In 1923, the Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt with the aim of making critical philosophy, or critical theory, an instrument of social change and transformation. The Institute quickly distanced itself from the pseudo-communism imported from the USSR and sought to promote interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophy and the social sciences. Far from becoming entrenched in ideology and dogma, the Institute, on the contrary, brought together individuals characterized by their free-thinking spirit and capable of contributing a wide range of perspectives. Dialogue and the exchange of ideas were a constant feature there, helping to maintain its dynamism for many years. The rise of Nazism to power in 1933 forced its members into exile, some of whom reopened the Institute in New York. This did not prevent the continuation of a very rich correspondence among these members. It was not until 1950 that it reopened its doors in Frankfurt, adopting the name Frankfurt School and thus ushering in a new phase in relation to the international context. It is worth noting that, unlike many other schools of thought of the 20th century, the writings of the Frankfurt School continue to nourish critical thought worldwide through its authors. French academic sociology, for its part, has shown little interest in the Frankfurt School; but who is still interested in French academic sociology?
It should be noted that the list of works proposed here is by no means exhaustive and is merely a brief overview of the critical fields opened up by the Frankfurt School.
– The Spirit of Utopia by Ernst Bloch
A groundbreaking and passionate work written throughout the war years, from April 1913 to May 1917, Ernst Bloch’s *The Spirit of Utopia*—a work that is more provocative than demonstrative—is driven by a dual movement of revolt and hope. His revolt rises up against a world that has lost the sense of “We,” of community.
We must fully realize that, for us, all solid things have gradually become lifeless and mere mediocre habits.
Thus, we are homeless, and it is something else that truly drives us forward in our dreary existence.
– History and Class Consciousness by Georg Lukács
In the process of critical thought that sheds light on the alienated and alienating structures of present-day society, *History and Class Consciousness*, published in 1923, represents a significant step forward following Marx and, in particular, as an extension of his insights in “The Fetish Character of the Commodity and Its Secret,” in the development of this line of thought that enables us to envision a different type of social organization.
A society that would allow humans to free themselves from the objectification (reification) of their being through the domination of market logic. His conceptualization of the phenomenon of reification in this work was undoubtedly a decisive contribution to twentieth-century critical thought, literally indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand our times.
There is a growing sense that social forces (reification) are stripping humanity of its human essence, that the more culture and civilization (that is, capitalism and reification) take hold of it, the less it is able to be human. And nature becomes—without our having realized the complete reversal in the meaning of this concept—the receptacle where all the inner tendencies acting against increasing mechanization, soullessness, and reification converge.
Nature is thus the authentic human being, the true essence of man liberated from false and mechanizing social forms, man as a completed totality, who has overcome or is internally overcoming the split between theory and praxis, between reason and sensibility, between form and matter; for this man, the tendency to take shape is not an abstract rationality that leaves concrete content aside, for freedom and necessity coincide.
– The Employees by Siegfried Kracauer
Completed at the end of 1929, the manuscript was published as a series of ten articles in the newspaper to which Kracauer contributed, the Frankfurter Zeitung. The book appeared in the following months. In May 1933, it joined the bonfire of books denounced as subversive by the Nazis.
The mass of employees differs from the working-class proletariat in that it finds itself spiritually homeless. For the moment, it cannot find the path that would lead it to its comrades, and the abode of bourgeois concepts and sentiments, where it once resided, is now nothing but ruins, for economic development has undermined its foundations. It currently has no doctrine to turn to, no goal it can question. It therefore lives in fear of turning toward anything, and of pushing the questioning to its ultimate consequences.
As Walter Benjamin remarked regarding this work, a troublemaker who tears off masks does not like to be labeled a portraitist.
– On Friendship and Other Texts – by Siegfried Kracauer
There are words that for centuries pass from mouth to mouth without their semantic content ever appearing clearly and precisely to our inner eye. Hidden within them lie the experience of past generations, the inexhaustible flow of life and countless events, and it is astonishing that verbal shells carrying such abundance still retain their ancient value, endure, and allow themselves to be filled with new content. They underpin our entire life; we think with them and assume their unity despite the indefinite multiplicity that trembles within them. What are they, these words that capture the richness of our inner world, if not names that are feeble, powerless, and meager in the face of overflowing content? Love, fidelity, courage, cowardice, hatred, compassion, pride: within them accumulates a future with a thousand faces.
– Correspondence – 1928–1940: Walter Benjamin / Theodor W. Adorno
This correspondence sheds light on the relationship between two of the most important figures in 20th-century intellectual life. It comprises over a hundred letters, ranging from a few lines on practical matters to extensive theoretical exchanges, to which the epistolary form lends a unique freedom and immediacy.
Against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism and the hardships of exile, these letters feature a host of prominent figures of the era, from Brecht to Scholem, from Bloch to Kracauer. Adorno’s work on music and Kierkegaard, Benjamin’s central concepts—the aura, messianism, the relationship between the old and the new—and the slow development of his major work on the Passages: all this intellectual activity is presented here with the charm provided by notes on daily life and the friendship between individuals.
– Spanish Cockpit: Report on Social and Political Conflicts in Spain (1936–1937) by Franz Borkenau
If Spanish Cockpit stands as a work of reference, it is because Borkenau is the only historian and commentator on this civil war who combined a first-rate intellect with a thorough political education. He knew how to ask the right questions, he saw both the front lines and the home front, and proved himself a remarkable observer. There is no more insightful or truthful account of this war. (…) That is why, beyond serving as a model for what any analysis of a revolution should be, Spanish Cockpit is also one of the best books ever published on Spain at that time.
In this POUM group, as among the young people gathered in front of the Hotel Colón (headquarters of the PSUC), there are Germans, Italians, Swiss, Austrians, Dutch, English, a few Americans, and a considerable number of young women from all these nations. These women stand out sharply from their Spanish counterparts by their free-spirited demeanor and the absence of any male chaperones. Words clashed, spoken in every language, and an indescribable atmosphere reigned, a blend of political enthusiasm, the thrill of the war adventure, relief after the sordid years of exile, and unshakable faith in an imminent victory. Friendships are formed instantly, each knowing that in twenty-four or forty-eight hours they will have to part ways according to their assignments at the front.
– Twilight: Notes from Germany (1926–1931) by Max Horkheimer
1934 (published in Zurich)
Twilight is a book of resistance and exile. First published in Switzerland in 1934, this work is, according to the 1974 German edition, the second part of a diptych of which Critical Notes constitutes the first part. This philosophical journal is valuable in two respects: it is an essential document for understanding Horkheimer and critical theory in its early period; alongside the canonical texts of 1937 that define critical theory in its distinction from traditional theory, this work—with its freer, fragmentary, micrological work reveals the rhythm of an emancipatory thought that owes its existence to suffering and does not forget the “bare life” of the dominated and the wronged. Denouncing the operations of transfiguration in metaphysics—the shift brought about by the system’s false totalization—the author ceaselessly connects the small facts of daily life with the massive and unforgettable fact of social division.
– On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin – 1940
A painting by Klee titled Angelus Novus depicts an angel who appears to be preparing to turn away from something he is staring at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth agape, his wings spread. The Angel of History must look like this. He has turned his face toward the past. Where a chain of facts appears before us, he sees a single catastrophe whose constant result is to pile ruin upon ruin and hurl them at his feet. He would no doubt like to stay, rouse the dead, and gather together what has been shattered. But a storm is rising from Paradise; it has caught his wings, and it is so powerful that the angel can no longer close them. This storm pushes him irresistibly into the future to which he turns his back, while the heap of ruins before him grows sky-high. What we call progress is this storm.
– The Dialectic of Reason by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
The authors begin with an observation: in the 20th century, scientific and technical progress had advanced sufficiently for a world without famine, war, or oppression to cease being the stuff of utopia. If this did not come to pass, it is, according to the authors, because the great innovations of the modern era were paid for “by a growing decline in theoretical consciousness.” Progress has brought society’s domination over nature to an unprecedented degree, but has been accompanied, on the other hand, by a development that values only what is immediately usable and technically exploitable. This amounts to saying that the principles of truth, freedom, justice, and humanity have lost their substance and become mere words. At the same time, the ambition to realize these principles in the social world has been emptied of its substance: those who do not know what freedom is are also unable to fight for it on the political level. The ideals of progress were the essential element of the bourgeois philosophy of the Enlightenment, which advanced under the banner of Reason. Horkheimer and Adorno analyze how this movement tends to eliminate its own values even before they have given rise to social practice, through a process they call the “dialectic of Reason.” They show that this self-destruction of Reason can only continue in the future and give rise to new forms of totalitarianism, unless the ambiguity at the heart of the notion of progress is clearly recognized and constantly overcome.
Mass culture deals with tragedy in the same way as total society, which is content to record the sufferings of its members rather than abolish them.
The more the cultural industry’s positions are reinforced, the more brutally it can act toward consumers’ needs—stimulating them, directing them, disciplining them…
In the process of their production, images are pre-censored in accordance with the norms of understanding that will later determine how they are to be viewed.
– Studies on the Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno – 1950
This research, due to its focus on the psychological aspects of fascism—which have been largely neglected until now—does not concern itself with the production of propaganda. It concentrates its attention on the consumer, the individual to whom the propaganda is addressed.
The individual must confront problems that he does not actually understand, and he must develop certain orientation techniques—however crude and fallacious they may be—that help him, so to speak, find his way in the dark.
These means serve a dual function: on the one hand, they provide the individual with a kind of knowledge—or a substitute for knowledge—that allows them to take a position when asked to do so, even though in reality they are not prepared to do so. On the other hand, they themselves psychologically soothe the feeling of anxiety and uncertainty and provide the individual with the illusion of a certain intellectual security, of something to cling to even if he feels, deep down, the incoherence of his opinions.
The more life itself becomes stereotyped, the more the stereopath feels justified and sees his pattern of thought confirmed by reality. Modern mass communication, modeled on industrial production, disseminates a system of stereotypes that allow him to appear up-to-date and “very well-informed” at all times.
What the individual constantly says in public, what he says when he feels safe from criticism, what he thinks but does not say at all, what he thinks but does not want to admit to himself, what he is willing to think or do when prompted in various ways—all these phenomena can be conceived as constituting a single structure.
– Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Mutilated Life by Theodor Adorno – 1951
Drawing on French moralists, Marx, and the German Romantics, Adorno undertakes, through short chapters, vignettes, and snapshots, a critique of the falsehood of modern society, pursuing to the very depths of individual existence the objective forces that determine and oppress it.
This book, which should be studied as a compendium, is to be embraced as an art of writing, meditated upon as an art of thinking, and practiced as an art of living. Better yet: an art of resistance.
For the delicacy between beings is nothing other than the awareness that relationships free from utilitarian ends are possible.
The frenzy of consumption of the latest technological products, (…) leads people to accept the most hackneyed junk and play along with programmed stupidity. Never asking what a product is for, doing as everyone else does, joining the stampede—this is what, for better or worse, replaces rational needs.
Their mass society has not only produced junk for customers; it has produced the customers themselves.
In the abstract representation of widespread injustice, all concrete responsibility disappears.
Anyone who wants to know the truth about life in its immediacy must investigate the alienated form it has taken, that is, the objective forces that determine individual existence at its very core.
– The Obsolescence of Man by Günther Anders – 1956
The ambiguity inherent in radio and television broadcasts consists in the fact that they immediately and by principle place their audience in a situation where the difference between experiencing an event and being informed about it is erased.
The task of those who present us with the image of the world thus consists in crafting for us a false Whole out of multiple partial truths.
Any doctrine that challenges the system must first be labeled as subversive and terrorist, and those who support it must then be treated as such.
On both sides, the burning question arises of humanity’s self-destruction through its own creations.
It is not enough to change the world. We are changing it anyway. It changes considerably even without our intervention. We must also interpret this change in order to be able to change it in turn. So that the world does not continue to change like this without us. And so that we do not end up in a world without humans.
– The Principle of Hope by Ernst Bloch – Published between 1954 and 1959
“The Principle of Hope” presents itself as humanity’s undertaking to reclaim itself, to transcend the reign of alienation and commodification, and to realize that new world of which all utopias are an abstract anticipation.
The barriers erected between the future and the past thus collapse of their own accord;
the future that has not yet come to pass becomes visible in the past, while the past—avenged and gathered as a legacy, the past that has been mediated and brought to fruition—becomes visible in the future.
It is only in old and dying societies, such as those of the West today, that a certain partial and fleeting intention turns downward. It is then that a fear of hope—opposed to hope itself—takes root among those who find no way out of this decline. The phenomenon of crisis then takes on the subjectivist mask of fear and the objectivist mask of nihilism: it is endured but not elucidated, lamented but not changed.
The dream must not stagnate; that leads to nothing good. As soon as it turns toward the future, it is of an entirely different caliber.
– One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse – 1964
Thus, having economic freedom should mean being “freed from” the economy, from the constraints exerted by economic forces and relations, being freed from the daily struggle for existence, no longer being forced to earn a living. Having political freedom should mean for individuals that they are “freed from” politics over which they have no effective control. To have intellectual freedom should mean that individual thought—currently drowned out by mass communication and a victim of indoctrination—has been restored; it should mean that there are no longer any makers of “public opinion” and no longer any public opinion. If these proposals sound unrealistic, it is not because they are utopian, but because the forces opposing their realization are powerful.
– The Oppositional Public Sphere by Oskar Negt – 2007
Oskar Negt’s The Oppositional Public Sphere is an absolutely essential work of contemporary critical thought. Published in 2007 by the well-known Payot publishing house, it has, for some obscure reason, become virtually impossible to find in France—even though it offers entirely original practical solutions to the logic of separation that is leading our society toward decay and ruin. Truly strange, this disappearance!
At the heart of his analysis lies this observation: “The capitalist system in which we live seeks to destroy social bonds. (…) The absence of bonds is a programmatic objective of a society defined by its economic order.”
Anyone with even a modicum of perspective on the evolution of our social structures over the past few decades cannot help but observe the disastrous effects of this strategy of domination; to the point where it has indeed become difficult to speak of “Society” in a world where separation has become so widespread, leaving each individual alone to face the totalitarian demands of the Market. Rebuilding an oppositional public space where the visions of a Common world can once again be expressed—a world where solidarity pushes back against the cold, competitive logic of political economy—has become an indispensable priority for all those who still hope for a human future. This book seeks precisely to contribute to that effort.
Those who surrender themselves completely to the present are condemned to react ceaselessly to faits accomplis. (…) Those who cannot find the strength to dream will not find the strength to fight.
– Alienation and Acceleration by Hartmut Rosa – 2010
But in the society of acceleration, we no longer repair things: while we can easily accelerate production, we cannot significantly accelerate maintenance and service. Consequently, repairing things becomes increasingly more expensive compared to reproducing them. Moreover, as most products become technically more and more complicated, we lose the practical knowledge necessary to take care of them ourselves. Finally, as the pace of social change accelerates, the “moral consumption” of things consistently outpaces their physical consumption: we tend to discard and replace cars, computers, clothes, and phones long before they are physically worn out.
Yes, human subjectivity is inevitably decentered, fragmented, fraught with tensions, and defined by insoluble conflicts between desires and evaluations. However, in late modernity, the dictates of speed, competition, and imposed deadlines create two dilemmas that justify the verdict of a new form of alienation deserving the attention of social criticism: first, these dictates result in patterns of behavior and experience that are not created by any particular set of values or desires, but remain truly “alien” to the subjects. Second, in contrast to other types of sociocultural regimes such as the Catholic Church, the environment of late modernity does not provide ideas or institutions of potential “reconciliation”: all failures and shortcomings are directly the responsibility of individuals. It is solely our own fault if we are unhappy or if we fail to stay in the race. One consequence is that, in the ultra-fast-paced environments of late modernity, individuals are unable to reconcile and align the different temporal horizons of their lives: the models, structures, horizons, and expectations that characterize our daily actions—even though we would undoubtedly be capable of mastering them—are becoming increasingly detached from the expectations and horizons we develop for our lives taken as a whole, from the temporal perspective of our life project.
– Philosophy of Praxis by Andrew Feenberg – 2016
What defines the philosophy of praxis is the principle that the “antinomies” of philosophy can only be resolved within history.
Philosophy treats its concepts as if they were based on eternal facts concerning nature or the human condition. But if we consider them in this way, we obscure the context of these concepts, and it becomes impossible to imagine the role of human action in resolving the problems they entail. (…) Once we consider social action as a real possibility, it seems to play a fundamental role in resolving a philosophical problem that has traditionally been treated as purely theoretical.
With the decline of the classical forms of the working class’s revolutionary struggles, these new forms of opposition would increasingly target the irrational nature of capitalism, the absurdity of its claim to organize all of social life through the market, and the catastrophic environmental consequences of its frenzied pursuit of profit through the immense possibilities of modern technology.