LITMIR.BIZ

      Preface to the 1996 Edition

      I arrived in Berkeley for the first time in August 1968, a twenty-four year old graduate student, invited by Leo Lowenthal to examine his extensive personal archive of materials from the Institute of Social Research. As I spent long hours poring over years of letters and unpublished manuscripts, amassing questions about figures, events and ideas that Lowenthal patiently answered, the world outside was convulsed by a series of cataclysmic events. On the 21st of August, tanks from the Soviet Union and its allies rumbled into Prague, violently ending the experiment in “Marxism with a Human Face” that had so captivated the imaginations of non-doctrinaire leftists earlier that year. Only a few days later as “the whole world was watching,” the Democratic convention in Chicago was disrupted by protestors enraged by both President Johnson’s policies in Vietnam and the likelihood that the party’s nominee, Hubert Humphrey, would continue his predecessor’s sorry course.

      On the daily walk from my apartment to Lowenthal’s office, I passed the forlorn, now empty Berkeley campaign headquarters of Robert Kennedy, whose assassination two months earlier had meant the end for many of the hopes that fundamental change might come, in the catch-phrase of the time, by “working within the system.” The Berkeley campus was itself a site for escalating confrontations between students and authorities egged on by a state administration headed by then Governor Ronald Reagan. In the surrounding community, the Black Panther Party was an insistent presence, bearing witness to the still volatile racial tensions that had exploded into ghetto riots after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. that spring.

The pressure of these circumstances was impossible to ignore as I made my way through the treasure trove of documents Lowenthal generously put at my disposal. The Frankfurt School had just begun to emerge into public consciousness as a theoretical inspiration—still, to be sure, only dimly understood—of the New Left here and abroad. Its impact was, in fact, now spreading well beyond the confines of academia.¹ When I arrived in Berkeley, one of the main protagonists in the story I hoped to tell, Herbert Marcuse, was in hiding from death threats in Lowenthal’s summer home in Carmel Valley. Only a few months before, during the “events” of May in Paris, student enragés had displayed placards emblazoned with the names “Marx/Mao/Marcuse.” Pilloried by the anti-Communist Right in California, which sought to terminate his contract at the University of California, San Diego campus, Marcuse was also the target of increasingly virulent attacks by the orthodox Left. Despite the principled support he extended to his controversial former student and Communist Party leader, Angela Davis, he was denounced for having abandoned the proletariat as agent of revolution. Marcuse, it soon became evident to me, was equally a source of uneasiness for most of his former Institut colleagues who were alarmed by his outspoken political militancy.

      A few months later after a semester back at Harvard, I readied myself to leave for Europe to continue research in Frankfurt and Montagnola, Switzerland. Shortly before my departure in January 1969, I happened to be at a party in New York, where I was introduced to Mark Rudd, the fiery leader of the Columbia student uprising who was soon to embark on the desperate, self-destructive adventure that was called the Weather Underground. When I told him of my dissertation project, he contemptuously responded that Adorno and Horkheimer were craven sell-outs, who had betrayed the revolutionary cause; Adorno’s very change of name from the Jewish-sounding Wiesengrund, Rudd snarled, betokened his cowardice.

      Such sentiments turned out to be all too common in the Frankfurt where I settled in early February. A number of university buildings were occupied in an on-going “active strike” that led to improvised courses in Marxist theory and practice. The Sociology Department had been rebaptized “the Spartacus Department” after the militants of the early Weimar years. On January 31st, the Institut für Sozialforschung itself had been taken over by radical students—or so thought its anxious directors, Adorno and Ludwig von Friedeburg, who had called the police to clear the building. Although it turned out to be just an embarrassing misunderstanding (the students were only looking for a place to hold a discussion), the gulf between the current leadership of the Frankfurt School and their unwanted progeny widened still further. The effects were obvious when Jürgen Habermas, still under fire for his imprudent condemnation of “left fascism,” showed me the lock on his office phone to prevent students who might break in from making long-distance calls. Adorno also nervously refused to allow me to tape our conversations for fear that he might leave “verbal fingerprints.”

      I left Frankfurt for Switzerland only a few weeks before the unhappy incident in April in which several women belonging to the German SDS interrupted one of Adorno’s lectures by rushing on the stage and baring their breasts, a symbolic act of a patricide that would come to seem a prefiguration of his actual death from a heart attack in August 1969. The beautiful Ticino town of Montagnola, near Lugano, where Horkheimer and Pollock lived in comfortable retirement appeared, to be sure, far removed from the tumult of Berkeley or Frankfurt. I was able to interview them extensively and work on their materials in a far less charged climate than I had found myself in before. But even in such relative isolation, the general global situation seemed filled with an odd mixture of radical promise and reactionary menace. A year later, after I had returned to America to finish my dissertation, Pollock wrote to me that

From this distance, what is happening in the USA looks really pathetic. All these symptoms of disintegration of a “Great Society” (this is meant quite seriously considering the positive elements of American life as measured in terms of other countries) point to no other alternative but the loss of the remaining liberties and the rule of a narrowly materialistic middle class under a ruthless “Führer.”²

      Such an apocalyptic vision thankfully never materialized, but recalling Pollock’s alarm along with the other events mentioned above can help remind the reader of this second edition of The Dialectical Imagination of the supercharged context in which the book was originally written and initially received. Although the times may not have been as tempestuous as they were during the battle of Jena of 1806, which famously raged around Hegel as he completed his Phenomenology of the Spirit, I certainly did not find myself in a typically contemplative scholarly setting removed from the pressures of the day.

When the revised dissertation was published in 1973, the hopes and fears of the late 1960s were still potent, the Vietnam War had two more years to run its course, and the New Left was not yet a spent force. The intellectual tradition that became known as Western Marxism was still described in an American anthology of 1972 as an “unknown dimension,”³ which might provide useful ideas for the struggles of the present and future. Translations of its classical texts were only first becoming available at that time (Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness in 1971, for example, and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment the following year), and there was a strong sense of intellectual treasure still to be excavated. Journals like New Left Review, Telos, and New German Critique tumbled over each other in their eagerness to present, explicate and apply ideas that promised to help subvert the status quo.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that certain politically invested reviewers of The Dialectical Imagination were impatient with what they saw as an “elegiac” tone signaled by the claim in the introduction that the School’s historical moment was “now irrevocably past.” They were convinced, the example of the occasional extremist like Mark Rudd aside, that Critical Theory contained resources for the practical struggles of the present and future. In truth,

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