The academic influence of the
critical method is far reaching. Some of the key issues and philosophical
preoccupations of the School involve the critique of modernity and capitalist
society, the definition of social emancipation, as well as the detection of the
pathologies of society. Critical Theory provides a specific interpretation of
Marxist philosophy with regards to some of its central economic and political
notions like commodification, reification, fetishization and critique of mass
culture.
Some of the most prominent
figures of the first generation of Critical Theorists were Max Horkheimer
(1895-1973), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Walter
Benjamin (1892-1940), Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970), Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993),
and Eric Fromm (1900-1980). Since the 1970s, a second generation began with
Jürgen Habermas, who, among other merits, contributed to the opening of a
dialogue between so-called continental and the analytic traditions. With
Habermas, the Frankfurt School turned global, influencing methodological
approaches in other European academic contexts and disciplines. It was during
this phase that Richard Bernstein, a philosopher and contemporary of Habermas,
embraced the research agenda of Critical Theory and significantly helped its
development in American universities starting from the New School for Social
Research in New York.
The third generation of
critical theorists, therefore, arose either from Habermas’ research students in
the United States and at Frankfurt am Main and Starnberg (1971-1982), or from a
spontaneous convergence of independently educated scholars. Therefore, tthird
generation of Critical Theory scholars consists of two groups. The first group
spans a broad time—denying the possibility of establishing any sharp
boundaries. It can be said to include also scholars such as Andrew Feenberg,
even if he was a direct student of Marcuse, or people such as Albrecht Wellmer
who became an assistant of Habermas due to the premature death of Adorno in
1969. Klaus Offe, Josef Früchtl, Hauke Brunkhorst, Klaus Günther, Axel Honneth,
Alessandro Ferrara, Cristina Lafont, and Rainer Forst, among others, are also
members of this group. The second group of the third generation is instead
composed mostly of American scholars who were influenced by Habermas’
philosophy during his visits to the United States.
1.
Critical Theory: Historical and Philosophical Background
Felix Weil’s father, Herman,
made his fortune by exporting grain from Argentina to Europe. In 1923, Felix
decided to use his father’s money to found an institute specifically devoted to
the study of German society in the light of a Marxist approach. The initial
idea of an independently founded institute was conceived to provide for studies
on the labor movement and the origins of anti-Semitism, which at the time were
being ignored in German intellectual and academic life.
Not long after its inception,
the Institute for Social Research was formally recognized by the Ministry of
Education as an entity attached to Goethe University Frankfurt. Felix could not
imagine that in the 1960s Goethe University Frankfurt would receive the epithet
of “Karl Marx University”. The first officially appointed director was Carl
Grünberg (1923-9), a Marxist professor at the University of Vienna. His
contribution to the Institute was the creation of a historical archive mainly
oriented to the study of the labor movement (also known as the Grünberg
Archiv).
In 1930, Max Horkheimer
succeeded to Grünberg. While continuing under a Marxist inspiration, Horkheimer
interpreted the Institute’s mission to be more directed towards an
interdisciplinary integration of the social sciences. Additionally, the
Grünberg Archiv ceased to publish and an official organ was instead launched
with a much greater impact: the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. While never
officially supporting any party, the Institute entertained intensive research
exchanges with the Soviet Union.
It was under Horkheimer’s
leadership that members of the Institute were able to address a wide variety of
economic, social, political and aesthetic topics, ranging from empirical
analysis to philosophical theorization. Different interpretations of Marxism
and its historical applications explain some of the hardest confrontations on
economic themes within the Institute, such as the case of Pollock’s criticism
of Grossman’s standard view on the pauperization of capitalism. This particular
confrontation led Grossman to leave the Institute. Pollock’s critical
reinterpretation of Marx received support also from intellectuals who greatly
contributed to later developments of the School as, for instance, in the case
of Leo Lowenthal, Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno and Erich Fromm. In particular,
with Fromm’s development of a psychoanalytic trend at the Institute and with an
influential philosophical contribution by Hokheimer, it became clear how under
his directorship the Institute faced a drastic turning point which
characterized all its future endeavors. The following sections, therefore,
briefly introduce some of the main research patterns introduced by Fromm and
Horkheimer, respectively.
Since the beginning,
psychoanalysis in the Frankfurt School was conceived in terms of a
reinterpretation of Freud and Marx. The consideration of psychoanalysis by the
Frankfurt School was certainly due to Horkheimer’s encouragement. It was Fromm,
nevertheless, who achieved a significant advancement of the discipline; his
central aim was to provide, through a synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis,
“the missing link between ideological superstructure and socio-economic base”
(Jay 1966, p. 92). A radical shift though occurred in the late 1930s, when
Adorno joined the School and Fromm decided, for independent reasons, to leave. Nevertheless,
the School’s interest in psychoanalysis, particularly in Freud’s instinct
theory, remained unaltered. This was manifest in Adorno’s paper Social Science
and Sociological Tendencies in Psychoanalysis (1946), as well as in Marcuse’s
book Eros and Civilization (1955). The School’s interest in psychoanalysis
coincided with a marginalization of Marxism, a growing interest into the
interrelation between psychoanalysis and social change, as well as with Fromm’s
insight into the psychic (or even psychotic) role of the family. This interest
became crucial in empirical studies of the 40s that led, eventually, to
Adorno’s co-authored work The Authoritarian Personality (1950). The goal of
this work was to explore, on the basis of empirical research making use of
questionnaires, to define a “new anthropological type”—the authoritarian
personality (Adorno et. al. 1950, quoted in Jay 1996, p. 239). Such a character
was found to have specific traits such as: compliance with conventional values,
non-critical thinking, as well as absence of introspectiveness.
As pointed out by Jay:
“Perhaps some of the confusion about this question was a product of
terminological ambiguity. As a number of commentators have pointed out, there
is an important distinction that should be drawn between authoritarianism and
totalitarianism [emphasis added]. Wilhelminian and Nazi Germany, for example,
were fundamentally dissimilar in their patterns of obedience. What The
Authoritarian Personality was really studying was the character type of a
totalitarian rather than an authoritarian society. Thus, it should have been no
surprise to learn that this new syndrome was fostered by a familial crisis in
which traditional paternal authority was under fire” (Jay 1996, p. 247).
Horkheimer’s leadership provided a very distinct methodological direction and
philosophical grounding to the research interests of the Institute. As an
instance of Horkheimer’s aversion to so-called Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of
life), he criticized the fetishism of subjectivity and the lack of
consideration for materialist conditions of living. Furthermore, arguing
against Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, Horkheimer, by use of dialectical
mediation, attempted to rejoin all dichotomies including the divide between
consciousness and being, theory and practice, fact and value. Differently from
Hegelianism or Marxism, dialectics amounted for Horkheimer to be neither a
metaphysical principle nor a historical praxis; it was not intended as a
methodological instrument. On the contrary, Horkheimer’s dialectics functioned
as the battleground for overcoming overly rigid categorizations and unhelpful
dichotomies and oppositions. It originated from criticism by Horkheimer of
orthodox Marxism's dichotomy between productive structures and ideological
superstructure, as well as positivism’s naïve separation of social facts and
social interpretation.
In 1933, due to the Nazi
takeover, the Institute was temporarily transferred, first to Geneva and then
in 1935 to Columbia University, New York. Two years later Horkheimer published
the ideological manifesto of the School in his Traditional and Critical Theory
([1937] 1976) where he readdressed some of the previously introduced topics
concerning the practical and critical turn of theory. In 1938, Adorno joined
the Institute after spending some time as an advanced student at Merton
College, Oxford. He was invited by Horkheimer to join the Princeton Radio
Research Project. Gradually, Adorno assumed a prominent intellectual leadership
in the School and this led to co-authorship, with Horkheimer, of one of the
milestones works of the School, the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment
in 1947. During the time of Germany’s Nazi seizure, the Institute remained the
only free voice publishing in German language. The backlash of this choice,
though, was a prolonged isolation from American academic life and intellectual
debate, a situation described by Adorno with the iconic expression “message in
the bottle” to refer to the lack of a public American audience. According to
Wiggershaus: “The Institute disorientation in the late 1930s made the balancing
acts it had always had to perform, for example in relation to its academic
environment, even more difficult. The seminars were virtually discussion groups
for the Institute’s associates, and American students only rarely took part in
them” (1995, p. 251).
Interestingly, and not
surprisingly, one of the major topics of study was Nazism. This led to two
different approaches in the School. One marshaled by Neumann, Gurland and
Kirchheimer and oriented mainly to the analysis of legal and political issues
by consideration of economic substructures; the other, instead, guided by
Horkheimer and focusing on the notion of psychological irrationalism as a
source of obedience and domination (see Jay 1996, p. 166).
In 1941, Horkheimer moved to
Pacific Palisades, near Los Angeles. He built himself a bungalow near other
German intellectuals, among whom were Bertold Brecht and Thomas Mann as well as
with other people interested in working for the film industry (Wiggershaus
1995, p. 292). Other fellows like Marcuse, Pollock and Adorno followed shortly,
whereas some remained in New York. Only Benjamin refused to leave Europe and in
1940, while attempting to cross the border between France and Spain at Port
Bou, committed suicide. Some months later, Arendt also crossed the same border,
passing on Adorno Benjamin’s last writing: Theses on the Philosophy of History.
The division of the School
into two different premises, New York and California, was paralleled by the
development of two autonomous research programs led, on the one hand, by
Pollock and, on the other hand, by Horkheimer and Adorno. Pollock directed his
research to study anti-Semitism. This research line culminated into an
international conference organized in 1944 as well as a four-volume work titled
Studies in Anti-Semitism; Horkheimer and Adorno, instead, developed studies on
the reinterpretation of the Hegelian notion of dialectics as well as engaged
into the study of anti-Semitic tendencies. The most relevant publication in
this respect by the two was The Authoritarian Personality or Studies in
Prejudice. After this period, only few devoted supporters remained faithful to
the project of the School. These included Horkheimer himself, Pollock, Adorno,
Lowenthal and Weil. In 1946, however, the Institute was officially invited to
join Goethe University Frankfurt.
Upon return to West Germany,
Horkheimer presented his inaugural speech for the reopening of the institute on
14 November 1951. One week later he inaugurated the academic year as a new
Rector of the University. Yet, what was once a lively intellectual community
became soon a small team of very busy people. Horkheimer was involved in the
administration of the university, whereas Adorno was constantly occupied with
different projects and teaching duties. In addition, in order to keep US
citizenship, Adorno had to go back to California where he earned his living by
conducting qualitative research analysis. Horkheimer, instead, attempted to
attract back his former assistant Marcuse when the opportunity arose for a successor
to Gadamer’s chair in Frankfurt, but neither this initiative nor further
occasions were successful. Marcuse remained in the United States and was
offered a full position at Brandeis University. Adorno returned to Germany in
August 1953 and was soon involved again in empirical research, combining
quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of industrial relations
for the Mannesmann Company. In 1955, he took over Horkheimer position as
director of the Institute for Social Research, and on 1 July 1957 he was
appointed full professor in philosophy and sociology. Even though greatly
influential in philosophy, Adorno’s most innovative contribution is unanimously
thought to be in the field of music theory and aesthetics. Some of his
significant works in this area included Philosophy of Modern Music (1949) and
later Vers une Musique Informelle. In 1956, Horkheimer retired just when
several important publications were appearing, such as Marcuse’s Eros and
Civilization and the essay’s collection Sociologica. These events marked the
precise intellectual phase of maturity reached at that time by the Frankfurt
School.
The sixties—which saw famous
student protests across Europe—also saw the publication of Adorno’s fundamental
work, Negative Dialectics (1966). This study, while far from either materialism
or metaphysics, maintained important connections with an “open and
non-systemic” notion of dialectics. It appeared only a few years later than
One-Dimensional Man (1964), where Marcuse introduced the notion of “educational
dictatorship”— a strategy intended for the advancement of material conditions
aimed at the realization of a higher notion of the good. While Marcuse, quite
ostensibly, sponsored the student upheavals, Adorno maintained a much moderate
and skeptical profile.
In 1956, Habermas joined the
Institute as Adorno’s assistant. He was soon involved in an empirical study
titled Students and Politics. The text, though, was rejected by Horkheimer and
it did not come out, as it should have, in the series of the Frankfurt
Contributions to Sociology. Only later, in 1961, it appeared in the series
Sociological Texts (see Wiggershaus 1995, p. 555). Horkheimer’s aversion
towards Habermas was even more evident when he refused to supervise his
Habilitation. Habermas obtained his Habilitation under the supervision of
Abendroth at Marburg, where he addressed the topic of the bourgeois formation
of public sphere. This study was published by Habermas in 1962 under the title
of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, just before he handed in
his Habilitation. With the support of Gadamer he was, then, appointed professor
at Heidelberg. Besides his achievements, both in academia and as an activist,
the young Habermas contributed towards the construction of a critical
self-awareness of the socialist student groups around the country (the
so-called SDS, Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund). It was in this context
that Habermas reacted to the extremism of Rudi Dutschke, the radical leader of
the students' association who criticized him for defending a non-effective
emancipatory view. It was principally against Dutschke’s positions that
Habermas, during a public assembly labeled such positions with the epitome of
“left-wing fascism”. How representative this expression was of Habermas’ views
on student protests has often been a matter of contention.
Discussions of the notion of
emancipation had been at the center of the Frankfurt School political debate
since the beginning. The concept of emancipation (Befreiung in German), covers
indeed a wide semantic spectrum. Literarily it means “liberation from”. The
notion spans, therefore, from a sense related to action-transformation to
include also revolutionary action.
After his nomination in 1971
as a director of the Max Planck Institute for Research into the Conditions of
Life in the Scientific-Technical World at Starnberg, Habermas left Frankfurt.
He returned there only in 1981 after having completed The Theory of
Communicative Action. This decade was crucial for the definition of the
School’s research objectives. In The Theory of Communicative Action (1984b
[1981]), Habermas provided a model for social complexities and action
coordination based upon the original interpretation of classical social
theorists as well as the philosophy of Searle’s Speech Acts theory. Within this
work, it also became evident how the large amount of empirical analysis
conducted by Habermas’ research team on topics concerning pathologies of
society, moral development and so on was elevated to a functionalistic model of
society oriented to an emancipatory purpose. The assumption was that language
itself embedded a normative force capable of realizing action co-ordination
within society. In this respect, Habermas defined these as the “unavoidable
pragmatic presuppositions of mutual understanding”. Social action whose
coordination-function relies on the same pragmatic presuppositions was seen as
connected to a justification discourse based on the satisfaction of specific
validity-claims.
Habermas described discourse
theory as relying on three types of validity-claims raised by communicative
action. He claimed that it was only when the conditions of truth, rightness and
sincerity were raised by speech-acts that social coordination could be obtained.
As noticed in the opening sections, differently from the first generation of
Frankfurt School intellectuals, Habermas contributed greatly to bridging the
continental and analytical traditions, integrating aspects belonging to
American Pragmatism, Anthropology and Semiotics with Marxism and Critical
Social Theory.
Just one year before Habermas’
retirement in 1994, the directorship of the Institut für Sozialforschung was
assumed by Honneth. This inaugurated a new phase of research in Critical
Theory. Honneth, indeed, revisited the Hegelian notion of recognition
(Anerkennung) in terms of a new prolific paradigm in social and political
enquiry. Honneth began his collaboration with Habermas in 1984, when he was
hired as an assistant professor. After a period of academic appointments in
Berlin and Konstanz, in 1996 he took Habermas’ chair in Frankfurt.
Honneth’s central tenet, the
struggle for recognition, represents a leitmotiv in his research and
preeminently in one of his most important books, The Struggle for Recognition:
The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts ([1986]). This work represents a mature
expansion of what was partially addressed in his dissertation, a work published
under the title of Critique of Power: Stages of Reflection of a Critical Social
Theory (1991 [1985]). One of the core themes addressed by Honneth consisted in
the claim that, contrary to what Critical Theory initially emphasized, more
attention should have been paid to the notion of conflict in society and among
societal groups. Conflict represents the internal movement of historical
advancement and human emancipation, falling therefore within the core theme of
critical social theory. The so-called “struggle for recognition” is what best
characterizes the fight for emancipation by social groups. This fight
represents a subjective negative experience of domination—a form of domination
attached to misrecognitions. To come to terms with negations of subjective
forms of self-realization means to be able to transform social reality. Normatively,
though, acts of social struggle activated by forms of misrecognition point to
the role that recognition plays as a crucial criterion for grounding
intersubjectivity.
Honneth inaugurated a new
research phase in Critical Theory. Indeed, his communitarian turn has been
paralleled by the work of some of his fellow scholars. Brunkhorst, for
instance, in his Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community
(2005 [2002]), canvasses a line of thought springing from the French Revolution
of 1789 to contemporary times: the notion of fraternity. By the use of
historical conceptual reconstruction and normative speculation, Brunkhorst
presented the pathologies of the contemporary globalized world and the function
that solidarity would play.
The confrontation with
American debate, initiated systematically by the work of Habermas, became soon
an obsolete issue in the third generation of critical theorists—not only
because the group was truly international, merging European and American
scholars. The work of Forst testifies, indeed, of the synthesis between
analytical methodological rigor and classical themes of the Frankfurt School.
Thanks to Habermas’ intellectual opening, the third generation of critical
theorists engaged into dialogue with French post-modern philosophers like
Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard and so forth, which according to Foucault are the
legitimate interpreters of some central aspects of the Frankfurt School.
2.
What is Critical Theory?
“What is ‘theory’?” asked
Horkheimer in the opening of his essay Traditional and Critical Theory [1937].
The discussion about method has been always a constant topic for those critical
theorists who have attempted since the beginning to clarify the specificity of
what it means to be “critical”. A primary broad distinction that Horkheimer
drew was that of the difference in method between social theories, scientific
theories and critical social theories. While the first two categories had been
treated as instances of traditional theories, the latter connoted the
methodology the Frankfurt School adopted.
Traditional theory, whether
deductive or analytical, has always focused on coherency and on the strict
distinction between theory and praxis. Along Cartesian lines, knowledge has
been treated as grounded upon self-evident propositions or, at least, upon propositions
based on self-evident truths. Accordingly, traditional theory has proceeded to
explain facts by application of universal laws, that is, by subsumption of a
particular to a universal in order to either confirm or disconfirm this. A
verificationist procedure of this kind was what positivism considered to be the
best explicatory account for the notion of praxis in scientific investigation.
If one were to defend the view according to which scientific truths should pass
the test of empirical confirmation, then one would commit oneself to the idea
of an objective world. Knowledge would be simply a mirror of reality. This view
is firmly rejected by critical theorists.
Under several aspects, what
Critical Theory wants to reject in traditional theory is precisely this
“picture theory” of language and knowledge as that defined by “the first”
Wittgenstein in his Tractatus. According to such a view, later abandoned by
“the second” Wittgenstein, the logical form of propositions consists in showing
a possible fact and in saying whether this is true or false. For example, the
proposition “it rains today” shows both the possibility of the fact that “it
rains today” and it affirms that it is the case that “it rains today.” In order
to check whether something is or is not the case, one must verify empirically
whether the stated fact occurs or not. This implies that the condition of truth
and falsehood presupposes an objective structure of the world.
Horkheimer and his followers
rejected the notion of objectivity in knowledge by pointing, among other
things, to the fact that the object of knowledge is itself embedded into a
historical and social process: “The facts which our senses present to us are
socially preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the object
perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ”
(Horkheimer [1937] in Ingram and Simon-Ingram 1992, p. 242). Further, with a
rather Marxist twist, Horkheimer noticed also that phenomenological objectivity
is a myth because it is dependent upon “technological conditions” and the
latter are sensitive to the material conditions of production. Critical Theory
aims thus to abandon naïve conceptions of knowledge-impartiality. Since
intellectuals themselves are not disembodied entities observing from a God’s
viewpoint, knowledge can be obtained only from a societal embedded perspective
of interdependent individuals.
If traditional theory is
evaluated by considering its practical implications, then no practical
consequences can be actually inferred. Indeed, the finality of knowledge as a
mirror of reality is mainly a theoretically-oriented tool aimed at separating
knowledge from action, speculation from social transformative enterprise.
Critical Theory, instead, characterizes itself as a method contrary to the
“fetishization” of knowledge, one which considers knowledge as something rather
functional to ideology critique and social emancipation. In the light of such
finalities, knowledge becomes social criticism and the latter translates itself
into social action, that is, into the transformation of reality.
Critical Theory has been
strongly influenced by Hegel’s notion of dialectics for the conciliation of
socio-historical oppositions as well as by Marx’s theory of economy and society
and the limits of Hegel’s “bourgeois philosophy”. Critical Theory, indeed, has
expanded Marxian criticisms of capitalist society by formulating patterns of
social emancipatory strategies. Whereas Hegel found that Rationality had
finally come to terms with Reality with the birth of the modern nation state
(which in his eyes was the Prussian state), Marx insisted on the necessity of
reading the development of rationality through history in terms of a class
struggle. The final stage of this struggle would have seen the political and
economic empowerment of the proletariat. Critical theorists, in their turn,
rejected both the metaphysical apparatus of Hegel and the eschatological
aspects connected to Marx’s theory. On the contrary, Critical Theory analyses were
oriented to the understanding of society and pointed rather to the necessity of
establishing open systems based on immanent forms of social criticism. The
starting point was the Marxian view on the relation between a system of
production paralleled by a system of beliefs. Ideology, which according to Marx
was totally explicable through an underlying system of production, for critical
theorists had to be analyzed in its own respect and as a non-economically
reducible form of expression of human rationality. Such a revision of Marxian
categories became extremely crucial, then, in the reinterpretation of the
notion of dialectics for the analysis of capitalism. Dialectics, as a method of
social criticism, was interpreted as following from the contradictory nature of
capitalism as a system of exploitation. Indeed, it was on the basis of such
inherent contradictions that capitalism was seen to open up to a collective
form of ownership of the means of production, namely, socialism.
a.
Traditional and Critical Theory: Ideology and Critique
From these conceptually rich
implications one can observe some of the constant topics which have
characterized critical social theory, that is, the normativity of social
philosophy as something distinct from classical descriptive sociology, the
everlasting crux on the theory/practice relation and, finally, ideology
critique. These are the primary tasks that a critical social theory must
accomplish in order to be defined as “critical”. Crucial in this sense is the
understanding and the criticism of the notion of “ideology”.
In defining the senses to be
assigned to the notion of ideology, within its descriptive-empirical sense “one
might study the biological and quasi-biological properties of the group” or,
alternatively, “the cultural or socio-cultural features of the group” (Geuss
1981, p. 4 ff). Ideology, in the descriptive sense, incorporates both
“discursive” and “non-discursive” elements. That is, in addition to
propositional contents or performatives, it includes gestures, ceremonies and
so forth (Geuss 1981, pp. 6-8); also, it shows a systematic set of beliefs—a
world-view—characterized by conceptual schemes. A variant of the descriptive
sense is the “pejorative” version where a form of ideology is judged negatively
in view of its epistemic, functional or genetic properties (Geuss 1981, p. 13).
On the other hand, if one takes “ideology” according to a positive sense, then,
reference is not with something empirically given, but rather with a
“desideratum”, a “verité a faire” (Geuss 1981, p. 23). Critical Theory,
distances itself from scientific theories because, while the latter understands
knowledge as an objectified product, the former serves the purpose of human
emancipation through consciousness and self-reflection.
If the task of critical social
theory is to evaluate the degree of rationality of any system of social
domination in accordance to standards of justice, then ideological criticism
has the function of unmasking wrong rationalizations of present or past
injustices—that is, ideology in the factual and negative sense—such as in the
case of the belief that “women are inferior to men, or blacks to whites…”. Thus
ideological criticism aims at proposing alternative practicable ways for
constructing social bounds. Critical Theory moves precisely in between the
contingency of objectified non-critical factual reality and the normativity of
utopian idealizations, that is, in between the so-called “theory/practice”
problem (see Ingram 1990, p. xxiii). Marcuse, for instance, in the essay
Philosophie und Kritische Theorie (1937), defends the view that Critical Theory
characterizes itself as being neither philosophy tout court nor pure science,
as it claims to be instead an overly simplistic approach to Marxism. Critical
Theory has the following tasks: to clarify the sociopolitical determinants that
explain the limits of analysis of a certain philosophical view as well as to
transcend the use of imagination—the actual limits of imagination. From all
this, two notions of rationality result: the first attached to the dominant
form of power and deprived of any normative force; the second characterized, on
the contrary, by a liberating force based on a yet-to-come scenario. This
difference in forms of rationality is what Habermas has later presented,
mutatis mutandis, in terms of the distinction between instrumental and
communicative rationality. While the first form of rationality is oriented to a
means-ends understanding of human and environmental relations, the second form
is oriented to subordinating human action to the respect of certain normative
criteria of action validity. This latter point echoes quite distinctively
Kant’s principle of morality according to which human beings must be always
treated as “ends in themselves” and never as mere “means”. Critical Theory and
Habermas, in particular, are no exception to these view on rationality, since
they both see Ideologiekritik not just as a form of “moralizing criticism”, but
as a form of knowledge, that is, as a cognitive operation for disclosing the
falsity of conscience (Geuss 1981, p. 26).
This point is strictly
connected to another conceptual category playing a great role within Critical
Theory, the concept of interest and in particular the distinction between “true
interests” and “false interests”. As Geuss has suggested, there are two
possible ways to propose such separation: “the perfect-knowledge approach” and
“the optimal conditions approach” (1981, p. 48). Were one to follow the first
option, the outcome would be one of falling into the side of acritical
utopianism. On the contrary, “the optimal conditions approach” is
reinterpreted, at least for Habermas, in terms of an “ideal speech situation”
that by virtually granting an all-encompassing exchange of arguments, it
assumes the function of providing a counterfactual normative check on actual
discursive contexts. Within such a model, epistemic knowledge and social
critical reflection are attached to unavoidable pragmatic-transcendental
conditions that are universally the same for all.
The universality of such
epistemological status differs profoundly from Adorno’s contextualism where
individual epistemic principles grounding cultural criticism and
self-reflection are recognized to be legitimately different along time and
history. Both versions are critical in that they remain faithful to the
objective of clearing false consciousness from ignorance and domination; but
whereas Habermas sets a high standard of validity/non-validity for discourse
theory, Adorno’s historicism remains sensitive to degrees of rationality that
are context-dependent. In one of his later writings of 1969 (republished in
Adorno 2003, pp. 292 ff.), Adorno provides a short but dense interpretation in
eight theses on the significance and the mission of Critical Theory. The
central message is that Critical Theory, while drawing from Marxism, must avoid
hypostatization and closure into a single Weltanschauung on the pain of losing
its “critical” capacity. By interpreting rationality as a form of
self-reflective activity, Critical Theory represents a particular form of
rational enquiry that must remain capable of distinguishing, immanently,
ideology from a Hegelian “Spirit”. The mission of Critical Theory, therefore,
is not exhausted by a theoretical understanding of social reality; as a matter
of fact, there is a strict interconnection between critical understanding and
transformative action: theory and practice are interconnected.
b.
The Theory/Practice Problem
During the entire course of
its historical development, Critical Theory has always confronted itself with
one crucial methodological concern: the “theory/practice” problem. To this
puzzle critical theorists have provided different answers, such that it is not
possible to regroup them into a homogeneous set of views. In order to
understand what the significance of the theory/practice problem is, it is
useful to refer back to David Hume’s “is/ought” question. What Hume
demonstrated through the separation of the “is” from the “ought” was the
non-derivability of prescriptive statements from descriptive ones. This
separation has been at the basis of those ethical theories that have not
recognized moral statements as a truth-property. In other words, alternative
reading to the “is/ought” relation have defended either a cognitivist approach
(truth-validity of moral statements) or, alternatively, a non-cognitivist
approach (no truth-validity), as in the case of emotivism.
Even if characterized by
several internal differences, what Critical Theory added to this debate was the
consideration both of the anthropological as well as the psychological dynamics
motivating masses and structuring ideologies.
As far as the anthropological
determinants in closing up the gap of the “theory/practice” problem is
concerned, it is possible to take into consideration Habermas’ Knowledge and
Human Interest ([1968] 1971). There Habermas combined a transcendental argument
with an anthropological one by defending the view according to which humans
have an interest in knowledge insofar as such interest is attached to the
preservation of self-identity. Yet, to preserve one’s identity is to go beyond
mere compliance with biological survival. As Habermas clarifies: “[…] human
interests […] derive both from nature and from the cultural break with nature”
(Habermas [1968], in Ingram and Simon-Ingram,1992, p. 263). On the contrary, to
preserve one’s identity means to find in the emancipatory force of knowledge
the fundamental interest of human beings. Indeed, the grounding of knowledge
into the practical domain has quite far-reaching implications as, for instance,
that interest and knowledge in Habermas find their unity in self-reflection,
that is, in “knowledge for the sake of knowledge” (Habermas [1968], in Ingram
and Simon-Ingram 1992, p. 264).
The Habermasian answer to the
theory/practice problem comes from the criticism of non-cognitivist theories.
If it is true, as non-cognitivists claim, that prescriptive claims are grounded
on commands and do not have any cognitive content which can be justified
through an exchange of public arguments, it follows that they cannot provide an
answer to the difference between what is a “convergent behavior”, established
through normative power on the basis, for example, of punishment and what is
instead the notion of “following a valid rule”. In the latter case, there seems
to be required an extra layer of justification, namely, a process through which
a norm can be defined as valid. Such process is for Habermas conceived in terms
of a counterfactual procedure for a discursive exchange of arguments. This
procedure is aimed at justifying those generalizable interests that ought to be
obeyed because they pass the test of moral validity.
The Habermasian answer to the
is/ought question has several important implications. One implication, perhaps
the most important one, is the criticism of positivism and of the epistemic
status of knowledge. On the basis of Habermasian premises, indeed, there can be
no objective knowledge, as positivists claim, detached from intersubjective
forms of understanding. Since knowledge is strictly embedded in serving human
interests, it follows that it cannot be considered value-neutral and
objectively independent.
A further line of reflection
on the theory/practice problem comes from psychoanalysis where a strict
separation has been maintained between the “is” and “ought” and false “oughts”
have been unmasked through the clarification of the psychological mechanisms
constructing desires. Accordingly, critical theorists like Fromm referred to
Freud’s notions of the unconscious which contributed defining ideologies in
terms of “substitute gratifications”. Psychoanalysis represented such a strong
component within the research of the Frankfurt School that even Adorno in his
article Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda (1951) analyzed
Fromm’s interconnection between sadomasochism and fascism. Adorno noticed how a
parallel can be drawn between the loss of self-confidence and estimation in
hierarchical domination, on the one hand, and compensation through
self-confidence which can be re-obtained in active forms of dominations, on the
other hand. Such mechanisms of sadomasochism, though, are not only proper of
fascism. As Adorno noticed, they reappear under different clothes in modern cultural
industry through the consumption of so-called “cultural commodities”.
Notwithstanding the previous
discussions, the greatest philosophical role of psychoanalysis within Frankfurt
School was exemplified by Marcuse’s thought. In his case, the central problem
became that of interpreting the interest in the genealogical roots of
capitalist ideology. How can one provide an account of class interests after
the collapse of classes? How can one formulate, on the basis of the insights
provided by psychoanalysis, the criteria through which it can be distinguished
true from false interests? The way adopted by Marcuse was with a revisitation
of Freud’s theory of instinctual needs. Differently from Freud’s tensions
between nature and culture and Fromm’s total social shaping of natural
instincts, Marcuse defended a third—median—perspective where instincts were
considered only partially shaped by social relations (Ingram 1990, p. 93 ff).
Through such a solution, Marcuse overcame the strict opposition between biological
and historical rationality that was preventing the resolution of the
theory/practice problem. He did so by recalling the annihilation of
individual’s sexual energy laying at the basis of organized society and
recalling, in its turn, the archetypical scenario of a total fulfillment of
pleasure. Marcuse took imagination as a way to obtain individual reconciliation
with social reality: a reconciliation, though, with an underlying unsolved
tension. Marcuse conceived of overcoming such tensions through the
aestheticization of basic instincts liberated by the work of imagination. The
problem with Marcuse’s rationalization of basic instincts was that by relying
excessively on human biology, it became impossible to distinguish between the
truth and the falsity of socially dependent needs (see on this Ingram 1990, p.
103).
c.
The Idea of Rationality: Critical Theory and its Discontents
For Critical Theory,
rationality has always been a crucial theme in the analysis of modern society
as well as of its pathologies. Whereas the early Frankfurt School and Habermas
viewed rationality as a historical process whose unity was taken as a
precondition for social criticism, later critical philosophies, influenced
mainly by post-modernity, privileged a rather more fragmented notion of
(ir)rationality manifested by social institutions. In the latter views, social
criticism could not act as a self-reflective form of rationality, since
rationality cannot be conceived as a process incorporated in history. One point
shared by all critical theorists was that forms of social pathology were
connected to deficits of rationality which, in their turn, manifested
interconnections with the psychological status of the mind (see Honneth 2004,
p. 339 ff.).
In non-pathological social
aggregations, individuals were said to be capable of achieving cooperative
forms of self-actualizations only if freed from coercive mechanisms of
domination. Accordingly, for the Frankfurt School, modern processes of
bureaucratic administration exemplified what Weber considered as an
all-encompassing domination of formal rationality over substantive values. In
Weber, rationality was to be interpreted as purposive rationality, that is, as
a form of instrumental reason. Accordingly, the use of reason did not amount to
formulating prescriptive models of society but aimed at achieving goals through
the selection of the best possible means of action. If in Lukács the
proletariat was to represent the only dialectical way out from the total
control of formal rationality, Horkheimer and Adorno saw technological
domination of human action as the negation of the inspiring purposes of
Enlightenment. In the already mentioned work—>Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1969 [1947])—Horkheimer and Adorno emphasized the role of knowledge and
technology as a “means of exploitation” of labor and viewed the dialectic of
reason as the archetypical movement of human self-liberation. Nevertheless, the
repression by formal-instrumental rationality of natural chaos pointed to the
possible resurgence of natural violence under a different vest, so that the
liberation from nature through instrumental reason opened to the possibility of
domination by a totalitarian state (see Ingram 1990, p. 63).
According to this view, reason
had been seen essentially as a form of control over nature characterizing
humanity since its inception, that is, since those attempts aimed at providing
a mythological explanation of cosmic forces. The purpose served by instrumental
rationality was essentially that of promoting self-preservation, even if this
goal turned paradoxically into the fragmentation of bourgeois individuality
that, once deprived of any substantive value, became merely formal and thus
determined by external influences of mass-identity in a context of cultural
industry.
Rationality, thus, began
assuming a double significance: on the one hand, as traditionally recognized by
German idealism, it was conceived as the primary source of human emancipation;
on the other, it was conceived as the premise of totalitarianism. If, as Weber
believed, modern rationalization of society came to a formal reduction of the
power of rationality, it followed that hyper-bureaucratization of society led
not just to a complete separation between facts and values but also to a total disinterest
in the latter forms. Nevertheless, for Critical Theory it remained essential to
defend the validity of social criticism on the basis of the idea that humanity
is embedded in a historical learning process where clash is due to the
actualization of reason re-establishing power-balances and struggles for group
domination.
Given such a general framework
on rationality, it can be said that Critical Theory has undergone several
paradigm revolutions, both internally and externally. First of all, Habermas
himself has suggested a further pre-linguistic line of enquiry by making appeal
to the notion of “authenticity” and “imagination”. This suggests a radical
reformulation of the same notion of “truth” and “reason” in the light of its
metaphorical capacities of signification (see Habermas 1984a). Secondly, the
commitment of Critical Theory to universal validity and universal pragmatics
has been widely criticized by post-structuralists and post-modernists who have
instead insisted respectively on the hyper-contextualism of the forms of
linguistic rationality, as well as on the substitution of a criticism of
ideology with genealogical criticism. While Derrida’s deconstructive method has
shown how binary opposition collapses when applied to the semantic level, so
that meaning can only be contextually constructed, Foucault has oriented his
criticisms to the supposedly emancipatory power of universal reason by showing
how forms of domination permeate micro-levels of power-control such as in
sanatoriums, educational and religious bodies and so on. The control of
life—known as bio-power—manifests itself in the attempt of normalizing and
constraining individuals’ behaviors and psychic lives. For Foucault, reason is
embedded into such practices which display the multiple layers of
un-rationalized force. The activity of the analyst in this sense is not far
from the same activity of the participant: there is no objective perspective
which can be defended. Derrida, for instance, while pointing to the Habermasian
idea of pragmatic of communication, still maintained a distinct thesis of a
restless deconstructive potential of any constructing activity, so that no
unavoidable pragmatic presuppositions nor idealizing conditions of
communication could survive deconstruction. On the other hand, Habermasian
theory of communicative action and discourse ethics, while remaining sensitive
to contexts, pretended to defend transcendental conditions of discourse which,
if violated, were seen to lead to performative contradictions. Last but not
least, to the Habermasian role of consensus or agreement in discursive models,
Foucault objected that rather than a regulatory principle, a true critical
approach would simply enact a command in case of “nonconsensuality” (see
Rabinow, ed. 1984, p. 379 ff).
3.
Concluding Thoughts
The debate between Foucault
and Critical Theory—in particular with Habermas—is quite illuminating of the
common critical-universalist orientations of the first phase of the Frankfurt
School versus the diverging methodologies defended starting from the
Habermasian interpretation of modernity. For Foucault it was not correct to
propose a second-order theory for defining what rationality is. Rationality is
not to be found in abstract forms. On the contrary, what social criticism can
only aim to achieve is the unmasking of deeply enmeshed forms of irrationality
deposited in contingent and historical institutional embeddings. Genealogical
methods, though, do not reject the idea that (ir)-rationality is part of
history; on the contrary, they rather pretend to illuminate abstract and
procedural rational models by dissecting and analyzing concrete institutional
social practices through immanent criticism. To this views, Habermas has
objected that any activity of rational criticism presupposes unavoidable
conditions in order to justify the pretence of validity of its same exercise.
This rebuttal reopened the demands of transcendental conditions for immanent
criticism revealed along the same pragmatic conditions of social criticism. For
Habermas, criticism is possible only if universal standards of validity are
recognized and only if understanding (Verständigung) and agreement
(Einverständnis) are seen as interconnected practices.
A further line of criticism
against Habermas, one which included also a target to Critical Theory as a
whole, came from scholars like Chantal Mouffe (2005). What she noticed is that
in the notion of consensus it nested a surrendering to a genuine engagement
into “political agonism”. If, as Mouffe claimed, the model of discursive action
is bound to the achievement of consensus, then, what rolecan be left to
politics once agreement is obtained? The charge of eliminating the
consideration of political action from “the political” has been extended by
Mouffe also to previous critical theorists such as Horkheimer, Adorno and
Marcuse. Criticism concerned the non-availability of context-specific political
guidance answering the question “What is to be done?” (see Chambers 2004, p.
219 ff.). What has been noticed is that whereas Critical Theory has aimed at
fostering human emancipation, it has remained incapable of specifying a
political action-strategy for social change. For the opponents to the Critical
Theory paradigm, a clear indication in this sense was exemplified by Marcuse’s
idea of “the Great Refusal”, one predicating abstention from real political
engagement and pretences of transformation of the capitalist economy and the
democratic institutions (Marcuse 1964). It was indeed in view of the
reformulation of the Critical Theory ambition of presenting “realistic
utopias”, that some of the representatives of the third generation directed
their attention. Axel Honneth, for instance, starting from a revisitation of
the Hegelian notion of (mis)-recognition and through a research phase
addressing social pathologies, has proposed in one of his latest studies a revisited version of socialism, as in The
Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal (2017). Nancy Fraser, instead, by focusing
on the notion of redistribution has provided key elements in understanding how
it is possible to overcome economic inequalities and power-imbalances in
post-industrial societies where cultural affiliations are no longer significant
sources of power. In his turn, Alessandro Ferrara along his recent monograph
The Democratic Horizon (2014), has revived the paradigm of political liberalism
by addressing the significance of democracy and tackled next the problem of
hypepluralism and multiple democracies. For Ferrara, what is inherent to
democratic thinking is innovation and openness. This notion bears conceptual
similarities with what Kant and Arendt understood in terms of “broad
mindedness”. Seyla Benhabib, along similar lines, has seeked to clarify the
significance of the Habermasian dual-track model of democracy, as one based on
the distinction between moral issues that are proper of the institutional level
(universalism) and ethical issues characterizing, instead, informal public
deliberations (pluralism). Whereas the requirement of a universal consensus pertains
only to the institutional sphere, the ethical domain is instead characterized
by a plurality of views confronting each other across different life-systems.
Benhabib’s views, by making explicit several Habermasian assumptions, aim to
countervail both post-structuralist worries as well as post-modern charges of
political action ineffectiveness of Critical Theory models. Finally, Forst’s
philosophical preoccupation has been that of addressing the American
philosophical debate with the specific aim of constructing an alternative
paradigm to that of liberalism and communitarianism. Forst’s attempt has
integrated analytic and continental traditions by radicalizing along
transcendental lines some core Habermasian intuitions on rights and
constitutional democracy. In his collections of essays, The Right to
Justification, Forst suggests a transformation of the Habermasian
“co-originality thesis” into a monistic “right to justification”. This move is
aimed at suggesting an alternative and hopefully more coherent route of
explanation for the understanding of the liberal constitutional experience
(Forst, [2007] 2014, see also Forst, [2010] 2011).
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