``Especially appealing to academics is the way Critical Theory makes the analysis of culture feel like a revolutionary act in and of itself. Reading Adorno on modern music, or Benjamin on literature, it is momentarily possible to believe that criticism is a weapon of liberation, rather than simply a hermetic exercise for intellectuals.
No wonder that after the 1960s, as Thomas Wheatland writes in his impressive new study The Frankfurt School in Exile, "ambitious young sympathizers with the New Left" in the academy turned en masse to the Frankfurt School, a scholarly subject that they could explore "without having to disguise or hide their intellectual and political orientations." It is strange that it took until the 1960s for the Frankfurters to make a major impact on America, however, since from 1934 to 1949 they were actually living in the United States.''
Adam Kirsch
----------
I want to point out that it is _not_ ``strange that it took until the 1960s for the Frankfurters to make a major impact on America,... since from 1934 to 1949 they were actually living in the United States.''
The one word explanation is MacCarthy. A longer explanation follows.
And then remember too, that most of what I am writing about are the effects in public education which is directly managed by the politics of state officials. Meanwhile, places like The Institute for Social Research was not a public institution, so it could afford a certain amount of independence.
Just think about the dates mentioned. During the 30s through 40s in the US, there was quite a bit of left-liberal cultural production in writing and art. The Frankfurters left the US because of the rise of the US right and its anti-communist politics. Thomas Mann and much of the LA German emigre community split about the same time. The Hollywood HUAC hearings were known for their chilling effect on any form of socialist-realism or neo-realism in film---the kind of social comentary and documentary style that had some popular following. The movie studios figured it out pretty quickly. America wasn't supposed to look like a dirty, sorted, crime ridden, repressive, racist, psychopathic, politically corrupt nightmare as portrayed in cinema noir. No sir. America was beautiful, filled with beautiful people, who always had above average children. We are cleaning up the West. Movies like Night of the Hunter and The Bad Seed told a different story.
So then, growing up in that era in LA I could feel there was something wrong with writers and painters. They were somehow an attack on american middle class values. Everything about them was wrong. They didn't have regular jobs, they didn't keep regular hours, the inside of their apartments, studios, flats didn't look like regular places to live. (Well, ours didn't at any rate. I had two families. One near downtown and the other out in Valley. One bohiemian, the other track home regular.)
The same intellectual and culture chill penetrated everything. Certainly the school system. By the time I got to college in 1961 the civil rights movements were hammering away, challenging the nice presumptions of white liberal academy, peeling away the layers of pretend tolerance to find a not so very nice and not very liberal nuggut inside.
There was a constant drone of anti-commie noise pervading just about every course I took from English to History, even Biology where they never failed to mention Lysenko. American biology seem obcessed with the idea that Lysenko was wrong---and that was proof Soviet science was bunk. The sciences were particularly noted for this constant drumming away at the communist menace. The Russians got the bomb, now they had Spitnik. God we're all going die in the big after glow. It was crazy.
Kennedy had launched a series of federal education programs to beat the Russians on the higher education battle front. The federal student loan program was called The National Defense Education Act. I had to sign a loyalty oath on my loan application. I had to sign a loyalty oath for student registration. The Oppenhiemer case was still in the news now and again. Edward Teller was on the new warning of the missle gap.
The very earilest student revolts were over this anti-commie bullshit one week, then civil rights the next. The FBI was convinced civil rights were a communist plot. Words like bourgois were highly suspect. Talk of class war...even the word class itself was not right thinking.
It was in this climate that I started reading all kinds of books that never appeared on the curriculm or reading lists. There was a thriving student culture and word of mouth recommendations on what to read. I was always on the look out for some off-beat looking professor. Maybe arm patches, hand knit sweater, or smoking french cigarettes. My first continental philosophy professor looked like a state college professor was supposed to look, sports coat, tie, but there was something off about him.
The point was that by the 60s there was a general intellectual and student revolt on going since MacCathy when much of this activity was not exactly underground, but off the cultural-state monitoring system. The revolt covered a broad cultural, arts, intellectual front. You could sense it jazz in its fight against swing era big bands. Or listen to records of folk and blues. Or listen to public radio, KPFK and KPFA.
Well, so this was when I remember reading Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, C.Wright Mills, Eric Fromm, etc. I even borrowed Hegel's Phenomenology because the paper back had some op-art on the cover. Didn't understand a word of the few pages I looked at. These were all circulating in the student culture. Nobody I knew could take a class in any of this stuff. Occasionally some of this sort critical work would appear on an official course suggested reading list, which nobody usually followed up. The first time I saw a book written by Karl Marx, it was from a little red set, an English translation printed in Russia, I think. It had all the mystic of forbidden work. Somebody had produced a memographed copy of the Communist Manifesto.
It's taken me years to figure out that the whole Anglo-American world, let's call it the public intellectual mind had undergone a post-WWII purge, an erasure and denial syndrome. One of the insights into this purge academia mentality I got was by reading the interesting background of Haakon Chevalier.
It started by accident when I read Chevalier's Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship (1966), another of those books on the student circuit, but off the official reading lists.
[For those who don't know, from the 30s through the 40s Oppenheimer and Chevalier were friends, both lived in Berkeley, both were members of an underground communist party, and Chevalier's above ground organized teacher's union. Oppenheimer was of course a nuclear physicist and Chevalier was a professor of romance languages. Between the two you have encapulated the sciences and humanties in the purge mentality. Oppenheimer was fired as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in a protracted battle. Chevalier was subpoenaed by the HUAC hearings in SF where he refused to answer questions and was dutifully fired from UCB. Chevalier did what the Frankfurters did, pack up and leave for Europe.]
Everybody understands MaCarthism in terms of political repression. What wasn't well understood was the cultural-intellectual dimension of the repression.
So returning to the above quote, the reason it took until the 1960s was due to the cultural-intellectual dimension of the anti-communist, cold war repressive mentality, the big chill. This is a much more complex area to think and read because of an overlap between the anti-bourgeois artists, writers, musicians, and the general intellectual class internal conflicts, and the class war of a Marxist view of society. Some share in the revolt of what is in the name of what could be, and some don't.(Thanks to DRR for reminding me).
There is yet another emigre body in this post-war period that was much more influencial than the Frankfurters in developing the post-war Anglo-American public mind. This influence was the Austrian School or Vienna circle intellectuals in philosophy and the social sciences. These included Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Goedel among many others. I only recently started reading Popper and Hayek. I immediately recognized all the kinds of arguments put forth in my courses in the humanities as to why the nature of western civilization was at stake, in our (student) needs to reject all forms of Hegelian and Marxist thought. One spoke of Hegel and Marx as the dark menace threatening the clear glass palaces of the open American mind.
I'd never seen a book in a book store with Karl Marx's name as author. I had only seen a small red book edition of Marx printed in `Great' Britain from long ago. God damn. At nineteen I had held actual evil in my hands. I flipped through a few pages and didn't understand a word.
In any event the Austrians had done a fine job of helping to set up the post-war intellectual purge in academia and the professional class everywhere. Here is Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 1950:
``...Neither the war or any other contemporary event was explicitly mentioned in the book; but it was an attempt to understand those events and their background, and some of hte issues which were likely to arise after the war was won. The expectation that Marxism would become a major problem was the reason for treating it at some length.
Seen in the darkness of the world situation of 1950, the criticism of Marxism which it attempts is liable to stand out as the main point of the book. This view of it is not wholly wrong and perhaps unavoidable, although the aims of the book are much wider. Marxism is only an episode---one of many mistakes we have made in the perennial and dangerous struggle for building a better and freer world.'' (Preface, viip]
I have to admit, I only flipped through this work and read some of the sectons on Plato, and a smattering of his chapter on Hegel. But I think I understand its general plan. At stake is the struggle between Idealism and Materialism and their interpenetrating weave of thought, action, and social systems. The `free' or open society only arises when a more rational and empirical based view of the world is used to create and manage the world we live in.
Here is a quote opening Chp 24, Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt Against Reason:
``Marx was a rationalist. With Socrates, and with Kant, he believed in human reason as the basis of the unity of mankind. But his doctrine that our opinions are deteremined by class interest hastened the decline of this belief. Like Hegel's doctrine that our ideas are deteremined by national interest and traditions, Marx's doctrine tended to undermine the rationalist belief in reason. Thus threatened both from the right and from the left, a rationalist attitude to social and economic questions could hardly resist when historicist prophecy and oracular irrationalism made a frontal attack on it. This is why the conflict between rationalism and irrationalism has become the most important intellectual and perhaps even moral, issue of our time.'' (410p)
So, finally then it is no surprise that it took until the 1980s for the Frankfurters to emerge from the intellectual mire of the US. Politics, society, social conflict, class war, intellectual and philosophical books from other countries must be really low on publisher's lists of projects, plus translation costs and copyrights all seem to conspire to keep the US isolated. Then of course the forever toxic political climate, the constant academic wars and on and on, not to mention the problem of literacy and fluency in the global world of ideas.
Max Horkheimer writes in his reissue preface from 1969:
The first edition of The Dialectic of the Enlightenment was published by Querido of Amsterdam in 1947. The book made its reputation only by degrees, and has now been out of print for a long time. We have decided, to rissue it after more than twenty years, not only in answer to many requests but because we believe than not a few of the ideas it contains are still apposite to the times and have to a large extent determined our later theory...'' (Preface to the New Edition, ix)
Then pulling out the companion work, Critical Theory, selected essays (1968, English trans, 1972, reissue 1999), Max Horkheimer I read (had read and forgotten):
The new left of the early 1960s was no less imbued with the habis of thought characateristic of the American celebration than its elders. At first optimistic about the chances to change society through the application of consistent pressure on the institutions to live up to their pluralistic claims. The crisis of late capitalism was seen as the conflict between the ideology of bourgeois individualism and the reality of the concentration of power in the hands o a few large corporations, the military and the government which they controlled.... If many radicals had been disabused of the possibility of piecemeal reform, they were firmly wedded to a symbolic politics whose foundation was moralistic rather than Marxist.
The generation which venerated Marcuse was attracted more to his indictment than his analysis...'' (CT. xi)
CG