xii The Dialectical imagination acial tensions that had exploded into ghetto riots after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. that spring The pressure of these circumstances was impossible to ignore as I made my way through the treasure trove of documents Lowenthal gen erously put at my disposal. The Frankfurt School had just begun to emerge into public consciousness as a theoretical inspiration-still,to be sure, only dimly understood--of the New Left here and abroad. Its impact was, in fact, now spreading well beyond the confines of acade mia.'When I arrived in Berkeley, one of the main protagonists in the story I hoped to tell, Herbert Marcuse, was in hiding from death threats in Lowenthals summer home in Carmel valley. Only a few months be- fore, during the"events"of May in Paris, student enrages had displayed placards emblazoned with the names"Marx/Mao/Marcuse. "Pilloried by the anti-Communist Right in California, which sought to terminate his contract at the University of California, San Diego campus, Mar cuse was also the target of increasingly virulent attacks by the ortho- dox Left. Despite the principled support he extended to his controver- sial former student and Communist Party leader, Angela Davis, he was denounced for having abandoned the proletariat as agent of revolution Marcuse, it soon became evident to me, was equally a source of un- easiness for most of his former Institut colleagues who were alarmed by his outspoken political militancy. A few months later after a semester back at Harvard, I readied my self to leave for Europe to continue research in Frankfurt and Montag- nola, Switzerland. Shortly before my departure in January 1969, I hap- pened to be at a party in New York, where I was introduced to Mark Rudd the fiery leader of the Columbia student uprising who was soon to embark on the desperate, self-destructive adventure that was called the Weather Underground. When I told him of my dissertation project, he contemptuously responded that Adorno and Horkheimer were craven sell-outs, who had betrayed the revolutionary cause; Adorno's very change of name from the Jewish-sounding Wiesengrund, Rudd snarled betokened his cowardice. Such sentiments turmed out to be all too common in the frankfurt here I settled in early February. A number of university buildings were occupied in an on-going"active strike"that led to improvised courses in Marxist theory and practice. The Sociology Department had been rebaptized"the Spartacus Department"after the militants of the early Weimar years. On January 3Ist, the Institut fur Sozialforschung itself had been taken over by radical students-or so thought its anx ious directors, Adorno and Ludwig von Friedeburg, who had called the police to clear the building. Although it turned out to be just an emb rassing misunderstanding( the students were only looking for a place
Preface to the 1996 Edition xiii to hold a discussion), the gulf between the current leadership of the Frankfurt School and their unwanted progeny widened still further The effects were obvious when Jurgen Habermas, still under fire for his imprudent condemnation of"left fascism, "showed me the lock on his office phone to prevent students who might break in from making long-distance calls. Adomo also nervously refused to allow me to tape our conversations for fear that he might leave"verbal fingerprints I left Frankfurt for Switzerland only a few weeks before the un- happy incident in April in which several women belonging to the ger- man SDS interrupted one of Adorno's lectures by rushing on the stage and baring their breasts, a symbolic act of a patricide that would come seem a prefiguration of his actual death from a heart attack in August 1969. The beautiful Ticino town of Montagnola, near Lugano, where Horkheimer and Pollock lived in comfortable retirement appeared, to be sure, far removed from the tumult of Berkeley or Frankfurt. I was able to interview them extensively and work on their materials in a far less charged climate than I had found myself in before. But even in such relative isolation, the general global situation seemed filled with an odd mixture of radical promise and reactionary menace. a year ater, after I had returmed to America to finish my dissertation, Pollock wrote to me that From this distance, what is happening in the USA looks really pathetic. All these symptoms of disintegration of a""Great Society"(this is meant quite seriously considering the positive elements of American life as measured in terms of other countries) point to no other alternative but the loss of the re- maining liberties and the rule of a narrowly materialistic middle class under a ruthless"Fuhrer. 2 Such an apocalyptic vision thankfully never materialized, but recall- ing Pollock 's alarm along with the other events mentioned above can help remind the reader of this second edition of The Dialectical imagi nation of the supercharged context in which the book was originally written and initially received. Although the times may not have been as tempestuous as they were during the battle of Jena of 1806, which famously raged around Hegel as he completed his Phenomenology of the Spirit, I certainly did not find myself in a typically contemplative scholarly setting removed from the pressures of the day When the revised dissertation was published in 1973, the hopes and fears of the late 196os were still potent, the vietnam War had two more years to run its course, and the New Left was not yet a spent force. The intellectual tradition that became known as Western Marxism was still described in an American anthology of 1972 as an"unknown dimen sion, "3 which might provide useful ideas for the struggles of the pres
xiv The Dialectical imagination ent and future. Translations of its classical texts were only first becom- ing available at that time( Georg Lukacs' History and Class Con sciousness in 1971, for example, and Horkheimer and Adorno' s Di- alectic of Enlightenment the following year), and there was a strong sense of intellectual treasure still to be excavated. Journals like New Left Review, Telos, and New German Critique tumbled over each other in their eagerness to present, explicate and apply ideas that promised to help subvert the status quo. It should not be surprising, therefore, that certain politically in- vested reviewers of The Dialectical Imagination were impatient with what they saw as an"elegiac"tone signaled by the claim in the intro- duction that the School's historical moment was"now irrevocably past. They were convinced, the example of the occasional extremist like Mark Rudd aside, that Critical Theory contained resources for the practical struggles of the present and future. In truth, I had never been entirely sympathetic to the more questionable arguments of certain of its adherents. Temperamentally unsuited to militant activism, I always maintained a certain skeptical distance from the maximalist tendencies of the New Left and had resisted joining any particular faction of"the But The Dialecticai Imagination was certainly written with the hop of conveying the palpable sense of excitement and promise I felt in un earthing and trying to sort out so radically unfamiliar and challenging a corpus of work. Although the precise historical moment of the School,s central figures was indeed past (insofar as their major work was clearly behind them and many were no longer alive), it seemed to me that the reception and appropriation of that work still lay very much in the future. The book was written, at least in part, in the hope of facilitating that process, but without inviting the uncritical dogma tism that characterized so many other embraces of Marxist theory This expectation became realized beyond my most grandiose fan tasies, as the Frankfurt School soon emerged as the focus of intense contemporary as well as historical interest. Ultimately translated into eight languages with a ninth, into Chinese, now imminent, The dia- lectical Imagination has been able to play a modest role in introducing the School to an international audience. In particular, the German translation of 1976 helped stimulate a serious historical interest where current controversies had been too heated to permit a detached or scholarly account (indeed at that very moment, the School was serving as the whipping boy of conservatives who blamed the terrorism of the left on its teachings). Written by an outsider with no prior investment in its ideas or personal debts to its members, the book seems to have had the virtue of a certain innocence which allowed both friends and
Preface to the 1996 Edition Xv foes of the school to take from it different lessons. Unlike certain later treatments, reflecting a more disillusioned and debunking mood, it view from below by a servant who washes durty linnerperspektive:the luckily avoided what the germans call Kammerdier Significantly for The Dialectical Imagination's later fate, the recep- tion of Critical Theory outlived the moment of the recovery and ab- sorption of Western Marxism in the 197os. The end of this moment be- tokened a precipitous decline in interest in other figures in its history such as Karl Korsch, Louis Althusser or Lucien Goldmann, but the Frankfurt School managed to become an enduring fixture in the theo- retical landscape of the late 20th century. Although its coherence as a monolithic school may now seem less evident than it did when I first sought to write its history, the general impulses of Critical Theory are still identifiable a quarter century later, even as its work has been hy bridized and amalgamated with other theoretical tendencies. One major reason for the Frankfurt Schools continued relevance is the very richness and variety of the work done under its auspices. If certain figures, such as marcuse, Horkheimer and Fromm seem less powerful a presence today than they did when I began my research, others like Adomo and Benjamin have only increased in importance As each new translation of their works has appeared, it seems to reach wider audiences. Members once assumed to be marginal, such as Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, have gained a new hearing in the wake of a waxing interest in jurisprudential and legal questions from the Weimar era, an interest piqued in part by the vigorous recep- tion-both on the left and the right-of the controversial jurist Carl Schmitt, 7 Another source of the School's abiding power has been the remark- able quality of work done by its many descendants, and not merely in Europe and america. It is now conventional in Germany to speak of a second generation of the Frankfurt School whose most notable mem- bers are Jurgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt and Albrecht Wellmer, as well as a third generation, which wouid include Axel Honneth, Peter Burger, Oskar Negt, Helmut Dubiel, Claus Offe, Alfons Sollner, Hauke Brunkhorst, Detlev Claussen, W. Martin Luidke and Christoph Menke Although in his last years Lukacs spawned a"Budapest School"and Galvano della Volpe and Althusser enjoyed large followings for a while, no comparable tradition of thought has managed to renew itself with as much vigor and as little pious repetition as that whose early history this book tried to trace. There is, however, still another explanation for the dogged survival of interest in Critical Theory, which allowed it to remain potent even
xvi The Dialectical imagination after the larger paradigm of Western Marxism lost its momentum: its unexpected fit with the concerns and anxieties of an era whose begin- nings were only dimly perceptible, if at all, when The dialectical Imagination first appeared. It tums out that 1973 was more than the highwater mark in the American New Left's discovery of European Western Marxist theory in its efforts to challenge bourgeois society indeed, it can be said to have had a very different significance in initi ating another narrative whose end is not yet in sight The global recession of 1973 was the first since the end of World ar II and was perhaps most dramatically symbolized by the long lines at gas stations precipitated by the sudden rise in oil prices by OPEC. The result, to simplify a complicated process, was a radical re- structuring of the world economic system which ultimately led to, or was at least signaled by, the bankruptcy of the actually existing So- cialism"of the East and the piecemeal abandonment of the Keynesian- Fordist policies of the West. What David Harvey has called the rise of a new system of"flexible accumulation"meant the growing impor ance of intemational finance capital over the increasingly impotent nation state; the globalization of labor markets producing accelerated migration of cheap foreign labor and the weakening of the trade union movement;the compression of time and space through technological innovations; and the blunting of capitalism's tendency to overaccumu late through the temporal and spatial displacement of demand. Al- though by no means stable and smoothly functioning, the system that began to crystallize in 1973 seems to produce crises that are neither controllable by a conscious steering mechanism(such as state fiscal and monetary policy)nor able to generate a collective social actor, eir to the Marxist proletariat, able to challenge it from within At first glance, such developments might seem to provide little sus- tenance for a continued interest in the Institut fur Socialforschung's legacy. Neither the traditional Marxist crisis theory espoused by Hen ryk Grossmann, nor Franz Neumann's notion of a mixture of monop- oly capitalism and a command economy, nor Frederick Pollock's idea of state capitalism and the"primacy of the political"conform to the new paradigm. Even Claus Offe's later argument for disorganized capitalism"may be deficient, if Harvey is right in claiming that"capi- talism is becoming ever more tightly organized through dispersal, geo- graphical mobility, and flexible responses in labor markets, labor processes, and consumer markets, all accompanied by hefty doses of stitutional, product, and technological innovation. "10 In fact, there is little in the work done by the Institut on ec issues, it has to be admitted, that illuminates the post-1973 res ing of capitalism. It is, however, on the level of its cultural c