)^[3] is proof that they are a kind of manifesto, which, while maintaining a certain plurality of opinion among the members of the group, sets out its orientation in an original manner. The conceptual focus and argumentational foundation of critical theory are well documented in these studies and in several other texts by Horkheimer and Marcuse from that time. Although these older texts belong irrevocably to the era in which they were created, it is possible to identify ideas that retain their appeal and are far from obvious.

Max Horkheimer anticipated the content of his essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” in an inaugural speech delivered in January 1931 on the occasion of taking over the position of director of the Institute for Social Research and professor of social philosophy at the University of Frankfurt (Horkheimer 1931), a move that brought together the two isolated professorships of philosophy and sociology for the first time in the German-speaking world. Referring to Marx in his speech, Horkheimer emphasized that two important factors – the culmination of German classical philosophy in Hegel’s social philosophy and the subsequent development of industry and science in the 19th century – had allowed society as a whole to become less unpredictable and unjust towards individuals (Horkheimer, 1932a; Regius, 1934).^[4] Thus, according to Horkheimer, the task of contemporary social philosophy is to help bring the two factors into accord on the basis of philosophical inquiry and through interdisciplinary cooperation with sociology, economics, history, and other sciences.

Although a research project formulated in this way meant for the Institute for Social Research the following of the research of social issues set out by the first director of the institute, Carl Grünberg, especially in his journal Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, it was a transition from social history to social theory related to The Crisis of Marxism, which was the title of the book Horkheimer was working on.^[5] By emphasis on interdisciplinary theoretical research of contemporary society, Horkheimer referred to the programme being pursued by one of the founding figures of the Institute, Kurt Albert Gerlach.

Evolution in thinking

However, in the time that elapsed between the writing of the inaugural speech and his programmatic article, Horkheimer’s views evolved. They did not change fundamentally, but in writing the article, he framed his ideas primarily within materialist theory, seeking to expound on the aforementioned project of implementing Hegelian-Marxist philosophy in fair social practices, emphasizing the use of existing research knowledge and industrial potential. However, the tense pre-war situation and the fact that some of Marx’s predictions failed to materialize led Horkheimer to revise his thinking in 1937 and to focus on critical theory – while maintaining the materialist grounding of the theory.

Although the impetus for Horkheimer’s study “Traditional and Critical Theory”, written after emigration from Nazi Germany into exile in New York and published in Paris, was the 70th anniversary of the first volume of Capital, as an émigré in a new work environment his options were limited and so there is no explicit mention of Marx.^[6] However, Horkheimer left obvious clues and references, thereby eliminating the need to be more explicit. As the title suggests, the article focuses on the distinction between traditional and critical theory. While traditional theory attempts only to describe the existing state, for the most part impartially, in the spirit of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, especially within established positivism, inadvertently conservative in accepting the supporting pillars of power and the structure of the given social order, whereas critical theory rejects such an alienating affirmative approach to social reality (Horkheimer, 1932c).^[7] Horkheimer, who agreed with other researchers working on the programme ideas of critical theory at that time, declares that “Critical theory maintains: it need not be so; man can change reality,” and points to the social engagement of critical theory: “the critical theory of society is, in its totality, the unfolding of a single existential judgment” (Horkheimer, 2002a, pp. 223-224); it unfolds a practical judgement that enables the struggle for a just society. In broadly conceived interdisciplinary research, this social critique is linked to the historically formed connection between the validity of individual theories and the interests of individual social groups as representatives of the social order. On that basis and with an analysis of natural human needs, he develops a practically committed theory in which the stress is on the political economy and which opposes exploitation and discrimination. Thus, critical theory combines theory of knowledge with theory of society, and theory with practice in general. Hence epistemology has to be linked to social theory and to the social subject. This subject of “critical thought and its theory” is “a definite individual in his real relation to other individuals and groups, in his conflict with a particular class, and, finally, in the resultant web of relationships with the social totality and with nature.” (Horkheimer, 2002a, p. 211)

Dialectics forms an internal part of this project. In his article “Zum Problem der Wahrheit”, Horkheimer lists the characteristics of dialectical thinking: “… the unifying principle of regressive and progressive moments, preservation and overcoming, of good and bad aspects of moments in nature and human history; an attempt … to try to analytically achieve concepts in relation to each other and through them to reconstruct reality – these and all other features of dialectical thinking correspond to a form of complex reality that is constantly changing in all its details.” (Horkheimer, 1935b, p. 351) In short, it is an “open dialectic” that should be capable of reflecting a historically changing reality (Horkheimer, 1934, p. 25; Horkheimer, 1941a, pp. 121-123).^[8]

Horkheimer does not attempt a literal reception of Hegel’s or Marx’s conception of dialectics but expresses the intention to incorporate his theory into a particular stream of thought. The dialectical movement from thesis via antithesis to synthesis has its parallel in the relationship analysed earlier among the three elements of critical theory – critique, explanation, and normativity – and it is within this implicit framework that Horkheimer sets out the basic theses of critical theory in “Traditional and Critical Theory” and in his other writing from the 1930s, much of which was published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Although Horkheimer does not sufficiently articulate or distinguish these, it is possible to at least partly identify them and show how they are linked in terms of their arguments.

Critique

In his study entitled “The Social Function of Philosophy”, Horkheimer defines the first element of critical theory, i.e., critique, not mere negation but an “effort which is not satisfied to accept the prevailing ideas, actions, and social conditions unthinkingly and from mere habit; effort which aims to coordinate the individual sides of social life with each other and with the general ideas and aims of the epoch, to deduce them genetically, to distinguish the appearance from the essence, to examine the foundations of things, in short, really to know them.” (Horkheimer, 2002b) Horkheimer develops a critique of knowledge that rejects the acontextual and ahistorical independence of ideas, in which ideas perpetuate and fulfil only ideological functions, in the sense of politically serving the self-centred partial interests of certain social groups, either as a consequence of insufficient reflection or the conscious concealment of reality. In Anfänge der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie, Horkheimer builds on revelation of the ideological contradictions between ideologically proclaimed ideals and social reality (Horkheimer, 1930a; 2002a, p. 77, p. 87; 1930b; 1933a, pp. 13-14; 1937).^[9] He points out that while ideology creates the illusion that an ideal is identical to the reality or for example promises the freedom of the individual, in practice the ideology suppresses it. Thus, his approach is also a critique of a given social practice.

This type of critique does not require any external criteria, since it is satisfied with the subject of its examination, in which it finds contradictions. However, for Horkheimer, it is not just a matter of critiquing the discrepancy between words and deeds. He does not seek to critique the practical non-fulfilment of racist ideals, for example. Although even in this case there is a contradiction between reality and the proclaimed politics, critical theorists do not consider this discrepancy undesirable. He is not just concerned with the contradiction between reality and ideas but with the contradiction between reality and the correct ideas. The premise is to critique the failure to pursue the correct ideas, such as the failure to achieve the promised freedom of the individual referred to above. This brings us to the question of how to determine which ideas are correct and which are not. Since immanent criticism, as I have already indicated, would be existentially dependent on the contradiction in the relationship between any words and deeds, any less unspecific examination of relations would end in relativism. Although Horkheimer states that, at the most general level, no invariant criteria are desirable, that does not mean that critical theory has no criteria and that it gives itself up to relativism. In the article “Montaigne und die Funktion der Skepsis”, we read that Horkheimer rejects relativistic and sceptical approaches that are barely able to fulfil their restorative function in contemporary conditions as they were in late antiquity or the Renaissance (Horkheimer, 1938).^[10] The weighty foundations of critical theory must therefore be borne by immanent critique with the help of a closer specification expressed by some other critical-theoretical moment.

Description and explanation

The second element is description and explanation, which is linked primarily to the materialistic foundations of critical theory. As indicated earlier, the practical commitment of critical theory and the interconnection of critique, explanation and normativity protect critical-theoretical description against the pseudo-neutralist temptations of positivism.

In his articles “Materialismus und Moral” and “Materialismus und Metaphysik”, Horkheimer sees human being as a being entrenched in nature and society who adapts his surroundings to his work (Horkheimer, 1933b, p. 185; 1933b, pp. 223-224). The world is transformed by historically conditioned human practice, specifically by work in society. Since people are active subjects who participate in shaping their environment as members of historically situated social groups, they cannot be considered either a purely passive element, controlled by the environment they impartially observe, or a completely decisive factor that determines voluntaristically their surroundings. In its own practical situation, “Critical theory is neither ‘deeply rooted’ like totalitarian propaganda nor ‘detached’ like the liberalist intelligentsia.” (Horkheimer, 2002a, pp. 223–224) As potential critical self-awareness, critical theory seeks to be part of the good practice in which it participates epistemologically and socially; the truth of the theory here is the moment of good practice (Horkheimer, 1935b, p. 345; 2002a, p. 90). In his article “Zur Rationalismusstreit in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie”, Horkheimer tries to specify good practice, stating that a theory’s value is historically connected to the aims of progressive social forces (Horkheimer, 1934, pp. 26–27; 1932c, p. 1). He then further defines good practice among progressive forces by introducing the distinction between partial and generalizable interest, and the general interest or the general public (Horkheimer, 1934, p. 32).

But which social groups, as progressive forces, promote this general interest? Horkheimer is in no doubt that this interest is primarily about the economic concerns of class society: “such a concern is necessarily generated in the proletariat.” (Horkheimer, 2002a, p. 213) Further to Marx’s analysis of the struggle for recognition of individual social classes and the critique of ideology, Horkheimer concludes that the social groups most affected by the ideologically generated irrationality (in terms of the inconsistency) of the capitalist order and its social perpetuation relations have – as social forces negating the status quo – an interest in creating a rational organization of human activity, a rational society (Horkheimer, 1937).

However, Horkheimer’s reflections on the workers’ movement are already indicated in “Traditional and Critical Theory” by the scepticism of the second half of the 1930s regarding the progressive role the proletariat should play in society: “even the situation of the proletariat is, in this society, no guarantee of correct knowledge” (Horkheimer, 2002a, p. 213); “Nor is there a social class by whose acceptance of the theory one could be guided.” (Horkheimer, 2002a, p. 242) The hopes previously placed in this social class by philosophy of history had largely been dashed, mainly because of the general trend of its disintegration in the capitalist countries, the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Nazi tendencies in Germany and other countries (Horkheimer, 1939; 1941b; 1941c). The class-defined connection between theory and practice – a reflection of the theoretical hopes in social reality and in people’s awareness – was weakening. Here Marxism provided no sufficient explanation, since the proletariat, the dominant subject of social change, was disappearing from the scene. However, Horkheimer made only brief reference to an alternative subject, whether in general or in specific terms.

The descriptive materialistic dimension of Horkheimer’s conception of critical theory has one other supporting element: the psychoanalytic tradition, particularly Freud’s theory of the libido, that was still not very well developed in critical theory in the 1930s. Horkheimer talks about the instinctive drives that stimulate people into relieving tension and fulfilling their needs. In “Materialismus und Metaphysik”, this stimulus is considered a natural fact (Horkheimer, 1933a; 1936). The pursuit of happiness, satisfaction, and self-preservation are legitimate human reactions, as they are elementary, natural attributes of the human race, but they are suppressed by the current organization of society, especially by its economic side. According to Horkheimer, the task of critical theory is to understand these social limitations that prevent human being from achieving fuller self-realization and to help eliminate them.

Normativity

As a result of the disappointment at the marginalization of the social role of the working class a normative concept of human being in general characteristics became increasingly important for Horkheimer. This normativity forms the third element of critical theory set out by Horkheimer. Although Horkheimer’s reference to the generalizable interest of one social group seems to echo the role of the proletariat, which was to represent all mankind, the growing emphasis on a generalization that includes other groups reflects the collapse of the historical mission of this subject of social change (Horkheimer, 1968, p. 193).

As can be seen from Horkheimer’s introductory pages to Marcuse’s study “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” the difficulty of finding support in the rejected reality, which was at that time distorted by repressive, Nazi moments, renders critical theory increasingly reliant on the imagination in formulating normativity (Horkheimer, Marcuse, 1937; Horkheimer, 1935a; Honneth, 1994).^[11] The imagination is idealistic in inspiration, while its content, to be contrasted with the undesirable reality, acquires a materialistic critical character: “This negative formulation … is the materialist content of the idealist concept of reason.” (Horkheimer, 2002a, p. 242) However, Horkheimer is straightforward in specifying these normative elements of critical theory. References to a community of free people are among the initial formulations that were not taken further.

All three elements of trichotomic critical theory (critique, description, normativity) require interdisciplinary research as a condition of the critical theory (Horkheimer, 1932b; 2002a), not just in terms of linking up the tasks of the individual social sciences but also in connecting them with the possibilities of philosophy. However, it is not possible to rely solely on the original claim of critical theory that the most general, yet particular results of the analyses stemming from the particular standpoints of the individual sciences or disciplines will find a new position and significance in the reconstruction of the whole within the broader, interconnected theoretical framework with a philosophical examination. This claim is rendered problematic by the unreflected adaptation of positivist-oriented sciences to the given power relations. Hence philosophy acquires a fundamental significance.

Conclusion: Towards re-formulations

Although Marcuse’s articulation of the basic theses of critical theory in the 1930s is largely analogous to Horkheimer’s, it must be considered distinctive, being expressed from Marcuse’s specific perspective. Marcuse—who joined the Institute for Social Research in 1933 on Horkheimer’s recommendation to his colleague Leo Löwenthal, who also lured Erich Fromm to the Institute —was initially heavily influenced by phenomenology and related existentialism through his studies with Husserl, Heidegger and other philosophers. However, aware of the limits of these schools of thought, he gradually, beginning with his Habilitation thesis and then other writings, transformed his Heideggerian theory of historicity into a critical theory of history (Marcuse, 1932). In his treatment of the young Marx, he stressed that phenomenology lacks completeness since it neglects the material and historical conditions of human life (Marcuse, 1968, p. 21; 1937, pp. 414–415). On the same basis, he formulated his critique of the political existentialism of the time, which he thought contributed to “totalitarian political theory” rather than offering fruitful existential motives (Marcuse, 1934).^[12] However, I plan to discuss these issues in my next text, along with issues relating to Horkheimer and Adorno’s redefinition of critical theory after World War II and later. In these, we can identify both the deficits and inspiration for the methodological trichotomy of critical theory.

In the end, I have to add that the historical research in this article will of course have to be accompanied by research into contemporary critical thinking in order to address the social issues dealt with since the founding of the Institute for Social Research 100 years ago and the role played by critical social theory. In our era of global conflicts, we need further research that considers social issues through the lens of contemporary critical theory and its functional equivalents in other parts of the world and in connection to international, transnational, supranational, and global analyses. I have already embarked on this elsewhere from the social and economic (Hrubec, 2013), intercultural and intercivilizational (Hrubec, 2010), and security and political (Hrubec, 2018) perspectives, linked to other related analyses (Dussel, 2009; Allen & Mendieta, 2021; Fornet-Betancourt, 2004; Tehranian, 2007; Wiredu, 1996; Sklair, 2002).