But what is often forgotten in the desire to purge the phrase “activist intellectual” of its oxymoronic connotations is that intellectuals are already actors, although in a very special sense. The intellectual is always engaged in symbolic action, which involves the externalization of his thought in any number of ways. “Men of ideas” are noteworthy only when their ideas are communicated to others through one medium or another. The critical edge of intellectual life comes largely from the gap that exists between symbol and what for want of a better word can be called reality. Paradoxically, by attempting to transform themselves into the agency to bridge that gap, they risk forfeiting the critical perspective it provides. What usually suffers is the quality of their work, which degenerates into propaganda. The critical intellectual is in a sense less engagé when he is self-consciously partisan than when he adheres to the standards of integrity set by his craft. As Yeats reminds us, “The intellect of man is forced to choose between / Perfection of the life or of the work.”1 When the radical intellectual too closely identifies with popular forces of change in an effort to leave his ivory tower behind, he jeopardizes achieving either perfection. Between the Scylla of unquestioning solidarity and the Charybdis of willful independence, he must carve a middle way or else fail. How precarious that middle path may be is one of the chief lessons to be learned from the radical intellectuals who have been chosen as the subjects of this study.
The so-called Frankfurt School, composed of certain members of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research),* can in fact be seen as presenting in quintessential form the dilemma of the left intellectual in our century. Few of their counterparts have been as sensitive to the absorbing power of both the dominant culture and its ostensible opponents. Throughout the Institut’s entire existence, and especially in the period from 1923 to 1950, the fear of cooptation and integration deeply troubled its members. Although the exigencies of history forced them into exile as part of the intellectual migration from Central Europe after 1933, they had been exiles in relation to the external world since the beginning of their collaboration. Far from being a source of regret, however, this status was accepted, even nurtured, as the sine qua non of their intellectual fertility.
Because of their intransigent refusal to compromise their theoretical integrity at the same time that they sought to identify a social agency to realize their ideas, the adherents of the Frankfurt School anticipated many of the same issues that were to agonize a later generation of engaged intellectuals. Largely for this reason, the work they did in their early years together excited the imaginations of postwar New Leftists in Europe and, more recently, in America as well. Pirated editions of works long since out of print were circulated among an impatient German student movement, whose appetites had been whetted by the contact they had with the Institut after its return to Frankfurt in 1950. The clamor for republication of the essays written in the Institut’s house organ, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal of Social Research), led in the 1960’s to the appearance of such collections as Herbert Marcuse’s Negations3 and Max Horkheimer’s Kritische Theorie,4 to add to the already reissued selections from the writings of other Institut members, such as Theodor W. Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Neumann.5 Although it is not my intention to comment extensively on the Instituas history after its return to Germany, it should be noted that much of the recent attention paid to it was aroused by the reappearance of work done in the relative obscurity of its first quarter century.
Why a history of that period has never before been attempted is not difficult to discern. The Frankfurt School’s work covered so many diverse fields that a definitive analysis of each would require a team of scholars expert in everything from musicology to sinology. It would, in short, demand a Frankfurt School all its own. The hazards awaiting the isolated historian are therefore obvious. They were certainly a source of some hesitation on my part before I decided to embark on the project. However, when that decision was behind me and I began to immerse myself in the Institut’s work, I discovered that the expertise I lacked in specific disciplines was compensated for by the very comprehensiveness of my approach. For I came to understand that there was an essential coherence in the Frankfurt School’s thought, a coherence that affected almost all of its work in different areas. I soon learned that Erich Fromm’s discussion of the sado-masochistic character and Leo Lowenthal’s treatment of the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun illuminated one another, that Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of Stravinsky and Max Horkheimer’s repudiation of Scheler’s philosophical anthropology were intimately related, that Herbert Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensional society was predicated on Friedrich Pollock’s model of state capitalism, and so on. I also discovered that even when conflicts over issues did develop, as they did, for example, between Fromm and Horkheimer or Pollock and Neumann, they were articulated with a common vocabulary and against a background of more or less shared assumptions. An overview of the Institut’s development, despite the superficiality it might entail on certain questions, thus appeared a justifiable exercise.
Moreover, the timing of such a project seemed to me crucial. Although certain of the Institut’s members were no longer living—Franz Neumann, Walter Benjamin, Otto Kirchheimer, and Henryk Grossmann, to name the most important—many of the others were still alive, vigorous, and at the stage in their careers when a concern for the historical record was probable. In every case they responded positively to my initial expression of interest in the Institut’s history. How much help I received will be apparent in the acknowledgment section that follows.
Despite the aid given me in reconstructing the Institut’s past, however, the results should in no way be construed as a “court history.” In fact, the conflicting reports I frequently received of various incidents and the often differing estimations of each other’s work offered by former Institut colleagues left me at times feeling like the observer at the Japanese play Rashomon, not knowing which version to select as valid. My ultimate choices will not please all my informants, but I hope they will be satisfied with my attempts to cross-check as many controversial points as possible. In addition, my own estimate of the Institut’s accomplishment ought not to be identified with those of its members. That I admire much of their work cannot be denied; that I have not refrained from criticism where I felt it warranted will, I hope, be equally clear. Remaining faithful to the critical spirit of the Frankfurt School seems much more of a tribute than an unquestioning acceptance of all it said or did.
My only constraint has been dictated by discretion. My access to the extremely valuable Horkheimer-Lowenthal correspondence was qualified by an understandable reluctance on the part of the correspondents to embarrass people who might still be alive. This type of control, which, to be sure, was exercised only infrequently, was the only disadvantage following from my writing about living men. It is rare for the historian to be able to address his questions so directly to the subjects of his study. By so doing, not only have I learned things which the documents could not reveal, but I have also been able to enter into the lives of the Institut’s members and appreciate in a more immediate way the impact of their personal experiences as intellectuals in exile. Although the bulk of my text concerns the ideas of the Frankfurt School, I hope that some of those experiences and their relations to the ideas are apparent. For in many ways, both for good and for ill, they were the unique experiences of an extraordinary generation whose historical moment has now irrevocably passed.
* The German spelling of Institut will be used throughout the text to set it apart from any other institute. It will also be used as coterminous with the “Frankfurt School” in the period after 1933. What must be remembered, however, is that the notion of a specific school did not develop until after the Institut was forced to leave Frankfurt (the term itself was not used until the Institut returned to Germany in 1950). As will be made clear in the opening chapter, the Weimar Institut was far too pluralist in its Marxism to allow the historian to identify its theoretical perspective with that of the Frankfurt School as it emerged in later years.2
Acknowledgments
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