Horkheimer and Adorno's book Dialectic of Enlightenment was written in the concluding months of the Second World War. It is comparable with contemporaneous works by other exiled German speaking philosophers, notably Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies and Lukács's The Destruction of Reason, in being what Popper himself described as his “contribution to the war effort.” Comparisons are instructive.

Karl Popper was a philosopher of science and a resident of London. The Open Society traces – from the vantage point of western democracy – the way in which a certain kind of intolerant (and hence “unscientific”) thinking reproduces itself in totalitarian political philosophies: Plato is the ancient representative of this tradition, while its modern representatives Hegel and Marx are discerned, despite their superficial political differences, as the authors of twentieth-century dictatorships of all colors. Györky Lukács, by contrast, wrote as a resident of the Soviet Union and as a metaphysician committed to socialism. For him, Marx, and to a substantial extent Hegel as well, were the fountainheads of an enlightened and humane political system. The strength of “scientific socialism” lay precisely in its incorporation of the insights of dialectical philosophy. Dialectic of Enlightenment differs from the other two works in that it reckons up not merely with philosophy under the Nazis, but also with the unashamed free market capitalism of its authors’ temporary home, the United States. The book is a work of conservative cultural criticism, which, on a conceptual level, is by no means incompatible with work the Nazis were happy to tolerate. This is not to say that it is politically tainted. Of the three books mentioned, however, it offers the least clear alternative to the errors it castigates.

Unfinished, still a work-in-progress at the time of his death in 1969, Aesthetic Theory is arguably not only Theodor W. Adorno's masterwork, but perhaps the pivotal document of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics. The book was to be dedicated to Samuel Beckett; and, at one level, the work can be construed as the philosophical articulation of the meaning of artistic modernism, as modernism brought to the level of the concept. Yet even these simple statements cannot be forwarded innocently: that a work of aesthetics stands at or near the center of the thought of Adorno's Marxism has always been cause for consternation and embarrassment; that western Marxism (in the writings of Ernst Bloch, Györky Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse) has been from the outset bound to cultural critique and aesthetic theory can only deepen the puzzle. Some ground-clearing is thus necessary before a real start can be made.

In 1931, three years after the publication of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the obscure masterpiece that he had intended as his habilitation thesis, Walter Benjamin wrote about it to the Swiss editor, Max Rychner:

The location of that connection – whether, indeed, it can be said to exist at all – remains deeply problematic. Nor should this be in the least surprising. What could be further removed from what one would normally understand by “materialism” than Benjamin’s early writings, with their predilection for mystical theories of language and unblushingly antiscientific metaphysics? To put them together with the ideas of Marx and Engels can only, it would seem, undermine the latter: the connection appears at all plausible only if Marxism, its scientific pretensions notwithstanding, rests upon a mystical view of the world.

HABERMAS’S “KANTIAN PRAGMATISM”

Habermas's philosophical career can easily and instructively be read as a succession of attempts to appropriate the achievements of Kant's critical philosophy without being drawn into its commitment to a “philosophy of the subject.” Even Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), whose task is described as the continuation of epistemology by other means (e.g. social theory) and which is perhaps the work most philosophically distant from Kant, opens with an appreciation of Kant's enterprise: “The critique of knowledge was still conceived in reference to a system of cognitive faculties that included practical reason and reflective judgment as naturally as critique itself, that is, a theoretical reason that can dialectically ascertain not only its limits but also its own Idea” (KHI 3). Similarly, Habermas's later conception of philosophy as (in part) a “reconstructive science” that seeks to make explicit the pretheoretical know-how of speaking and acting subjects - expressed most clearly in the project of a formal or universal pragmatics - shares many features with other roughly contemporaneous attempts to deploy transcendental (or “quasitranscendental”) arguments without the trappings of transcendental idealism. Finally, and perhaps most obviously, the project of discourse ethics, first outlined in the early 1980s, is explicitly conceived as a defense of a Kantian conception of morality (e.g. categorical imperatives that bind us solely in virtue of our capacity for rational agency) within the context of his theory of communicative action.

It has long been commonplace to point out that the Critical Theory of Horkheimer and Adorno has no politics. This is usually meant in three senses. The first is that Critical Theorists of this time explicitly refused to engage in party politics, voice opinions about current events, propose reform agendas, or indeed talk about political institutions in any specific way. The second sense in which early Critical Theory has no politics is that its critique focused more and more on a realm of culture and aesthetics detached from politics. For some this merely led to abstraction, while others thought it led to irrelevance. Finally, and most significantly, early Critical Theory has no politics because its diagnosis of the times is so pessimistic as to make any political action, or indeed any attempt to break out of the logic of instrumental reason, futile. Thus, to the question “What is to be done?” Horkheimer and Adorno appear to answer, “Alas, nothing.”

REVOLUTION IN THE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION

In February 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Manifesto of the Communist Party appeared in London's Red Republican. This treatise was the one and only celebration of the revolutionary power of the new, bourgeois age. Marx and Engels were expecting from the bourgeoisie and its epoch not only the freeing of all productive forces of humankind, but also the permanent revolution of all relations of production and, what is more, of all social relations:

Critical Theory first develops during a period of extraordinarily complex intellectual activity in Germany. If one were to take the year 1930 as a benchmark - when Max Horkheimer becomes the director of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt - and were to look back upon the decade preceding that date, one would encounter in their most vibrant forms many of the most important philosophical movements of the twentieth century: the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger; the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle and the early Wittgenstein; various strands of neo- Kantianism; and the humanistic Marxism of Lukács. In political and social theory, psychology, historiography, and economics the situation is hardly less multifarious. Each of these views or schools, sometimes in combination with elements of others, vies for predominance in the Weimar period. Moreover, each of the contenders takes care to incorporate within it involved criticisms of the others.

The members of the Institute for Social Research were the first group of philosophers and social theorists to take psychoanalysis seriously - indeed, to grant Freud the stature that is generally reserved for the giants of the philosophical tradition. In addition to Hegel, Marx, and Weber, Freud became one of the foundation stones on which their interdisciplinary program for a critical theory of society was constructed. It has often been observed that the Critical Theorists turned to psychoanalysis to make up for a deficiency in Marxian theory, namely, its reduction of the psychological realm to socioeconomic factors. This explanation, however, does not go far enough. With a few notable exceptions, the Left was not particularly interested in the modernist cultural movements of the past century - or, worse yet, denounced them for their bourgeois decadence. Though it may have proved to be an impossible project, the Frankfurt School - largely under Adorno's influence - sought to integrate cultural modernism with left-wing politics. And this is one of the places where psychoanalysis came to play an important role. For, despite Freud's own stolid lifestyle and aesthetic conservatism, his creation, psychoanalysis, made an incontrovertible contribution to the radical avant-garde that was transforming almost every realm of European culture. The Interpretation of Dreams and Ulysses are cut from the same cloth.

With the turn of the new century, Critical Theory appears to have become an intellectual artifact. This superficial dividing point alone seems to increase the intellectual gap separating us from the theoretical beginnings of the Frankfurt School. Just as the names of authors who were for its founders vividly present suddenly sound from afar, so too the theoretical challenges from which the members of the school had won their insights threaten to fall into oblivion. Today a younger generation carries on the work of social criticism without having much more than a nostalgic memory of the heroic years of western Marxism. Indeed, already over thirty years have passed since the writings of Marcuse and Horkheimer were last read as contemporary works. There is an atmosphere of the outdated and antiquated, of the irretrievably lost, that surrounds the grand historical-philosophical ideas of Critical Theory, ideas for which there no longer seems to be any kind of resonance within the experience of the accelerating present. The deep chasm that separates us from our predecessors must be comparable to that which separated the first generation of the telephone and movie theatre from the last representatives of German idealism. The same vexed astonishment with which a Benjamin or a Kracauer may have observed a photo of the late Schelling must today come over a young student who, on her computer, stumbles across a photo of the young Horkheimer posing in a bourgeois Wilhelmian interior.

When I initially embarked on this chapter, I mentioned it to a well-known scholar of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. His response was “That is indeed a risky venture.” This attitude is probably fairly typical. The idea of a critical social science is, at best, unclear and, at worst, invested in a variety of outdated philosophical commitments of the early Frankfurt School. As Axel Honneth says in his contribution to this volume, many of the original ideas of this school seem, at least at first glance, to be “antiquated, dusty, and irretrievably lost.”

Frankfurt School can be retrieved. My approach will be to take up the claim of the early Critical Theorists that they provided a philosophical basis for a systematic orientation to social science. To use more recent terminology, they imagined that their work constituted a “research program” or “research tradition” of a distinctive, critical sort. My argument is that this tradition can, when appropriately revised, constitute a defensible, critical social science. The necessary revisions come from two sources, one internal and the other external. The first is Habermas’s work after Knowledge and Human Interests, when he began developing the idea of communicative rationality as the ontological centerpiece of Critical Theory. It will hardly come as news to anyone to say that this turn constituted a substantial revision of the Frankfurt tradition. But what has not been adequately teased out is how this clear ontological modification impacts the possibility of a critical social science.

At the center of the contentious debates that have engaged second generation Critical Theorists and poststructuralists since the publication of Habermas's “Modernity: An Unfinished Project” (1980) and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) lie several embattled epistemological and political presuppositions: on the one hand, the normative validity claims underpinning Habermas's theory of communicative action; on the other, the antifoundationalism of poststructuralism. In the wake of modernity's “legitimation crisis,” Habermas argued for the retention of the Enlightenment legacy of reason, vowing to complete the unfinished project of political modernity, whose anatomy was radically different from the aesthetic modernity initiated by Baudelaire, from Nietzsche's aestheticism, or even from a “presentist” culture of the “now.” Poststructuralist thinkers, by contrast, rejected the principles of universalism and consensus formation, together with the defunct narratives of rationality, legitimacy, and normative justification, either in the name of a postmodern agonistic pragmatism (Lyotard), a postmetaphysical deconstruction (Derrida), or a critical genealogy of the historical vicissitudes of reason (Foucault).

The theorists who conceptualized Critical Theory's general framework set themselves a double task: they sought to critically illuminate the great historical changes of the twentieth century while reflexively grounding the possibility of their critique with reference to its historical context. Most attempts to contextualize Critical Theory have done so in terms of contemporary historical developments, such as the failure of revolution in the West after World War One and the Russian Revolution, the development of Stalinism, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, and the growing importance of mass mediated forms of consumption, culture, and politics. Too often, however, such attempts do not consider that Critical Theory sought to make sense of such developments with reference to a superordinate historical context - an epochal transformation of capitalism in the first part of the twentieth century. In grappling with this transformation, the Frankfurt School theorists formulated sophisticated and interrelated critiques of instrumental reason, the domination of nature, political domination, culture, and ideology. Yet they also encountered fundamental conceptual difficulties. These difficulties were related to a theoretical turn taken in the late 1930s, in which the newer configuration of capitalism came to be conceived as a society that, while remaining antagonistic, had become completely administered and one-dimensional.

REVOLUTION

A story has it that during the storming of the Bastille in 1789, King Louis XVI, hearing the commotion, asked one of his courtiers what was going on, a riot (émeute) perhaps? “No, Sire,” the courtier is said to have replied, “a revolution.” One of several reasons for being suspicious of this story is that it seems to attribute to the courtier preternatural prescience. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe were to be the age of revolution, and this is at least as much a claim about intellectual history as it is about real political and social history. To be sure, the history of this period, from the Oath of the Tennis Court at the start of the first French Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, can be told as the story of a series of radical transformations of the political and socioeconomic structures of various European societies. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, were not just a period of actual instability and change, but one in which people acquired certain general ideas about the possibilities of large-scale social change and the human ability to unleash and perhaps control it. More or less spontaneous urban and rural violence, rebellions, jacqueries, uprisings of subjugated populations, conspiracies to seize established power, have been the stuff of much of human history for a long time, but events like this come to take on a new character altogether when the actual and potential participants (and the actual and potential opponents) acquire even a rudimentary general conceptual framework with which to understand their situation, the possible courses of action they could undertake, and the possible outcomes.