In addition to the problems in the dialectical concept of total immanence, what if “the self-dissatisfaction of the object,” its striving to be adequate to its concept, fails to manifest itself in a society that Herbert Marcuse could call “one-dimensional” and Adorno “totally administered”? What if the possibility of “objective transformation” is thwarted by the ideological seamlessness of a social order that actually functionalizes apparent dissatisfaction in the service of system maintenance? What if the totality that prevails is not one whose contradictions and antinomies threaten to undermine it, but rather one in which they serve to keep it going through a kind of autoimmune equilibrium? In Minima Moralia, Adorno acknowledged precisely this danger with reference to the decline of irony:
Irony’s medium, the difference between ideology and reality, has disappeared. The former resigns itself to confirmation of reality by its mere duplication … There is not a crevasse in the cliff of the established order into which the ironist might hook a fingernail … Pitted against the deadly seriousness of total society, which has absorbed the opposing voice, the impotent objection earlier quashed by irony, there is now only the deadly seriousness of the comprehended truth.15
With all possible grounds for critique thus, in one way or another, insufficient, was it then perhaps simply a vain quest to seek a legitimating point d’appui? If there was no social subject position or historical agent whose praxis could be the source of critique, no purely philosophical first principles or a priori, transcendental grounds from which to launch such an analysis, and no immanent totality in which objects might become adequate to their concepts, might looking for such ground be itself part of the problem, rather than the solution?16 In the subsequent history of the Frankfurt School, this antifoundationalist conclusion became increasingly hard to avoid, as the material basis for critique grew ever more remote and both the appeal of a philosophy of transcendent principles and the confidence in immanent critique diminished. Even the call for an “objective” or “emphatic” notion of reason, which Horkheimer still desperately undertook as late as Eclipse of Reason in 1947, lost its capacity to inspire much confidence, as rationality itself seemed to suffer a self-liquidation embedded from its very beginnings in the need for self-preservation against a hostile nature.17
And yet Critical Theory did not, as we know, give up the mission of critically analyzing the status quo in the hope of enabling a radically different and better future. Might not some explanation of its stubborn refusal to abandon that task be found not in abstract principles, or at least not in them alone, but also in the history of its own institutional foundation in the Weimar era? The remainder of this chapter explores the school’s historical origins so as to interrogate its assumption of a critical vantage point on the world it inhabited. How can we characterize the literal foundation of the Frankfurt School and what kind of authority, if any, did it provide for the work that followed? Might its willingness to draw intellectual sustenance from a heteroclite variety of sources—including, as I will suggest, even the anti-Hegelian philosophy of Schelling—be illuminated by acknowledging those origins?
The details of the origins of the Institute of Social Research have, of course, been known for some time.18 What must be emphasized is the ragged, inadvertent, adventitious quality of its beginnings. Nothing expresses this dimension of the story as explicitly as the source of its financial support, which came from the fortune of German-Jewish grain merchant Hermann Weil, who had cornered the Argentine trade in wheat in the late nineteenth century and came to play a critical role in the economic policies of Germany during World War I, when he advised the kaiser and the general staff. He shared the ambitious war aims that fueled German aggression in 1914, but, by the end of the war, had come to argue for a negotiated peace with England to avoid economic disaster. After the armistice, he turned away from politics to philanthropy, joining the many other generous bourgeois donors who had helped create a “Stiftungsuniversität” in Frankfurt before the war.19 Weil’s political sympathies, however, were certainly not on the left, so it is hard to gainsay Bertolt Brecht’s sardonic remark about the Institute’s founding in his unfinished satire of contemporary intellectuals, The Tui Novel: “A rich old man, the grain speculator Weil dies, disturbed by the miseries on earth. In his will he leaves a large sum for the establishment of an institute to investigate the sources of that misery, which is, of course, he himself.”20
Brecht was, to be sure, off the mark in his precise history, but he did put his finger on the irony involved in the generosity of an unabashed capitalist supporting a venture that was anything but a defense of the system that made him rich. In the history of Marxism, of course, this is not a new story, as demonstrated by Engels’s financing Marx’s revolutionary writings and research through his work for the family firm of Ermen and Engels, which owned the Victoria Mill in Manchester. But it does complicate our understanding of the point d’appui from which Critical Theory launched its critique, opening it to the accusation of militants like Brecht and Lukács that its radical credentials were tainted from the start (even though the latter’s own background was anything but plebian).
Hermann Weil had first attempted to create an institute, focused on labor law, at the university in 1920, but it had been unsuccessful; with the vigorous participation of his son Felix, though, the second venture came to fruition. Felix Weil, born in 1889 and raised for the first nine years of his life in considerable comfort in Buenos Aires, had come to Frankfurt to study during the war and was caught up in the revolutionary events of 1918. Because of a prior connection with Social Democrat Hugo Sinzheimer, a leading labor lawyer who served for a short while as police president of the city’s workers’ council, he had a brief taste of action, but, apparently, it was the reading of the SPD’s [German Social Democratic Party’s] 1891 Erfurt Program on the night of November 11, 1918, that converted him to socialism.21 He joined a socialist student group at the university, among whose members was Leo Löwenthal, later a colleague at the Institute. After a year at the university in Tübingen, working under political economist Robert Wilbrandt but prevented for political reasons from getting his degree, Felix Weil returned to Frankfurt. There, with political economist Adolph Weber, he was able to complete his dissertation, “Socialization: Essay on the Conceptual Foundations and Critique of Plans for Socialization,” which was published in a series on “Practical Socialism” edited by Karl Korsch, still then a left-wing member of the KPD [Communist Party of Germany].
During the early 1920s Weil was politically close to the Spartacists, although he later acknowledged that he was always a “salon Bolshevik” who was never jailed and never considered renouncing his fortune.22 He used his position instead to support many left-wing causes, including the Malik Verlag, the theater of Erwin Piscator and the corrosive art of Georg Grosz, who in fact painted his portrait in 1926 while Weil read the proofs of a German translation of Upton Sinclair’s book on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Among his projects was the “First Marxist Work Week,” which took place near the Thuringian town of Ilmenau at Whitsun in 1923. The participants, mostly from the orbit of the newly formed German Communist Party, included Korsch, Lukács, Karl August Wittfogel, Konstantin Zetkin (son of the KPD luminary Clara Zetkin), Julian and Hede Gumperz, Béla Fogarasi, Richard Sorge, Eduard Alexander, Fukumoto Kuzuo, Friedrich Pollock and four young friends from Weil’s student days in Tübingen.23 Here, papers were given on such subjects as socialist planning and the theory of imperialism, with Lukács’s recently published History and Class Consciousness as a major source of discussion. Although the meeting was apparently a success, a second week the following year did not ensue because of Weil’s founding of the more permanent institution. According to Friedrich Pollock, who was later married to one of Weil’s cousins, it was conceived in conversations with a third figure, who had not been in Ilmenau, in the castle garden in the Taunus mountain town of Kronberg in 1922.
That third figure was, of course, Max Horkheimer, who, with Pollock, had been introduced to Weil by Konstantin Zetkin in the fall of 1919 in Frankfurt. Horkheimer’s important role in the early years of the Institute has not always been recognized. But as his most recent biographer, John Abromeit, has noted, “Horkheimer was instrumental