With these remarks, Horkheimer was clearly identifying with those who shared the exhibition’s goals and ratified its methods for achieving them. But for a student of his oeuvre, much in this introduction will seem very surprising. Unlike other critics of a scientistic version of Marxism, such as his erstwhile colleague Erich Fromm, he had always resisted the lure of a humanist alternative suggested in Marx’s 1844 Paris manuscripts.21 His evocation of Kant rather than Hegel or Marx, endorsing what Michel Foucault came to call Kant’s “empirico-transcendental doublet” of the individual and humanity,22 was in tension with what are normally taken to be the primary philosophical inspirations for Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Nor do we find any indication of his life-long fascination with Schopenhauer, whose illusionless pessimism he could still call in 1961 “the philosophic thought that is a match for reality.”23
Perhaps because of its Kantian perspective, the introduction underplays the persistent power of intermediate identifications, whether with class, gender, nation, religion, or status group, which resist, for good or for ill, abstract homogenization on the level of the whole or the isolated singular. Rather than uncritically celebrating the American cult of individuality, as he seems to in his paean to the exhibition, Horkheimer had long harbored doubts about its darker side. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, he and Adorno had bitterly remarked that
the decay of individuality today not only teaches us to regard that category as historical but also raises doubts concerning its positive nature … In the autonomy and uniqueness of the individual, the resistance to the blind, regressive power of the irrational whole was crystallized. But that resistance was made possible only by the blindness and irrationality of the autonomous and unique individual.24
In the chapter entitled “The Rise and Decline of the Individual” in his 1947 Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer bemoaned the survival of the ideology of individual self-preservation at a time when there no longer seemed a coherent self to preserve. “The dwindling away of individual thinking and resistance, as it is brought about by the economic and cultural mechanisms of modern industrialism, will render evolution towards the humane increasingly difficult.”25
But nothing of these bleak assessments of the weaknesses of the bourgeois humanist notion of the individual remained in his introduction to The Family of Man. Additionally, Horkheimer glossed over one of Kant’s most fateful moves from “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” which would have been inconvenient to foreground in this context: the philosopher’s unsentimental justification of social conflict or what he called “asocial sociability” as the hidden mechanism of progress toward the goal of a cosmopolitan order of federated states. Instead of stressing the functional value of social strife, even violence, as had Kant, Horkheimer short-circuited the indirect process by which the ultimate pacification of social existence might be achieved. Unlike Hegel, who stressed the role of dialectical negation expressing the “cunning of reason,” and Marx with his valorization of the class struggle, he moved quickly from the still imperfect present to a more utopian world constitution based on reason.
But perhaps most unexpected of all is Horkheimer’s valorization of the power of images, photographic or otherwise, to give concrete meaning to the abstract yearnings expressed in philosophical language.26 After his return from exile, Horkheimer came increasingly to identify with his Jewish roots, often invoking the taboo on graven images, the Bilderverbot, in Exodus 20:1–7 as a still potent reason for Critical Theory’s distrust of positive utopian fantasies.27 Adorno would also frequently cite the same source in his characterizations of a doggedly negative dialectic, refusing all higher affirmative sublations.28 They likewise invoked the Bilderverbot in the other direction, as explanation for their distrust of attempts to give realistic aesthetic form to the experience of the Holocaust.29 Although often extolling the virtues of mimetic similarity rather than conceptual subsumption as a way to avoid the domination of otherness, they were deeply suspicious of the ways in which it could slide into denigrating mimicry, a pattern they had witnessed firsthand in the Nazi mockery of Jews.30 In his introduction, however, mimesis is firmly on the side of empathetic identification alone.
The anomalous character of this text in Horkheimer’s thinking in this era is even more apparent if we compare it with another essay written at virtually the same time, his 1957 “The Concept of Man.”31 Impatient with the incessant pious chatter about the “crisis of man” in the postwar era—a phenomenon trenchantly probed by the American intellectual historian Mark Greif in his recent The Age of the Crisis of Man32—Horkheimer argued that “the word ‘man’ no longer expresses the power of the subject who can resist the status quo, however heavily it may weigh upon him. Quite differently than in the context of critical philosophy, to speak of man today is to engage in the endless quest for an image of man that will provide orientation and guidance.”33 The abstract appeal to “man,” whether anthropological or existential, is a deception designed to distract attention from the contradictory social realities that still smolder beneath an alienated totality that remains irrational to the core.
Rather than upholding the virtue of empathetic identification with individuals, “The Concept of Man” repeats the bleak characterization of the fate of individuality in the modern world that Horkheimer had lamented in earlier works written in the shadow of the Holocaust, such as Dialectic of Enlightenment or Eclipse of Reason: “The factors in the contemporary situation—population growth, a technology that is becoming fully automated, the centralization of economic and therefore political power, the increased rationality of the individual as a result of his work in industry—are inflicting upon life a degree of organization and manipulation that leaves the individual only enough spontaneity to launch himself onto the path prescribed for him.”34 Any appeal to personal “authenticity” is thus ideological, an “empty well from which those who cannot achieve their own private life, their own decisions and inner power, fill up their dreams.”35
Significantly, Horkheimer bemoaned the ineffectiveness of the contemporary nuclear family in resisting these tendencies, an argument that drew on the empirical work the Institute had done on the crisis of the bourgeois family in the 1930s.36 Because children were becoming ever more directly socialized by society, particularly by the seductions of consumerism, they could not develop the interior strength needed to reject its conformist blandishments. The family was no longer a “haven in a heartless world,” defended by a nurturing mother, where an experience of childhood happiness might serve as a spur to critical reflection about its denial in later life.37 Instead, the family’s integrity had been eroded, so that it now functioned only as a porous shield against the penetration of commodification and the modern media. Ironically, the seemingly progressive entry of women into the labor force, Horkheimer worried, had had its costs: “The principle of equality is penetrating even into the family, and the contrast between private and social spheres is being blunted. The emancipation of woman means that she must be the equal of her husband: each partner in the marriage (the very word ‘partner’ is significant) is evaluated even within the home according to criteria that prevail in society at large.”38 Such equality was a sinister expression of the exchange principle in bourgeois society in which everything qualitatively different was rendered quantitatively fungible.
Mentioning the erosion of the traditional family lamented by Horkheimer in “The Concept of Man” raises the larger question of the symbolic function of the family in Steichen’s exhibition, which operated on two levels: the repetition of parallel images of happy nuclear families in different cultures and the metaphor in the title implying that humanity as such should be seen as one giant family. Many critics of The Family of Man excoriated it precisely for its tacit affirmation of the patriarchal, heteronormative nuclear family of the 1950s as a model of the family tout court. From our perspective today, at a time when families come in so many different varieties and the appeal to “family values” has turned into a coded way to decry those developments from a conservative perspective, it is easy to mock the homogenizing effect of the images in the exhibition.
Defenders of the exhibition, however, have contended that a tacit distinction was