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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
1 In his text, Tar calls my The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston, 1973) and Albrecht Wellmer's Critical Theory of Society (New York, 1974) the only English accounts available, although his bibliography also mentions Phil Slater's Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School: A Marxist Perspective (London, 1976). He is correct in denying “definitive” status to any of these studies because of the still uncompleted status of the Frankfurt School's collected works; he might have added the existing restrictions on archival material, but as a sociologist, he seems not to have recognized this as a problem.
2 Buck-Morss, Susan, The Origins of Negative Dialectic: Theodor W. Adomo, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York, 1977),Google Scholar and Dubiel, Helmut, Wissenschafts-organisation und politische Erfahrung: Studien zur frühen Kritischen Theorie (Frankfurt, 1978).Google Scholar Buck-Morss was able to use material from the Adorno Nachlass and Dubiel gained access to the Pollock archive.s
3 Buck-Morss has even been able to trace residues of Benjamin's influence on Adorno to the chapters he contributed to Vie Authoritarian Personality, perhaps the Frankfurt School's least characteristic work. Buck-Morss, p. 182.
4 According to the reckoning of Francesco Apergi, twenty-four of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung's articles dealt with economic matters as compared with thirty-two on sociological, twenty-nine on philosophical, and nineteen on aesthetic issues. See his Marxismo e ricerca sociale nella Scuola di Francoforte (Florence, 1977), p. 9
5 Tar's confusion here is understandable because the volume of the Archiv in which the Korsch essays appeared is dated 1925. But it included all the material published since the previous volume, which came out in 1922. Although the Grünberg Archiv was published for twenty years, it had only fifteen volumes.
6 Tar's source for this assertion is a letter Horkheimer wrote in 1921, when he spent a semester in Freiburg, in which he mentioned the power of Heidegger's personality and the fact that his philosophy came from experience rather than mere intellect. This letter is quoted in Gumnior, Helmut and Ringguth, Rudolf, Max Horkheimer in Selbstzeugnisseen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1973), p. 24.Google Scholar While this reference clearly shows that Horkheimer met Heidegger and may have heard him lecture, it is not enough to establish that he was his true student. In fact, there are nothing but hostile references to Heidegger in Horkheimer's writings.
7 His most extensive writing on his former teacher was Alban Berg: Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs (Vienna, 1968).
8 Although it is true that he criticized Mannheim's static and affirmative use of the term, Horkheimer employed it as a critical concept in a number of his early writings. See, for example, “Materialism and Metaphysics” (1935), in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell and others (New York, 1972), p. 25. Adorno, on the other hand, was more critical of the concept, at least as far as it was used by philosophers who pretended to know the whole. See, especially, “The Actuality of Philosophy” (1931), Telos 31 (Spring 1977): 120,129, and 133.
9 Marcuse, Herbert, One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, 1964), p. xvii.Google Scholar
10 Tar's allegation is derived from Judith Marcus Tar's unpublished dissertation on “Thomas Mann and Georg Lukács” (University of Kansas, 1976), which I gather stresses the importance of Lukádcs's 1918 essay “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem,” translated and introduced by her in Social Research 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1977), and its sequel “Tactics and Ethics” of 1919. In these essays, Lukács does treat Marxism as an ethical issue of particular importance for the individual deciding whether or not to join the communist movement, an issue that was preoccupying him at that moment. But in his later work, especially History and Class Consciousness and his 1926 essay on “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” he explicitly repudiated an ethical reading of Marxism. His main reason was his belief that the true subject of history is the collective class and not the individual, who is better understood as an expression of the reifications of bourgeois society. To make Lukács into an ethical Marxist is to misunderstand the depth of his repudiation of Bernstein and the Revisionists, who were the true moralists of the socialist movement.
11 In his essay of 1940, “Authoritarian State,” he wrote: “Today's possibilities are no less than the despair,” Telos 15 (Spring 1973): 15.
12 The second half of Dubiel's book is devoted to an analysis of the institute's inter-disciplinary work, which he claims was based on an application of Marx's distinction between the procedures of research and presentation.
13 Here Tar's date is the correct one and Landmann is in error.
14 “The Social Function of Philosophy,” Critical Theory: Selected Essays, p. 270.
15 The major point Horkheimer and Adorno (and later Marcuse) make against their former colleague Erich Fromm concerns precisely these dangers. Adorno summarized his suspicion of premature harmony most explicitly in “Sociology and Psychology,” New Left Review 46 (Nov.-Dec. 1967) and 47 (Jan.-Feb. 1968).
16 Feuer, Lewis, “The Preconceptions of Critical Theory,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 16, no. 7 (June 1974);Google ScholarKellner, Douglas, “The Frankfurt School Revisited: A Critique of Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination” New German Critique 4 (Winter 1975).Google Scholar
17 (New York, 1974), pp. 153–54. Cuddihy's explanation of the Jewish influence is far more ingenious than Tar's, although he carries it to reductionist extremes too.
18 For a discussion of the attitude of certain members of the Frankfurt School and their friends toward Rosenzweig, see Jay, Martin, “Politics of Translation: Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible,” Year Book XXI of the Leo Baeck Institute (London, 1976).Google Scholar
19 Tar admits as much himself when he writes in another place of Adorno's Viennese days: “One important element in Adorno's work can also be traced back to the influence of those times: the fear and anxiety (Angst) of modern, alienated man.”
20 See, for example, the vigorous denial of the proposition that Marx was a sociologist in Lefebvre, Henri, The Sociology of Marx, trans. Norbert, Guterman (New York, 1968), p. 22.Google Scholar
21 Bernstein, Richard, The Reconstruction of Social and Political Thought (Philadelphia, 1976).Google Scholar
22 Adorno, Theodor W. et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn, Adey and David, Frisby (London, 1976).Google Scholar In this volume there are discussions of not only the first generation of Critical Theorists' attack on positivism, but also that of Jürgen Habermas. It is one of the weaknesses of Tar's analysis that he neglects entirely Habermas's amplification of Horkheimer and Adorno's earlier work, which adds powerfully to their critique of “scientific” sociology.