Spring 2025 Reading Group Announcement

Spring Reading Group: The Science of Society in Critical Theory

Our upcoming reading group session begins on Saturday, March 22. Meeting weekly on Saturdays at 12:00 PM Eastern Time, it will comprise seven sessions over the course of eight weeks. The sessions are as follows:

• March 22 — Class, Monopolies, and Rackets: “On The Sociology of Class Relations” by Max Horkheimer (presented by Re Tejus)
• March 29 — Rackets, Monopolies, and Imperialism: Texts by Horkheimer and Milios and Sotiropoulos (presented by Mac Parker)
• April 5 — The Origins of Mechanical Explanation: “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” by Boris Hessen (presented by Anatarah bin AlKaf)
• April 12 — Historical Materialism and Nature: Texts by Karl August Wittfogel (presented by J. E. Morain)
• April 19 — No meeting
• April 26 — The Polymorphous Psyche of Bourgeois Society: “Egoism and Freedom Movements” by Max Horkheimer (presented by Esther Planas Balduz)
• May 3 — Revolution and Rhetoric in Modernity: Texts by Max Horkheimer (presented by James Crane)
• May 10 — Adorno’s Dialectical Sociology and Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: “Introduction” to The Positivist Dispute by Theodor Adorno (presented by Zach Loeffler)

Full descriptions with reading lists can be found below.

We have opened a Discord server for participants in our reading groups and people interested in critical theory broadly. Invitations will be sent out to those who sign up for the upcoming reading group through this eventbrite link.

Full Reading Group Descriptions

March 22 — Class, Monopolies, and Rackets: “On The Sociology of Class Relations” by Max Horkheimer (presented by Re Tejus)

Description: The questions regarding the processes of monopolization and concentration of capital has been central to the orientation and strategy of the revolutionary working class movement in the 20th century. For instance, the increasing importance of financialization, the nature of imperialism and cartelization of key industries throughout the world was understood to be deeply related to capitalism’s tendency for monopolization. The debates surrounding these questions served as key orientation for socialist strategy. Adorno and Horkheimer’s writing on class asks the question of the processes of monopolization and all its consequences with the changing nature of the working class movements and its mutual interaction. For the concept of class to be concrete, it was to be understood in its (political and social) activity alongside other groups in totality—hence, the nature of class and the working class movement was fundamentally interlocked. We will be looking at Horkheimer’s “On the Sociology of Class Relations” as an intervention into the debates of what has to be done with monopolies occupying the central role in capitalist organization and the spread of fascism throughout Europe. How do we understand class and class struggle with monopolies occupying the primary role in organizing social reproduction?

The stage of monopoly capitalism and imperialism sheds light on the nature of group formation and integration in societies based on the extraction/exploitation of surplus labour of producers for the social reproduction of everyday life. In the outline for a planned book on rackets, Horkheimer writes, “The fact that history is a history of class struggles means that history is a history of rackets fighting among themselves and against the rest of society.” The concept of Rackets in history reveals the logic of domination immanent in class society that shackles the individual within groups, that in times of crisis results in a rapid unleashing of irrational destruction and violence. Under the limits imposed by class society, individuals are forced to integrate themselves into groups that will rule over groups below them—The oppressed become the oppressors of “those further down” the hierarchy. Traditional forms of domination and rule that were understood as inadequate liberalism were instead integrated into the economic apparatus, “by abolishing the classes in this way, class rule comes into its own.” Only through the establishment of a rationally organized society that “coincides with that of the association of free human beings” by a conscious working class struggle will lead to the unfolding of genuine democracy and freedom.

Primary Reading:

• Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations”

Supplementary Reading:

• Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory”
• Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty”
• Sweezy and Baran, Monopoly Capital,
  • Chs. 1-2
• Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
  • Chs. 1, 7
• Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations”

March 29 — Rackets, Monopolies, and Imperialism: Texts by Horkheimer and Milios and Sotiropoulos (presented by Mac Parker)

Description: Imperialism is one of the areas often touched on by Horkheimer and Adorno without detailed elaboration, and one which lies inherently close to their general problematic through its connection to the question of monopolies and their role in the changes that took place within a broad swath of capitalist social formations (and the international system as a whole) over the course of the 20th century. The purpose of this session will be to connect the ‘racket theory’ developed by Horkheimer and Adorno in the 40s to contemporary debates around imperialism, the critique of political economy and the periodization of capitalism. This will be done by reading Horkheimer’s “On the Sociology of Class Relations” essay alongside selections from Milios and Sotiropoulos’ Rethinking Imperialism: A Study of Capitalist Rule. These two works have opposing orientations to the question of monopoly and its role in the above mentioned transformations, with Milios and Sotiropoulos taking a more macro-economic approach that emphasizes the embeddedness of monopolies within the laws or structural determinations of the capitalist mode of production and Horkheimer taking a more micro-economic approach that centers on monopolies themselves as the determinant instances in broader social changes that seem to entail the (at least partial) suspension or transformation of those laws. My hope is that by reading them together we will be able to begin to evaluate each in the context of the other, as well as see the ways in which their disagreements are relevant to our understanding of the broader discourse on imperialism within which Milios and Sotiropoulos’ work is situated.

Primary Reading:

• Horkhiemer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations” (16 pages)
• Milios and Sotiropoulos, Rethinking Imperialism (49 pages total):
  • Sections 1.3.2 - “Monopoly and the decay of capitalism”, 1.3.3 - “Capital exports and the theory of underconsumption”, and 1.4 - “Codification of the theoretical problematic of the classical theories of imperialism” (pp. 20-32; 12 pages)
  • Sections 2.1 - “Introductory comments: the issue of dependency”, 2.2 - “The traditional approach”, and 2.10 - “The critique of Cordova and Cardoso” (pp . 33-35, 48-51; 6 pages)
  • Section 3.4 “Modern theories of the ‘New Imperialism’ (pp . 70-83; 13 pages)
  • Chapter 6 - “Capitalist Mode of Production and Monopolies” (pp .112-131; 9 pages)
  • Sections 7.1 - “Introduction, and 7.2 “On the Periodization of Capitalist Social Formations” (pp. 121-131; 9 pages)

Supplementary Reading:
Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory” (13 pages)

April 5 — The Origins of Mechanical Explanation: “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” by Boris Hessen (presented by Anatarah bin AlKaf)

Description: In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer stated that “Technology is the essence of this [‘scientific’] knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others,* capital. (…) What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness. Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.]” (pp. 2) From this account, we can see the fragmentary yet cumulative work of early critical theory positing a Marxist account of science, technology, and nature—a perspective becoming increasingly urgent in our current conjuncture. From run-away ecological catastrophes to disastrous technologies like AI, we witness how these systems only enable and amplify the continuous and singular catastrophe called capitalism. How, then, did “instrumental reason” take form? What is the historical account of its genesis?

To answer these questions, we will go back to early critical theory and its application to the sciences. We will revisit the Hessen-Grossmann theses and interrogate the classical Marxist historiography of science. We will trace the emergence of ‘mechanical’ reason, discover how technology and science became a unity, explore how scientific knowledge became linked with capitalist production, and aim to locate the “real abstractions” in scientific and technological labor. Specifically, we will tackle Boris Hessen’s “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” as an exemplary classical study through which we will excavate the “mechanism” behind how enlightenment reverts back to myth!

Primary Reading:

• Hessen, “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” (~52 pages)
• Freudenthal and McLaughlin, “Classical Marxist Historiography of Science: The Hessen-Grossmann-Thesis” in The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann (30 pages)

Supplementary Reading:

• Grossmann, The Social Foundations of the Mechanistic Philosophy and Manufacture
• Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital
  • Chs. 7-8
• Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump
• Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist
  • Chs. 1-3

April 12 — Historical Materialism and Nature: Texts by Karl August Wittfogel (presented by J. E. Morain)

Description: In this session, we will read substantial excerpts from two essays by sociologist and historian Karl August Wittfogel (including one newly translated into English for the first time). These essays represent an interesting, if polemical, attempt to formulate historical materialism as a rigorous social science that integrates history, sociology, and geography. Wittfogel’s writings have exerted a subterranean influence on a variety of fields within the broad umbrella of the social sciences, such as comparative history, social geography, historical sociology, and economic history. His unique approach to historical materialism stands out due to its pointed emphasis on the influence of natural factors on human history.
Primary Reading:

• “Geographical Materialism” pp. 39-59 (~20 pp, 2 columns)
• “Natural Factors in Economic History” (Excerpt, ~20 pp)

Supplementary Reading:

• Engels, Letters on Historical Materialism
• Marx and Engels, “I. Feuerbach” from The German Ideology
• Plekhanov, “Fundamental Problems of Marxism” Sections VI-XVI in Selected Works, Vol. 3

April 26 — The Polymorphous Psyche of Bourgeois Society: “Egoism and Freedom Movements” by Max Horkheimer (presented by Esther Planas Balduz)

Description: This reading intends to revisit Max Horkheimer’s exposing of the psychic mechanisms at work in the morally polymorphous critique of egoism versus the promotion of freedom within the paradigm of the Bourgeois era, and analyse those resonances that his account at the time can have with contemporary cases. As we will see how in this essay, Freud’s modern psychology and the “conceptual apparatus which he created in his early work [and his] original theory shows [us] that social prohibitions, under the given familiar and general social conditions, are suited for arresting people’s instinctual development at a sadistic level or reverting them back to this level.” (Horkheimer, 1936) In this essay Horkheimer declares that “[Freud’s]theory of partial drives, of repressions, of ambivalence are crucial for a psychological understanding of the process under discussion here [and that] [t]he transformation of psychic energies that takes place in the process of internalization cannot be understood today without the psychoanalytical perspective.” (Horkheimer, 1936) We will thus evaluate in this session the dialectics and possible speculative encounters between materialism as method and modern psychology, which in the article has already incorporated aspects of a critique of Freud by another member of the IfS, such as Erich Fromm.

Understanding that we are still, albeit on different times, under the similar and “common structural features” to evaluate, as Horkheimer did, how “at these exceptional moments, the social constellation becomes recognizable together with its most important mediations: the idealistic hierarchy of values, the theoretical condemnation of egoism, and the brutal and cruel streak in the bourgeois type’s disposition.” Through the analysing of how these two confronted values as Freedom and Egoism stand for the bourgeois totality, Horkheimer tackles those terms in which mediation takes form and is at work for the bourgeois “revolutionary” leaders along with its supporters, as they activate, or manage, a ‘psychic obedience’ from the masses to which it necessarily has to betray; as “…both themes, universal social interest and class interest, pervade[d] the critique of egoism.” [The] “bourgeois leader tries to idealize and spiritualize the brutal wishes for a better life, the abolition of differences of wealth and the introduction of real community ideas which have been represented in those centuries by religious populists and theological utopians. Not so much revolt as spiritual renewal, not so much the struggle against the wealth of the privileged as against universal wickedness, not so much external as internal satisfaction are preached to the masses in the course of the revolutionary process.” (Horkheimer 1936)

We will aim at devising the repetition of patterns of a psychic manipulation of the subjects considered the people, plebs, or masses and the differences that can be noted between these historical cases. A possible guideline or answer as to why we appear to have sunk into political fascism and authoritarian leaderships that screams so loud of freedom?

Primary Reading:

• Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era”

Supplementary Reading:

• Fromm, “Studies on Authority and Family: Sociopsychological Dimensions”

May 3 — Revolution and Rhetoric in Modernity: Texts by Max Horkheimer (presented by James Crane)

Description: In a letter written immediately after finishing the first draft of the ‘Egoism’ essay, Horkheimer writes to a friend: it is a “monstrosity.” But he ends the letter by saying it contains the germs for a theory of modern political rhetoric. Furthermore, in pieces written at the same time, Horkheimer is dedicated to developing a comprehensive theory of modern revolutions and counter-revolutions, as well as a typological distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ terror. The purpose of this session is to reconstruct and develop these germs. This will be a supplement to Esther’s presentation on revolution and the transition from anthropology to psychology. (Texts will be provided in translation.)
Primary Reading:

• Horkheimer, “Editor’s Remark on Greer’s Book”
• Horkheimer, “The Function of Speech in Modernity”
• Horkheimer, Excerpts on revolution and rhetoric from 1930s fragments and essays

May 10 — Adorno’s Dialectical Sociology and Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: “Introduction” to The Positivist Dispute by Theodor Adorno (presented by Zach Loeffler)

Description: In this session, we will explore Adorno’s “dialectical” or “critical” approach to sociology and how he positions it in relation to positivism and Marx’s project. The point is to reopen the case (wrongly closed by Habermas, Jay, and even Rose) of Adorno’s critique of political economy, since none of his work can be understood without doing so.
Primary Reading:

• Adorno, “Introduction” from The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology