The CTWG is a voluntary collective of researchers united by the recognition that recovering the radical, forgotten core of early critical theory coincides with renewing the singular effort of early critical theorists to comprehend our common predicament in the course of its reiteration—the reasserted social domination of capital covered in the vanishing alternation of liberal apologetic and fascist enforcement. Moreover, that the radicality of their work is validated in their apprehension it would be forgotten in the same dynamic stasis (Sempre erranti e sempre qui!)Horkheimer: "The individual no longer has a personal history. Though everything changes, nothing moves. He needs neither a Zeno nor a Cocteau, neither an Eleatic dialectician nor a Parisian surrealist, to tell what the Queen in *Through the Looking Glass* means when she says, 'It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place, or what Lombroso's madman expressed in his beautiful poem: *Noi confitti al nostro orgoglio / Come ruote in ferrei perni, / Ci stanchiamo in giri eterni, / Sempre erranti e sempre qui!*'' *Eclipse of Reason*. (Bloomsbury, 2013), 112. which would re-engender the very need that first engendered it. To the extent early critical theory seems to us to have a tragic character, this does not derive from the fact it has largely been forgotten, but from the fact it is still needed at all. For us, as for the early critical theorists themselves, the enduring validity of the critical theory of society, of its critical diagnostic of capitalist society and its social theorists, is a bitter confirmation that its dream is still unrealized. Critical Theory is only right in a wrong world.
Following recent scholarship on the origin and formation of critical theory (a period stretching from the late 1910s through the early 1940s, though we focus on the 1930s), our recovery takes its point of orientation from the intersection of two premises. First, early critical theory was—and can only be adequately understood and evaluated as—a development and extension of the Marxian critique of political economy, which inherited the impulses of dissident (and particularly councilist) communism. Second, the traditional, and still predominant, reception of early critical theory has not interpreted it as such given, on the one hand, the popular context, intellectual and political, in which it has been received since the student movements of the late 60s,Cf. Chris O'Kane. "On Frankfurt School Critical Theory and Political Economy." JHI Blog, January 10, 2024. <https://www.jhiblog.org/2024/01/10/on-frankfurt-school-critical-theory-and-political-economy/> and, on the other, the neglect in academic scholarship of the esoteric form of writing consciously cultivated by early critical theorists.Eva-Maria Ziege, *Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie. Die Frankfurter Schule im amerikanischen Exil.* (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009), 42-43; Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Eva-Maria Ziege, "70 Jahre Dialektik der Aufklärung," in *Zur Kritik der regressiven Vernunft*, ed. Noerr & Ziege (Springer VS, Wiesbaden, 2019) 10-11.
This esoteric form of early critical theory is configured by three elements: tactical self-censorship, esoteric technique, and the negative method of presentation required by the dialectical conception of the critique of political economy. To a much larger degree than has been appreciated, their esotericism can be explained by ‘tactical’ considerations of the benefits of implementing self-censorship protocols in the hostile, anti-communist conditions of their theoretical production in exile, as is especially evident from their correspondence. However, as an esoteric technique, it was more than a tactic. It was an expression of the refusal to capitulate in thought to those compromises required of them in fact.
The Institute’s original organ of publication was the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, which appeared in German from 1932-1939. It may still have fulfilled its function even when its distribution was prohibited in Germany: to make a number of readers conscious of the fact that political powerlessness does not necessarily entail the sacrifice of the intellect.Adorno "Eine Stätte der Forschung (1941)," Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 20.2, (Suhrkamp-Verlag, 1997). Author's translation.
In a particularly revealing letter to Horkheimer in late 1941, Adorno makes a ‘tactical’ recommendation to remove an explicit reference to Marx from a draft of an essay to appear in the ISR’s journal, providing three reasons: “Those in-the-know know it anyway, the others need not notice, and it should annoy Grossmann.”Adorno to Horkheimer, 8/18/1941. *Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Volume 17*. (Hereafter: MHGS Vol. #). Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Alfred Schmidt. (1996), 134. Author's translation. Eva-Maria Ziege has called it “an esoteric form of communication,”Eva-Maria Ziege, "The Irrationality of the Rational. The Frankfurt School and Its Theory of Society in the 1940s" in *Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology*, ed. Marcel Stoetzler (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 275-276. one meant not only to help the early critical theorists avoid potential political persecution but also to enable them to continue their collective work on what they often referred to simply as “the theory”Horkheimer, "The Jews and Europe" [1939], translation by Mark Ritter. *Critical Theory and Society: A Reader.* Ed. Stephen Eric Bronner & Douglas Mackay Kellner (Routledge, 1989), 77-78—and “there is only one theory.”
What do we actually mean by “essence”? Even in Marx, the tension between essence and appearance is due to the fact that he sees society under the aspect of communism. (...) We formulate in the manner of Spinoza. The essence in appearance consists in a relationship of the phenomenon, what is given, to what is possible. There is only one theory.Horkheimer [1939]. *MHGS Vol. 12.* (1985), 523-524. Author's translation.
In addition to implementing protocols of tactical self-censorship under pressure and elaborating an esoteric technique in protest, the early critical theorists insist on a negative method of presentation derived from the conception of the critique inherent to the critique of political economy itself: “Marxist science constitutes the critique of bourgeois economy and not the expounding of a socialist one.”Horkheimer, "Authoritarian State" [1942], Trans. Peoples Translation Service in Berkeley and Elliott Eisenberg. *Telos* Spring 1973, No. 15 (1973); doi:10.3817/0373015003, 13. Rather, “Marx (...) wrests from bourgeois society the standard of legitimacy it fashions for itself, shows it cannot fulfill this, and, at the same time, maintains such a standard as a negative expression of the right society,” the realization of which “would abolish this form of society itself.”Adorno and Horkheimer [1939]. *MHGS Vol. 12* (1985), 438. Author's translation. Later, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), they give their pithiest formulation of this orientation, inverting Spinoza and Hegel: the false is the index of itself and the true.*Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments*. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Trans. Edmund Jephcott (SUP, 2002), 31.
What they term “the critical irony of Marxian conceptuality”"The Marxian method and its applicability to the analysis of the present crisis. Seminar Discussion (1936)," *MHGS Vol 12*. (1985), 402. Author's translation. lies in the dialectical gesture of learning dialectic from the immanent contradiction of capitalist society, by virtue of which it secures its own reproduction through crisis, to meet guile with double guile,Paul Ricoeur, *Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation*. Translated by Denis Savage (Yale University Press, 1970), 34. to turn its own cunning against it with a “naivete” that preserves “an element of childhood, the courage to be weak that gives the child the idea that it will ultimately overcome even what is most difficult.”Adorno, *Hegel: Three Studies* (MIT Press, 1993), 42-43. Horkheimer calls this the ‘logical structure of the critique of political economy’ in Marx’s Capital, in which the dialectical necessity of deductions within the self-referential context of the logic of the commodity in theory mirrors the processual necessity of the self-contradictory totality of capitalist society itself; however, in the course of this presentation, the truly dialectical reversal is prepared, through which this dialectically self-necessitating totality is denied its absoluteness in the practice of human self-emancipation.
[I]n Marxs Capital concrete tendencies are derived from the first simple and general concepts within a logical self-referential context; these lead to destruction. The consistency of logical forms, the necessity of the dialectical deductions correspond here to the natural necessity with which economic principles prevail in the reality of this society. Other forms of presentation as well as other theoretical methods would, therefore, be appropriate to a condition of enhanced freedom and a more rational social structure. These cant be anticipated now.Horkheimer to Grossmann, 10/1/1935. *A Life in Letters. Selected Correspondence by Max Horkheimer*. Ed. & translated by Evelyn M. Jacobson, Manfred R. Jacobson (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 56-58.
Horkheimer suggests in a 1939 conversation with Adorno that the trick is neither believing in happiness when faced with the “objective despair” of the present nor relinquishing the anobjective claim on a happy future, to which Adorno responds: “We must be much more naive [naiver] and much more unnaive [unnaiver] at the same time.”Adorno [1939]. *MHGS Vol. 12* (1985), 509-510. Author's translation.
Yet, because critical theory does not dogmatically anticipate the world, but finds the new world through the criticism of the old one,Horkheimer says these lines of Marx could serve as a "motto" for his essays of the 1930s. Letter to Hans Mayer (12/17/1937) in *Life in Letters.* Ed. Jacobson & R. Jacobson (2007), 121-124. For the full exchange with Mayer, see *MHGS Vol. 16* (1995b), 297-305; 333-337. it has “no secret doctrine” (Adorno);Adorno [1939]: "On the other hand, I have no secret doctrine either. I believe, however, that the kind of view I have is such that it finds the reflexion in things of the very source of light which cannot be the object of intentions and thoughts." *MHGS Vol. 12* (1985), 506. Author's translation. its indirect, dialectical method of presentation is “one of rational self-identification” which holds out for true agreement with the addressee who makes it to the end (the truth is in the whole, but that whole is untrue), and is therefore “by no means an esoteric one” (Horkheimer).Horkheimer [1939]. *MHGS Vol. 12* (1985), 477. Author's translation. Adorno and Horkheimer (1939) go so far as to refer to the Communist Manifesto as a stylistic model, as it demonstrates that “[i]n theory, everything has to be equally close to the center.”Adorno [1939] *MHGS Vol. 12* (1985), 509. Author's translation. Each sentence of the Manifesto presents the reader with a formative experience of their own, something everyone has already thought for themselves, but in such a way as to “penetrate the facade” over the world, the “fog” of complications and the false “opacity” that serve as “a veil to cover up the simplicity of it all,” which makes the world seem “incomprehensible” to those who comprise it.Adorno and Horkheimer [1939]. *MHGS Vol. 12* (1985), 512-513. Author's translation. In his pseudonymous Dämmerung (1934), Horkheimer distills the essence of their technique: “Language must therefore be prevented from creating the illusion of a community that does not exist in class society,” but “has to be used as a means in the struggle for a united world” and “today, the words of the fighters and martyrs of that struggle seem to be coming from that world.”Horkheimer, "The Urbanity of Language," *Dawn & Decline*. Trans. Michael Shaw. (Continuum: Seabury Press, 1978), 75-76. The anti-esoteric esotericism of early critical theory meant to introduce a torsion in language, giving lie to the harmonizing semblance of communicative reason in the present,Cf. Hermann Schweppenhauser, "The Concept of Language and Linguistic Presentation in Horkheimer and Adorno" (1986), Trans. James/Crane. CTWG Blog, April 22, 2024. <https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2024/language/> out of fidelity to the vulnerable possibility of “the society we imagine as unfolded reason.”Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 1/4/1938. *MHGS Vol. 16* (1995), 355-356. Author's translation.
Throughout the archive of posthumously published writings, the “concept of reason” that early critical theory seeks to realize is given an unambiguous determination: “Classless society in the critical sense.”Adorno and Horkheimer [1939]. *MHGS Vol. 12* (1985), 514. Author's translation. However, already in the original publication of “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937) in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Horkheimer defines the idea of critical theory as such through a negative formulation of the communist program:
Critical theory, despite the clarity it may have into the individual steps of social transformation and the agreement of its elements with those of the most advanced traditional theories, has no authority of its own except the concern for the abolition of class domination [Interesse an der Aufhebung der Klassenherrschaft] connected with it."Traditionelle und kritische Theorie". ZfS vol. 6, no. 2, pages 245-294,(1937), 291-292. Author's translation. The extant English translation in *Critical Theory* (2002) is based on the revision of the essay under Horkheimer's direction for the republication of a selection of his early essays in German in 1968, which substitutes "*gesellschaftliche* *Unrecht*" [social injustice] for "*Klassenherrschaft*" [class domination].
As Christian Voller has recently demonstrated, even under self-imposed censorship protocols, the description of a “rationally organized society” which constitutes the normative horizon of the most circumspect early critical theorists—Adorno and Horkheimer in particular—is drawn almost verbatim from a single passage in Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology.Christian Voller, *In der Dämmerung*. *Studien zu Vor- und Frühgeschichte der Kritische Theorie* (Matthes & Seitz, 2023), 61-63.
Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. *Vol. 5 of Collected Works*. (Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 81.
This idea of a “rationally organized society,” Horkheimer explains in a letter of 1938, “coincides with that of the association of free human beings,” and this “coincidence of which we speak is brought about by the socialization of the means of production and the abolition of classes and is ever-renewed by the active participation of individuals in administration.”Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, (1/4/1938). *MHGS Vol. 16* (1995), 353-354. Author's translation. Through the late 1940s, their critical criterion is furnished by “the ideal of social self-administration of the productive forces in the mode of a universalized republic of councils.”Voller traces Adorno's "Theses on Need" [1942] back to the theoretical-political problematic elaborated in the works of Karl Korsch. *Dämmerung* (2023), 140-142. Not even Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) is an exception:
[W]ith the revolutionary avant-garde, the utopia which proclaimed the reconciliation between nature and the self emerged from its hiding place in German philosophy as something at once irrational and rational, as the idea of the association of free individuals—and brought down on itself the full fury of reason.Adorno and Horkheimer, *Dialectic of Enlightenment*. Trans. Jephcott & ed. Noerr (2007), 71.
This is most explicit in essays such as Adorno’s “Theses on Need” (1942) and Horkheimer’s “Authoritarian State” (1942), in which ‘the democracy of the councils’ is presented as the completion of socialist construction or ‘socialization’ suppressed (but possibly latent) in state socialism, as the measure of the betrayal of democracy under the formal equality of liberal principles in crisis-prone capitalist societies, and as the antithesis of fascist nationalization that re-privatizes public functions in the hands of warring cliques which vie to be the dominant particularity of a universal state.Adorno, "Theses on Need" [1942], Translation by David Fernbach. *New Left Review 128* (2021): 79-82. Horkheimer, "Authoritarian State" [1942], *Telos* (1973), 8-10. Horkheimer, "The Jews and Europe" [1939], 78, 85-86. There is an invariant program at the foundation of early critical theory:
The theoretical conception which, following its first trailblazers, will show the new society its way—the system of workers’ councils—grows out of praxis. The roots of the council system go back to 1871, 1905, and other events. Revolutionary transformation has a tradition that must continue.Horkheimer, "Authoritarian State" [1942], *Telos* (1973), 10.
The “obstinacy” with which the critical theorist smashes the fetishes which occlude its realization of “the association of free human beings in which each has the same possibility of self-development” and sifts through the caput mortuum of modern humanity for traces of its possibility is what gives early critical theory its fragility, its “common bond” with “fantasy.”Horkheimer. "Traditional and Critical Theory" [1937]. *Critical Theory* (2002), 219-220. Translation modified. The universalized republic of councils is the contested possibility of mediation between universal and particular interest, the telos of any truly revolutionary internationalism, the emancipation of humanity and nature from the compulsions of capital accumulation through which humanity might be realized for the first time, and the concretion of self-enlightening of enlightenment.
With the thoroughgoing organization of humanity towards a common plan, alienation ends, because no one confronts it as alien anymore. The process is completed when the universal plan is no longer forced upon the individual by external violence, even if that plan is ideologically disguised as ones own. (...) This was Marxist reason, the free association of humanity, free from the unplanned effects of social power. Only then, when each in their conduct becomes a means of the whole, do they also become an end to the whole and to themselves. Once the means is fully recognized as an end, we are freed from the domination of means. (...) The only rescue for thinking tired of the triumph of means is to drive it to the point of reversal. It is not true that enlightenment is at an end.Horkheimer, "Magic of the Concept" (1949). *MHGS Vol. 12* (1985), 323-325. Author's translation
The modest contribution of early critical theory consists in providing a model for the exploration and comprehension of, as a fellow traveler will later express it, “the aporia intrinsic to socialist activity between the daily struggle and the goal beyond the limits of that struggle, which therefore cannot secure itself in advance.”Gillian Rose, *The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society*. (Blackwell, 1992), 205-206. Cf., Rose *Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation* (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7-8. The problem is one of true revolution—total revolution—for any movement seeking to overturn capitalist society that risks, through their very opposition to it, inadvertently reinforcing it: “The revolutionary movement negatively reflects the situation which it is attacking”; “Whatever seeks to extend itself under domination runs the danger of reproducing it.”Horkheimer, "Authoritarian State" [1942]. *Telos* (1973), 5-6. This task cannot be abdicated even in the ongoing obliteration and cooptation of revolutionary movements from which the concepts of early critical theory first emerged, for “the knowledge of the falling fighter, insofar as it reflects the structure of the present epoch and the basic possibility of a better one, is not dishonored because humanity succumbs to bombs and poison gases.”Horkheimer, "On the Problem of Truth [1935]." *Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, Max Horkheimer.* Translated by G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (MIT Press, 1993), 199-200. The critical theorist is tasked with preserving and intensifying our unease with the world which exists, to return us to these concepts ignited by the liquidated enemies of capitalist social domination and ensure, by our own will, that “the truth of them will out.”Horkheimer, "Postscript [to Traditional and Critical Theory]." *Critical Theory*. (2002), 251. This negative unity of opposites—restless critique of this world and unwavering aim at its abolition—is the “illusion-free orientation” into which early critical theory would initiate us.Horkheimer to Wittfogel, (8/21/1935), *MHGS Vol. 15* (1995), 389-391. Author's translation.
To the degree we remain loyal to the early critical theorists, our recovery is critical.Cf. Horkheimer, "Art and Mass Culture" in *Critical Theory* (2002), 286-289. And, Adorno and Horkheimer, "Thought" from "Notes and Sketches" *Dialectic of Enlightenment.* (2002), 203. This is, as Adorno expresses and performs it, the minimum condition of loyalty to dialectical theory:
Everyone says that Marxism is done for. To this we say, no, it is not done for, but rather, that one must remain loyal to it. But if one is actually loyal to it, then this can only mean driving the movement of the dialectical process further.Adorno [1939]. *MHGS Vol*. *12* (1985), 524. Author's translation.
Or, in an uncharacteristically laconic formulation of Horkheimer’s: “Progress in ideas does not consist in “novelty” but in a life-process in which existing ideas are transformed through the acts by which they are experienced.”Horkheimer to the Editors of the *Philosophical Review*, April 1949. *Life in Letters* (2007), 270-72.Rather than pass judgment on the legitimacy of their esoteric strategy, we seek to engage their work in those terms which they, rightly or wrongly, concealed, and do so in the name of overcoming the very “context of delusion”Adorno, *Negative Dialectics*. Trans. E.B. Ashton (Routledge, 2004), 141, 182, 406. in which they felt compelled to conceal them. More than that, we seek to hold them to the measure of these terms without making excuses for them. To paraphrase Horkheimer’s critique of the apologetic reception of Nietzsche, the eloquence which would cover for their naivete and illusions, or excuse them as ‘thinkers of their time,’ delivers them, having been made presentable and thereby unintelligible, over to the same society against which their antagonism was uncompromising and within which they were compromised.Horkheimer, "Bemerkungen zu Jaspers' 'Nietzsche.' " *ZfS* V6, Issue 2, 1937, 407-414. To paraphrase Adorno’s critique of the apologetic reception of Kierkegaard, for the thorns they felt stinging their own flesh and turned against society, they deserve, at the very least, faithful rather than deferential exegesis.Adorno, "[Double review of Wahl, Jean *Etudes Kierkegaardiennes* & Lowrie, Walter *The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard*]." *ZfS* Jahrgang 8: 1939-1940; V8, Issue 1/2, 1939, 232-235. To express this polemically: the living kernels of early critical theory from the works of the early critical theorists cannot be recovered apart from the partisan criticism of capitalism, the early critical theorists themselves, and their critics.
* * *
In the following essays, the “non-dogmatic”Cf. Karl Korsch, "A Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxism" (1946), transcribed by Anthony Blunden for Marxists.org in 2003 [link: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1946/non-dogmatic.htm>] Marxian core of early critical theory is emphasized in the spirit of what Horkheimer and Adorno later call the “productive orthodoxy”Cf. Horkheimer \"Ernst Simmel und die Freudsche Philosophie\" (1947). *MHGS, Vol. 5* (1987), 396-405. Cf. Adorno, "Revisionist Psychoanalysis" (1952), Translated by Nan-Nan Lee. *Philosophy and Social Criticism* 40(3); 2014., 326-337. of their reception of Freud: reconstructive fidelity to the boundaries of their thought, the unresolved integrity of which can only be presented through critique.
In “Essence in the Archaic: Notes Towards a Historical Materialist Account of the Concept of Essence,” Mac Parker takes on the challenge posed in Marcuse’s “Concept of Essence” (1936)Cf. "ZfS in English" for links to available English translations of the essays published in the ISR's ZfS/SPSS. CTWG Blog, November 6, 2024. <https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2024/language/> the historical-materialist reconceptualization of the concept of essence, understood by the early critical theorists as the potential freedom inherent in different historical situations in which the doctrine of essence received philosophical elaboration. Responding in kind, Parker challenges Marcuse’s transcendental-idealistic methodological presuppositions, according to which the task of the theorist is discovering the schematism through which the thought of a historical period is determined on the basis of an historical a priori set of conditions of possibility, which prevent Marcuse from fulfilling this desideratum. Instead, Parker argues for an alternative model for theorizing the social determination of thought: beginning from detail-oriented analysis of historical material, reconstruction of the asymmetric relations of reciprocal determination between changes in the economic base (broadly considered) and the philosophical-ideological superstructure, with a focus on the analysis of the role of class-situated subjective mediation in the translation of objective conditions into determinations of thought. The majority of the essay is a test of this model in the case of the emergence of the concept of essence in ancient Greece, which provides the basis for a criticism of competing accounts of the advent of philosophy in Greek antiquity offered by historians and the early critical theorists themselves (from Sohn-Rethel to Adorno).
In “On the Falsity of Prevailing Ideas: The Concept of Ideology in Early Critical Theory,” Samuel J. Thomas argues for the importance of Horkheimer’s critique of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia in the early 1930s for a critical theory of ideology.For a supplementary précis of Mannheim's *Ideology and Utopia*, see Samuel J. Thomas, "Précis of Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia." CTWG Blog, November 12, 2024. <https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2024/Mannheim/> Distinguishing between Ideologietheorie and Ideologiekritik, Thomas demonstrates that Horkheimer’s critique of the methodology of Mannheim’s ‘value-free’ ‘sociology of knowledge’ (Wissenssoziologie) turns on this distinction and, moreover, on the problematic and unreflective separation of these moments in Mannheim’s project. In the course of this reconstruction, Thomas develops a model for diagnosing the pitfalls of more contemporary, one-sided approaches to theories and critiques of ideology and argues that the singular difficulty of analyzing ideology under the conditions of capitalist social relations requires the adoption of a specific conception of the dialectical method. Presenting the unity of Ideologietheorie and Ideologiekritik in Horkheimer’s own work throughout the 1930s, in which ideology theory focuses on the functional role of ideology in relations of class domination and ideology critique focuses on the relation between ideology and totality (as well as ideological theories of ideology and totality), Thomas contextualizes Horkheimer’s own conception of ideology as self-contextualizing. This is required by the self-reflexive core of the critical theory of ideology, which Thomas calls the ‘double determination’ of any inquiry into ideology itself: the mode in which capitalist social totality determines the object of analysis and the subject of the researcher who seeks to offer a theory or critique of ideology. After exhibiting this approach in the case of Horkheimer’s own analysis of the bourgeois revolutionary in the figure of Tommaso Campanella (inter alia), Thomas concludes with polemical suggestions for the further development of the critical theory of ideology.
In “Analytic Social Psychology as Critical Social Theory,” J.E. Morain recovers the early work of Erich Fromm, a foundational and unjustly neglected figure in accounts of the formation of early critical theory—specifically, the ISR’s project of developing an ‘analytic social psychology,’ which would provide the conceptual scaffolding of the group’s Studien über Autorität und Familie (1936) and, arguably, the framework and foci of the ‘socio-psychological’ approach to empirical research the ISR would use throughout the 1940s, culminating in The Authoritarian Personality (1950).See Morain's recent report on research conducted at the Erich Fromm archive on the CTWG blog, which reconstructs the systematic, Marxian conception Fromm contributed to the ISR's *Studien über Autorität und Familie* (1936): "The Origins of Studien über Autorität und Familie." CTWG Blog, April 27, 2024. <https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2024/origins_of_the_family/> In this essay, Morain begins with a critical survey of secondary literature on Fromm’s contribution to ‘The Frankfurt School,’ which, on the whole, has read Fromm from a ‘standpoint of redemption’ that assumes the condemnation of his work from the outset. In Morain’s reconstructive-reparative approach, Fromm is restored to his role as the author of the interdisciplinary synthesis of historical materialism and classical psychoanalysis that underlies the ISR’s famous ‘Freudo-Marxism’: explanations of the large-scale social phenomena posited by historical materialism on the basis of the psychic dynamics of individuals as conceived by Freudian psychoanalysis. Fromm’s approach is shown to outfit early critical theory with the ‘microfoundations’ of their conception of social reproduction. In explicit and militant opposition to any transhistorical theory of human motivation or ‘interests’ in the life of society, as well as to the vulgar Marxist theory of ‘reflection,’ Fromm reorients social psychology to an analysis of the mediation of economic ‘base’ and ideological ‘superstructure,’ social existence and social consciousness, by the network of institutions in which the psychic character of individuals is formed—for the sake of producing functional, capitalist subjects—in the course of capitalist social reproduction as a whole. In particular, Fromm’s focus is on the family as a complex of mediations, which serves, Fromm argues, as the primary agent of socialization and influence on the social formation of psychic character-structure. Morain differentiates Fromm’s particular appropriation psychoanalytic theory from that of Freudian orthodoxy and develops Fromm’s distinctive conception of ‘analytic social psychology’ in a reconstruction of three basic concepts: social-psychic ‘cement’ (distinct from ‘ideology’ proper), ‘the psychic structure of society,’ and a unique concept of ‘ideology’ in social reproduction, which, in conjunction, provide the elements for Fromm’s social-psychological ‘crisis’ theory, according to which, as Fromm puts it in his inaugural essay in the ZfS, “the libidinal energies” which comprise the social-psychic cement “no longer serve the preservation of the society, but contribute to the development of new social formations. They cease to be ‘cement,’ and turn into dynamite.”Fromm, "The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology: Notes on Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism" [1932]. *The Essential Frankfurt School Reader*. Ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. (New York: Continuum, 1977), 495. Morain concludes with a critique of three main limitations in Fromm’s work in light of further developments—past or potential—in the project of developing an ‘analytic social psychology.’
In “Horkheimer’s Materialism vs Morals and Metaphysics: Its Limitations and Possibilities,” Esther Planas Balduz tackles the problem of the normative orientation of early critical theory through immanent critique of Horkheimer’s foundational essays on Marxist materialism for the ZfS: “Materialism and Metaphysics” (1932) and “Materialism and Morals” (1932).Cf. "ZfS in English." CTWG Blog, November 6, 2024. <https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2023/ZfS/> Namely: how can we account for the moral dimension of the Marxist materialist’s critique of morality? Notwithstanding the critique of ‘value-free’ social theory in early critical theory as a whole, and in Horkheimer’s work in particular, Horkheimer himself criticizes moral conflicts, particularly in moral philosophy, for failing to recognize that they occur in the context of a world that is itself wrong, a society that is itself unjust. Planas Balduz begins here, interrogating the perspective from which the value judgment which assesses the world qua society as a totality has been—and, perhaps, ought to be—made. In the course of the essay, Planas Balduz reconstructs the method with which Horkheimer traces the categories of ‘materialism,’ ‘morality,’ and ‘metaphysics’ proper to each of these fields of judgment back to the constitutive, modern tension between ‘subjective’ and ‘social’ value judgments about what is considered socially and personally unbearable. In the above-mentioned foundational essays on Marxist materialism, Horkheimer argues that, and shows us how, sociology and positivist philosophy repeat this core tension through the rejection of value judgement, which binds them to their negative doubles—idealist moral philosophy of unconditional obligation and proto-totalitarian romanticism of unconditional self-determination. It is precisely because of the power of Horkheimer’s critique of ‘value-free’ social theory and science which, Planas Balduz concludes, compels us to pose two questions. First, given Horkheimers concern in these essays with questions of the individual in relation to the moral law, how can we relate his arguments to the position of the individual relative to the ‘second nature’ laws of the capitalist market? Or: in what sense is Horkheimer’s ‘materialist’ critique of morality materialist? Second, to the extent that materialism requires a critique of morality, how can we reconcile this with the need to confront the a-moral morality in the critique of socialism in neoliberal social thought? Or: does Horkheimer’s moral anti-moralism have its own negative double in the hegemonic discourse of the present?
In “On the Social Situation of Adorno’s Critical Music Theory,” Zach Loeffler restores Adorno’s eccentric musical perspective in the early 1930s—represented in particular by his first published contribution to early critical theory in the ISR’s orbit, “On the Social Situation of Music” (1932)—to its own ‘social situation’: namely, as an effort to elaborate the theoretical consequences of direct proletarian action and worker militancy in the first years of the Weimar Republic, its brutal suppression, and its ongoing structural absence for a critical theory of artistic production. In the course of the essay, Loeffler reinterprets “Social Situation” through the late self-critique Adorno provides of the essay more than three decades later, reconstructing the re-articulation of Adorno’s theory of music through the reconfiguration of several ambivalences through which his earlier theoretical perspective develops. In the course of this reinterpretation, Adorno’s late musical theory is itself read in light of the young Adorno’s project of thinking music in its total ‘social situation.’ The perspective which emerges is as follows: if music is to do justice to the promise of fulfillment made by bourgeois art, then it must embody the truth of the untruth of capitalism and in turn something of a truly free, non-instrumental sociality bridging the gap between theory and revolutionary praxis; and if music is to do these things, then its material must be rationalized past the point where class society necessarily cuts rationalization short, a process which renders music socially mute and functionless. The musical rearticulation of Adornos critical theory therefore makes legible the Marxism of "consummate negativity" and maximalist communism that form the crux of his work, rendering concrete the negotiation of the problem of freedom vis-à-vis theory and praxis in the face of intractable social compulsion and the concrete possibility of realizing its mirror image.
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