There is indeed a Frankfurt School, despite the variety, in style and thought, of the authors who have claimed it or who have been linked to it. Its unity, underlines J.-M. Durand-Gasselin, resides less in a set of common theses than in a type of theory, put at the service of the emancipation of the masses.
Coined in the 1950s about an intellectual movement born thirty years earlier, the term “ Frankfurt School » evokes the great names of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. It designates a modern Germanic thought, anchored in social research and concerned with identifying the theoretical means of a critique of capitalism and the social pathologies that result from it. It is this thought, developed over three generations, made more complex by the conceptual contribution of a whole nebula of thinkers, among whom we must also count Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Neumann or Leo Löwenthal, that the The work of Jean-Marc Durand-Gasselin undertakes to map. If Dialectical Imagination. The Frankfurt School (1989) by Martin Jay or The Frankfurt School: history, development, significance (1993) by Rolf Wiggershaus provided us in their time with the more or less exhaustive historical version of the Frankfurt theoretical adventure, the new sum proposed here stands out for its resolutely philosophical turn. Perfectly informed of the essential historical determinations, she chooses to confront above all the theoretical problems constituting this movement without drowning in the detail of the circumstances.
The plastic unit of the School and its “ edge » Benjaminian
The author agrees from the introduction, the unity of the Frankfurt School is problematic. The variety of its actors, “ the centrifugal dynamics of individual trajectories » which cross paths there and its constant impulses of “ degermanization » (the exile in America of the first generation, the Institute’s exchanges with local researchers like Lazarsfeld in the 1950s, the opening to linguistic turn at Habermas…), already make it more than a school “ Frankfurter “. The very idea of “ go to school “, that is to say to maintain a theoretical tradition, for a line of thought which was constructed against the authority of the tradition is also paradoxical. Y “ put away » an author like Adorno, openly hostile to any logic of descent and who even congratulated himself in a letter to Benjamin on not having disciples, is no less so ; not to mention Benjamin himself, an idiosyncratic intelligence, hostile to the academic codes of university life, much more curious about Goethe, Proust and Schlegel than Hegel, Freud and Weber, of whom the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research made yet its great theoretical references.
Aware of the danger of the labeling which envelops and which neutralizes and (of) the identity which is too small and too strong which opens the door to quarrels over legitimacy » (p. 11), Jean-Marc Durand-Gasselin nevertheless convinces of the relevance philosophical of this notion of school and the integration of its most heterodox actors. Whether to use the term with “ a little of the prudence of the nominalist “, “ the Frankfurt School » does indeed cover an intellectual production, of Dialectics of Reason (1944) by Adorno and Horkheimer The Society of Contempt (2004) by Honneth, through the decisive Theory of Communicational Action (1981) by Habermas. Without being the result of a unified theory, such production proceeds from a “ kind of theory » identifiable, the letter of which Horkheimer gave in the early 1930s, when he defined the tasks of the Institute. Critical Theory then presented itself as the postmetaphysical project of a multidisciplinary and reflexive development of the critique of all the forces contrary to the emancipation of individuals in modern society. Summoning history, anthropology, economics, sociology and psychoanalysis, it demonstrated from the start, although oriented by a critical proposition of Freudo-Marxist inspiration, a remarkable plasticity.
Certainly, Benjamin’s esotericism and theoretical short-circuits seem far removed from the demand for systematic conceptuality invoked by Horkheimer. But the total disregard for disciplinary compartmentalizations, the heterodox reading of Marxism and finally the “ fundamental impulse ”, present both at Bloch and Kracauer, “ of a broader ideological critique of urban life in the capitalist era » (p. 95), make Benjamin’s work a sort of “ edge » of the Frankfurt School essential to the identification of the latter. Far from subjugating the originality of the thinker to the rigidity of a common program, integration at the margins of the latter makes the School less a pacified and closed territory of thought than a true tension zone, between its Horkheimerian heart and its Benjaminian margin. Adorno’s work, both orthodox and rebellious, can be seen as the fruit of this tension.
Transformations
Adapted to such an object, in its flexibility and rigorous attention to each work discussed, Jean-Marc Durand-Gasselin’s presentation remains very educational. While revisiting the critical issues in an always stimulating manner, it follows in three main parts the chronology of the historical contexts that each generation was confronted with.
The first generation of Horkheimer and Adorno first experienced, before exile in America, the advent of Nazism and the anti-Semitic barbarity which confronted the theory with “ disaster challenge “. For Habermas, after them, in a context of stabilization of federal Germany in the 1970s, the challenge consisted rather in the “ democratic readjustment » of Theory, through a plural reflection on the conditions of a communicative democracy. The global crisis of capitalism and the resurgence of an anti-capitalist protest marking the third generation, dominated by the Habermasian left and at its head, Honneth, chooses to direct the theory towards a reassessment of the damage induced by the social reification of individuals, and encouraged a “ reintroduction of conflict » in the critical analysis of society.
Over the generations and pages, we witness the continuous transformation of the founding theoretical presuppositions of the project and in particular of the Marxist, structural anchoring for the Theory. In the first part we grasp the gap which separates the initial branches of an Austro-Hungarian Marxism, more centered on economic questions, in Horkheimer himself, Pollock or Fromm, from “ aesthetic Marxism » inspired by the young Lukács, focused on art and culture, giving a new place to sensitivity and imagination and nourished by German idealism, in Bloch, Benjamin or Adorno. Even more profoundly, we understand the underground impact, even in the Habermasian reconstruction of Marxism and its left-wing critique, of the opposition between the “ revisionism » or optimistic reformism of Eduard Bernstein at the end of the XIXe century and the pessimistic style of combat » by Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin. Widely marked by this pessimism discrediting the ordinary parliamentary political game to the point of wrapping itself in a pathos of the ultimately ambiguous catastrophe, the first generation of the School proved sterile in the eyes of Habermas. But reciprocally, the Habermasian ambition of a rationalization of public space, its identification with “ cause » of democracy, seemed to blunt the critical impact of the Theory, neutralizing its awareness of social struggles, justifying the attack of a more radical Marxism.
Inseparable from this Marxist background, transdisciplinarity, characteristic of the type of thinking promoted by the Frankfurt School, was also variously understood by the authors. A methodological requirement for Horkheimer, it highlights, in the “ aesthetic Marxism » of Benjamin, of Bloch or of Adorno, of a “ affect » of thought rather than a formalized comparative method: less concerned with comparing experimental data from different approaches than with letting thought function freely according to various regimes (aesthetic, philosophical, political), the latter made the test their favorite philosophical form. In Habermas, on the other hand, transdisciplinarity once again takes on a more technical meaning: it integrates the most decisive advances in the human sciences in the twentieth century (the philosophy of language of the second Wittgenstein, the functional sociology of Parsons, the integrative psychology of Piaget and of Kohlberg, the transcendental pragmatics of Apel, among others). Guided by the Weberian principle of the plurality of voices of reason, Habermasian disciplinary decompartmentalization presents an almost encyclopedic ambition, ultimately related to a “ post-metaphysical version of the convergence of knowledge in Leibniz » (p. 383). Finally, at Honneth, transdisciplinarity operates as an opening to infra-rational and infra-linguistic regimes of communication, through the reintroduction of the empathic dimension (already present in Adorno) and through the analysis of the psychological and emotional parameters involved in the recognition process.
Developed at the crossroads of this transdisciplinarity and the Marxist critical foundation, the conceptual idiom highlighted during these transformations reveals in doing so its lasting relevance: the notions of integration, administration, cultural industry, impoverishment of me, of standardization, provide a “ living theoretical arsenal, ready to point out regressive, reactionary, plebiscitary tendencies in the world as it goes » (p. 454), further demonstrating the topicality of the project.
A fair retrospective
Retrospective study, The Frankfurt School does not present a speculative whole whose moments exceed each other, neutralizing the problematic residues, the tensions. Habermasian by training, the author knows how to recognize the “ decisive historical importance » representatives of aesthetic Marxism, since marginalized within the School, for us who “ we are still in a world of social contradiction, of the cultural industry and advertising culture » (p. 91). Among the representatives of this latter Marxism, Siegfried Kracauer could certainly have occupied a more important place, particularly for his work anticipating the experimental research of the School, Employees (1929), and for his influence on the “ micrology » Adornian of Minima moralia, but the author had to make choices.
Ultimately, the great strength of this sum is perhaps the unprecedented intensity of its portrait of Habermas, caught between the first generation with whom he made the immense theoretical effort to break, and the new criticism which makes him pay the price for its somewhat dull realism. A figure of the philosopher-builder made almost tragic by the ingratitude of history which gives voice to more provocative and less humbly responsible intellectual positions, Habermas is finally placed here in a historical perspective which reveals his greatness. If the task that the Frankfurt School set itself was to make men freer by means of an enlightened critique of culture and society, the very scale and relative failure of the Habermasian attempt illustrate this, perhaps. be more eloquent than ever, the unfathomable difficulty.