Jeffrey Herf on reactionary modernism & Dialectic of

[Ralph Dumain]

Quotes from:  Herf, Jeffrey.  Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, 
and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich.  London: Cambridge University 
Press, 1986 [1984].

More than any other modern social theorists, Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno 
placed the intertwining of myth and rationalization at the center of 
attention in their classic work, Dialectic Of Enlightenment. They opened 
their book with the now well-known assertion that the "fully enlightened 
world" radiated "disaster triumphant." If this was the case, understanding 
the relation between nazism and modernity was crucial. Part of their 
argument merely repeated standard Marxist views: "Bourgeois anti-Semitism 
has a specific economic reason: the concealment of domination in 
production."  Right-wing anticapitalists identified the Jews with the 
"unproductive" circulation sphere of banking, finance, and commerce and 
praised the sphere of production and technology as an integral part of the 
nation. German anticapitalism was anti-Semitic but not antitechnological. 
But it was a second, and more sweeping, analysis of the Enlightenment that 
made Horkheimer and Adorno's work truly distinctive. They argued that the 
German disaster was the outcome of a link between reason, myth, and 
domination implicit in Enlightenment thought since Kant and Hegel. The 
Enlightenment's true face of calculation and domination was evident in de 
Sade's highly organized tortures and orgies. In Germany the Jews suffered 
from being identified with both abstract rationality and with backwardness 
and reluctance to conform to national community." National Socialism 
telescoped in a particular place and time the awful potentialities of the 
Western domination of nature.

Horkheimer and Adorno were right to point out that reason and myth were 
intertwined in the German dictatorship. No doubt, the cultural paradoxes of 
reactionary modernism were less perplexing for these dialectical thinkers 
than for those more accustomed to dichotomous modes of thought. But if 
their perceptions were accurate, their theory of the Enlightenment and 
their view of modern German history were woefully mistaken. What proved so 
disastrous for Germany was the separation of the Enlightenment from German 
nationalism. German society remained partially  never "fully"  enlightened. 
Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis overlooked this national context and 
generalized Germany's miseries into dilemmas of modernity per se. 
Consequently they blamed the Enlightenment for what was really the result 
of its weakness. Although technology exerted a fascination for fascist 
intellectuals all over Europe, it was only in Germany that it became part 
of the national identity. The unique combination of industrial development 
and a weak liberal tradition was the social background for reactionary 
modernism. The thesis of the dialectic of enlightenment obscured this 
historical uniqueness. As a "critical theory," it is strangely apologetic 
in regard to modern Germany history. It is one of the ironies of modern 
social theory that the critical theorists, who thought they were defending 
the unique against the general, contributed to obscuring the uniqueness of 
Germany's illiberal path toward modernity.

This said, it is better to have been perceptive for the wrong reasons than 
to have neglected an important problem altogether. It would be less than 
generous of me not to acknowledge the role concepts such as reification, 
the aestheticization of politics, and the dialectic of enlightenment have 
had in directing my attention to the existence of a reactionary modernist 
tradition in Germany. Although some of the literature on National Socialism 
inspired by the critical theorists suffers from sloganeering about fascism 
and capitalism, some very fine reconsiderations of the interaction of 
modernist and antimodernist currents in National Socialism have also 
appeared.   [pp. 9-10]

*  *  *  *

To be sure, there were similarities between the modernist vanguard in 
Germany, especially Junger, and right-wing modernism in Europe generally. 
Some observers have interpreted these parallels as lending support to 
Adorno and Horkheimer's thesis of the dialectic of enlightenment according 
to which enlightenment rationality contains within itself a return to myth 
regardless of national histories and traditions. In my view, however, the 
urge to compare has obscured German uniqueness. Nowhere else in Europe did 
technological modernity and romantic protest clash with such force as in 
Germany. Nowhere else had industrialization developed so quickly in the 
absence of a successful bourgeois revolution. And nowhere else was protest 
against the Enlightenment a constitutive element in the formation of 
national identity as it had been in Germany from the early nineteenth 
century up through Weimar. Although Italian, French, and British 
intellectuals presented similar themes, none of these societies witnessed 
anything comparable to the Streit um die Technik that filled the political 
clubs of the literati and the lecture halls of the technical universities 
in Weimar. Nor did they produce a cultural tradition spanning 
three-quarters of a century.

The reason for the depth and pervasiveness of the reactionary modernist 
tradition in Germany had less to do with capitalism or modernity in general 
than with the form they took in Germany. The conservative revolution must 
be understood in light of the German problem in general, that is, the 
weakness of democracy and the liberal principle in a society that became 
highly industrialized very quickly. Neither anti-Western resentments nor 
technological proficiency were monopolies of the Germans. But nowhere else 
did the two coexist in such thorough forms. This is why reactionary 
modernism became part of German nationalism while elsewhere in Europe it 
remained one of the fads and fashions of the avant-garde. It was the 
weakness of the Enlightenment in Germany, not its strength, that encouraged 
the confusions concerning technology I have called reactionary modernism. 
And it was also Germany's unique (at that time) path to modernity that made 
possible the ultimate political impact of reactionary modernist ideology. 
[pp. 47-48]

*  *  *  *

Before examining Sombart's views on technology in more detail, it will be 
useful to introduce the following brief comments on explanations of 
anti-Semitism in Germany. In particular, I want to comment on Horkheimer 
and Adorno's analyses in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The least 
convincing aspect of Horkheimer and Adorno's theory was their assertion 
that modern anti-Semitism was connected to the transition from competitive 
to monopoly capitalism. They argued that power had shifted to the 
corporations, yet the economic power of the Jews remained in finance. As 
the circulation sphere declined in power and influence, the attacks on it 
as the source of Germany's problems grew.  "Bourgeois anti-Semitism has a 
specific economic reason," they wrote, namely, "the concealment of 
domination in production."  According to Horkheimer and Adorno, although 
the capitalists called themselves productive, "everyone knew the truth." 
The truth was that this was an ideological mystification obscuring the 
realities of exploitation in the labor process. Attacks on the merchant, 
middleman, and banker are "socially necessary pretenses" directed at the 
circulation sphere to obscure the real source of exploitation.' Proudhonian 
anarchism and German volkisch traditions, though differing in many ways, 
were similar in redirecting the resentment of peasants, artisans, and later 
the urban lower middle classes against capitalism into rage at the 
Jews.  By the time they wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and 
Adorno had distanced themselves from this restatement of conventional 
Marxist accounts to incorporate a more Weberian and, in the last years of 
the war, more pessimistic and more interesting perspective.

This second account was part of their view of the disastrous consequences 
of the Enlightenment. Anti-Semitism, they claimed, represented a distorted 
"appeal to idiosyncrasy" in the face of civilizational reason and 
abstraction. By viewing the Jews as the cause of the destruction of 
particular, idiosyncratic individuals and their national identity and 
culture, the anti-Semite turned anticivilizational moods into racism. In 
Helmut Plessner's phrase, antimodernism in Germany ends in the "hour of 
authoritarian biology." Rather than conceptualize the origins of social 
problems, anti-Semitism served to rally nationalist sentiment against 
conceptual thinking per se. Scientific and technical progress seemed to 
arouse hatred of the intellect because the conceptualization associated 
with it always "absorbed the different by the same," thus eclipsing a 
mimetic world of religious myth and imagery with one in which all 
experience would be subject to quantification. What was peculiar about 
modern anti-Semitism was that it presented the Jews as both the primary 
agents of this rationalization process and the remnants of tabooed elements 
of life that civilization was trying to repress. The Jews both lagged 
behind and were too far ahead of civilization. As Horkheimer and Adorno put 
it, "They are both clever and stupid, similar and dissimilar ... Because 
they invented the concept of kosher meat, they are persecuted as swine." 
The Jews were the demiurge of rationalization as well as representatives of 
backward remnants, both members of German-Jewish assimilated 
cosmopolitanism and the East European ghetto. Moishe Postone has recently 
analyzed these paradoxes in terms taken from Marx. Modern anti-Semitism 
translated a revolt against commodity fetishism into biological terms. The 
Jews stood for abstract labor and the Germans for concrete labor. 
Anticapitalist revolution was thus redefined into its subsequent murderous 
paths. A powerful German revolution was necessary to destroy the 
all-pervasive power of the Jews.

These authors' efforts are interesting from our perspective not because 
they succeed in presenting a general theory of modern antiSemitism. Such 
success is, in my view, both impossible and not worth the effort. Rather, 
their interest lies in grasping German, and subsequently National 
Socialist, anti-Semitism as possessed of equal parts of modernist and 
antimodernist components. This is what Horkheimer meant when he described 
National Socialism as a system of rule that used bureaucratic organization 
and modern propaganda to organize this "revolt of nature" against 
abstraction. If the Jews were simultaneously agents of abstract rationality 
and symbols of backwardness, then attacking them both placed one firmly 
within the traditions of the national insiders and signified adaptation to 
the spirit of modern times. Anti-Semites attacked the Jews for being both 
soulless and overintellectualized, and oversexed and money hungry.  It was 
a form of racial hatred that attacked the mind yet did not call industrial 
advance into question.  Instead of attacking machines or the capitalists, 
anti-Semites dreamed of a world without Jews.  [pp. 130-133]

*  *  *  *

However critical the Frankfurt theorists were of developing Soviet 
orthodoxy, their analysis of National Socialism, even after World War II, 
was imprisoned in the limits of Marxist theory. Probably the most peculiar 
and bizarre analysis of nazism was Marcuse's view that liberalism and 
fascism were intertwined. He mistook the weakness of German liberalism, its 
failure to have effectively confronted the authoritarian forces in German 
society, for the essence of liberalism. Benjamin's analysis of fascist 
aesthetics was particularly insightful in grasping the appeal of fascism 
for the intellectuals in France and Italy as well as in Germany. But again, 
Benjamin generalized a phenomenon that was most widespread and pervasive in 
Germany into the problem of fascism as a European phenomenon. Franz 
Neumann's Behemoth was embarrassingly wrong about the Holocaust because he 
could not believe that the Nazis would do something so irrational as to 
kill the scapegoats that allegedly held their rule together. He, too, 
interpreted National Socialism as a German variant of a crisis generally 
inherent in advanced monopoly capitalism.

But the most important work on National Socialism written by the critical 
theorists was the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Let us recall its first 
sentence: "The fully enlightened world radiates disaster triumphant." 
Adorno and Horkheimer went on to argue that implicit in the beginnings of 
the Enlightenment, in Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, was the synthesis of 
reason, domination, and myth that was revealed in all its truth in de 
Sade's orgies and Nietzsche's aphorisms, and then put into practice in 
Auschwitz. Auschwitz was the Enlightenment's truth: reason as total 
domination. What is striking in rereading this now-classic work is how 
little, if any, space is allotted to the Enlightenment as a contributor to 
the liberal political tradition  political pluralism, parliaments, public 
discussion, the defense of individual liberty against the state  and how 
much the book focuses on scientific reason undermining universal normative 
claims to the good life. The book is also striking in how little it has to 
say about the fate of the Enlightenment in Germany, discussing it instead 
as if it were a uniform development throughout Europe and America. Its 
authors' clear intention was to suggest that Auschwitz presented the 
possible fate of the modern world as a whole. Modernity in general, not 
only German modernity, combined myth and reason. Enchantment and 
disenchantment exist side by side. Auschwitz, not the proletariat, is the 
specter that haunts the modern world.

Because they viewed modernity through the prism of Auschwitz and because 
they were accustomed to laying bare the antinomies and inner tensions 
within bourgeois thought and society, Horkheimer and Adorno saw paradoxes 
the Marxists and modernization theorists missed. But they mistakenly 
attributed to the Enlightenment what was in fact the product of Germany's 
particular misery. Germany did not suffer from too much reason, too much 
liberalism, too much Enlightenment, but rather from not enough of any of 
them. De Sade's orgies and Nietzsche's aphorisms were warnings of the 
possibilities of rationalized domination in the absence of liberal 
freedoms. Horkheimer and Adorno misinterpreted modern German history so 
badly because they remained too loyal to a version of Marxist orthodoxy 
that failed to reflect enough on the weakness of liberalism in the German 
national context. It is ironic that two theorists so devoted to salvaging 
the particular and unique should have attempted to interpret National 
Socialism in the context of an overgeneral theory of modernity. It was not 
the "fully enlightened world" that radiated disaster. Hitler's Germany was 
never more than partly and woefully inadequately enlightened. Auschwitz 
remains a monument to the deficit and not the excess of reason in Hitler's 
Reich. [pp. 233-234]