Marx once famously wrote, Hitherto, philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point is: to change it. In what ways do the Frankfurt School theorists (Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno) address this challenge?

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5 May 2011 Contemporary Political Philosophy

Marx once famously wrote, “Hitherto, philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point is: to change it”.  In what ways do the Frankfurt School theorists (Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno) address this challenge?

This paper explores how the twentieth-century critical theorists Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) and Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), as part of the ‘Frankfurt School’, attempt in various ways to address the revolutionary challenge issued by Marx for philosophers to ‘change the world’.  These three Frankfurt School theorists are generally accepted as the core of a loose group of self-defining Marxists working for most of the twentieth century, first in Frankfurt, Germany, and later in New York following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.  Significantly, early in their careers they all broke and disagreed with the official Soviet Communist Party, following especially the publication of Lucáks’ History and Class Consciousness (1923), which challenged the deployment of ‘orthodox’ Marxism, and turned to consider in more detail the complex, dialectical relationship between social circumstances and working class consciousness, ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ from an objective Marxist perspective. Lucáks’ point was that ‘orthodox’ Soviet (i.e. Stalinist) Marxism was not – in fact - being true to Marx.  The Frankfurt School wanted further to articulate a Marxist theory that explained the failure of socialism (Gordon 2010).

In general, therefore, the theories of Horkheimer, Marcuse and Adorno are united in attempting both a critical engagement with – and development of – Marx’s ideas.  They all take as a point of departure, on the one hand, the degeneration of official socialism in the Soviet Bloc after 1923, in practice, and on the other, the seeming failure of Marx to account for developments in twentieth-century capitalist countries, in theory: the failure of international proletarian revolution in Europe (the ‘spectre’ haunting Europe of Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848)); the rise of different forms of fascism, specifically Nazism; and two World Wars (Gordon, 2010).  The theorists are united, in principle, with what they see as the continuation of a Marxist project of developing an emancipatory philosophy in the form of ‘Critical Theory’, whose central aim is defined by Horkheimer as: “the emancipation of human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1976:219).  Hence, despite seeming to reject a number of aspects of Marx’s writings, especially concerning the proletariat as ultimately the universal agent of social transformation, the theorists nevertheless seek to continue what they see as the Marxist project of emancipating people from the circumstances which dominate them.

This paper argues that their theories can thus be understood as searching for a suitable agent of social transformation, given the failure of the proletariat to establish a socialist society, as seemed ‘predicted’ by Marx.  In various ways, this is found in premising the emancipation of the individual through a constant revolutionary praxis of Critical Theory.  The Frankfurt School’s main theoretical development is, therefore, that individuals qua individuals are themselves agents of radical emancipatory change, when suitably guided by the correct theory.  The theorists either disagree on, or are ambivalent about, the possibility of proletarian socialist revolution in the future.  However, there are a number of divergences and developments that this paper will discuss in detail, specifically regarding method, the sphere of political activity and the debate about the category and function of domination in late capitalist societies, which allow us to examine their approach to ‘changing the world’ more thoroughly.

It is first important to clarify the meaning of Marx’s criticism of the philosophers. Taken in isolation, it seems to imply that “merely” interpreting the world is of little value, because what is required is political activity; however, this does not entail either that Marx held that theoretically engaging with the world is unnecessary, nor is it in and of itself a revolutionary act.  Rather, the quotation should be placed in its historical context – the publication of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (1888) - to be properly understood as a methodological and epistemological reorientation of philosophy, through advocating a move from the abstract to the concrete.

“The philosophers” Marx refers to are his predecessors and contemporaries, the “hitherto existing materialis[ts]” (Feuerbach et al), who theorized reality only as an abstract “object of contemplation” – something ‘outside’ of human beings to be passively reflected upon in thought (Marx 1888:I, emphasis in original).  They therefore cannot grasp reality as also being a “sensuous human activity, practice…subjectively”, a dynamic, productive and concrete process, and hence “…do not conceive human activity itself as objective activity” (Marx 1888:I, emphasis in original).  Marx aims to widen the category of the objective beyond the natural world to human activity itself – and ultimately articulate objective, scientific laws for the development of human society.  Whilst previous philosophers may grasp that circumstances change, they “forget…that circumstances are changed by men” (Marx 1888:III).  This refers to Marx’s famous materialist dialectic, which holds that the dynamic process of men self-consciously transforming their own circumstances can “be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice” (Marx 1888:III, emphasis in original).  This is only possible by understanding people and philosophical practice itself in their concrete historical circumstances, seeing them as ultimately “a social product” that belong “to a particular form of society” (Marx 1888:VIII).  Philosophy must grasp that people are products of concrete historical and social circumstances, that people have shaped those circumstances and can further go on to change them; hence, Marxism itself can help to influence and shape this process, alongside discovering the laws of historical and social development.

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Since the Frankfurt School theorists developed much of their work from a critical engagement with Marx, and also advocated an historical materialist view of history, they also tend to view philosophy as an “ongoing socio-historical phenomenon” (Fagan 2005).  From this perspective, Critical Theory would seem to absorb the dialectical methodology of Marx, and this is what gives it its potential for social transformation.  Hence: “the area of tension between an established social order and the ideas of reason it relies on is just where dialectical critique drives its wedge” (Hoy & McCarthy 1994:20).  The emancipatory potential of Critical Theory ...

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