You have already been introduced to Marxism, through a lecture on Marx’s own thought in the
context of the nineteenth century. Today I’m going to examine one of the major developments
of Marxist analysis in the twentieth century, in the form of the enquiries conducted by
members of what came to be known as the ‘Frankfurt School’. This refers to a tradition of
German critical thought which emerged in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, and came to be
enormously influential in certain sectors of academic and critical thinking after the Second
World War. The major text within this tradition was The Dialectic of Enlightenment by
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, which was published in 1944 in New York. Through
this, I will try to suggest the historical and philosophical dilemmas confronted by this branch of
Marxist critical theory, and I will do this mainly through an analysis of selected quotes from
your reading for this week. But I’ll come to that in the second part of the lecture. Before I get
there, I’d like to take a bit of time to sketch in the historical context we need to understand in
order to grasp Adorno and Horkheimer’s project.
Let’s begin with the fact that the intellectuals associated with the Institute of Social Research
(Institut von Sozialforschung), set up in 1923, which later came to be known as the Frankfurt
School, were mostly German Marxist intellectuals deeply shaped by the recent experience of
the First World War and the Russian Revolution. As you know, the October Revolution in
1917 was conceived of as the first step in a Europe-wide revolutionary conquest of power: this,
indeed, was a key part of the rationale behind the Bolshevik take-over in October. Germany,
for various reasons, was expected to be the storm-centre of the European revolution. Bear in
mind that at a time when European powers were locked in a deeply self-destructive world war
of unprecedented dimensions, this was not an unrealistic expectation. But the revolutionary
upsurge which did take place in Germany was violently suppressed and defeated [Slide 1 and 2:
Images of workers, Rosa Luxemburg]. Its major leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht, were assassinated in the brutal struggles which led eventually to the establishment
of the Weimar Republic. As Germany settled down into a shortlived period of liberal
democracy, the socialist revolution was increasingly confined to the East. European, and
especially German, Marxist intellectuals therefore faced an apparently clear political choice.
Either they could commit themselves to the insecurities of a Communist Party which
increasingly was coming under the sway of Moscow, or they could effectively give up on
revolution in the near future, and work with more moderate socialists within the increasingly
shaky structures of the liberal German republic. The intellectuals I will speak about today took
what they considered a third option – they withdrew from, or refused to join, direct political
engagement, and concentrated on the development of Marxist thought. This marked a new
departure: previously, Marxist theory itself had mainly been a product of labour and socialist
movements, and had, since Marx, chiefly discussed the possibilities of socialist change and
revolutionary politics. Now, the production of Marxist theory itself began to move into what we
might broadly consider the ‘academy’ – not so much in the sense of the university, as in the
sense of scholarly circles, independently funded research institutes, and the world of academic
journals and publications. Simultaneously, the scope of Marxist research broadened: no longer
focused primarily on questions of revolution and political change, Marxists began to undertake
sociological, psychoanalytic, historical, philosophical and aesthetic studies with greater intensity.
No single institution embodied this shift more starkly than the Frankfurt School. German
Marxists felt the need to set up an independent institute for two chief reasons. First, the
orthodoxy of ‘official’ Marxism was bolstered by the Bolshevik Revolution, and independent
Marxists not necessarily wedded to the Soviet cause found little support as the 1920s wore on
from that quarter. Towards the end of the 1920s, with the rise of Stalin, the Soviet Union began
to clamp down on academic freedom and research, and the effects were felt by many Marxists
who held independent opinions about the Russian Revolution, or about the subjects on which
Stalin laid down a dictatorial intellectual line. Second, and more immediately, Marxist research
was not a safe subject to pursue within the German academic establishment: universities
discriminated systematically against left-wing scholarship and teaching. There was no room, for
instance, for left-wing subjects like histories of the German working class. The German
academic establishment was also conservative in intellectual terms: it frowned upon more
imaginative, cross-disciplinary forms of research, and kept disciplines like history, sociology and
philosophy rigidly demarcated. Yet Marxist inquiry required precisely such cross-disciplinary
fertilization. So it was that in 1923, Felix Weil, a young Marxist from a wealthy family, used
some of the money from his father’s fortune in the grain trade to establish an independent
institute in Frankfurt. [Slide 3: image of Weil] The first director of the Institute was Carl
Gruenberg [Slide 4: photograph of Gruenberg], a rare instance of a Marxist with a tenured
professorial job, at Frankfurt University. Gruenberg was a historian of the labour movement,
and an orthodox Marxist who kept the Frankfurt School distant from theoretical innovations till
1930, when he stepped down.
He was replaced by Max Horkheimer [Slide 5: Horkheimer], who played a major role in
shifting the direction of intellectual inquiry at the Institute. At a purely scholarly level,
Horkheimer disliked the massive tomes which characterized German scholarship at the time.
He preferred conciseness and brevity. Scholars at the Institute tended to write essays,
sometimes long ones which stretched into modest-sized books. Before publication, they were
collectively discussed and critiqued by other members of the Institute: thus, publications by
members were conceived of as collaborative undertakings. Horkheimer also established a
journal, the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, or the Journal of Social Research. [Slide 6: Journal]
Horkheimer made two major changes in the organization of scholarship at the Institute. First,
he insisted on a social science which was critically aware of its own role in the world, rather than
seeking a pure form of truth independent of social and historical context. Second, he insisted
on interdisciplinarity. The Frankfurt School thus included philosophers, cultural critics,
sociologists and psychoanalysts who tried to develop arguments which integrated these different
disciplines. From your reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment for this week, you will already
have noticed how difficult it is to slot it into a disciplinary category.
Horkheimer was critical of the stultification of Marxist thought in Germany, which he felt had
come out of an over-direct link with political work and agitation. So, in the first place, he
refused to confine the membership of the Frankfurt School to card-carrying Marxists alone. In
the 1930s and beyond, the Frankfurt School would become genuinely cross-disciplinary, and
while the development of Marxist thought would remain a priority, there was a conscious
attempt to try and accomplish this without introducing sectarian quarrels into scholarship. So
along with a strong core of Marxist intellectuals, the Frankfurt School also included intellectuals
of broadly left-wing persuasion who were not Marxist, such as the great cultural theorist
Siegfried Kracauer, or Marxist in an extremely unorthodox fashion, such as Walter Benjamin,
one of the major cultural critics and philosophers of the twentieth century. Horkheimer was
also critical of developments in the Soviet Union, along with many fellow-Marxists. In the early
1930s, they maintained a studied silence about the Soviet Union, in contrast to the outpouring
of enthusiasm in other Marxist circles. In the late 1930s, in the context of Stalin’s show trials
and executions of thousands of Communists, some European Marxists, including those
associated with the Frankfurt School, would adopt a more openly critical posture. Horkheimer
and his close associate Adorno were among those Marxist intellectuals for whom the
experience of the Soviet Union meant a painful realization that Marxist optimism about the
shape of the future was ill-founded.
More immediately than the distortions of socialism in Soviet Russia, however, the Frankfurt
School, under Horkheimer’s directorship, had to face fateful events in Germany. The rise of
the Nazis made the presence of a Marxist institute in Germany untenable, as democrats,
socialists and communists alike were forced to flee from their country, and often from Europe
itself. For members of the Frankfurt School, whether Marxist or non-Marxist, the problem was
made more intense by the heavy presence of Jewish intellectuals at the institute. Theodor
Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin – who are remembered today as the three
leading figures of this intellectual movement, were all Jewish. Horkheimer was quick to realize
the dangers in the early 1930s for a left-wing institute, and the Frankfurt School was relocated
to the United States. So the thinkers associated with it all also experienced exile from their own
country, and this feature marked their thought in a decisive way: it was felt as a loss, but also
offered them new, and arguably deeper, perspectives both on German and American society.
Before I go on to talk about Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, let me
briefly introduce you to some of the figures associated with the Frankfurt School. I have already
talked about Horkheimer. So here’s Adorno [Slide 7: Adorno]. Adorno was born in 1903 to a
Jewish wine merchant named Wiesengrund, and a German singer with the maiden surname of
Adorno, which he later adopted as his own. His principal interests from an early age were
music and art, and he would in due course become one of the most noted aesthetic thinkers of
the twentieth century, with a powerful analysis of musical and artistic forms. His work is
perhaps best described as a distinctive mix of aesthetics, sociology and a self-critical Hegelian
Marxism. He joined the Frankfurt School in 1928 as a philosopher, and came to work closely
with Horkheimer. Another very influential figure was Herbert Marcuse [Slide 8: Marcuse], who
joined the Institute in 1932. Marcuse had been active both in the Social Democratic Party and
revolutionary movement in Berlin during the war. He had been politically radicalized during
military service, and the officers’ corps he belonged to participated in the Communist uprising
in Berlin. Marcuse quit the Social Democratic Party, which he saw as having betrayed the
working class by plunging it into war, and studied philosophy under the tutelage of Martin
Heidegger. This has to be one of the more tragic intellectual partnerships of the twentieth
century: Heidegger, acclaimed by many as one of the greatest philosophers of the age, went on
to ally actively with the Nazis, and participate in the expulsion of Jewish intellectuals. Marcuse
migrated to Geneva and then the United States, joining US Government service during World
War II. In the 1960s, Marcuse would for a while become perhaps the most popular and
influential intellectual in the Western world, as student radicals in the 1960s were inspired by
his critique of contemporary capitalism.
I should also mention perhaps the most intriguing and tragic figure of Walter Benjamin [Slide
9: Benjamin]. Benjamin was a maverick philosopher and cultural theorist who combined
Marxism with a deep interest in arcane forms of Jewish theology, and deployed concepts from
both Marxism and messianic Judaism to examine contemporary mass culture, forms of
consciousness, and the movement of history. He committed suicide while trying to flee from
the Nazis in 1940. His work was considered too unorthodox for him to receive anything but a
small occasional stipend from the Frankfurt School while he lived, though posthumously he
became enormously influential in the fields of aesthetics, cultural theory and philosophy.
So with this historical background in place, let me now turn to Dialectic of Enlightenment. This
was first published in 1947, and comprised collaborative work done chiefly by Adorno and
Horkheimer in their American exile during and immediately after the Second World War.
There are two things you’ll notice almost immediately about the text, no matter how obscure
and elusive it seems. First, you will have noticed the deep note of historical pessimism in the
text – this was in stark contrast to the official Marxism promoted by the Soviet Union and
Communist movements, which essentially held on to faith in historical progress in the direction
of the future socialist society. Adorno and Horkheimer were the major representatives of an
alternative and opposed trend on the intellectual Left: a deeply tragic and pessimistic view of
modern life. The second thing you will have noticed is the attention paid to culture, and the
relative absence of any of the classic concepts and methods of historical materialism. Adorno
and Horkheimer were as insistent as other Marxists that culture be related to society – but they
felt this could not be accomplished simply by identifying the economic bases and contexts of
history and culture. Rather, they conceived of the culture of wartime and postwar European
society as a symptom of the malaise of liberal capitalism. In order to do this, however, they
needed to grapple with a capitalism – and a modernity – for which classical Marxism had not
really laid the coordinates of study. The attention paid to mass society – the society of
consumers whose individuality is stripped from them by market forces and capitalist ideology –
and mass culture – the replacement of older forms of cultural expression by radio, popular
music, advertising, cinema and so on – is a major feature of this work. As such, Adorno and
Horkheimer were laying the basis of a new and broader critique of Western capitalist
civilization, conceived of in terms which were no longer primarily socio-economic.
The third thing you will have noticed, of course, is how very difficult Dialectic of
Enlightenment is as a text. I sympathize fully if this is what you felt: it is a challenging and at
many points a frustrating text. But it is of profound importance for understanding the directions
taken not only by Marxism, but also by social analysis in general after the Second World War.
So let me lay out the problem as starkly as possible: Adorno and Horkheimer were writing in a
historical moment in Europe which had been shaped by two world wars, the deaths of tens of
millions of people in the biggest orgy of death the world had ever known, the rise of Nazism,
and what they saw as the reversal of the Russian Revolution’s initial promise of liberation into
Stalinism. Liberal society, as it had been understood, was clearly dead. Now it is important to
stress this point. Today, we are used to a more comforting notion of twentieth century history:
historians and opinion-makers in the Western world, for several decades, have restored a
certain liberal teleology of progress, based on the social experience of a small part of the
western world. It appears, from these accounts, that Nazism and Stalinism were terrible threats
to the liberal project of the Enlightenment, with its values of freedom, equality and progress,
which were eventually defeated. They are seen as aberrations. Writing in 1947, Adorno and
Horkheimer were denied the comfort of this vision: it might also be said that they were spared
its smugness. In a sense, what they were saying was – what if it is not the case that totalitarian
regimes were an aberration from the main line of modern Western history? What if, on the
contrary, they reveal a profound truth about the historical trajectory of the modern West? Here
is how they present the problem:
In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at
liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth
radiates disaster triumphant.
The context of these lines is not hard to see: Auschwitz, the World Wars, Stalinism, to name
just three instances. How could this be? How could European civilization, which had
advertised its progressive virtues to the rest of the world – and to itself – for over a century,
have come to this point of totalitarian rule on the one hand and global destruction on the
other? Adorno and Horkheimer put the problem in more precise terms in their Introduction:
The dilemma that faced us in our work proved to be the first phenomenon for investigation:
the self-destruction of the Enlightenment. We are wholly convinced […] that social freedom is
inseparable from enlightened thought. Nevertheless, we believe that we have just as clearly that
the notion of this very way of thinking, no less than the actual historic forms – the social
institutions – with which it is interwoven, already contains the seed of the reversal universally
apparent today.
Note that Adorno and Horkheimer, in contrast to liberal notions, stress the self-destructive
character of the Enlightenment. They proclaim themselves committed to the Enlightenment
project: however, precisely for this reason, they have to take stock of the horrors, as they see it,
that the progress of Enlightenment itself has wrought. In order to rescue the radical, liberating
impulse buried within the Enlightenment, they therefore have to undertake a painstaking and
painful critique of the Enlightenment itself. For them, the seeds of the disasters of the twentieth
century do not lie in the rejection of Enlightenment values, but a certain direction taken by the
Enlightenment itself in the course of its history. They clarify this thought just a few lines later:
…the prime cause of the retreat from enlightenment into mythology is not to be sought so
much in the nationalist, pagan, and other modern mythologies manufactured precisely in order
to contrive such a reversal, but in the Enlightenment itself when paralyzed by fear of the truth.
In this respect, both concepts are to be understood not merely as historico-cultural
(geistesgeschichtlich) but as real. Just as the Enlightenment expresses the actual movement of
civil society as a whole in the aspect of its idea as embodied in individuals and institutions, so
truth is not merely the rational consciousness but equally the form that consciousness assumes
in actual life.
The point here is a delicate one. What do we mean by Enlightenment? Now in the form in
which we study the Enlightenment in a course like Historiography, we tend to understand it as
a particular historical development in the way people in Europe came to think and orient
themselves towards the world, a process we can date to the eighteenth century, broadly
speaking. But Adorno and Horkheimer make a conceptual move which will define future
generations of research in the postwar world: they identify Enlightenment not as an idea, but as
a concrete historical process in which ideas are materially embedded, in the forms of
structures, ways of life and institutions. So it is not in the development of thought alone that we
should search for what is called the Enlightenment – rather, the Enlightenment tells us
something fundamental about the dynamic of human interaction with the world in European
history, and most intensely in the modern age. Enlightenment, in other words, attests to a
certain historical impulse most sharply visible in European society, evident at various points in
history. This can account for something otherwise rather confusing about the early parts of
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Adorno and Horkheimer make ample use of texts written long
before the Enlightenment as we understand it, notably Homer’s Odyssey. They are able to do
this because they see the drive behind the Enlightenment as something which has surfaced and
resonated at various points in European history, though most powerfully over the last two
centuries.
So what is this driving impulse, this fundamental historical logic which the Enlightenment
expresses? This is how Adorno and Horkheimer put it:
Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles: neither in the enslavement of men nor in
compliance with the world’s rulers. […] Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It…refers
to method, the exploitation of others’ work, and capital […]: the radio as a sublimated printing
press, the dive bomber as a more effective form of artillery, radio control as a more reliable
compass. What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it
and other men. That is its only aim. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has
extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. […] Enlightenment is totalitarian.
So, in order to establish human freedom in the world, the Enlightenment historically has led to
the enslavement of the world by human beings. This is a difficult concept, and one which I
cannot fully outline right now. But the starting point is the disenchantment of the world.
Enlightenment, for Adorno and Horkheimer, aims at replacing a world of gods, spirits and
magic by a world ruled by reason and science. So the world, with all its symbolic meanings as
attributed by myth and legend and magic, now simply becomes ‘nature’ – an object to be
worked over by secular reason and technology, in order to yield social benefits. Human beings
are the subject, the world or nature is simply an object to be overcome or harnessed.
However, this is only the beginning of a very dark story. Because what Adorno and
Horkheimer then try to establish, through a series of studies, is how this drive to mastery over
nature inevitably ends up reproducing new kinds of power relations in society itself. Here they
are both more radical and bleaker than Marx. Marx had believed quite unproblematically in
the right of man to ‘master’ nature and harness it to the task of solving the problems of society.
He believed that the problem lay in the fact that the power to exercise this kind of technological
mastery lay with a small ruling class, and would be resolved if this was replaced by social
control. Adorno and Horkheimer, however, detect a symptom of disease in the very drive to
master and harness nature – i.e. the world – in the first place. Why is this? Briefly, they suggest
that the modes of thought, power and practice which the Enlightenment devised to achieve
human mastery consisted of technology, mathematics, and statistics. In the process, the
qualities – of both human beings and nature – were flattened out. People, no less than plants,
became items to be counted, tabulated, classified, and acted upon by vast impersonal
mechanisms – the state, the market, the mass media. Number, quantity and abstraction – rather
than real human relationships – became the substance of human life. People become objects to
be worked over by technologies of scientific reason and market logic. They become statistics.
That is how governments, the market, and mass entertainment – the giant forces governing the
world – see them, and that effectively is what they become.
So it is necessary at this point to be precise about what Adorno and Horkheimer are saying.
They are not discounting social progress, or the potential of science. They are, rather, asking
why such enormous potentials have, rather than freeing people and allowing them to express
their individuality, actually ended up suppressing them? Once again: remember the specific
historical context of these words. At the time Adorno and Horkheimer are thinking these
thoughts, three huge ideologies – Nazism, Stalinist Communism, and liberal capitalism – are
competing for European and world domination. Each of these, at this moment in time, seeks
an enormous expansion of the powers of the state, in a way that individuals appear like tiny
exchangeable, inter-changeable units. It is not that this does not represent social progress of a
kind. But it is a very distorted kind of progress:
The fallen nature of modern man cannot be separated from social progress. On the one hand
the growth of economic productivity furnishes the conditions for a world of greater justice; on
the other hand it allows the technical apparatus and the social groups which administer it a
disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population. The individual is wholly devalued in
relation to the economic powers, which at the same time press the control of society over
nature to hitherto unsuspected heights. Even though the individual disappears before the
apparatus which he serves, the apparatus provides for him as never before. In an unjust state of
life, the impotence and pliability of the masses grow with the quantitative increase in
commodities allowed them.
Note the difference between the world described by these deeply Marxist lines, and the world
of classical Marxism. In the nineteenth century, Marx had not been able to envisage the
prospect of industrial society producing anything but misery and impoverishment for the vast
majority of the populations who lived in capitalist countries. Adorno and Horkheimer are
writing in the 1940s, at the precise moment when what used to be the modern welfare state is
coming into existence – yet it is doing so, in Germany and Russia, through iron dictatorships,
and in western Europe and the United States, through an equally frightening mass consumer
society. So capitalism itself has changed. In place of the supercharged profits of individual
entrepreneurs, we now – in the 1940s – have giant monopoly concerns in industry, finance and
banking, whether run privately or by the state. In place of the mass impoverishment predicted
by Marx, we have relative economic affluence. But, Adorno and Horkheimer claim, this rise in
living standards, which Marx thought could only be achieved through social revolution, was
actually achieved through Nazism, Stalinism, and monopoly capitalism, and amounted to a
restriction of human freedom, rather than its expansion. In Marxist terms, the contradiction
between the forces and relations of production had actually been overcome, but by centralized
welfare states, democratic and dictatorial, rather than through the revolutionary activity of the
working class. The material comforts of the modern world are bought at the price of social
freedom and individuality. In each form of society, a deadening sameness and uniformity is
falling over patterns of social life. In capitalist America no less than in fascist Germany, people
are being rendered into social types and thereby losing their individuality. The world now
appears as shelves of identical products with different labels in supermarkets and stores, as
films and music which repeat the same themes over and over again in a standardized format,
and finally it appears as absolute social conformism, with everyone eager to fit in. This is the
paradoxical, tragic world which the ‘progress’ promised by Enlightenment has created.
You will by now have noticed that Adorno and Horkheimer may be responding specifically to
the fact of fascism, but their guns are not trained solely at fascism. Equally, they are taking aim
at modern capitalist society in the liberal democracies, where they predict that increasingly
political choices will become as meaningless as cultural choices. Their most energetic critique
of the culture of Western capitalism is contained in the chapter on the ‘culture industry’, which
is part of your reading for the seminar.
Now I don’t have time to go into the details of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of modern
culture. It is very wide-ranging, very insightful and illuminating, and equally problematic. They
fundamentally see the concentration of economic power, in the form of state and private
monopolies, as driving the way culture is produced. Rather than the individual artist who makes
often difficult choices about what to say and what not to say, modern culture is produced
primarily according to a market logic. Here is a longish, extended quote which sums up a major
part of their case:
Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to
show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its
violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to
be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the
rubbish they deliberately produce. […] The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of
what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of
stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on
classifying, organizing and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may
escape; the distinctions are emphasized and extended. The public is catered for with a
hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of
complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his
previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out
for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organization charts, and are divided by
income groups into red, green and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of
propaganda.
In other words, think Rupert Murdoch!
The disturbing dimension of this analysis – which Adorno and Horkheimer extend through
comments on popular film, radio, cartoons, advertising and other features of modern
consumer culture – is that it describes a world that is possible for us to recognize. Adorno and
Horkheimer are pointing to these forms of mass culture as indicative of a deep truth about the
way modern society relates to itself – as a series of investments, calculations, classifications, and
a reduction of human relationships to abstract numbers and figures. Through all this, new and
more insidious forms of total domination are established: nothing lies outside the sway of this
society, and anything which resists is treated as degenerate or perverted.
Adorno and Horkheimer basically see modern capitalist society – and socialist states as well –
as reproducing forms of social conformity, forcing people to be ‘normal’ according to certain
strict, if invisible, parameters. So rather than instructing the mind in how to resist, culture in the
age of mass consumer society becomes an instruction in how to conform and imitate. And
Adorno and Horkheimer were able to do this, in a sense, because of their very deep
attachment to the cultural achievements of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie in the fields of
literature, art and music. They implicitly set this up as a model against which the values of new,
mass consumer societies are tested, and found wanting. I should stress that all these historical
forms of culture – cinema, radio, and the like – were relatively new at the time, and Adorno
and Horkheimer were old enough to remember a world where culture had looked very
different. They were aware that this was a world of privilege, and tried not to romanticize it. But
they believed it contained possibilities for furthering artistic expression and cultural richness,
possibilities destroyed by mass consumerism.
But there is also a different sort of reason for why we might find this disturbing. We find in this
text an unremitting hostility to all forms of mass culture which, despite the Marxism of Adorno
and Horkheimer, is not free from a certain cultural elitism. This again flowed from their
attachment to the great achievements of individual artists before the rise of mass society. It can
be argued that this yardstick which they set up made it impossible for Adorno and Horkheimer
to fully grasp the more creative possibilities within the cultural forms produced in the midtwentieth century. They could only see the results of mass culture as deadening, producing a
society of endless uniformity. And if you flip channels on the TV or sit through hours of
identical advertisements, it is hard not to see a very profound point there. At the same time, is
this really all that can be said about mass culture? Are the aesthetic and cultural pleasures and
meanings offered by it really so empty? Is it really true that cinema, for instance, cannot
provide the cultural and human depth of the great nineteenth-century novelists, or offer
something equally meaningful in its stead? I’m not going to try to answer this question directly:
this is something for your seminar discussion. But I will make a brief observation about the
dilemmas this theory could run into because of its one-dimensional critique of modern culture.
When the great cultural revolution of the sixties took place, as you know, popular music and
art and literature and cinema – in particular, music – had a great deal to do with it. Here a
certain split emerged within theorists of the Frankfurt school. Herbert Marcuse, who I have
mentioned, saw something profoundly liberating about the cultural energies of the sixties (rock
music, pop art, the counterculture) and emerged as a sort of guru for people ranging from
student revolutionaries to hippies. Adorno, on the other hand, bitterly resisted and criticized
these cultural developments, seeing them as a further extension of the shallowness of the
culture industry.
Let me end with a few comments on the significance of the Frankfurt School, and Dialectic of
Enlightenment, for the future course of critical and specifically historical thinking. First of all,
the Frankfurt School was the decisive agent in a very significant transformation of Marxist
thought, especially in the post-war world. The project initially outlined by Horkheimer
consisted of the use of the humanities and social sciences to construct a thoroughgoing critique
of society. Critical theory – the use of theory to criticize and transform the world, rather than
simply contemplate it – became the watchword of successive generations of philosophers and
social and cultural theorists. This increasingly took the form of a critique of ideology or of
culture. So by the late twentieth century, the most powerful Marxist currents in intellectual life
– including within the fields of history and sociology – were to be found in the realm of cultural
criticism. This was, to say the least, somewhat unexpected for a theory which had emerged as
an account of modern capitalism, and an ongoing reflection on the prospects of social
revolution. There is no doubt that the growth of Marxist theory in academia in the second half
of the twentieth century was accompanied by a decline in Marxist political strategy and
economic theory. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the enormous influence of Marxism
in specifically cultural studies was initiated, and in large part sustained, by the Frankfurt School.
And it certainly contributed to a broadening of Marxist thought, something we shall encounter
again in a couple of weeks when I talk about E.P. Thompson.
Even more important, perhaps, was the great theme introduced by Adorno and Horkheimer,
the critique of the Enlightenment. The argument that Enlightenment reason in some sense
produced its own negation in the rise of totalitarian regimes and ‘administered society’ has been
a very influential current in intellectual life over the last few decades. Its immediate sources are
post-modernism and post-colonial theory, both of which critique Western thought and its
global domination on the grounds of the hidden drivers and biases of Enlightenment thinking.
This is something which will recur later in this course, when you look at scholars like Michel
Foucault, post-structuralists, the Subaltern Studies school and post-colonial thought. But it is an
interesting fact of twentieth-century intellectual history that the contemporary critique of
Enlightenment, which has been so influential in historical thinking, has distant roots in a
direction taken by specifically Marxist thinking, in response to the historical situation of the
mid-twentieth century. This, I’d argue, has implications for how we think about the sources of
historical and theoretical directions and traditions.