Horkheimer: Traditional & Critical Theory (1)

[Ralph Dumain]

Max Horkheimer's "Traditional and Critical Theory" (which can be found in 
his CRITICAL THEORY: SELECTED ESSAYS) is a fascinating document which 
reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of the intellectual tradition he 
represents, both its achievements and its shortcomings in it striving to 
become the self-consciousness of its age.  Horkheimer perspicaciously 
points to the social division of labor as determining the social role and 
hence the structural limits constraining the self-consciousness of the 
scientific professional.  However, Horkheimer's project remains incomplete 
due to the limitations of his own intellectual specialization.  If we 
attend carefully to the problems here, we could actually achieve a new 
understanding rather than following provincially in the same old rut.

Highlights of Horkheimer's argument:

(1) What is theory?  Horkheimer, in explaining scientific theory as an 
integrated system of deductive inference, draws upon Poincare, Descartes, 
Husserl, and Hermann Weyl, an interesting panoply of sources which may 
perhaps reveal the limitations of his scope.

(2)  The social sciences have attempted to piggyback on the success of the 
natural sciences.  More abstract, qualitative, conceptual and philosophical 
approaches do not carry the weight of minute empirical data collection 
(reminiscent of industrial production techniques) in the intellectual 
marketplace.  Horkheimer claims: "There can be no doubt, in fact, that the 
various schools of sociology have an identical conception of theory and 
that it is the same as theory in the natural sciences."  (I suggest that, 
regardless of the ambitions of sociologists, there is plenty of doubt as to 
whether the conceptions of theory of sociologists are in actual fact 
identical to those of the natural sciences.)   Horkheimer claims that both 
empirically and theoretically oriented sociologists subscribe to the same 
basic theoretical conceptions as those which govern the natural sciences; 
they differ among themselves as to the value of general principles in lieu 
of exact empirical formulations.  Those dubious of grand theory find little 
use for the abstractions of Durkheim or Weber.  There are those such as 
Durkheim himself who respect the orientation of the empiricists but do not 
find such austerity as productive as a less restrictive approach to 
classifying phenomena according to general categories.  All are agreed on 
the need to fit the data to theory in a rigorous and non-arbitrary manner.

(3) Horkheimer's next move is to pan out and examine the social functioning 
of science.  An ordered set of hypotheses is mandated by the economic and 
social mechanisms that underlie the manipulation of physical nature.  Thus 
a conception of theory is absolutized and reified. (This is very very weak, 
though there must be a connection historically between the possibility of 
scientific development at a certain stage and social forces.)   Social 
factors themselves and not purely intellectual ones help determine the 
acceptance or rejection of theories in actuality.  (Horkheimer precedes 
Kuhn!)  "That Copernicanism, hardly mentioned in the sixteenth century, 
should now become a revolutionary force is part of the larger historical 
process by which mechanistic thinking came to prevail."  Henryk Grossman is 
cited here.  (This is very weak analysis, even though the recognition of 
the social dimension of science is valid.)

(4) The Positivists and Pragmatists are the ones who "apparently pay most 
attention to the connections between theoretical work and the social 
life-process."  However, those who have a "social" view and those who have 
a more "detached" view share the limitation of considering the subjective 
individual viewpoint alone.  The scientist or scholar occupies a particular 
position in the social division of labor and his job is "to integrate facts 
into conceptual frameworks and to keep the latter up-to-date so that he 
himself and all who use them may be masters of the widest possible range of 
facts."

(5) Here Horkheimer makes his shrewdest observation, when he focuses on the 
issue of the division of labor:

"The traditional idea of theory is based on scientific activity as carried 
on within the division of labor at a particular stage in the latter's 
development. It corresponds to the activity of the scholar which takes 
place alongside all the other activities of a society but in no immediately 
clear connection with them. In this view of theory, therefore, the real 
social function of science is not made manifest; it speaks not of what 
theory means in human life, but only of what it means in the isolated 
sphere in which for historical reasons it comes into existence. Yet as a 
matter of fact the life of society is the result of all the work done in 
the various sectors of production. Even if therefore the division of labor 
in the capitalist system functions but poorly, its branches, including 
science, do not become for that reason self-sufficient and independent. 
They are particular instances of the way in which society comes to grips 
with nature and maintains its own inherited form. They are moments in the 
social process of production, even if they be almost or entirely 
unproductive in the narrower sense. Neither the structures of industrial 
and agrarian production nor the separation of the so-called guiding and 
executory functions, services, and works, or of intellectual and manual 
operations are eternal or natural states of affairs. They emerge rather 
from the mode of production practiced in particular forms of society. The 
seeming self-sufficiency enjoyed by work processes whose course is 
supposedly determined by the very nature of the object corresponds to the 
seeming freedom of the economic subject in bourgeois society. The latter 
believe they are acting according to personal determinations, whereas in 
fact even in their most complicated calculations they but exemplify the 
working of an incalculable social mechanism."