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BOOK REVIEW Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Boston: Little, Brown (1973) pp. xxi + 382. $12.50. The work of the Institut fffr Sozialforschung has become a virtual cult object in certain circles of American social philosophy. From responsible academics such as Norman Birnbaum, self-assured in his intellectual heritage, to polemicists of the New Left, doubtful of their ideological parentage, waving any flag of environmental protection, gay liberation, or animal rights, etc., Martin Jay's history of the fiastitut, the Old Frankfurt School from 1923 to 1950 will be eagerly received. It will be found in the Park Avenue suites with The New Yorker and in the Village walkups with the Voice, on the end tables of those who have arrived and worry about it, and those who haven't made it yet but whose social class insures they will. It will be carried on the subway by those who cultivate a slight Central European accent and listen to Bela Bartok, those who feel intensely about their heritage. That will be unfortunate because Jay has a pleasant style, and his is a well researched history. He has talked to just about everyone who mattered, and has read extensively. Jay's book is pure history, neither philosophy, history of ideas, nor sociology. There are some problems with that, to which we'll turn in a moment. Jay's book also has a lesson, if one reads between the lines. There are eight chapters and an epilogue. Chapters include ones on the Creation of the Institut in the mid-20's, the Genesis of Critical Theory, the attempt to Integrate Psychoanalysis and Marxism in the thirties, the early Studies on Authority, the examination of Nazism, aesthetics and the critique of mass culture, the wartime empirical work, and the critique of Enlightenment of the late 40's. The conclusion skims over the post-war Frankfurt School and is followed by a lengthy bibliography. There is a substantial index, but it does not accord with the page numbers, which diminishes the book's reference value somewhat. I found only one other typographical error (191). 1 Jay emphasized several immanent factors in the development of the Old Frankfurt School. Of paramount importance were "financial good fortune" (114), the house organ, the Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, and the "central tradition of European philosophy, open to contemporary empirical techniques" that it published, and the shared experience of forced exile and the struggle against Nazism (143). When Jay comes to less proximate factors, his discussion is less plausible. Almost as a parody of Critical Theory, he exal~nes the relevance of the Jewish ethnic tradition of the Institut members (31-34) 2 and their lack of intergenerational (Oedipal?) conflict (35) on their participation in the Old Frankfurt School. Later he turns to "sociological" factors,

t All references to The Dialectical Imagination herein are bracketed page citations in the text. z It is curious that Jay overlooks a major instance of Fromm's Jewish heritage (200). One need only compare Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, New York: Ungar (1966), pp. 45-46 on language and alienation with Karl Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, New York: International (1947) p. 19 to realize how much theology Fromm imports to his discussion of Marx. Fromm sees "alienation" as having Old Testament origins (op.cit., p. 44). Cf. also George Lichtheim, "Alienation" International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. I, New York: Macmillan (1968), esp. pp. 264-265.

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including the social marginality of the Institut members (289) and their social class position (292), but he only introduces the latter factor to argue they aren't mandarins in Ringer's terms.

We never really discover why the Institut did what it has done. We do discover how Pollock struggled to preserve its endowment through the depression and war (e.g. 220). We also discover that Jay is no historical materialist. This was hinted early on, when he quotes a letter from an Institut participant to Max Eastman (12). Eastman, editor of The Masses before World War I, was a "renegade Marxist" like Peter Struve, who rejected the dialectic. He repudiated socialism in the forties; after World War II he was an editor of the Readers Digest. Eastman was just the sort of person to whom you would write a letter contemptuous of the "M.I.H." Jay doesn't know what this acronym - The Materialist Interpretation of History - means. Perhaps his unfamiliarity with the Old Left explains his relatively brief treatment of the Marxists of the Institut. Jay's treatment of the Marxists may be, however, wilfully ideological. Thus we find such cant as "the proletariat's integration into society" (43) which is to justify Critical Theory's "transcendence." Later, we are equally surprised to find that it was a "bankrupt utilitarianism" which Jay supposes informs "orthodox Marxism" (49). And who, in heaven's name, are the orthodox Marxists? Those of the New Left who castigate the vulgar reduction of "thought" to a "secretion of the brain" are ignorant that this comes from the physiologist Cabanis, who was of the Cartesian and not at all of the Classical German tradition. So who are the orthodox Marxists? Georg Luk~ics, who so labelled himself? a If so, then how does Jay find "limited thinking of many orthodox Marxists" (180) to be a problem? He nowhere tells us how to identify these bdtes noires of the New Left. One has the distinct feeling that Jay would concur with Paul Piccone and flatly identify "orthodox Marxists" with "Stalinists," hence betraying the secret of ideology masquerading as philosophy. Jay finds little evidence to suggest that the Old Frankfurt School engaged in an explicit class analysis (347, note 13) and goes on to say what evidence there is indicates that class analysis decreased after the war (258). Thus he supposes that in the late forties, a complete break with Marxism occurred. Yet in the Authoritarian Personality, 4 Adorno gives one of those very striking class analyses of the relation of the "crank" to unsocialized modes of production, an analysis that underscores the theoretical shallowness of the ego psychology that informs the rest of the Study (AP, 765). We will not maintain that Adorno was any sort of "orthodox Marxist," but that Jay far overstates his case (207-208). s At this juncture, we expect the New Left's call for "new categories," and it resounds (56). As Habermas views it, Marx's materialism "does not eliminate from practice the structure of symbolic interaction and the role of cultural tradition . . . but this aspect of practice is not made part of the philosophical frame of reference. ''6 The need of "new categories" rather than the "fetishization of labor" (156) follows. This point is hardly new, as Masaryk argued "Sociology is impossible without psychology," Grundlagen des Marxismus, w 36, a half-century ago. 3 Cf. Georg Lukfics, " W h a t is Orthodox Marxism?" Political Writings, 1919-1929, London: NLB (1972), p. 19. 4 Theodor Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harpers (1950), now conveniently available in a one-vohime Norton Library paperback (1969) $ 4.95. Hereinafter this study is cited in the text as AP with the appropriate page references. 5 Cf. also Theodor Adorno, Prisms, London: Neville Spearman (1967) pp. 40-41. 6 JiJrgen Habermas, Knowledge andHuman Interests, Boston: Beacon Press (I 971), p. 42.

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The old Frankfurt School was somewhat ambivalent on this point, since they realized that the control of symbolic interaction and ultimately the production of Objectivized Mind was just that, production. 7 The outcome of the turn from Marx has been less than auspicious for the New Frankfurt School. Habermas can do little better than to follow Freud and call for an anarchism of "consensus arrived at in communication free from domination, ''8 while Wellmer looks to educational institutions to effect the "revolution, ''9 strongly reminiscent of the 34th chapter of Galhraith's New Industrial State. Culture critique indeed! In the Old Frankfurt School's ambivalence, they were troubled by the metatheoretic dualism, and its consequences for theory, that results from "new categories". Jay doesn't appreciate the theoretical necessity of distinguishing between "genuine individual happiness" and "repressive desublimation" (57-59) although when Marcuse addresses the schism, his resolution amounts to a call for "effective social control over the production and distribution of necessities." ~o But the theoretical distinction is problematic because of the rectatheoretical dualism. There are simply too many categorial structures being applied to one social system. The consequences for theory of the metatheoretical dualism recur. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment we find reason and "reason". Adorno is faced by genuine and false happiness ~ as well as by Sch6nberg's genuine and "the younger twelve-tone composers'false music? 2 Although Jay overlooks it, the bifurcation appears throughout the Authoritarian Personality (AP, 243,368,682) where "genuine" and "pseudo" attitudes are constantly and not always convincingly juxtaposed. Jay emphasizes throughout his history that the Old Frankfurt School waged an unceasing battle against the Identity Theory. It is this Identity Theory that underlies the rejection of Marx. The Identity Theory can be clearly seen in Spinoza's reduction of both volition and extension to Substance in Ethica L Prop. XXXII. This reduction favorably impressed a number of Marxists, including the Russian Plekhanov. a3 It has been assumed by bourgeois critics of Marx that this reduction is Marxian, even that it is due to M a r x ? 4 Were this the case, the Old Frankfurt School's critique would be well founded, as the Spinozistic assumptions lead to untenable social action. The identification of will and matter will ultimately lead to quietism, no matter what the philosophical pretensions of the author of that identity. The identification of volition and extension denies the reality of the Subject. Let us note one illustration. Writing of Black youth, Gurin argues that "we cannot really separate the motivational and reality aspects of the problem that these youth face, for their motivation is directly tied to the reality-payoffs available to them." ~s We can only wonder if we can separate the two for anyone, Black or not, young or not, on this argument. 7 Cf. Max Horkheimer and T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Herder (1972) p. 123. They say "industrialism objectifies the spirit" on p. 28. Also consider G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopiidie, w 553. 8 Habermas, op. e/t., p. 284. 9 Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society, New York: Herder (1971), p. 138. ~o Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press (1964), p. 251. 11 Adorno, Prisms, op. cit., p. 87. ~2 Adorno, ibid., p. 170. 13 George Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House (1961), Vol. I. C f pp. 521-522. ~4 E.g. Murray Wolfson, Reappraisal of Marxian Economics, New York: Columbia University Press (1958), pp. 18-19. 5 Gerald Gurin, " A n Expectancy Approach to Job Training Programs" V. L. Allen (ed) Psychological Factors in Poverty, Chicago : Markham (1970), p. 284.

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The quietistic implications follow directly. Gurin continues that a job training situation for the Blacks "should give them enough success experience to provide some basis for a change in their orientation, but not so much success that the training program becomes divorced from reality..."16 which is another way of saying to the Black: Know your place ! A page later, Gurin closes the door on the Black: "The nature of the world, particularly for these trainees, is such that rewards do not always follow performances." The facile identification of will and matter masks the social reality of Blacks controlled by the larger society, even controlled in attempts such as "job training" that would rectify that social reality in part. The secret of Gurin's apologetic lies in his invocation of "the nature of the world." Thus the Identity Theory! Such an argument cannot be attributed to Marx. For Marx, the Subject is always properly differentiated. In this regard, Marx had transcended the materialism and Spinozism of the Enlightenment? 7 Man's life-activity, production, both creates "an object for the subject" as well as "a subject for the object. ''18 The object is at once an objectivization of the historical Subject, "the language of real life,''19 hence mediator among men and presupposing the subject, as well as the telos of the Subject presupposing the object. This polarity is irreducible; indeed, alienation is the object qua subject and the subject qua object? ~ It is difficult to imagine a competent reading of Marx which would fail to recognize this. Yet we find Adorno saying that, for Marx, "the primacy of economics is to yield historically stringent reasons why the happy end is immanent in history."21 While the productive forces may mask the differentiation of Subject and its object at certain historical stages, the recognition of this masking, this fetishism in its fullness and pretense to identity, is to transcend the hypostatization of social processes into "historical necessities." How Adorno accords his judgment of Marxian historicism with, e.g. The Holy Family of 1844 is unclear. There we find that "History does nothing... 'history' does not use man as a means for its purposes as though it were a person apart; it is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his ends. ''zz We cannot pursue this problem further at this time; we will note that the rectatheoretic dualism which Jay treats so lightly is on the contrary seriously problematic, is unresolved by the Frankfurt School, and in good part appears to have been motivated by the metatheoretic interest of integrating Freud and (presumably non-orthodox) Marx. This is the interest for which the Old Frankfurt School is best known. II A major problem of Jay's history appears at this point: his unconcern for the Old Frankfurt School's position on the Woman Question. Consideration of their position is crucial, as we shall see, for assessing the possibility of the "integration" of psychoanalysis and Marxism which Jay treats in Chapter III. Jay remarks, on the last page of his book, that "women's liberation" was one of several

16 1bid., p. 291. 17 As Hegel had likewise recognized in the 1807 Phenomenology of Mind, London: George Allen & Unwin (1931), pp. 592-593. la Karl Marx, Grundrisse, New York: Harpers (1972), p. 26. 19 Karl Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, op.cit., p. 14. 20 Marx, Grundrisse, op.cit., pp. 67-68. 21 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, New York: Seabury (1973), p. 322. 22 Friedrich Engels, "Criticism and Feuerbach" Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Garden City: Doubleday (1967), p. 385; also Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op.cit., p. 304.

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"issues that the Frankfurt School had treated with sophistication . . . " (298). He glosses over the secret of Freudomarxism, viz., the impossibility of integrating the two theories, an impossibility resulting from incompatible conceptions of women. 23 We can leave aside F r o m m (88ff), who was considered a revisionist by the more orthodox Freudians of the Frankfurt School, as Jay notes (101if). The revisionist thesis that character or personality was culturally, not organically, determined, denied Freud's libido theory and shifted all aspects of the contradictions of h u m a n existence to the realm of Mind. Adorno and Horkheimer sought to retain the libido theory, as it was a crucial element of their rejection of identity theory. Let us give brief consideration here to Freudian doctrine on women and to Adorno and Horkheimer's concurrence with that doctrine. 24 Freud begins with the anatomical differences of the sexes. Horkheimer and Adorno likewise state that "between [woman] and man there was a difference she could not bridge. ''25 For Freud, the irresolution of the woman's Oedipal attachments led to a superego weak by comparison to man's, and to an inability to sublimate, to contribute to civilization. 26 All of this was biologically grounded. Moreover, woman threatened man's ability to contribute to civilization. Horkheimer and Adorno likewise see the subjugation of woman, "the embodiment of the biological function" as necessary to civilization. They continue: "The world and its purposes need the whole man. ''z7 Thus woman had little to offer in what Erik Erikson has called "Outer Space." Overall, the Freudomarxians appear to be Freudians. Freud develops the other side of the medal as well. Woman's recognition of her anatomical inferiority leads to envy and a desire to bear a child as compensation. 28 As Horkheimer and Adorno put it W o m a n herself, on behalf of all exploited nature, gained admission to a maledominated world . . . At the price of radical disengagement from action and of withdrawal into the charmed circle, nature receives homage from the lord of creation. 29 Thus woman, as a vestige of the Romantic conception of Natur, contacts Kultur by renouncing action for "passivity" and (for Freud) "masochism." Woman is directed (and psychotherapy is at hand if she fails) to attend to Erikson's "Inner Space." And if she fails .t "The last vestiges of female opposition to the spirit of a male-dominated society are engulfed in a morass of paltry rackets, religious sects, and hobbies. ''3~ W o m a n is confined to a maternal role, restricted to the household and to its virtually neolithic handicraft mode of production, denied participation in liberating socialized modes of production. Hence women are oppressed, necessarily, biologically, socially. Where we find a sophisticated treatment here o f " w o m e n ' s liberation" utterly escapes this z3 We will document the assertion of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, Garden City: Doubleday Anchor (1967), p. 194, that "Freudian p s y c h o l o g y . . , is fundamentally incompatible with the anthropological presuppositions of Marxism." 24 As Wellmer, op.eit., p. 131 puts it: "Horkheimer and A d o r n o . . . know their Freud." 2s Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cir., p. 248. 26 Sigmund Freud "Femininity" (1933) in Collected Works, Vol. 22, London: Hogarth (1964), pp. 118-129. 27 Horkheimer and Adorno. op.cit., p. 252. 2s Sigmund Freud, "Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes" (1925) Collected Papers Vol. 5, London: Hogarth (1950), pp. 194-195. 29 Horkheimer and Adorno, op.cit., p. 249. Cf. also "The woman remains the one without power, for power comes to her only by male mediation," p. 72. 30 Ibid., p. 250.

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reviewer. Horkheimer and Adorno seem as captivated as does Freud by the incompatibility of women and civilization. 31 Had the Old Frankfurt School recognized that only by "humanizing nature," by socializing the household and child-rearing, would women's handicraft mode of production, with its consequent immediate mode of thought (unmittelbare Umstandder Gedanken) and its "drudgery," be ended! But this would have required an anthropological analysis prohibited by their Freudianism. Had the Old Frankfurt School recognized that the massive employment of women in the public sector alone would facilitate the participation of women in socialized modes of production, with the mediated modes of cognition, the basis for the liberation of women. But this would have required a more sensitive understanding than reflected in Adorno's charge that " M a r x wanted to turn the whole world into a workhouse" (57). After all, it is not scarcity 32 but the transformation of consciousness that demands highly socialized modes of production. 33 The Old Frankfurt School saw none of this. The "seemingly inconsistent systems" of Marxism and psychoanalysis (296) are indeed incompatible. Marxism requires that women, as the bearers of traditional culture, cease to socialize the next generation while Freud saw no other role for women. The attempt to integrate these two theories can lead at the most to sexual liberalism but not to the liberation of women. The failure of the Old Frankfurt School to integrate reason and praxis (64-65, 266) is exemplified in this failure to cope with the profundity of the Woman Question. III Martin Jay is not a social scientist, so we can excuse his superficial understanding ol the major document of empirical social science produced by the Institut, the Authoritarian Personality. It will be convenient to detail his misunderstandings which run throughout Chapter VII, in terms of the research question, the sample, and the instrumentation and logistics of the Study. In its own way the Authoritarian Personality is an attempt to integrate Marxism and psychoanalysis. The Study sought to discover relationships between ideology, personality, and "sociological factors operating in the individual's past" (AP, 6). Perhaps because Fromm was not a student of Hegel, he was inclined in the earlier Studien iiber Autoritiit und Familie to polarities such as positive versus negative freedom. For a Hegelian, however, capitalism represented the world historic moment of the Spirit and a product of that objectivity was the world historic ("anthropological") character type, the authoritarian personality. Thus Adorno speaks of an "over-all pattern" in the data (AP, 655). What is implicit in the Study is a "theory of modern society as a w h o l e . . , a unified framework within which all the 'elements' are linked" (AP, 608). 34 Thus we would not expect a polarity of empirical types to be developed in the Study, and contrary to Jay's contention that the "democratic" was the "opposite of the 'authoritarian personality'" (227), it is clear that the anti-authoritarian subjects made up a residual category, not a polar type, for the Berkeley group. The "unprejudiced person" is character-

31 Ibid., p. 31: " F o r civilization, pure natural existence, animal or vegetative, was the absolute danger." 32 C f Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, Boston: Beacon Press (1955), p. 35. ss Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, New York: Harpers (1972), p. 124 and 142. The necessity of transforming women's consciousness along these lines as a condition of the transformation of society was first referred to in Karl Marx and F. Engels, German Ideology, op.eit., pp. 17-18. 34 Cf. also Georg Luk~ics, op.cit., pp. 22ff.

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ized by a "relative absence o f . . . features" and, as a group, they lack "basic uniformity" (AP, 484, 751). Adorno, commenting on "low-scorers," notes that "it is more difficult and less promising to analyze the absence of highly specific opinions and attitudes than it is to deal with their existence" (AP, 644) among the "high-scorers" on the Ethnocentrism (E) scale.a 5 As an epistemic point, the polar typology entails a recognition of the transcendental observer, utterly alien to Adorno. Examining linkages of"elements" of the totality does not. Since Jay has not fully grasped the question which the Study addressed, it is less than surprising that he misunderstands the sample as well. He ponders that the study "refrained from offering any conclusions about the prevalence of authoritarianism" in the general population (249). It obviously wouldn't; Adorno remarks "we are living in potentially fascist times" (AP, 656). The research question was that of the nature of relationships among social factors such as early childhood socialization, and ethnocentrism, which is a totalistic question, not the strength of prejudice itself which is a descriptive question (AP, 20-23, 972-973). Since earlier writers such as Leon Trotsky in 1930 pointed out that the petty bourgeois classes were the ground of National Socialism, it is theoretically unexceptional if Adorno and his colleagues look for the relationships of interest in this social group. 36 With the concern for the structure of phenomena, not the distribution, we would expect Adorno et al to be more attentive to the instrumentation of the Study than to its sample. The problems of instrumentation and logistics of this sort of study were hardly unknown outside of the Old Frankfurt School, or prior to the mid-forties. Lazarsfeld had written on the integration of open-ended interviews and survey questionnaires? 7 Rather than supposing that instrument development per se was "the primary methodological objective of the project" (241), we would like to suggest that the goal was to develop a complex Objeetivization which could capture the complexity of the phenomena of Objective and Subjective Mind that make up prejudice (AP, 12). This objectivization would subsume instruments such as the Anti-Semitism (A-S) Scale under ones like the Fascism (F) Scale, when the phenomena were similarly structured. The main statistical tool was correlational analysis, whereby the responses on the A-S Scale would be correlated, e.g. with the responses on the F-Scale (AP, 244). 38 Having gone through the various aspects of the Study, we have come to a problem in Jay's work that is quite distinct from those of interdisciplinary research, that of misreading. By way of illustration, he finds no "critique of tolerance for its own sake" (227) in the Authoritarian Personafity. But that critique is implicit in the need to "make use of authorities" to change the prejudiced individual (AP, 486) and is quite explicit in Adorno's disavowal of"pseudorational discussions of anti-Semitism" (AP, 607). Jay is no more sensitive to other's misreadings, as he cites uncritically (245) Bramson's hopelessly confused treatment of Marcuse and the Authoritarian Personality? 9 While the Study presents some material indicative of prejudiced attitudes towards as In fact, it was not until Arthnr Couch and K. Keniston, "Yeasayers and Naysayers",

Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 60 (1960), pp. 151-174, a blatantly psychologistic study, that "low authoritarianism" was finally measured. 36 There were also logistical considerations (AP, 22-23), as well as historical complications (AP, 267). 37 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, "The Controversy over Detailed Interviews", Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 8 (1944), pp. 38-60. 38 Jay apparently missed this (243). 39 Leon Bramson, Political Context of Sociology, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1961), pp. 135-139.

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women, where popular opinion accords with the Freudian position (AP, 107, 116, 121), it also displays the authors' own prejudice towards "the feminine role" (AP, 394-395, 405, 428-429). This additional evidence of the Old Frankfurt School's position on the Woman Question escapes Jay. He also fails to note the contradiction between Horkheimer and Flowerman's notion of education as the mechanism for social change (AP, vii) and Adorno's repudiation of this point (AP, 617), the latter recognizing that the problem of prejudice may well be psychodynamic (AP, 974). Instead Jay contrasts Horkheimer and Flowerman's programmatic observations (227) with some of Adorno's substantiveremarks (343, note 23), which are irrelevant in the context. However, Jay may find solace in the fact that Adorno himself misreads the protocol of one of subjects (AP, 651). Thus we are left with Jay's history. The lesson of the Old Frankfurt School is that of avoiding cultural isolation. The explanation of why the lnstitut took its characteristic cast will await further research. Shil's somewhat jaundiced essay in Vol. 99 of Daedalus will surely be relevant, as will the lead suggested by Wellmer: The "philosophization" of Capital in the discussions of Marxist intellectuals was a necessary reaction to the bureaucratic ossification and inflexibility of socialism . . . 40 Of course an adequate explanation will not proceed solely in the realm of ideas, as Wellmer seems to think. Karl Korsch's study in Marxism and Philosophy of the failure of the Second International is still instructive here for the historical materialist. Gordon Welty Wright State University

4o Wellmer, op.eit., p. 137.