[FRA:] Young Horkheimer

[Ralph Dumain]

<http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/horkheimer-young.htm>Young 
Horkheimer: Critical Theory Before the Dialectic 
of Enlightenment, And After It by Matthew Sharpe (2007)

Sharpe claims the Young Horkheimer has been 
eclipsed (eclipse of reason?), partly on account 
of the pervasive influence of Dialectic of 
Enlightenment, which can be seen as a reneging on 
his original interdisciplinary program.  Sharpe 
is interested in Horkheimer's work preceding his 
key essay on critical vs traditional theory, in 
which the terminology of critical theory 
supplants  that of Marxism.  Young Horkheimer of 
the early 1930s calls himself a materialist, 
translating metaphysics back into history, and it 
is his materialism that Sharpe wants to reclaim.

"As Robert Stirk has commented, Horkheimer’s 
early essays on the history of bourgeois society 
undoubtedly contain the key to his political 
philosophy. Having completed his doctorate and 
Habilitationschrift under the neoKantian Hans 
Cornelius, from 1925-1930 Horkheimer lectured at 
Frankfurt on the history of philosophy. In this 
time, he conducted a series of detailed studies 
on “bourgeois” thinkers, from Machiavelli and the 
theologians of the reformation to Kant, which 
formed the basis of the 1930 Anfange der 
Burgerlichen Geschichsohilosophie. Yet, even in 
the paradigmatic 1995 collection On Max 
Horkheimer, comparatively little attention has 
been paid to Horkheimer’s early history of the 
modern period and its ideas. This is all the more 
remarkable, given the fame Horkheimer’s later, 
speculative philosophy of history, contained in 
the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and the very 
contrast these earlier essays exhibit when read 
alongside this text. In them, fascism is 
conceived not as the completion of a process 
beginning with the Homeric Greeks, but as the 
symptom of the self-contradictions intrinsic to 
European modernity, beginning in the Italian renaissance."
Skipping down a bit:

"The result is that these essays not only contain 
many of Horkheimer’s arguably most valuable, and 
certainly most nuanced, contributions to the 
history of ideas. They also present themselves – 
and this is my interest today – as perhaps the 
place to look if we are to seek out in the 
Horkheimer of ‘before the dialectic of 
enlightenment’ theoretical concepts which might 
still have something new to say to us in today’s particular conjuncture."
Sharpe then addresses Horkheimer’s “The Latest 
Attack on Metaphysics” (1934), directed against 
logical positivism. Horkheimer saw the scientific 
revolution as progressive, but he also placed in 
the context of the aggressive bid of the emerging 
bourgeoisie for power, freeing up the masses from 
feudal servitude and making them freely 
exploitable by capital. The harnessing and 
subjugation of the rebellious tendencies of the 
popular masses led to an early "aestheticization 
of politics" on the part of the bourgeoisie and a 
preoccupation with demagoguery and the mob.

"In the cultural sphere, young Horkheimer argues 
that the “chaotic” lack of coordination between 
the sciences which motivates his 
interdisciplinary program in social research 
itself reflects the contradictory “anatomy” of 
the market-regulated civil society of the modern 
period. On the one hand, the positive sciences’ 
“presuppositionless” lack of reflexivity about 
their own social preconditions, he argues, does 
make them vulnerable to the “uncritical 
reproduction” of systemically promoted principles 
of “utilisation, exploitation, and 
administration” (Bon) – although, as we have 
seen, there is no sense in the early essays that 
the sciences, or rationality per se, could be 
reduced to these instrumental functions. (cf. 
Bon) On the other hand, young Horkheimer holds 
that the “neglect of the dynamic relationships 
between the separate object-domains” (NSC) of the 
different sciences reflects, within the cultural 
sphere, the more general antinomies of bourgeois 
society. The contradiction between the 
quantitative expansion of knowledge within, and 
qualitative non-coordination between, different 
disciplines, his bold contention is, 
symptomatically reproduces the wider 
contradiction between “general irrationalism” 
that stands over the micro-economic “rationalism 
in details” of particular capitalist ventures. (SFP)"
Note Horkheimer's concern that . . .

" . . . when modern philosophy attempts to 
address the substantive questions of meaning and 
morality not addressed by the natural sciences, 
it is necessarily distorted by the increasing 
inability of subjects to “cognitively map” “the 
social process as a whole,” . . . . For young 
Horkheimer, the re-emergence of scepticism in the 
modern age, first in Montaigne (MFS) and later in 
Hume’s ‘deconstructions’ of personal identity as 
“fictional” or consciousness as a “theatre” (MFS, 
Stirk), already reflect the material 
disempowerment underlying the bourgeois’ paeans 
to the autonomous “masters and possessors of nature”. "
  Kant's dichotomies are a manifestation of the divided early modern self.

Horkheimer purports to correct Weber:
“[I]rrationalism is from the start no less 
associated with [bourgeois] history.”
Horkheimer points out the irrationalist 
antecedents of the descent into fascism:

"Like Heidegger if only in this much, that is, it 
is as an “inversion” of traditional theory 
(McCarthy), rather than its ‘overcoming’, that 
Horkheimer situates the vitalisms of Nietzsche or 
of Bergson – “whose expression ‘sub specie 
durationis’ indeed indicates the viewpoint of 
change, but at the same time infinite change” 
(Stork) – the philosophy of “values” of Scheler 
or Hartmann, and even the death drive of the 
later Freud which, “like the Devil in the Middle 
Ages ... is to be blamed for all evil” without 
need for any more concrete forms of 
social-historical analysis. There is truth in 
these species of irrationalism, young Horkheimer 
characteristically accedes. Their truth lies in 
the insight into the real “crisis” of 
contemporary forms of positivistic rationalism. 
Their falsity, however – and the very clear and 
present danger embodied in the thought of Klage, 
Schmitt, Junger and Spengler, is to turn this 
insight into the vindication for a constellation 
of ideas whose defining poles are the 
valorisation of a sacrificio intellectus before 
the simultaneously “immediate” and “vague” Truths 
of life, race, “the volk” or the nation, and – in 
fascism – the “channelling” of “the huge amount 
of aggression which are emerging in a climate of 
destitution into self-sacrificial devotion 
against each particular individual or into a 
spirit of battle against national enemies”."
What he said!

Sharpe sees this bourgeois dichotomy playing out 
in contemporary philosophical ideologies--in the 
tug of war between analytical and continental 
philosophy. Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, and 
Agamben are singled out, as are the shits who 
publish Telos today.  Horkheimer matters now because . . .
What Horkheimer’s earlier position allows us, in 
this context, is part of a framework to challenge 
what seems to me to be the most vital political 
illusion fostered by Hayek et al: the “equation” 
between economic liberty (the freedom to trade) 
and civil, social and political liberties. Less 
sanguine than the neoliberals, or we have to add, 
many post-structuralists about the necessarily 
beneficent effects of opening subjects to the 
radical uncertainty of a future whose shape they 
can be less and less sure of, his position allows 
us to come to terms with today’s growing 
neoconservative reactions across the first world, 
which superimpose neotraditionalist cultural 
paradigms, combined with post-liberal state 
forms, on top of an economic system which is 
celebrated as melting everything solid into air.
Sharpe refutes McCarthy's Habermasian position, 
as well as Honneth's. As for Horkheimer's alleged "economism":

". . . it was not his earlier ‘economism’ that 
led him down the path to the impasses of The 
Dialectic of Enlightenment from 1938 to 1942. 
What Postone and Brick document is how 
Horkheimer’s trajectory in the late 1930s was in 
fact determined by his uncritical appropriation 
of Pollock’s argument for the new “primacy of the 
political” in contemporary social reproduction. 
Famously, alongside Meyer and Manddelbaum, 
Pollock adduced the category of “state 
capitalism” in order to explain politico-economic 
developments in Soviet Russia, National Socialist 
Germany, and the capitalist countries after the 
Great Depression. In each of these regimes, 
Pollock maintained, the price and market 
mechanisms had been superseded as the means of 
distributing the social surplus by systems of 
centralised administration. Now: as Postone and 
Brick point out, given young Horkheimer’s hopes 
for a more rational organisation of society which 
would supersede the chaotic irrationality of 
later capitalism, his acceptance of Pollock’s 
thought had to have a devastating effect."