Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age

The Institute for Social Research was formed in 1923, under the auspices of Goethe University, in Frankfurt. Early meetings occurred at the Senckenberg Natural History Museum, beneath a diplodocus skeleton and other prehistoric relics. At first, the institute concentrated on earnest Marxian research projects. Then, in 1930, Horkheimer, a brilliant, turbulent man with a melancholic streak, became director and instilled a more intransigent perspective. He took his lead from Pollock, who believed that the modern capitalist state had advanced to the point where its overthrow was no longer a likely prospect. Social-welfare programs had kept the working classes from becoming restive. In the absence of a revolution, Horkheimer called for scholars to focus on the intersection of capitalism, science, technology, and mass culture. He dubbed this new mode of engaged philosophy “critical theory.”

As Lenhard notes, Horkheimer “avoided the term ‘Marxist’ as the Devil avoids holy water.” Still, he retained many of Marx’s core concepts—above all, that of the dialectic. Since Socrates, dialectical thinking had been a method of eliciting truth through questioning and refutation. Hegel redefined the dialectic as a process of assertion, negation, and synthesis that gathers force through history. Marx, in turn, cast the dialectic in economic terms, establishing the emancipation of the proletariat as history’s goal. Horkheimer, amid the wreckage of world war, lost faith in progress; his dialectic negated one construct after another. The liberal order, to begin with, was diseased: “The bourgeois economy was so arranged that individuals maintain the life of society by looking after their own happiness. Inherent in this structure, however, is a dynamic that ultimately accumulates fantastic power on one side and material and spiritual weakness on the other, to a degree that recalls the old Asiatic dynasties.” The bureaucratic coldness of Bolshevik Communism and the violent regressions of Fascism were yet worse. The value-neutral positivism of modern science cast its nerve-rattling accomplishments as something inevitable and irrevocable—a “further extension of nature.”

Adorno internalized and perfected Horkheimer’s implacable voice. One of the youngest members of the original Frankfurt School, he had studied both music and philosophy before turning to the latter in the late twenties. He won lasting notoriety for his diatribes against commercial jazz, though his assessments of the classical-music industry were equally acidulous: “The type of conductor who wallows insatiably in the glories of the Adagio of Bruckner’s Eighth acts like a capitalist magnate, bringing as many organizations, institutes, and orchestras as possible under his control.” Adorno was not yet thirty when Hitler took power. The institute, alert to what was coming, had already moved its financial resources out of the country and opened a subsidiary office in Geneva. By 1934, it was putting down roots in New York.

Disaster glowed ever brighter. Benjamin killed himself at the French-Spanish border in 1940, having despaired of his chances of escaping the Nazis. Horkheimer and Adorno ended up in Los Angeles, where, under the ironic glare of a perpetual sun, they co-wrote “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” the most extreme of Frankfurt School tracts. Their primary target was the sainted Kant, who had defined enlightenment as “the human being’s emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity,” with maturity consisting of the resolve to act freely and independently. This sounds glorious, and yet, Horkheimer and Adorno observe, freedom falls to those who are best positioned to grab it. They show how the proud autonomy of the bourgeois individual can degenerate into lawless self-aggrandizement—the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche are leading examples—and, eventually, totalitarian megalomania. Herrschaft, or domination, is the principal theme: domination of nature, domination of people, domination of culture.

“I make a joke, a minute later, he tells the same joke and acts like it’s his!”

Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby

Adorno assails the last topic in a chapter titled “Culture Industry,” which has few rivals in the annals of élite dyspepsia. “All mass culture under monopoly is identical,” he notes. Consumers have the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” He is arguing with the absent Benjamin, who saw liberatory potential in Charlie Chaplin movies. Until recently, Adorno seemed to have lost the debate. Generations of readers rejected his snobbery, his prejudice, his tendency to write sentences such as “The same babies grin endlessly from magazines, the jazz machine endlessly pounds.” But the underlying ideas sting harder now. Adorno sees mass culture as a pivotal component of the capitalist scheme to mollify the populace with calculated compensations. It claims to be serving the public while inventing needs that the public had been happy to live without. The façade is democratic—Hollywood stars are just like us!—yet the structure is authoritarian, training us to bow down before celebrity gods. The birth of a fascist President out of the spirit of reality television could be seen as a Q.E.D. for Adorno’s thesis.

The question, of course, is what we are supposed to do with these bourgeois jeremiads against bourgeois civilization, beyond enjoying them as high-end primal-scream therapy. Members of the Frankfurt School were prey to what Habermas’s colleague Karl-Otto Apel called the “performative contradiction”: if you have used the tools of reason to dismantle reason, your own work might be compromised in turn. The Marxist theorist Georg Lukács complained that Adorno and company had taken up residence in what he called the Grand Hotel Abyss—“a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity.” Habermas wished, in a sense, to vacate the hotel and traverse the abyss outside.