On The Frankfurt School

Over at the Orphans of Liberty, James Higham has a post up that is highly (to say the least) critical of the Frankfurt School. And as curious at it might seem to disagree with a frequent commenter here over a post on a website that I contribute to as well, I do have to take issue with his reading of the Frankfurt School. Partly because some of the contributors to the Frankfurt School have been key inspirations for my own views on politics*.

Before we get into the main body of what I want to say, let me first point out that it is possible to read most political philosophers in a number of different ways. Rousseau is for some a champion of democracy, for others an advocate and anticipator of totalitarianism. Machiavelli is for some an arch-cynic - the instigator of the realism in politics that can be traced straight to the likes of Tony Blair. For others, he is someone who is trying to put the concept of virtue back into politics. And so on and so on - the point here being that it is more than possible to read the collected works of the Frankfurt School in very different ways.

In part because the thinkers that make up the Frankfurt School are very disparate, and the school itself has been around for 90 years or so. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas agreeing on very much at all. Furthermore, the main incarnation of the Frankfurt School came when Max Horkheimer became the director of the institute in 1930 - two years after the "Manifesto of Cultural Marxism" that allegedly came from the Frankfurt School that initially inspired James's vitriol. To some extent, attacking the Frankfurt School is like attacking the Conservative Party - you are attacking a long history of disparate thinkers who often just plain disagreed with each other.

But enough with the scene-setting. Let's look at the Frankfurt School itself. First up, yes, the Institute/School was founded on a Marxist basis. However, many of the key thinkers involved had at best an idiosyncratic reading of Marxism. Indeed, I struggle to see Habermas's discursive (and largely impractical) Theory of Communicative Action as hardly Marxist at all, while Horkheimer himself ended up on the side of liberal capitalism. Furthermore, Marx's canon is not without its merits, even for a libertarian like me. While I can't stomach the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and can clearly see the damage that concept has done, the "withering away of the state" sounds a pretty admirable aim to me. As such, it is wrong to conflate all self-defined Marxists as one and the same, and the Frankfurt School alienated just as many traditional Marxists as it did conservatives. We're not talking about Stalinists here, or apologists for Stalinism such as the Webbs. We're talking about a very disparate group of thinkers with an often unique interpretation of Marxism.

So the relationship with Marxism was extremely fraught and often full-on critical - in particular, with the USSR, as Marcuse's seminal work Soviet Marxism shows. It is, however, true that the Frankfurt School was also very critical of the Western world. But let's take a look at why. Adorno, for example, was a cultural snob and often attacked mass-market entertainment. He saw it as making the people compliant and distracting them from real political issues. Personally, I think it is wrong to dismiss mass entertainment, but at the same time, when I watch the feverish coverage of The X Factor I can't help but think of The Culture Industry.

On a wider basis, though, it is important to think about the context in which the wider context in which the school produced its work - especially the thinkers who produced their work between 1930 and 1970; in other words, the era of the Frankfurt School that is perhaps most associated with Critical Theory. This was the Frankfurt School forced to flee Nazi Germany - and one of their number did not make it, leading to his suicide. And it was this Frankfurt School that was faced with the apparent descent of civilisation into either fascism or communism - either way, into totalitarianism. The diagnosis of some of their number that the USA was drifting into totalitarianism was not without its flaws, but this was the America of the 1950s, of McCarthyism, and the America that plunged itself into Vietnam and ended up at the Kent State Shootings. Just as liberals of our era argued against the Patriot Act and (in this country) ID cards, the likes of Herbert Marcuse argued against a US state that was often draconian in its attempts to control its own people.

This underpins the critique of the nuclear family. To my mind, it is not so much a wholesale rejection of the idea of a family so much as a rejection of the patrimony and conformism that traditional views of the family were often used to back-up. Remember the context again - a Western world struggling to come to terms with ideas such as equality between the genders and ethnicities, as well as a world where homosexuality was largely taboo. It would be a reactionary, as opposed to a liberal or a conservative, who would argue that greater equality in these areas is not a step forward for liberty - and it is in part these areas of life that that lead to Marcuse's permissive, if not promiscuous, views on sexuality.

But is Critical Theory against Western civilisation? Yes, but only so much as it is critical of any civilisation. And in the same way that it is about immanent critique - the critique of any system using its own terms. This is what Adorno's Negative Dialectics is about. Any status quo, be it a liberal democracy, a pseudo-Marxist state like the USSR or a theocracy, should be open to critique. And that is the point of Critical Theory - it is about much more than just the Frankfurt School. Don't believe me? Just take a look at the list of critical theorists ; it shows how disparate a bunch they truly are. In a sense, I would define myself as a Critical Theorist. Finally, criticising a society does not neccessarily mean the wholescale rejection of it. One of the aspirations that informs Marcuse's work is how to use technology in such a way as to meet the wants of the whole of society. Given we still live in a world where famine is a problem, this remains a good aspiration and alludes to pertinent questions about the use of technology.

So the Frankfurt School are not a homogenous bunch of thinkers at whose doors we can lay many of the problems of our modern society and culture. Indeed, even if I did believe the harsh reading of the Frankfurt School (which, of course, I don't), that doesn't then mean that they had the power and the influence to fundamentally affect the societies in which they live. Quite the opposite is true, really, if we look at the Frankfurt School. They alienated potential allies in the Western and Marxist worlds to such an extent that such alienation almost seemed to be a mission statement. While Marcuse had a flirtation with the New Left, he was never really part of that movement and was harshly critical of its violence (through groups such as the Red Army Faction). However, his association with the New Left has tainted his record in the eyes of many, meaning he has gone out of fashion just as the New Left went out of fashion. As for the others, even those such as Habermas who have become public intellectuals in their own countries have been scuppered why one crucial problem - there work tends to be obscruantist in the extreme. Adorno, for example, was given to writing obtuse aphorisms, making his work interesting only if you can decipher what the hell he was trying to say. It is hard to imagine the political class who have created so many problems in our society making their way through Negative Dialectics. Indeed, that's why the political "theorists" (if we can dignify these crass writers with such a title) who tend to have the most influence on the political class are those who present a Ladybird version of political theory - like Anthony Giddens and Phillip Blond.

So I don't think there is anything to be gained by dismissing the Frankfurt School. There work was not without its flaws, but they presented a bold critique of issues still having a devastating effect on modern life, such as the growth of faceless bureaucracies and of bland conformism. They also pointed to the need to critique society rather than blandly accepting what the ruling class tell you (surely the point of websites such as the Orphans of Liberty?) You can look elsewhere for the malaise that has done so much to damage our society; fighting the Frankfurt School is fighting relevant ideas that we could potentially use at the same time as letting the real enemies carry on undisturbed.

*Not the greatest influences, though. For that I would have to point to Arendt, Lyotard and Hayek.

On the troubles of Chris Huhne

I've been following the Chris Huhne story with a certain amount of weariness and disinterest. I mean, I don't know whether he got his estranged wife to to accept speeding points on his behalf. I don't know he or his wife and (judging by this nasty little spat) I don't ever want to know either of them. But there is something intuitively plausible about this story. Because Chris Huhne comes across as utterly ghastly. He seems to be the sort of person who would fuck you over not just to get ahead, but also to assert a curiously misplaced sense of superiority over you. And this comes across in his desperation to lead the Liberal Democrats. Quite why anyone would want to lead Britain's second-rate third party - especially at the moment, when leading it is effectively taking a deep swip from a not just poisoned but also utterly toxic chalice? I guess because it would make Huhne important; it would make him a leader. Which would make him better than you, my non-leader reader.

There is an air of undeserved smugness around Chris Huhne - that unpleasant air of arrogant mediocrity. He comes across as someone who believes he should be in Parliament - and therefore have some sort of control over you - for no other reason than he just plain thinks he knows better than you. And if other people have to fall by the wayside in order for him to get ahead - if he has to abdicate personal responsibility to others for his own mistakes to get ahead - then that's absolutely fine with it.

Which leads me to the point of this post, and my question - what is about being a politician that turns most people into being the sort of self-serving shit you would cross the street to avoid?

Remind me, just what is the point of our political class?

Regular readers will know that I am not a big fan of the political mainstream. In fact, one of the reasons why I think our country is heading to hell in a handcart is because our leaders fail to offer anything other than more of the same, with mild, peripheral, cosmetic changes. But I think it is important to understand why we are in this situation, and why it has come to pass that blandness is a bonus for political leaders.

As far as I can see the answer is twofold. First of all, our leaders have ceded so much power away to the EU that it is next to impossible for them to promise to do anything meaningful, since the EU actually has the lion’s share of power in relation to the running of this country. That isn’t necessarily to say that the EU shouldn’t have that power (although regular readers will again know my position on the EU), but rather an acknowledgement that any UK politician claiming to want to do anything radical is basically lying unless they are willing to address the imbalance of power between the UK and the EU first.

The second limitation on politicians seems to be the media response to anything that is not entirely mainstream. As soon as a party leader offers a radical proposal, they are in danger of being shot down by the media as some sort of dangerous extremist. The media seems to be inherently conservative, meaning it is far more rewarding for a politician to adhere to the status quo.

The upshot is that we have a political class that is nothing more than a useless self-perpetuating oligarchy. If you’ve ever stopped to wonder just what the point of our politicians is, then you’ve been close to the truth, since realistically they have ceased to have any point whatsoever. We no longer need intelligence or ideological commitment from our politicians. The sole criteria they need to have is a desire to beat the opposition – exactly the same mentality that you might expect from a seven year old determined to win in the sack race on a school sports day. We don’t so much have politics in this country anymore than a marginally more cerebral version of The X Factor with a vote every five years rather than every week that masquerades as politics.

It is the fault of the political class, of course. Because whilst the media and the EU might constrain them, both of those are things that can be dealt with by politicians. The EU is a human construct; it may be difficult and expensive to reform or even leave the EU, but it can still be done. It may be difficult to make a case for radical change to the media, but again it can be done. It is a question of ambition and scope of ideological views. The only ambition our political class is to get power for themselves, and keep it.

What is the point of our political class? An entertainment, a distraction. We can despair of Gordon, mock Nick and tut at David, and all the time not recognise that our political class is utterly pointless. Because the tedious ongoing drama that calls itself British politics is not politics in any meaningful sense of the word. And that won’t change unless we fundamentally change the people in the political class of this country.