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of certain of its adherents.⁴ Temperamentally unsuited to militant activism, I always maintained a certain skeptical distance from the maximalist tendencies of the New Left and had resisted joining any particular faction of “the movement.”

      But The Dialectical Imagination was certainly written with the hope of conveying the palpable sense of excitement and promise I felt in unearthing and trying to sort out so radically unfamiliar and challenging a corpus of work. Although the precise historical moment of the School’s central figures was indeed past (insofar as their major work was clearly behind them and many were no longer alive), it seemed to me that the reception and appropriation of that work still lay very much in the future. The book was written, at least in part, in the hope of facilitating that process, but without inviting the uncritical dogmatism that characterized so many other embraces of Marxist theory.

This expectation became realized beyond my most grandiose fantasies, as the Frankfurt School soon emerged as the focus of intense contemporary as well as historical interest. Ultimately translated into eight languages with a ninth, into Chinese, now imminent, The Dialectical Imagination has been able to play a modest role in introducing the School to an international audience. In particular, the German translation of 1976 helped stimulate a serious historical interest where current controversies had been too heated to permit a detached or scholarly account (indeed at that very moment, the School was serving as the whipping boy of conservatives who blamed the terrorism of the left on its teachings). Written by an outsider with no prior investment in its ideas or personal debts to its members,⁵ the book seems to have had the virtue of a certain innocence, which allowed both friends and foes of the School to take from it different lessons. Unlike certain later treatments, reflecting a more disillusioned and debunking mood, it luckily avoided what the Germans call Kammerdienerperspektive: the view from below by a servant who washes dirty linen.

      Significantly for The Dialectical Imagination’s later fate, the reception of Critical Theory outlived the moment of the recovery and absorption of Western Marxism in the 1970s. The end of this moment betokened a precipitous decline in interest in other figures in its history, such as Karl Korsch, Louis Althusser or Lucien Goldmann, but the Frankfurt School managed to become an enduring fixture in the theoretical landscape of the late 20th century. Although its coherence as a monolithic school may now seem less evident than it did when I first sought to write its history, the general impulses of Critical Theory are still identifiable a quarter century later, even as its work has been hybridized and amalgamated with other theoretical tendencies.

One major reason for the Frankfurt School’s continued relevance is the very richness and variety of the work done under its auspices. If certain figures, such as Marcuse, Horkheimer and Fromm seem less powerful a presence today than they did when I began my research,⁶ others like Adorno and Benjamin have only increased in importance. As each new translation of their works has appeared, it seems to reach wider audiences. Members once assumed to be marginal, such as Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, have gained a new hearing in the wake of a waxing interest in jurisprudential and legal questions from the Weimar era, an interest piqued in part by the vigorous reception—both on the left and the right—of the controversial jurist Carl Schmitt.⁷

Another source of the School’s abiding power has been the remarkable quality of work done by its many descendants, and not merely in Europe and America.⁸ It is now conventional in Germany to speak of a second generation of the Frankfurt School whose most notable members are Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt and Albrecht Wellmer, as well as a third generation, which would include Axel Honneth, Peter Bürger, Oskar Negt, Helmut Dubiel, Claus Offe, Alfons Söllner, Hauke Brunkhorst, Detlev Claussen, W. Martin Lüdke and Christoph Menke. Although in his last years Lukács spawned a “Budapest School” and Galvano della Volpe and Althusser enjoyed large followings for a while, no comparable tradition of thought has managed to renew itself with as much vigor and as little pious repetition as that whose early history this book tried to trace.

      There is, however, still another explanation for the dogged survival of interest in Critical Theory, which allowed it to remain potent even after the larger paradigm of Western Marxism lost its momentum: its unexpected fit with the concerns and anxieties of an era whose beginnings were only dimly perceptible, if at all, when The Dialectical Imagination first appeared. It turns out that 1973 was more than the highwater mark in the American New Left’s discovery of European Western Marxist theory in its efforts to challenge bourgeois society; indeed, it can be said to have had a very different significance in initiating another narrative whose end is not yet in sight.

The global recession of 1973 was the first since the end of World War II and was perhaps most dramatically symbolized by the long lines at gas stations precipitated by the sudden rise in oil prices by OPEC. The result, to simplify a complicated process, was a radical restructuring of the world economic system which ultimately led to, or was at least signaled by, the bankruptcy of the “actually existing socialism” of the East and the piecemeal abandonment of the Keynesian-Fordist policies of the West. What David Harvey has called the rise of a new system of “flexible accumulation” meant the growing importance of international finance capital over the increasingly impotent nation state; the globalization of labor markets producing accelerated migration of cheap foreign labor and the weakening of the trade union movement; the compression of time and space through technological innovations; and the blunting of capitalism’s tendency to overaccumulate through the temporal and spatial displacement of demand.⁹ Although by no means stable and smoothly functioning, the system that began to crystallize in 1973 seems to produce crises that are neither controllable by a conscious steering mechanism (such as state fiscal and monetary policy) nor able to generate a collective social actor, an heir to the Marxist proletariat, able to challenge it from within.

At first glance, such developments might seem to provide little sustenance for a continued interest in the Institut für Socialforschung’s legacy. Neither the traditional Marxist crisis theory espoused by Henryk Grossmann, nor Franz Neumann’s notion of a mixture of monopoly capitalism and a command economy, nor Frederick Pollock’s idea of state capitalism and the “primacy of the political” conform to the new paradigm. Even Claus Offe’s later argument for “disorganized capitalism” may be deficient, if Harvey is right in claiming that “capitalism is becoming ever more tightly organized through dispersal, geographical mobility, and flexible responses in labor markets, labor processes, and consumer markets, all accompanied by hefty doses of institutional, product, and technological innovation.”¹⁰

In fact, there is little in the work done by the Institut on economic issues, it has to be admitted, that illuminates the post-1973 restructuring of capitalism.¹¹ It is, however, on the level of its cultural correlate that the rise of the post-Fordist system of flexible accumulation may help explain the Frankfurt School’s staying power. For, if Harvey is right, what has become known as postmodernism is a cultural condition that somehow expresses and reflects—as well as at times resists—the economic changes that can be dated from around 1973. In contrast to many of the other variants of Western Marxism, Critical Theory has found this new climate relatively hospitable, if more so in America than in Germany, where the battle lines between post-modernists and second generation Critical Theorists have been sharply drawn. As questions of political economy and political praxis have been marginalized and those of culture and aesthetics gained center stage, the School’s varied and far-reaching explorations of these domains have stirred renewed interest and controversy.¹²

It would

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