The Dialectical Imagination - Martin Jay Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism

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has managed to produce significant practical effects in areas such as critical pedagogy, feminism and liberation theology. See his Critical Theory in Political Practice (Princeton, 1990). See also the earlier collection, Critical Theory and Public Life, ed., John Forester (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).

      Foreword

      December, 1971

      Dear Mr. Jay,

      I have been asked to write a foreword to your book on the history of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. Reading your interesting work does not permit me to refuse this request; however, the condition of my health limits me to the short letter form, which should now serve as a foreword. First, my thanks are due you for the care which is demonstrated through all the chapters of your work. Much will be preserved which would be forgotten without your description.

      The work to which the Institute devoted itself before its emigration from Germany—one thinks of Friedrich Pollock’s book The Experiments in Economic Planning in the Soviet Union, 1917–1927 or the subsequently published collective work, Authority and Family—meant something new in comparison to the then official educational system. It meant the ability to pursue research for which a university still offered no opportunity. The enterprise succeeded only because, thanks to the support of Hermann Weil and the intervention of his son, Felix, a group of men, interested in social theory and from different scholarly backgrounds, came together with the belief that formulating the negative in the epoch of transition was more meaningful than academic careers. What united them was the critical approach to existing society.

      Already near the end of the twenties, certainly by the beginning of the thirties, we were convinced of the probability of a National Socialist victory, as well as of the fact that it could be met only through revolutionary actions. That it needed a world war we did not yet envisage at that time. We thought of an uprising in our own country and because of that, Marxism won its decisive meaning for our thought. After our emigration to America via Geneva, the Marxist interpretation of social events remained, to be sure, dominant, which did not mean in any way, however, that a dogmatic materialism had become the decisive theme of our position. Reflecting on political systems taught us rather that it was necessary, as Adorno has expressed it, “not to think of claims to the Absolute as certain and yet, not to deduct anything from the appeal to the emphatic concept of the truth.”

      The appeal to an entirely other (ein ganz Anderes) than this world had primarily a social-philosophical impetus. It led finally to a more positive evaluation of certain metaphysical trends, because the empirical “whole is the untrue” (Adorno). The hope that earthly horror does not possess the last word is, to be sure, a non-scientific wish.

      Those who were once associated with the Institute, as far as they are still alive, will certainly be thankful to you for recognizing in your book a history of their own ideas. I feel obliged also in the name of the dead, such as Fred Pollock, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer, to express to you, dear Mr. Jay, acknowledgment and gratitude for your work.

Cordially, MAX HORKHEIMER

       Montagnola, Switzerland

      Introduction

      It has become a commonplace in the modern world to regard the intellectual as estranged, maladjusted, and discontented. Far from being disturbed by this vision, however, we have become increasingly accustomed to seeing our intellectuals as outsiders, gadflies, marginal men, and the like. The word “alienation,” indiscriminately used to signify the most banal of dyspepsias as well as the deepest of metaphysical fears, has become the chief cant phrase of our time. For even the most discerning of observers, reality and pose have become difficult to distinguish. To the horror of those who can genuinely claim to have suffered from its effects, alienation has proved a highly profitable commodity in the cultural marketplace. Modernist art with its dissonances and torments, to take one example, has become the staple diet of an increasingly voracious army of culture consumers who know good investments when they see them. The avant-garde, if indeed the term can still be used, has become an honored ornament of our cultural life, less to be feared than feted. The philosophy of existentialism, to cite another case, which scarcely a generation ago seemed like a breath of fresh air, has now degenerated into a set of easily manipulated clichés and sadly hollow gestures. This decline occurred, it should be noted, not because analytic philosophers exposed the meaninglessness of its categories, but rather as a result of our culture’s uncanny ability to absorb and defuse even its most uncompromising opponents. And finally to mention a third example, it is all too evident in 1972, a few short years after the much ballyhooed birth of an alleged counterculture, that the new infant, if not strangled in the crib, has proved easily domesticated in the ways of its elders. Here too the mechanisms of absorption and cooptation have shown themselves to be enormously effective.

      The result of all this is that intellectuals who take their critical function seriously have been presented with an increasingly rigorous challenge to outdistance the culture’s capacity to numb their protest. One response has been an ever more frantic flight into cultural extremism, a desire to shock and provoke by going beyond what had previously been the limits of cultural tolerance. These limits, however, have demonstrated an elasticity far greater than anticipated, as yesterday’s obscenities are frequently transformed into today’s bromides. With the insufficiency of a purely cultural solution in mind, many critical intellectuals have attempted to integrate their cultural protest with its political counterpart. Radical political movements, characteristically of the left, have continued to attract discontented intellectuals in our own time, as they have done traditionally in years past. But this alliance has rarely proved an easy one, especially when the realities of left-wing movements in power have become too ugly to ignore. Consequently, the ebb and flow of radical intellectuals to and from various leftist allegiances has been one of the constant themes of modern intellectual history.

      This oscillation stems as well from a more basic dilemma faced only by intellectuals of the left. The elitism of those who confine their extremism solely to the cultural sphere, rejecting its political correlate, does not necessarily engender any particular sense of guilt. For the radical intellectual who chooses political involvement, however, the desire to maintain a critical distance presents a special problem. Remaining apart, not just from society as a whole but also from the movement on whose victory he counts, creates an acute tension that is never absent from the lives of serious leftist intellectuals. The endless self-criticism aimed at exorcising the remnants of elitism, which has characterized the New Left in recent years, bears witness to the persistence of this concern. At its worst, it produces a sentimental nostalgie de la

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