[lbo-talk] Lowenthal v. Strauss?

[Chuck Grimes]

Lowenthal:....This prognosis of mine did not go uncontested in our circle. 
Marcuse and Walter Benjamin both defended Knut Hamsun. But I insisted that 
the subtitle of this essay, "On the Prehistory of Authoritarian Ideology," 
was not accidental. I tried to document my thesis not only with what Hamsun 
had produced in manifest political statements, but also by an immanent 
analysis of his characters and his principles of literary construction. It 
was an immanent critique, an experiment carried out in the spirit of 
Adorno's beautiful statement: "Art does not come to society, but society 
comes to art: society should originate in the work of art and not the other 
way around." In the Hamsun essay, and even in the Ibsen essay, one of my 
methodological convictions is developed-namely, that the private is unmasked 
as the socially mediated. Works of art can give us information about the 
social dimension in the private sphere of men, how society is present in the 
love relationship of two people, in friendship, and in an individual's 
return to nature. Hence, literature is treated as the documentation of 
social representation in the psyche of the individual. In later works I once 
formulated this to the effect that literature provides the best source of 
data for information on a society's pattern of socialization.

Dubiel: May I rephrase this in order to appropriate it? So literary 
sociology is meant not in the sense of a sociology of literature, its 
production and circulation; rather, it means understanding literature as the 
material, along with other cultural documentation, in which social and 
cultural structures can be identified. Such a kind of literary study uses 
literature as the medium and material for an analysis of society.

http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8779p24p&chunk.id=d0e3038&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e734&brand=ucpress

--------------

It just happens to be what I am reading this morning. It's from a book of 
interviews with Leo Lowenthal, a lesser known Frankfurt School social 
philosopher who ended up in Berkeley. His speciality was literature. 
Adorno's was music, and I forget Horkhiemer and Marcuse's specialties. The 
general plan was to re-write sociology as a Marxist informed method to 
analyze their contemporary society. Lowenthal makes the claim that their 
work in the late 20s saved their ass, when they began to study and 
understand the nature of German society's turn... They studied the 
phenomenon (field interviews and general observations) and decided to set up 
a back-up plan for an institute branch in Geneva. After preliminary set up 
of a building and a contrived shift of funding to keep their assets out of 
the hands of the German government, they decided that the Swiss were not 
particularly trustworthy either, so the set up a branch of the Institute in 
Paris. Paris looked a little dodgey by the mid-30s, so they put up another 
branch in London. Finally they made arrangements in New York. They got a 
building from Columbia, where they all got out except Benjamin who was still 
fooling around with some refugee underground on the Spanish border with 
Arendt. She got lucky and he didn't.

The underlying reason to study Lowenthal, is I need a foil to Strauss. 
Arendt was the first choice, but I am thinking Lowenthal might be a better 
choice. Lowenthal and Strauss clash early in Lowenthal's disillusionment 
with the German Zionists and already speculates (in print) about the Celts, 
scattered around western societies who suddenly discover their Celt identity 
and decide to make land claims in France. It's very funny. That essay which 
appeared in a Zionist newspaper cost him his connection to the newspaper 
needless to say and branded him ... Strauss made sure Lowenthal didn't get 
published in any thing Strauss had influence with.

I'd like to hear what LBO has to say on any of the above. I am working on a 
kind of general overview of Strauss as a counter-enlightenment figure. The 
trouble is there are at least two tracks in this counter-enlightenment idea. 
One follows right, via Strauss and others, and one follows left with say the 
Frankfurt crew....

CG