Current Social Theory

The Resistance is German & Jewish – The Frankfurt School

In the fear-fueled years after the end of World War I, an intellectual “resistance” enclave was established in Germany – The Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) – in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. “The Frankfurt School,” as they became known, were  interested in developing studies of Marx and Freud in Germany as part of an effort to understand why we live in the sort of regressive, oppressive systems of social control that we do. 

That they devoted themselves to “social research” is indicative of their collective concern that the insights of philosophy should be tested and perhaps even be modified by empirical investigation. Some of the primary figure heads who helped shape the school (as well as the field of Critical Theory) worked inside as well as outside the Institute. They include philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Members of the Frankfurt School include Theodore W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Lowenthal. Also noteworthy are contributions from Erich Fromm and, some might argue more remotely, Walter Benjamin. Their critique of fascism and social change spanned a broad range of academic disciplines that include sociology, psychology, economics, political science, and literature.

The Institute was originally concerned with the German concept of critique that descended from Immanuel Kant, who was focused on the task of rescuing reason from what he believed was a proneness to “self-deception.” To advance Kant’s work, the Frankfurt School shifted the focus on deception from within the human mind toward outlying social forces that had been  transformed dialectically into the opposite of how they originally appeared. With that, reason became unreason; civilization yielded to barbarism, and so on.

A central area of intellectual focus for the school was the study of how  capitalist societies emerged. Drawing from a combination of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Weberian economics, members of the school applied concepts from this work to the study of societal change. They developed   what is now known as “Critical Theory” in opposition to “traditional theory.”

Critical Theory, as Max Horkheimer once said, aimed to “liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”

During the run-up to World War II and the time period of 1933, the Nazis forced the Institute to close and move to the United States; its members found a new home at Columbia University (note that the Institute returned again to Frankfurt in 1949). Later, after World War II had commenced, the Frankfurt school was among the first to  sound the alarm bells. Their worst fears had been realized: Hitler’s army and the ideology of German fascism had been unleashed on the world.

Critical Theory Today

Critical theory continues to retain its power to shed light on the social dynamics that make up the current political constellation. Its theories and concepts remain  salient for those interested in understanding why  regressive and oppressive political movements continues to resonate with Americans and many others. In light of this, we we might say that the philosophical impact of the Frankfurt School is apparent now more than ever.

In the United States things are especially complex. The current political right wing’s favorite insult is to refer to someone as a “Cultural Marxist.”  Used as a term of disparagement, it is routinely deployed as a weapon against critical thinking. Why? Let’s keep reading.

Despite this criticism, the ideas are well worth considering, even as they have been shown to be flawed in some aspects. Contemporary audiences, both inside and outside of the the social sciences and humanities, have recently returned to the canonical works of Critical Theory to study the rise of  mass culture and  authoritarianism in their own time (some have gone so far as to label this development “Trumpism,” but I would advise a word of caution here, because what is happening in the U.S. and beyond is much larger than just on person). At any rate, studies of authoritarianism have suddenly become fashionable again.

Theodore Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality ( published in 1950), which was written with colleagues Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, was one of the first scholarly works that explored authoritarianism. The purpose of the authors’ study was to try to assemble an extensive psychological and sociological profile of the “potentially fascistic —-individual.”

The book essentially asks: What makes a fascist? What are the key character traits that make someone identifiable as a fascist? They posited a Freudian explanation of authoritarianism, where they posited that an insecure and threatening childhood environment created authoritarian adults. In this respect, Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality is not only one of the most significant works of social psychology ever written, it also marks a milestone in the development of Adorno’s thought, as it reveals him attempting to grapple with the problem of fascism and explain the reasons for Europe’s turn to reactionary politics.

Methodologically speaking, Adorno based his work on  questionnaires and subsequent interviews with American subjects. Another group of scholars pursued a similar study. Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman’s 1949 book, “Prophets of Deceit,” studied the Father Coughlin (a Roman Catholic priest), a sensationalistic pulpit-based ideologue, whom they believed demonstrated how “large numbers of people would be susceptible to psychological manipulation.”

Adorno’s study, however, contained many flaws. Chiefly, it is criticized for the scientific  basis of the book’s acclaimed “F” type personality, which was determined to be unfalsifiable. An F-type person, according to him, was understood to possess specific identifiable character traits, such as: compliance with conventional values, non-critical thinking, compliance with authority, and an absence of introspectiveness.

Nonetheless, despite this criticism, this work led to ongoing efforts to study and authoritarianism in populations. Erich Fromm undertook  a study of working class attitudes and beliefs as part of an effort to understand the contradictions between their professed attitudes and their character traits. Although his study findings were statistically inconclusive, he nonetheless estimated that the working classes would not resist a fascist takeover.

Survey: One-Third of Republicans Favor Leaders Unchecked by Courts or Congress

Academic Research on Authoritarianism

Alex Ross wrote in a New Yorker essay in 2016 that “THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL Knew Trump was Coming.”  To this the philosopher Martin Jay adds, “much has been made of late of the prescience of the Frankfurt School in anticipating the rise of populist nationalism in general and Donald Trump in particular. By and large, the focus has been on their critiques of the culture industry, the authoritarian personality, the techniques of right-wing agitators, and antisemitism.” However, he goes on to write that there is another aspect of their legacy that has “been largely ignored, which supplements their insights into the psychological and cultural sources of the problem, and deepens their analysis of the demagogic techniques of the agitator. I’m referring here to their oft-neglected analysis of what they (The Frankfurt School) called a “racket society” to explain the unexpected rise of fascism” (Jay, 2020).

According to Jay, “the America to which Horkheimer and his colleagues had fled in 1934, the words “rackets” and “racketeering” had been coined to indicate the increasing prominence of “organized” or “syndicated” crime. Surviving the end of Prohibition, it thrived in such illegal enterprises as prostitution, drug-dealing, numbers-running, and gambling, and easily spilled over into other forms of corruption, including political.” Jay asks questions that have become more than prescient in the current political moment, as he asks: “But what if a whole society, the Frankfurt School wondered, had been corrupted by the racket model, turning to bonds of personal loyalty forged through protection against the threats of an increasingly harsh world? What if universal moral norms and the abstract rule of law had been supplanted by transactional and concrete relationships between patrons and clients? What if the role of classes — both in terms of struggle between and solidarity within — had been replaced by other hierarchical relations of domination outside of those generated by the economic mode of production? What if the era of bourgeois capitalism had only been an interlude between two epochs in which the mediation of the impersonal marketplace had been unnecessary to secure subordination and compliance? (Jay, 2020).

Criticism from Ross and Jay represents an off-shoot critique of a much larger and well-developed scholarly literature on authoritarianism. One of the major findings of this body of work is that authoritarianism is strongly associated with political conservatism. Some social scientists have gone so far as to consider authoritarianism the psychological basis of conservatism, whereas others simply describe it as a particularly militant variation of political conservatism; one that demonstrates a strong aversion to social change.

A recent Pew research study revealed that many Americans have autocratic/authoritarian leanings. One of the key predictor variables in the study, which measured authoritarian dispositions, was “education.” Higher levels of education were found to be associated with people who expressed more pro-social support for democratic forms of government.

“Political Party” affiliation was another variable that revealed interesting findings. Republican party affiliation was associated with people who preferred the “strong man”/anti-democratic model of government, which is the preference of authoritarians and autocrats. Follow this link to an article in Foreign Policy magazine that discusses findings from the study.

In a recent book, Wendy Brown, Peter Gordon, and Max Pensky look at how “freedom” has become a rallying cry for what are decidedly un-emancipatory movements.

Gordon, for example, dismantles the idea that fascism is rooted in the susceptible psychology of individual citizens, as he argues that we must look to the broader cultural and historical circumstances that lend it force.

Pensky brings together the unlikely pair of Tocqueville and Adorno to explore how democracies can buckle under internal pressure.

The essays included in this work do not seek to smooth over the irrationality of the contemporary world, nor do they offer the false comforts of an easy return to liberal democratic values. Rather, the three authors draw on their deep engagements with nineteenth–and twentieth–century thought to investigate the historical and political contradictions that have brought about this moment, as they respond to the  demands of the current political moment (Brown, Gordon, Pensky, 2018).

Researchers have argued since 1973 that political conservatism as an ideological belief system is significantly related to concerns about the management of uncertainty. One recent study conducted at NYU concluded that people respond to uncertainty in much the same manner as they do any threat —- they respond with fear. They refer to this as the “Uncertainty Threat Model of Political Conservativism.” The results from their structural equation models demonstrated consistent support for the hypothesis:

H1: “uncertainty avoidance (e.g., need for order, intolerance of ambiguity, and lack of openness to experience) and threat management (e.g., death anxiety, system threat, and perceptions of a dangerous world) each contributes independently to political conservatism” (as opposed to liberalism) (Jost and Napier, 2011).

But what is meant by “threat?” A wide range of studies have noted that threats might include: personal threats; threat of personal failure; threats perceived to occur across society; socially learned and experienced threats; external/internal fear and anxiety; conforming in-groups threatened by unconventional out-groups; individual as well as collective threats; personal insecurity caused by the threat of terrorism; and differentially perceived economic threats, precarity, and economic insecurity (for more on threats perceived by working class Americans, see an older study published by Seymour Martin Lipset, “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism”). In the case of the latter, Lipset hypothesizes that low status and low education predispose individuals to favor extremist and intolerant forms of political and religious behavior (Lipset, 1959).

According to Lipset:

• Authoritarian predispositions and ethnic prejudice flow more naturally from the situation of the lower classes than from that of the middle and upper classes in modern industrial society.
• The lower-class way of life produces individuals with rigid and intolerant approaches to politics. These findings imply that one may anticipate wide-spread support by lower-class individuals and groups for extremist movements.
• In some countries, working- class groups have proved to be the most nationalistic and jingoistic sector of the population.
• The social situation of the lower strata, particularly in poorer countries with low levels of education, predisposes them to view politics in simplistic terms of black and white, good and evil. Consequently, they should be more likely than other strata to prefer extremist movements, which suggest easy and quick solutions to social problems and have a rigid outlook rather than those which view the problem of reform or change in complex and gradualist terms and which support rational values of tolerance.
• The insecurities and tensions which flow directly from economic instability are reinforced by the particular patterns of family life associated with the lower strata. There is more direct frustration and aggression in the day-to-day lives of members of the lower classes, both children and the adults.
• A comprehensive review of the many studies made in the past 25 years of child-rearing patterns in the United States reports that their “most consistent finding” is the “more frequent use of physical punishment by working-class parents.” The link between child rearing practices in lower-class families and adult hostility and authoritarianism is suggested by the findings of investigations in Boston and Detroit that physical punishments for aggression, characteristic of the working class, tend to increase rather than decrease aggressive behavior.

In another study, Feldman and Stenner used child rearing questions from the 1992 American National Election Studies (ANES) to estimate authoritarianism. They  found that “authoritarianism and perceptions of environmental stress [i.e., threat] interact in creating intolerance.” Put another way, threat did not make individuals more authoritarian. Rather, according to the authors’ hypothesis, it activated intolerant authoritarian behaviors in individuals who were already predisposed to authoritarianism.

Given the nature  of modern life and how we are surrounded by evidence of its danger  from things like terrorism, mass shootings, school shootings, pandemic illness, it is perhaps not surprising that some people have become more antagonistic towards others whom they perceive hold different beliefs and values. More often than not, they have become more fearful of the Other. This easily gives way to an “us vs. them” mentality, leaving many Americans in a constant state of fear, if not actual war, inside their own heads. Some feel they must carry guns to buy a sandwich, whereas others feel the need to build literal walls to protect themselves from immigrants and perceived hostile Others.

Telling people that they should simply stop being so afraid is not likely to yield results. Because everything in their experience, which feeds their anxious worldview, shapes their sense of self, and informs their “gut experience,” tells them otherwise. For many people, being afraid and staying on alert 24/7 seems fully rational, if not  instinctive.

Social science researchers, on the other hand, would perhaps argue differently, advising people that they should be more afraid of the kinds of things that might actually kill them – i.e. not having adequate health insurance, not having access to clean air and water, owning a handgun that they potentially use on themselves, and quite literally working themselves to death.

Who Were (Are) They?

First Generation

Listed here is a more extensive list of prominent figures of the first generation Critical Theorists. They include: Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodore Adorno (1903-1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970), Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993), Otto Kirchheimer, and Eric Fromm (1900-1980).  First generation critical theorists devoted their work to concerns with the elaboration of Hegel’s dialectics and what is often referred to as the “Weber-Marx-Freud synthesis.”

Second Generation

From the time period of the 1970s, the second generation was led by Juergen Habermas, whose writing contributed to fostering a dialogue between the so-called “continental” and “analytical” philosophical traditions. Under Habermas’ influence, there was an effort to develop a more specific focus on understanding the conditions of human action, which were  coordinated through speech-acts. This work was further complemented by the works of others, including Klaus Günther, Hauke Brunkhorst, Ralf Dahrendorf, Gerhard Brandt, Alfred Schmidt, Claus Offe, Oskar Negt, Albrecht Wellmer and Ludwig von Friedeburg, Lutz Wingert, Josef Früchtl, Lutz-Bachman.

Third Generation

Now, it is possible to speak of a “third generation” of critical theorists, symbolically represented in Germany by the influential work of Axel Honneth [for a comparison between the “inner circle” of the first generation, and the outer circle, see Axel Honneth, “Critical Theory,” in Social Theory Today, ed. A. Giddens and J. Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 347ff. The focus of the third generation theorists, following the works of Honneth, was a return to Hegel’s philosophy (especially Hegel’s notion of “recognition”) which was understood to be a cognitive and pre-linguistic sphere grounding intersubjectivity. This group of scholars is represented by a large group of people, inside and outside of Germany, including figures such as  Stanley Aronowitz, Andrew Arato, Kenneth Baynes, Seyla Benhabib, Jay Bernstein, Richard Bernstein, James Bohman, Susan Buck-Morss, Jean Cohen, Fred Dallmayr, Peter Dews, Alessandro Ferrara, Jean-Marc Ferry, Nancy Fraser, David Held, Agnes Heller, David Ingram, Martin Jay, Douglas Kellner, Thomas McCarthy, David Rasmussen, William Rehg, Gillian Rose, Steven Vogel, Georgia Warnke, Stephen K. White, Joel Whitebook, and others. Many among them studied with Habermas and/or Marcuse.

Areas of Intellectual Focus

Under Horkheimer’s leadership, members of the Institute aimed to address a wide variety of economic, social, political and aesthetic topics, ranging from empirical analysis to philosophical theorization. As we find to be the case in a lot of contemporary scholarship, there was a great deal of concern with the contradictions of public life. To this end, the scholars focused on the complex interplay of the psycho-dynamics of fascism, the manipulation of public opinion, the substitution of information for knowledge, material excess, mass-consumerism, and the breakdown of communication. 

Erich Fromm helped cement the Institute’s focus on the psycho dynamics of capitalism, however, it was his revision of Sigmund Freud’s ideas that caused him to have a bit of a falling out with Horkheimer. Fromm argued that the key problem of psychology was how individuals relate to one another and to the society around them, as opposed to deterministic fixation at libidinal stages (anal, oral, genital, etc.) indicated by Freud’s theory (Durkin, 2020).

Briefly put, the Frankfurt School theorists saw advanced capitalism and its accompanying instrumental rationality as contributing to the deterioration of all social life.

Mass Culture

The idea that culture is mass produced by “the culture industry” was one of the major ideas explored by the Frankfurt School, especially by Adorno and Horkheimer.They argued that the culture industry (and the culturally homogeneous/generic products it produces) is killing the desire that might allow people to freely imagine a better world. Sadly, they observed that the masses were oblivious to the mass controlled culture in which they lived (i.e. why does anyone care about or watch the Kardashians?).

According to this view, people will never be able to create an ideal society, one designed to serve human needs (as opposed to the needs of capitalist corporations) as long as they are stuck living and laboring in a a commodity-driven culture. That’s another way of saying that we all live and work on a capitalist plantation.

Put another way, they were concerned that mass society was making people comlpascent; that people were passively accepting what mass culture produced, without thinking critically about the social process as well as their own human potential. Mass culture and its commodities were getting in the way of people imagining as well as working to create different forms of social organization that could help everyone (not just a few) attain a better life.

Later, the founders of the Institute were  joined by Erich Fromm, who was also interested in culture, though his approach took into account the psycho-social dynamics of social class as a component in theory-building. In particular, Fromm’s psychoanalytic theory, which he conceived at the Institute, constituted a major development and contributed greatly to the school.

The Frankfurt School provides us with useful perspectives that we can use to study contemporary society; it also provides the intellectual underpinning of critique in the academic field of Cultural Studies. We might further combine the work of this school with the theoretical innovations provided by Poststructuralist/postmodern theorists like Foucault, Baudrillard, and Jameson to analyze key developments in our  present moment – mass consumerism, mass incarceration, social media, fashion & culture, computer and information technologies, as well as new forms of knowledge and power, and subjectivity and identity.

The “Critical” Method

The academic influence of the “critical” method was far-reaching in terms of the educational institutions that set out to apply this way of thinking to the study of social problems.

Key areas of focus included a critique of modernities and capitalist society, the perceived pathologies/problems of society, and the definition of social emancipation, where there was an effort to specify the terms under which people might remain free (or forfeit freedom)

Critical Theory reflects a very specific interpretation of Marxist philosophy: it reinterprets some of Marx’s central economic and political notions, including the ideas of commodification, reification, and fetishization. In doing so, it helps us to think about the world in terms of power relations and how individual humans are constituted as subjects, who are subject to those relations or power.

Philosophical Roots of Critical Theory

Critical theory draws from Kantian rationalism and Marxist  Hegelianism, which postulates the following:

• humans are rational beings; the world of the real comes not from our senses, but from our rational capacities; therefore, a rational society is possible.
• social systems are presented with constant challenge and contradiction; these contradictions produce new syntheses, and out of this change (progress) occurs [dialectical thinking].
• Progress does not occur as a result of straight means-end logic (formal rationality); means-end logic is what underlies repression and domination in society; this leads to totalitarianism.
• Events are not discrete and isolated; events are part of a social process that implies constant change.

Critical Theory incorporated Hegel’s dialectical concept of Self and Other:

• Critical Theorists see social progress as contingent upon a self that is able to take/see itself as an object – so to act self-consciously.  Failing to do this, they warn,  guarantees we are all doomed to repeat the errors of the past.

The Problem of Enlightenment

Critical theorists (Horkheimer and Adorno in particular) were concerned with the problem of “Enlightenment” within modernity and post-modernity. So for example, the central premise of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment was that “something went wrong with the Enlightenment.” Enlightenment, in their view, became totalitarian; its force and focus was now directed toward controlling nature and humans.

Enlightenment, it turns out, created a culture that was superficially appealing even as it violated individuality by compelling conformity. Interestingly, the potential of the individual was not being destroyed by fascism alone; rather, it was the positivist turn of modern science within the Enlightenment movement that was doing the most damage.

Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the only way to get out of this modern version of hell is to engage in a Critical Theory of Society – that this is will be our only hope to achieve social transformation and progress.

What is “Dialectical” thinking?

Dialectical thinking is a form of analytical reasoning that pursues truth and knowledge as such through a process of reconciling discursive conflict. Social change, in other words, is understood to occur through contradiction, where oppositions are made to clash more or less. Another way to think about this is that opposites attract, change takes place, and then you end up with a third order situation that is not like either the first or the second order that clashed.

Dialectics/the dialectical method can be illustrated as a form of a discourse between two or more people, who hold different points of view. In classical philosophy, the dialectic represents a form of reasoning based upon dialogue of arguments and counter-arguments, where one advocates propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses). The outcome of such a dialectic might be the refutation of a relevant proposition, or a synthesis, or a newly formulated combination of the opposing assertions.

Hegelian dialectic follows this logic, however, it is usually presented as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, which gives rise to its reaction, an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; the tension between the two are resolved by means of some form of synthesis. Although this model is named after Hegel, he himself never used that specific formulation. Hegel attributed the terminology to Kant. Carrying on Kant’s work, it was actually Fichte who greatly elaborated on the synthesis model and made it popular.

Summary of Dialectics

• Dialectics originated with Plato (dialogues)

• Kant also uses the dialectic (but different than Hegel does)

• In Hegel/Marx, the dialectic is about a relationship between subject and object.

• Horkheimer/Adorno examine the dialectic of reason and un-reason, as they look at how modernity’s promise of progress produces new forms of barbarism and violence.

• Marcuse looks at the dialectic of the individual and society; technology and domination.

Critique of Mass Culture

The critique of mass culture, however, remains as what is perhaps its most well-known social criticism. Writing for The New Yorker, Alex Ross says “Adorno believed that the greatest danger to American democracy lay in the mass-culture apparatus of film, radio, and television.” Indeed, in his view, this apparatus operates in dictatorial fashion even when no dictatorship is in place: it enforces conformity, quiets dissent, mutes thought. Nazi Germany was merely the most extreme case of this, which was essentially a late-capitalist condition, where people surrendered real intellectual freedom in favor of a sham paradise of personal liberation and comfort.

Watching wartime newsreels, Adorno concluded that the “culture industry,” as he and Horkheimer called it, was replicating fascist methods of mass hypnosis. Above all, he saw a blurring of the line between reality and fiction. In his 1951 book, “Minima Moralia,” he wrote:

Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power, a process that truth itself cannot escape if it is not to be annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false, which the hirelings of logic were in any case diligently working to abolish. So Hitler, of whom no one can say whether he died or escaped, survives.** **” (Ross)

Psychoanalysis, and the Nietzsche/Marx/Freud Synthesis

From the beginning, psychoanalysis in the Frankfurt School was conceived in terms of a reinterpretation of Freud and Marx. Its consideration in the School was clearly due to Horkheimer, who encouraged his researchers to direct their attention to the subject.

It was Fromm, nevertheless, whose incisive critique best produced an advancement, in terms of thinking on the subject. Fromm’s major aim and contribution was his effort to synthesize Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, which he said was “the missing link between ideological superstructure and socio-economic base” (Jay 1966, p. 92). Fromm attributed the rise of Nazis and fascism to the notion of threat. According to him, people who felt isolated, powerless, and insecure were people who  “escaped from freedom” by submitting to Nazi authoritarianism.

A radical shift occurred again, in terms of the School’s interests, when Fromm departed the Institute in the late 1930s. Despite retaining psychoanalysis as an area of interest (and in particular Freud’s instinct theory) there was almost at total abandonment of the study of Marxism and a turn away from the linking of psychoanalysis to social change. Fromm’s insight into the psychic (or even psychotic) role of the family was effectively sidelined We see this reflected in Adorno’s later paper “Social Science and Sociological Tendencies in Psychoanalysis” (1946), as well as Marcuse’s book Eros and Civilization (1955).

Fascism, Families, and Authoritarian Personalities

In retrospect, the move away from a focus on families was an unfortunate development, considering it was interest in the family as an agent of socialization, which proved to be so crucial to the School’s empirical studies in 1940 that culminated in Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno working together on “The Authoritarian Personality.“

It should be noted here that Nietzsche’s influence, particularly his critique of Enlightenment, was significant. According to Rolf Wiggershaus, Adorno aimed to correct/supplement Marx through the use of Nietzsche as a thinker concerned with the “totality of happiness incarnate.” Horkheimer, likewise, supported this view, to the extent that he saw in Nietzsche a critic of the “entire [bourgeois] culture of satiety” (Wiggershaus).

Horkheimer, says Wiggershaus, shares Nietzsche’s (as opposed to Marx’s) “distrust of the bourgeoisie” (Adorno); he also shares their detachment from the proletariat and social democracy, and merely avoids speaking of the superman (Nietzsche’s “aristocratism”), since there are those who would allege that, without class-rule and mass-domination, the characteristics and higher culture of the superman would be impossible. Horkheimer sees in this only a problem of release from stultifying toil. He concludes that if Nietzsche had realized that an extremely advanced domination of nature would make stultifying toil superfluous, he would have realized that his conviction that “all excellence [develops]. . .only among those of equal rank” means that either all or none would become supermen.

Thus, in a sharp criticism of Nietzsche, Horkheimer wrote: “Beneath [Nietzsche’s] seemingly misanthropic formulations lies . . . not so much this [elitist] error but the hatred of the patient, self-avoiding, passive, and conformist character at peace with the present.”

Adorno also said he did not want to adopt Nietzschean concepts like “love” and “longing.” Indeed, he and Horkheimer valued Nietzsche above all for his frankness concerning the instinctual nature of cruelty, for his attentiveness to the stirring of repressed instincts without minimizing rationalization. No philosopher, in their view, had brought such anti-Christian, antihumanistic furor to his age as the pastor’s son Nietzsche, who interacted almost exclusively with the educated, patricians, and petty nobility.

Likewise, they found no philosopher had attempted so resolutely, without regard for socio-historical trends, to negate and destroy his own origins and training.

On the issue of race, Adorno and Horkheimer insisted in a 1942 discussion that Nietzsche must be rescued from fascist and racist appropriations. They found in his work, perhaps more than any other philosopher, their own fears and desires confirmed and accentuated.

What’s Up with All This Critique of Capitalism?

Some might say, “Why all the hate for capitalism? Don’t you like money? Because I like money! Capitalism has brought about great innovations!” And so on and so on. Critical Theorists took a different view, because they were focused on analyzing social organization, and most especially systems of social control, which condition how people think, act, and form their basic beliefs about the world.

Most historians, including Marxist historical materialists, locate the rise of industrial capitalism in 18th century Britain. This European centered view, unfortunately overlooks the numerous forms of global commercial organization that thrived for centuries before this time (i.e. Venice, Istanbul, Spain) as well as the use of slavery to further economic enterprise. Nonetheless, the view taken by Critical theorists, like Marx before them, was that capitalism contained the seeds of totalitarianism and authoritarianism; as a social system, it did a better job of controlling people than markets and when left to its own devices (i.e. no government intervention), it would ultimately enslave people.

When you look at things this way, the picture that emerges in regards to capitalism ventures into dark territory. A better question than “Is Capitalism Good (or bad) is “Why does capitalism have such a firm psychological hold on people?” “Why do so many working class people, who are getting abused by this system, stand among its most vocal supporters?” You have to get to the root of this problem in order to nurture any hope of emerging from the contradictions imposed by capitalism.

Critical School Theorists  developed a compelling synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxist thinking in order to try to understand why we still regressive oppressive systems of social organization. They encouraged us to reflect on why it is so hard for people to recognize that capitalism, as a system of social organization, is a major barrier to creating human self-fulfillment and happiness. The answer they came up with, derived from psychoanalysis, was simply this: that capitalist ideology is socialized and thus internalized (into the super-ego). That’s another way of saying that people have become more or less brainwashed to act against (vote against) their own best interests.

Where it gets more interesting is how there are people who have mastered the con of playing the the role of the Super-ego: they act like an authoritarian father and either make demands, make people feel guilty, and correspondingly make them feel loved when they conform. This is often why the the working class continues to act against their own best interests. In essence, they complete the work of the authoritarian father figure, who despite their claims of strength are not strong enough to accomplish this feat alone.

This explanation goes a long way in explaining why many of us, despite all of our education, remain in the thrall of capitalism and hence throw our weight behind the authorities who are constantly telling people that they should love it and that anyone who is against it is a “loser.” Again, the questions we are still left with are compelling: Why are people so easily cowed by authority? Why do they conform? Why don’t people stand up for themselves?

Criticisms of Critical Theory

One critique of Critical Theory making the rounds of late is that the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist communist philosophers and sociologists, was at a loss regarding how to reinterpret Marx and help working people achieve class consciousness, so they could, in turn, initiate Marx’s theorized revolution.

The leaders of the school turned their attention to the cultural institutions of society. It is not an unfair criticism to say that Adorno was excessively pessimistic, offering almost no way out of the problem of culture and its ability to dominate the thinking of the masses. Put another way, critics have said that their view culture comprises a totalizing system. Of course, they advocate escape, even as they also lament that escape is impossible.  Their views, while compelling, are not backed up by empirical data, nor are they generalizable.

Critics, likewise, have argued that the products of mass culture would not be popular if people did not enjoy them. Culture is in this sense self-determining – people get what they desire.

Traditional Marxists accused the Critical theorists of claiming the intellectual heritage of Karl Marx without feeling the obligation to apply theory to the project of political action, or what Marx referred to as Praxis. Here again, it is argued that Critical Theory offers no practical solutions for societal change.

Positivist philosophers and social scientists accuse Critical theorists of not submitting their theories to empirical tests (they base this critique on Karl Popper’s revision of Logical Positivism). And in this they are correct. But that does not mean that the ideas fully lack merit. Counter-arguments leveled against positivists are that they are invested too heavily in the idea of standpoint objectivity – that they can magically stand outside of the field they are studying and construct variables to study that are completely without bias (very difficult as often the categories and variables they study are infused with one form of bias or another). This counter-critique also holds merit.

More recently, neoconservative critics in the United States have dismissed the entire canon of Critical Theory to what they have termed “Cultural Marxist” rubbish. They have reduced the complexity of thought on offer by a school of diverse thinkers as a refuge for “political correctness.” Of particular annoyance is how Critical Theory and its proponents tend to be e people who reject plain language and simple expression, preferring (or so it is argued) obscurantism and long-winded justifications for dubious schemes of social engineering.

In his book, The Death of the West, former Fox television personality and political pundit Pat Buchanan argues “the Frankfurt School must be held as a primary suspect and principle accomplice in the titular catastrophe.”

Nonetheless, Frankfurt School critical theory, contrary to the claims of many critics and media polemicists, can help put into context what appear to be the rising tide of authoritarian tendencies on both the right and left of the political spectrum. Though, to be sure, the aims of the two polarized camps are not the same.

Adorno was, in fact, very concerned about the bureaucratizing tendencies of capitalism (as was Weber) and its effects on social equality, politics, and culture.  He thought that overly bureaucratized governments could inspire left as well as right-wing totalitarianism. At the same time, he  worried this culture similarly might foster right and left-wing fascism.

Tyranny from the left, unmoored from disciplined and systematic intellectual reflection, is perhaps one example of what happens when people rise up against an over-administered society. Alternatively, tyranny from the right, which has also given up on reflective engagement and similarly decries government overreach, leads us to the same place. The way out; that is, the escape, cannot be a world with no government, no social order, and no social bonds between people. How we negotiate the ground between the extremist poles will determine where we go from here.

Summary

Whenever plainspoken self-proclaimed truth tellers tell you that complex social problems can be solved with simple “common sense” solutions, you  should let that be a warning that you’re about to get “played.” If you find the logic of plain-spokeness and simplicity appealing, take a moment and ask yourself – why? What is the appeal?

Reading Critical Theory can be difficult, but the theories and the ideas contained in them are compelling even if they aren’t perfect. Unlike conspiracy theory, which offers simplified full-circle solutions to every problem (blame it all on the lizard people), critical theory says “life is complicated…humans are complicated.” At the very least, Critical Theory aims to speak truth to power, as they attempt to mobilize people to action, this way people don’t sit back and accept government gridlock, status quo inertia, and social policies that only serve the wealthy and privileged. Who would be threatened by that?

Keep thinking. Take all the time you need.

Sources

Martin Jay, The dialectical imagination : a history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston : Little, Brown, 1973) – provides a history overview.

Susan Buck-Morss, The origin of negative dialectics : Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York : Free Press, 1977)

Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, trans. M. Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994)

Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985)

Zoltán Tar, The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977)

Joel Anderson, “The Third Generation of the Frankfurt School.”

Alex Ross, “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming.”

Martin Jay, “Trump, Scorsese, and the Frankfurt School’s Theory of Racket Society,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020.

Stephen M. Sales and Kenneth E. Friend, “Success and Failure as Determinants of Level of Authoritarianism,” Behavioral Science 18(3) (May 1973), 163.

Glenn D. Wilson, The Psychology of Conservativism (New York: Academic Press, 1973).

More Reading

Additional reading might be found on the blog – Introducing the Frankfurt School

For information on the current activity of the Institute, see the following website linked here.

Discussion Questions

How can we use the tools provided by Critical Theory to understand some of the more pressing problems that characterize the present moment in regards to culture and politics? Problems like police brutality, war, racial antipathy, the disappearance of the middle class, and other problems in connection with social inequality.

If the project of modernity was to achieve Enlightenment, do you think this vision has been fulfilled?

What role do you see science playing in this process? Has science been put to good use in a way that allows us to be self-reflective and democratic, or has it too occasioned “new forms of barbarism?”

Much has been made of Donald Trump’s campaign for the U.S. Presidency as well as his seeming popularity and rise in polls. Questions abound, such as “Is Trump like Hitler?” or “Is Trump like Mussolini?” The crux of what is happening, however, has nothing to do with parsing the political distinctions between fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, or unpacking the ways Mussolini was unlike Hitler. Rather, we might look closer into the process of how violent and repressive group social identities may be formed.

What is “Authoritarianism?”

Frederick Solt defined authoritarians are those with “unhesitating obedience to orthodox authorities—and indeed their demands that their fellow citizens similarly obey—such authoritarian individuals are thought to have provided a crucial base of mass support for some of the worst political disasters of the past century, from aggressive wars to genocide.”

Solt cites empirical research on authoritarians being “more intolerant of ethnic, religious, sexual, and political minorities.” According to him, their greater respect for authority “yields ready support” for the aggressive use of police and military force. Higher levels of authoritarianism “make individuals more likely to condone and even endorse illegal and blatantly undemocratic government.”

What is “Totalitarianism?”

Totalitarianism generally refers to centralized control by an autocratic authority; it is a political concept that holds that citizens should be totally subject to an absolute state authority.

What is “Fascism?”

Fascism generally refers to an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. In practice, we can see it operating in extreme right-wing, authoritarian governments, where there is strict intolerance for oppostional views. As a social movement, Fascism came into prominence in early 20th-century Europe under the influence if national syndicalism. One form of Fascism originated in Italy during World War I; it later spread to other European countries.

Fascism opposes liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism. If we look at it from the perspective of the traditional left-right paradigm, Fascism is identified with the far right.During the time period of World War I, Europe underwent massive changes in connection with the Great War; changes in terms of social organization, the state, and technology. Given how the entire society was mobilized for war, distinctions between civilian and combatant easily gave way. As a result, a form of “military citizenship” evolved. Everything in society was oriented towards supporting the war, economics, logistics, and even human procreation. The state, furthermore, achieved unprecedented power to intervene in the lives of citizens.

In terms of ideology, Fascists tend to believe that liberal democracy is obsolete; that it can’t be administered effectively and what is needed is a strong leader backed up by an authoritarian/totalitarian one-party state. Such a leader operates, more or less, as a dictator. A martial system of government is typically formed by members of a fascist governing party who work to forge national unity at all costs.

Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature; political violence, war, and even imperialism are understood to be within the normal range of options that may be exercised in order for the state to achieve its nationalistic goals. Fascists advocate a what might be thought of as a  mixed economy, through a combination of protectionist and interventionist economic policies.

Efforts to lable someone a “fascist” have, at least since the end of World War II, been met with skepticism (the rhetorical move is generally associated with hyperbole). Nevertheless, that does not mean that it is inappropriate to invoke use of the term. Why? Because in contemporary American society, we are witnessing a resurgence of what experts have identified to be “neo-fascist” and “post-fascist” groups. The candidancy of Donald Trump has, furthermore, embraced some of the toxic rhetoric of white supremecists, go so far in many instances to “re-tweet” the actual words of leaders associated with these groups. To be fair then, critiques and comparisons of Trump with Nazis and Nazism are not out of line because they share unusual points of resonance.

Alexander Billet explores the aesthetics of Fascism in Trump’s campaign in his article entitled  “Donald Trump and the Aesthetics of Fascism: What a 20th-century Marxist art critic can teach us about a very 21st-century candidate.” His article points to “The Freedom Kids,” who Trump trotted out on one of his campaign stops.

Cowardice

Are you serious?

Apologies for freedom, I can’t handle this.

When freedom rings, answer the call!

On your feet, stand up tall!

Freedom’s on our shoulders, USA!

Enemies of freedom face the music, c’mon boys, take them down

President Donald Trump knows how to make America great

Deal from strength or get crushed every time

According to Billet, “This is a cartoon version of American nationalism. The sheer absurdity of the performance is stunning. And yet, Trump’s supporters will surely both love it and accuse anyone who doesn’t of being a terrorist and a communist.”

Trump’s Aestheticization of Politics (reposted from article by Alexander Billet)

All of this points to one of the reasons why the discussion about Trump and fascism is such a difficult one to resolve. More than any other American presidential candidate in recent memory, Donald Trump understands the ideological power, the raw manipulative magic, in politics as aesthetics.

The phrase “the aestheticization of politics” is borrowed from the late Marxist philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s work has experienced a resurgence in interest over the past year. Partially, this has to do with the 75th anniversary of his death (suicide, poignantly enough after the news that he was about to be basically handed over to the Nazis). But what really animates the timeliness of his writings is the brilliant way he was able to diagnose just how capitalism saturates itself into the fabric of culture.

In his 1936 essay “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin charted the way in which technology had forever changed art. The ability to reproduce an image or a sound countless times had created the potential for the democratization of art. But that democratization was prevented by the means for that reproduction remaining the hands of a few. Thus, it was possible for undemocratic regimes and governments to use art for their own benefit the way it hadn’t been previously feasible.

Benjamin was writing with Nazi Germany in mind. This was a regime that knew how to deploy aesthetics ingeniously. Even as Hitler and the Third Reich railed against the poisons of modernity, they both used the latest technology to relay their message. They grabbed people’s attention and held it, igniting their imaginations and providing them with a sense of ownership over a system that would just as soon see them driven into dirt. Says Benjamin:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

The crisp, angular uniforms for party members cranked out by the thousands, the massive orchestrated rallies, the technologically innovative films of Leni Riefenstahl—these are all perfect examples of how fascism aestheticized politics to its own end. All employed the rhythmic regimentation of life, the fetishization of raw power and sacrifice for the Fatherland. Violence was not celebrated for its own sake, but was seen as a necessary and fascinating virtue, even beautiful for its ability to mobilize people’s minds and bodies.

The resemblance between these and the Freedom Kids performance, or Trump’s descriptions of a “great, beautiful wall” along the Mexico border, are clear. All equate freedom with the ability to exert absolute power. All are the intended substance of the vague slogan “Make America Great Again.”

But the aestheticization of politics does not (by itself) equal fascism. Benjamin’s argument is that fascism represents merely theintroduction of aesthetics into politics. On the one hand, he is arguing that the manipulative link between politics, art and fascism is not strictly causal. On the other, he’s saying that the ability to make human suffering pretty for political gain is something that can persist well beyond the decline of classic fascist dictators like Hitler, Mussolini or Franco.

In fact, if there is anything we can say about the aestheticization of politics in our own age, it is that it’s alarmingly quotidian. Contemporary cultural critics like Terry Eagleton, Martin Jay and others have observed this in their own writings. David Harvey, in his 1990 book The Condition of Postmodernity, argues that neoliberalism and its postmodern cultural logic have made meaning and coherence flexible, relative, accountable not to facts, but to subjective feelings. In this landscape, the aestheticization of politics is more effortless than ever.

Telescope this forward to today. Social media has made the individual persona or narrative, regardless of truth, endlessly reproducible through the electronic channels of Twitter and Facebook. Trump clearly knows this. And his time on The Apprentice proved that his Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous manner was ultimately adaptable to a 21st-century cultural tenor. He has a bottomless bank account to back it up. Add in a white, increasingly old middle class, palpably anxious about whether their days are numbered that can seal themselves in a media bubble echo chamber should if they really want to, and you’ve gone a long way toward explaining what’s underneath Trump’s poll numbers—and what makes him somewhat exceptional.

His media strategists are masters at detaching meaning from fact, making words accountable only to themselves and how loudly they’re shrieked. This makes him a quintessentially postmodern candidate contrasted to an age when the cold, everyday facts of collapse, crisis and apocalypse are unavoidable.

Trump taps into a vein of very real fear, and uses virtually any unmoored fact he can find to mobilize it. It is precisely why, though it is quite incorrect to label his right-wing populism as “fascist,” it is not impossible that he could pull a Father Coughlin. That there are open white supremacists campaigning for him shows that the raw materials are there, waiting to be pieced together. That his campaign is able to employ an “aesthetic strategy”—though they would likely never acknowledge it—reveals an ability to do so.

What can be done then? Benjamin, in his essay, posits an intriguing alternative to an obvious “anybody but Trump” voting strategy: Against the aestheticization of politics, the left “responds by politicizing art.” It sound likes classic academic hairsplitting, but what each represents is one of the elements that has set apart our side as more thoroughly democratic and bottom-up.

The Freedom Kids’ song employs a beat that is simple and one-dimensional, easy to follow, lulling the listener into a sense of security and predictability. It uses buzzwords and phrases that occupy a specific place in the heads of Trump’s target audience and are guaranteed to get a rise: “cowardice,” “apologize for freedom,” “c’mon boys,” “enemies of freedom,” and yes, “make America great.”

Never is there any mention of what these mean or the potential human toll underneath them. That’s deliberate. They are intended to whip resignation and fear into a highly emotional and irrational powder-keg that can be ignited or dampened as those as the front of it see fit. Trump is in control, and he wants us to both know this and take comfort in it.

By contrast, the left has a rich and vibrant history of using art, music, literature and performance to gain critical distance, to question why life is the way it is, to make it weird, unfamiliar, anarchic and atonal so that we might see just how little our present condition makes sense. This is art intended to challenge and polarize. It is a disruption; a fundamentally democratic disruption that pulls back the wizard’s curtainand reveals the cold, Machiavellian machinations of political and economic elites for what they are. It is a tradition that runs through the revolutionary romanticism of William Blake, socialist surrealists like André Breton, Benjamin Péret, Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, and the best examples of psychedelia, graffiti art and punk rock.

It is an alternative that flips Trump’s logic upside down, be it through individual pranks or concerted mobilization. It can be found in the counter-protests that are starting to follow him wherever he goes. Or in workers’ unionization efforts and threats of strikes at his casinos (a fitting rebuke to a man whose solution to the Greek debt crisis is to build a hotel on top of the Parthenon). Or the work of Sarah Levy, the Portland, Oregon artist whose painting “Whatever” took the Donald’s words about Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycle and turned them (literally!) inside out.

The Freedom Kids’ handlers would love nothing more than for us to smile gleefully when the doomsday button is finally pushed. Our side, conversely, must regain the confidence to smash and reshape reality, and push back against the Right’s weaponized fatalism.

Trump’s Authoritarianism & the “New Wave” – It Can Happen Here

Paula Young Lee’s article shifts focus as it takes a look at Trump’s authoritarianism. According to Lee, “Americans struggling to understand Donald Trump’s domination of the Republican primaries should consider that totalitarianism has already happened on U.S. soil—not as a political movement that swept the nation, but in the petri dish of one high school. The frightening but enlightening story is recounted in The Wave (Die Welle), a gripping 2008 German film that shows how a study in group psychology unexpectedly revealed the seductive lure of fascism. The plot is based on true events that took place in 1967 in a Palo Alto, Calif. high school.

The Wave commensed when “history teacher Ron Jones conducted an experiment with his class of 15-year-olds to sample the experience of the attraction and rise of the Nazis in Germany before World War II. In a matter of days the ‘Third Wave’ experiment began to get out of control, as those attracted to the movement became aggressive zealots.”

For the American teenagers caught up in the Third Wave, the startling discovery was how easily this particular strain of group-based identity could coalesce and harden, descending into cruelty and drowning them in a darkness they didn’t know existed. (In 1976, Ron Jones wrote a short story detailing what happened, and there also exists a 2012 documentary, The Lesson Plan, based on the events.)

“Be careful who you follow,” warns Mark Hancock, who was in Jones’ classroom, “because you never know where they might lead you.” For the students, the events of 1967 remain an abject lesson in “the psychology of leaders and followers, when passion for one’s cause leads to intolerance and persecution of others, extremist political and religious groups, cults, gangs, bullying, etc.”

Lee says “the world is now watching the Wave unfold in real time across the U.S. Given the steady amplification of violence at Trump rallies, it is impossible not to notice the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent to political prominence, and the swift spread of the Wave under Ron Jones/Herr Wenger. Appealing to a disenfranchised working class angered over jobs and immigration, Trump plays to unspoken hopes that he will upend the racial hierarchy destabilized by President Obama and reassert the primacy of whiteness, as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie has argued.”

“Trump’s campaign is itself the monstrous love child of pop culture married to ignorance. The “poorly educated” people Trump “loves” are simultaneously disgusted and enthralled by a media machine cynically profiting off their fears. Covert operators—all white, mostly male—who’ve managed to infiltrate Trump rallies have attempted to describe the peculiar energy there. They enter with vague expectations of entertaining weirdness and exit with their faith in humanity shaken to its core.”

“This isn’t politics,” says Lee, “it’s pure spectacle, right down to the messages from its leader. Trump paradoxically claims his lies are true, because to confirm a lie requires an ontological framework that assumes the possibility of truth. Eliminate truth, dismiss reality as so much media bias, and you automatically eliminate the lie, too.”

Un-Reason & “Un-truth”

As Horkheimer and Adorno argue in Dialectic of Enlightenment, we are potentially entering an era distinguished by new forms of Barbarism and un-reason. Lee argues similarly, using more plain-spoken language: “if Trump is the first political candidate to understand we have entered the Age of Untruth— an age from which there is no turning back—it is also the case that his adherents are attracted to the glittering promise of a return to authoritarianism for precisely that reason. The greater the epistemological uncertainty, the more vital the need to externalize order through abstract systems such as the Church and the Law, which create bright lines of difference between “us” and “them.”

“By orchestrating the chaos and calling it “beautiful,” Trump invokes the aesthetics of popular performance in order to legitimize inchoate feelings of anger and despair. Meanwhile, political commentators have been calling on Trump to start “acting presidential,” as if being a good actor was a necessary and sufficient condition of being the leader of the free world. What does acting presidential actually mean?

In Trump’s case, it means he is likely to eventually step in and impose order on the chaos he created; he will demand that his followers control themselves, but this will succeed only if Trump commands absolute power over their hearts, minds, and bodies. Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action.”

Social Class, Authoritarianism & Fascism

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? How has Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, become so popular?

What’s made Trump’s rise even more puzzling is that his support seems to cross demographic lines — education, income, age, even religiosity — that usually demarcate candidates. And whereas most Republican candidates might draw strong support from just one segment of the party base, such as Southern evangelicals or coastal moderates, Trump currently does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the towns of upstate New York, and he won a resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses.

To get at the answer here, we have to think about why people like, relate to, and/or sometimes act like authoritarians.

Solt takes a social learning approach to argue that “contexts of greater economic inequality shape experiences with authority in ways that can be expected to increase authoritarianism.” He says:

“Societies with higher inequality have unequal distribution of power, creating hierarchies of wealth and authority; the greater the economic inequality, the more widespread the authoritarianism. Insecurity plays a vital role here. reflexive deference to traditional authority (church, state, etc.) becomes a coping mechanism for social and economic isolation, powerlessness, and above all, fear. These can all be countered by “clinging to the refuge of unquestioning obedience to authority.”

Amherst Study

Last September, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Matthew MacWilliams realized that his dissertation research might hold the answer to not just one but all three of these mysteries. MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear. So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump.

His research was based on polling a large sample of likely voters, where he looked for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator. He later repeated the same poll in South Carolina, shortly before the primary there, and found the same results, which he published in Vox.

As it turns out, MacWilliams wasn’t the only one to have this realization. Miles away, in an office at Vanderbilt University, a professor named Marc Hetherington was having his own aha moment. He realized that he and a fellow political scientist, the University of North Carolina’s Jonathan Weiler, had essentially predicted Trump’s rise back in 2009, when they discovered something that would turn out to be far more significant than they then realized.

That year, Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

The upshot of all of this research is that social class and psychological pre-dispostions matter – and they have obvious implications for democracies with growing inequalities – increasing inequality will promote the social conditions that lead to support for authoritarians.

Most troublingly, the research also shows that authoritarians prefer the use of force to diplomacy. At home and abroad. Think about that.

Sources

“An Erie Early Warning of Trump’s Authoritarianism,” by Paula Young Lee. Last accessed April 2016.

“Authoritarianism’s Hidden Root Cause,” by Mathew Willis. Last accessed April 2016

“The Rise of American Authoritarianism,” by Amanda Taub. Last accessed April 2016

“Donald Trump and the Aesthetics of Fascism: What a 20th-century Marxist art critic can teach us about a very 21st-century candidate.”  by Alexander Billet. Last accessed August 4, 2016.

Discussion Questions

What parallels can you draw between the arguments presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Donald Trump’s political candidacy?
Set aside the Hitler/fascism comparisons – how do you see Trump exemplifying an “authoritarian” personality? What is it about him that resonates such mass-appeal?

What do you think will happen if Trump is not elected? Where will all the angry people direct their anger?

Generally speaking, of the four front-runners for political office, one on the GOP is a man who thinks God talks to him; the other is a egotist who essentially thinks he’s God. Forget about the candidates for a moment, what does this say about U.S. society, when we consider how many people do not appear to be turned off by this kind of thinking?

 

 

 

 

We Are All Bored – My Dinner With Andre

The film My Dinner With Andre consists of one meal and one conversation between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, which takes place at an upscale restaurant in New York. Gregory tells Shawn of his varied (and in some cases, quite bizarre) experiences since abruptly leaving the theatre five years prior. The two men then dive into a lengthy discussion in which Gregory skewers modern life as insincere and complacent, and Shawn defends it, asserting that humans should be entitled to certain creature comforts in their lives. By the end of the discussion (and the film), the two men essentially agree to disagree, and yet Shawn seems particularly moved by the exchange, connecting Gregory’s ideas to his own childhood and life on the cab ride home.

Two theme questions tie the entire dialog together: (1) should we live spontaneously in the moment, disconnecting ourselves from the totalitarian social forces of culture and rational purposive action; and (2) what does it mean to be human in the modern world?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68JLWyPxt7g

Structure/Format

In Act 1, Wally displays reluctance to meet with Andre, thus creating the tension that is carried throughout the film. For about a half hour, Andre, with brilliant story-telling ability, describes his quests around the world in an attempt to find meaning. In Act 2, Andre defends his philosophy of life (point 1 above), while Wally uncomfortably listens and politely even concedes some points. In Act 3, Wally reveals his true opinion of Andre’s views and, defending common sense, hammers away at Andre’s notions of purposeless action, outposts of enlightenment, and the supernatural.

The discussion is intense and thought-provoking, as the two men invite the audience to participate with them, pondering what it means to be human in our ever-changing modern society. Andre, the spiritualist and skeptic, asserts that the life lived by most New Yorkers in modern times is like living a dream: people only experience what they want to experience and perceive what they want to perceive.

Andre suggests that people must simplify their lives in order to fully experience reality; that the path to enlightenment is to eschew unnecessary material comforts in exchange for “real” – if not necessarily pleasant or comfortable – experiences, feelings, and emotions. Shawn doesn’t exactly disagree with Andre, but he argues that not everybody is capable of climbing Mount Everest in order to experience “real life,” nor should they have to. He contends that people can live perfectly simple and content lives even with their electric blankets and morning coffee and New York Times.

In truth, both men make excellent points, and that’s part of the point of “My Dinner With Andre:” in modern society, one must find a way to strike a balance between the material comforts that make us happy and the simple and “real” experiences that keep us grounded. Shawn and Gregory both represent extremes at the end of each spectrum, and the conversation aims to strike a harmony between them by proving that neither man can completely disprove the other’s argument.

Andre listens graciously to the attack. Both leave the dinner unconvinced of the others’ views, but rewarded by the debate. Like philosophy itself, this movie is for selective audiences, which the filmmakers themselves clearly understood.

“My Dinner with Andre” has influenced two other philosophical movies. In “The Quarrel” (1991), a conservative and a liberal Jew discuss the moral implications of the Nazi Holocaust. In “Mind Walk” (1991), a poet, politician and physicist discuss the relation between quantum physics and environmentalism.

Philosophy – Perception in the Life World

The existential-phenomenological tradition in philosophy is asserting a major influence here, particularly the German romantic and hermeneutic traditions – they explore among other ideas the notion that we are thrown into being, thrown into interpretation, and that meaning is both constructed and revealed through responding to that thrownness with “givenness,” attentiveness and care.

Heidegger, for one, aimed to turn away from “ontic” questions about beings to ontological questions about Being, in order to recover the most fundamental philosophical question: the question of Being, of what it means for something to be. Heidegger, Kant, Hegel, Husserl thus were all philosophers that were motivated by a derire to explain the world and our place as humans in it.

Heidegger approached the question through an inquiry into the being that has an understanding of Being. Human being is understood in terms of his concept Dasein (“being-there”). Dasein, Heidegger argued, is defined by “Care” in a practically engaged and concernful mode of Being-in-the-world. This conceptual framework stands in contradistinction to Rationalist thinkers like René Descartes, whose notion of cogito ergo sum, located the essence of man in his rational thinking abilities. Descartes says rationalism and empiricism, which are at the heart of the modern scientific method, can save us as a species.

For Heidegger thinking is thinking about things originally discovered in our everyday practical engagements. The consequence of this is that our capacity to think cannot be the most central quality of our being because thinking is a reflecting upon this more original way of discovering the world. In the second division, Heidegger argues that human being is even more fundamentally structured by its temporality, or its concern with, and relationship to time, existing as a structurally open “possibility-for-being.” He emphasized the importance of authenticity in human existence, involving a truthful relationship to our thrownness into a world which we are “always already” concerned with, and to our Being-towards-death, the Finitude of the time and being we are given, and the closing down of our various possibilities for being through time.[10]

Later, we add Nietzsche, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse to the list, all of whom are chaneling these concepts and arguments to some extent in their work.

Discussion Questions

How do the people you interact with on a daily basis create their own prison based on a cultivated lack of social awareness – their own limited knowledge bubble that insulates them from full knowledge of what is “real” and how the world works for people that live outside of their bubble. How can you connect Marcuse and/or Dialectic of Enlightenment to the movie clip?

Wally states near the end of the film that in the normal world of jobs, bills, and other responsibilities, there’s no need to seek the awareness-outposts that Andre describes as “Mt. Everest.” Happiness, he says, can be be effectively achieved my remaining within the comfort of our daily routines. Is Wally correct about this, or is he just a content robot? More pointedly, do you ever feel that maybe you are becoming a content robot?

Do you ever think of escaping New York…or Pittsburgh? Do you ever think about escaping the world that is comfortable and familiar to you or does the idea of that scare you?

Do you ever think you might be “trapped” in a prison of your own making?

What Was the “Enlightenment?”

Generally speaking, we might think of the Enlightenment time period as an elite 18th-century cultural movement that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. Some people like to think of the Enlightenment as the beginning of modern philosophy. It was important because the ideas that came from this movement influenced future democratic governments.

The Enlightenment period in the history of western thought and culture stretches roughly from the mid-decades of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century; it was characterized by dramatic social revolutions in science, philosophy, and politics. These revolutions helped to sweep away the dark medieval world-view and ushered in the light that is thought to typify the modern western world.

Enlightenment thought culminates historically in the political upheaval of the French Revolution, in which the traditional hierarchical political and social orders (the French monarchy, the privileges of the French nobility, the political power and authority of the Catholic Church) were violently destroyed and replaced by a political and social order informed by the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all, founded, ostensibly, upon principles of human reason. Theory is one thing, however, as the notion of “all” is, in practice, a matter infused with controversy and debate.

The Enlightenment begins with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of the new science progressively undermined not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos, but, with it, the entire set of presuppositions that served to constrain as well as guide philosophical inquiry. The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world, even as it aimed to account for a wide variety of phenomena through appeal to a relatively small number of mathematical formulae, promoted philosophy (broadly understood to include the natural sciences) over the handmaiden of theology. The basic idea here was to overcome archaic ways of thinking, which were constrained in purpose as well as methods, with an independent force of power and authority; one sufficiently powerful to challenge the old and construct the new in the realms of both theory and practice on the basis of its own principles.

D’Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par excellence,” because of the extraordinary intellectual progress that typified the age, the advances achieved by the sciences, and the enthusiasm for social progress, and because of the characteristic expectation of the age that philosophy could dramatically improve human life.

Who Are the Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment?

France

The Enlightenment is associated with the French thinkers of the mid-decades of the eighteenth century, the so-called “philosophes”- Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Montesquieu, and others. They constituted an informal society of men of letters who collaborated on a loosely defined project of Enlightenment centered around the project of the Encyclopedia. But the Enlightenment was even more ambitious than this suggests.

Scotland and Germany

In addition to the English and French movements represented here, there was a significant Scottish Enlightenment. Key figures were Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid as well as a similarly influential German Enlightenment (die Aufklärung) including Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing and Immanuel Kant.

All of these different Enlightenments spurred by different thought leaders might be thought of as nodes of thought within a disparate and varied course of intellectual development. Enlightenment philosophy is in this manner perhaps better understood in terms of general tendencies of thinking; not in terms of specific doctrines or theories.

The David Hume statue on its pedestal outside of St. Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, Scotland (photo credit: sandra trappen)

Immanuel Kant

At the foundation of Kant’s system is the doctrine of “transcendental idealism,” which emphasizes a distinction between what we can experience (the natural, observable world) and what we cannot (“supersensible” objects such as God and the soul). Kant argued that we can only have knowledge of things we can experience.

Only late in the development of the German Enlightenment, when the Enlightenment was near its end, does the movement become self-reflective; the question of “What is Enlightenment?” is debated in pamphlets and journals. In his famous definition of “enlightenment” in his essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), which is his contribution to this debate, Immanuel Kant expresses many of the tendencies shared among Enlightenment philosophies of divergent doctrines.

Kant’s Three Questions:

Kant can be said to have tried to answer three fundamental questions: What can I know?; What ought I to do?; and What may I hope?  (Critique of Pure Reason, 1787)

Accordingly, in answer to the question, “What can I know?” Kant replies that we can know the natural, observable world, but we cannot, however, have answers to many of the deepest questions of metaphysics. Humans are, in other words, limited by our senses, scientific instruments, and the sum of all the recorded knowledge of the human race limited by the time and discretion a mortal being has to assimilate and remember such knowledge. Setting oneself on a path to know such things, however, must be accomplished with considerable abridgment, and what you can know is not known best by limiting yourself to a knowledge of symbolic works, oral or written (i.e. religious texts). These are tools of finite minds incapable of knowing the entire truth about anything.

The answer to the second is – Hang in there and do what you are good at!

The answer to the third is to try and live a long and prosperous life; one that is diverse and rich in both experience and sensation, and to also use your talents and abilities in a manner that affords enjoyment to others trying to do the same with their own lives. All around good advice, yes?

On Enlightenment

For Kant, Enlightenment liberates us from authority. Those who hold authority—have mystery. The priest has special access to the mystery of religion; it is through him where God comes towards us. The Enlightenment says that human reason is capable of answering all the questions that the previous authorities claimed they had answers to. When you have a rational claim, you’ve laid a path that someone else can easily follow to the same conclusion. The light of the Enlightenment is that it leads to knowledge. For Kant, Enlightenment holds out the promise that it can free us from authoritarianism; for we now have a way to understand the light of the world that is derived from our own human rational capacities.

Kant likewise defines “Enlightenment” as humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Enlightenment is the process of undertaking to think for oneself, to employ and rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how to act. Enlightenment philosophers from across the geographical and temporal spectrum tend to have a great deal of confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an authoritative guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with suspicion or hostility toward other forms or carriers of authority (such as tradition, superstition, prejudice, myth and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete with the authority of reason.

Enlightenment philosophy tends to stand in tension with established religion; that is, it holds out the promise to release people from the self-incurred immaturity of the age as dictated by religion. Daring to think for oneself, awakening one’s intellectual powers, inevitably requires opposing the role of established religion in thought and action. The faith of the Enlightenment – if one may call it that – is that the process of enlightenment (of becoming progressively self-directed in thought and action) through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers, leads us all to a better and more fulfilled human existence.

These views describe the main tendencies of Enlightenment, which might be broken down as follows: 1) The True: Science, Epistemology, and Metaphysics in the Enlightenment; 2) The Good: Political Theory, Ethical Theory and Religion in the Enlightenment; and 3) The Beautiful: Aesthetics in the Enlightenment.

Horkheimer & Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

In their classic text, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno contest Kant and the positivity of Enlightenment.

They argue the concept of reason was transformed into its opposite – an irrational force – by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, reason came to dominate not only nature, but also humankind itself.

As major representatives of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno were the major architects of Critical Theory, who engaged in a project to interpret Marxist philosophy. More pointedly, they aimed to reinterpret Marx’s important economic and political ideas: commodification, reification, and fetishization, which they incorporated into their critique of mass culture.

Critical theory draws from a combination of: Kantian rationalism, Marxist Hegelianism, dialectical materialism, and historical materialism to critically engage the following ideas:

• the notion that humans are rational beings; the world of the real comes not from our senses; that from our rational capacities a rational society is possible.
• the idea that social systems are constantly challenged by their contradictions; contradictions produce new syntheses, and out of this change (progress) occurs [this is the essence of dialectical thinking].
• progress does not occur as a result of straight means-end logic (formal rationality); means-end logic is what underlies repression and domination in society; it leads to totalitarianism.
• the materialist conception of history, which is to say, the theory of history that connects the material conditions of a society’s primary mode of production (its way of producing and reproducing) to the means of human existence—these are Marxist terms which are used to describe the union of productive capacity with the social relations of production, as they are understood to fundamentally determine social organization and development.
• theoretical frameworks are use to explain social events as not discrete and isolated; rather, they are understood to be part of a social process that implies constant challenge, contradiction, and change.

The Problem of Enlightenment

Critical theorists (Horkheimer and Adorno in particular) were concerned with the problem of “Enlightenment” within modernity and post-modernity. So for example, the central premise of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment was that “something went wrong with the Enlightenment.” Enlightenment, in their view, became totalitarian; now it’s all about controlling nature and humans.

Enlightenment, furthermore, created a culture that violates individuality by compelling conformity. The potential of the individual is not being destroyed by fascism alone; rather, it’s the positivist turn of modern science and the Enlightenment that influences individuals and the world they live in, disposing them to become fascist.

The only way to get out of this modern version of hell is to engage in a critical theory of society – this is the only way to achieve transformation and social progress.

Faced with the unfolding events of the Holocaust, Dialectic of Enlightenment begins with the words:

“Enlightenment, as understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”

Again, the book here alleges that something went wrong with Enlightenment; the authors aim to discover the motives behind humanity’s seeming retrogression, which undercuts progressive claims of civilization.

Another focal point of the book is its critique of instrumental reason         (a concept H&A borrowed from Max Weber). Their formulation of the concept distinguishes how reason was employed for the purpose of mastering and dominating nature.

A related concept that they explore – “reification” – is drawn from Georg Lukacs; it refers to the process of the “objectification” of nature through this use of instrumental reason.

H&A’s critique of positivism and capitalism follows straightforwardly from here, as the Dialectic reveals their philosophical position: totalitarian states and state capitalism are one and the same; they institutionalize reason in a such a way as to realize the goal of transforming nature (including humans) into objects for the “commodity fetish”.

Their critique, furthermore, constitutes the basis of a grand narrative, which takes the point of view of the totality.  Grand theorizing, which is itself often criticized – was intentionally undertaken as a means to overcome more traditional academic disciplinary boundaries (and to this very day, many in academe don’t like that) by combining the study of history and philosophy with the study of society.

Clearly, H&A were not optimistic about the Enlightenment; the major project of the book was to demonstrate how the entire project of rationality with Enlightenment thinking was self-destructive right down to the core. Ultimately, what they leave us with is a sense of the underlying change dynamics that drive how the social order reproduces itself.

Book Organization

Section 1 deals with the concept of Enlightenment

Section 2 reveals Enlightenment to be a myth.

Section 3 addresses the submission of the subject,  who makes the object its master.

Section 4 focuses on the “Culture Industry” as the mediator of all social action and knowledge.

Section 5 traces the descent of humanity from Enlightenment into barbarism.

Historical & Theoretical Context of Their Work

In order to understand the emphasis that Horkheimer and Adorno placed upon the imperative need to undertake analysis of the nature of mass culture in contemporary society, it is necessary first of all to situate their “cultural theory” within the wider context of their theory as a whole, which is given its fullest expression in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

At the heart of their work lies a deep discomfort with the nature of modern capitalist society. They drew heavily upon a Marxist framework of analysis, seeing capitalism as fundamentally exploitative, and believing that it must be overthrown for humanity to achieve its full potential.

However, upon witnessing the rise of fascism, failure of socialism and dominance of monopoly capitalism, they argued that critical theory must move beyond a traditional Marxist emphasis on the mode of production (MOP) alone, which they felt was unable to satisfactorily account for these developments.

Marx’s emphasis on the economic base, they argued, led to the conclusion that capitalism was doomed to be replaced by socialism. However, H&A believed Capitalism’s more logical endpoint to be the creation of a ‘verwaltete velt’, in which mankind subjected itself to irrational rule in an entirely rational manner. H&A argued that as mankind had increased his technical mastery over nature humanity itself had become caught up in this process of domination. In such a society, the genuine aim of enlightened reason – to critically negate what is given – had been eradicated, allowing for the use of entirely rational methods to carry out the most irrational of goals, such as genocide or war.

Their belief in the importance of the need to understand the process of rationalization led H&A to expand the project of critical theory beyond a focus on political economy alone. In their view, it was necessary to uncover the processes which were leading to the creation of an entirely rationalized social totality, dominated by the logic of the market.

In other words, their critique focused on the social totality – where previously distinct spheres of culture, politics and the market were increasingly merging – revealed how this came to play a central role in the maintenance of the whole. Culture in such a society, they claimed, could not be seen as a mere epiphenomenon determined by the base; for it played a role in the creation of the base itself.

Political economy (Marx’s focus) declined in relative significance and the need for a critical analysis of culture became more pressing.

The Culture Industry

In this famous chapter, Horkheimer and Adorno set out to show how Enlightenment became a force of mass deception. Moving from this central thesis, they proceed to an explanation whereby they explore the dialectical relationship between culture and technics as part of a critique of the commodification of culture in modernity.

They use the term “culture industry” to describe the commodification of cultural forms that had resulted from the growth of monopoly capitalism. Popular culture, as they explain it, was constituted as a single culture industry whose purpose is to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests.

Culture might thus be thought of as a “factory” churning out standardized cultural goods — television, film, newspapers, magazines and other forms of entertainment. Their purpose is to manipulate mass society into passivity. Human critical thinking capcity (reason) is eliminated.

Culture, according to the authors, has evolved to the point that it is the central mediator of what we know and how social change takes place.

The Culture Industry cultivates false needs: these are needs created by and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, by way of contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness [Marcuse was the first among the Critical theorists to demarcate true needs from false needs in Eros and Civilization].

Adorno, furthermore, believed the culture industry was a system; that society was controlled though the top-down creation of standardized mass culture that intensified the commodification of artistic expression. These cultural processes, constituted as such, have the power to penetrate the very roots of our psychic and social formation as individuated subjects. The easy pleasures available through the consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their life/economic circumstances.

The Subsumption of Art Under Capital

H & A present an argument, where they contrast the emancipatory potential of what they term ‘genuine’ or ‘autonomous’ art, and the products of the culture industry, which play the opposite role. By uncovering the social conditions that gave rise to both forms of art, they claim to reveal the impact that commodification has had upon art itself, and hence on society as a whole and our very consciousness.

Enlightenment, they argued, brought about the social conditions that now represent the subsumption of the previously relatively autonomous realm of culture into a market  governed by instrumental logic.

Having been subjected to the intersection of the commodity form, instrumental rationality, and a social processes of reification, individuals increasingly experience themselves as exchangeable “things” within a social arena dominated by principles of market exchange.

Art suffers as a result, because it becomes a consumer good like any other consumer good. Ultimately, there is a loss of autonomous art through the process of commodification, where there is an increasing convergence of art, advertising, and marketing.

This results in a condition of universal spectacle and narcissistic consumerism (i.e. Kanye and the Kardashians) which precipitates regressive forms of failure to achieve, as well as a subject ego that increasingly defines itself based on the objects it acquires. In other words, autonomous subjectivity is dissolved and replaced by commodified forms of “pseudo-individuality.”

Adorno’s analysis allowed for a critique of popular mass culture from the left as well as the right. From both perspectives — left and right — he believed the nature of cultural production was the root of social and moral problems, which was a result of the consumption of culture.

A central tenet of Adorno’s argument is the idea that under certain social conditions, art can provide an alternate vision of reality. He argues that autonomous art has the capacity to highlight the inequalities and irrationality of the status quo, by presenting an ideal vision of what mankind can aspire towards. As such, it has an emancipatory character.

While the conservative critique from the right emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual and racial influences within popular culture, H&A located the problem not with the content of culture, but with the objective realities of the production of mass culture and its effects [recall how the conservative critique of the 1960’s “counter-culture” located degeneracy in the culture itself and social groups, rather than in the forces of production].

The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. Adorno conceptualized this phenomenon as “pseudo-individualization” and the “always-the-same.”

Under conditions of generalized commodity exchange, Adorno and Horkheimer claim that all aspects of cultural practice, technique, and meaning-making – whether high or low, elite or popular – become subsumed within the industrial system of production, exchange, and consumption. This commodification of culture results in the general homogenization of cultural artefacts and the instrumentalisation of autonomous art.

Religion, Belief, and the Death of Reason

During the time that this book was written, religiosity was on the decline in Germany. Horkheimer and Adorno wrote: “the sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.”

The drive to “disenchant” the world (Max Weber’s term) reflected the ongoing tendency to wrest rational control from what previously could only be seen as blind fate — was always closely associated with the Enlightenment’s attack on the institutional privileges and intellectual status accorded to religion.

The story is well known. Kant saved faith from Hume and philosophy from dogmatism by curtailing the speculative pretensions of the one and the reach of the other. At the same time, he submitted religion to the court of reason and thus left space for autonomy.

The Left Hegelians (particularly Feuerbach and Marx) took the humanization of the world a step further by reducing metaphysics to anthropology and religion to need. The history of religion became the history of man’s alienated but authentic hope, a hope that needed to be reclaimed not in relgious terms, but in the name of freedom.

Nietzsche — the apostate son of a Lutheran pastor — launched his own, anti-Hegelian critique of metaphysics. He sought to psychologize the urge for atemporal, necessary, and universal Truth; that is, he sought to cure the nostalgia for a sovereign God and a sovereign Subject by revealing them both to be fictions of grammar and bad faith.

To this day, we find the emancipatory interest in overcoming metaphysics pursued literally by Left Hegelians and rhetorically by Nietzscheans, Marxists, Heideggerians, as well as by Leftists and Deconstructionists.

But also in the current day, we see a resurgence in belief-based metaphysical thought, which is often coupled with a critique of science that reduces it to speculation and theory.

Now, it goes without saying that metaphysics — the study of extra-sensory reality — is not always the same as religion. But, from his first book on Kierkegaard to his final completed work, the Negative Dialectics, in which he launches a critical recovery of metaphysics itself, Adorno returns again and again to themes derived from metaphysics and theology.

In a short essay on music, which was written 10 years after DoE and 10 years before Negative Dialectics, Adorno differentiates music from what he calls intentional language that is, the instrumental language of everyday communication:

“The language of music is quite different from the language of intentionality. It contains a theological dimension. What it has to say is simultaneously revealed and concealed. Its Idea is the divine Name which has been given shape. It is demythologized prayer, rid of efficacious magic. It is the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name, not to communicate meanings… Music points to true language in the sense that content is apparent in it, but it does so at the cost of unambiguous meaning, which has migrated to the languages of intentionality.”

True language is thus not the language of meaning, of information, of communication between people. It is the revelation of the absolute (the dream of a language beyond intention derives directly from Walter Benjamin).

Criticism of Horkheimer & Adorno

As I already addressed in a post on the Frankfurt School, H&A were not without their detractors. Many found their theories to be needlessly abstract and overwhelmingly negative, to the extent they offered no focused substantive answers that would suggest how we might “escape” the social forces they describe.

Even today, scholars of critical theory regard the philosophical exercises of the founding authors to be more or less marginal works― lapses of judgment for thinkers who are otherwise celebrated for their mastery of dialectics. The following passage comes from a jacket description of a book by Peter E. Gordon, Adorno and Existence, where the following passage alludes to this struggle:

“In the case of Adorno, his persistent fascination with the philosophical canons of existentialism and phenomenology suggests a connection far more productive than merely indicating antipathy. From his first published book on Kierkegaard’s aesthetic to his mature studies in negative dialectics, Adorno was forever returning to the philosophies of bourgeois interiority, seeking the paradoxical relation between their manifest failure and their hidden promise. Ultimately, Adorno saw in them an instructive if unsuccessful attempt to realize his own ambition: to escape the enchanted circle of idealism so as to grasp “the primacy of the object.” Exercises in “immanent critique,” Adorno’s writings on Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger present us with a photographic negative―a philosophical portrait of the author himself. 

What Can We Take Away From This Complex Work?

Enlightenment is not what it objectively seems to be. It failed on its promise to free humans from myth, for it creates its own myth – that we must achieve freedom from nature.

Sociology, as a discipline, has traditionally made the mistake of assuming that humans and nature constitute binaries, rather than seeing humans and nature as one [remember, it was Marx that told us the first level of “alienation” is the alienation of humans to nature].

Knowledge-seeking does not occur through a neutral acquisition of information [sorry, Weber & Durkheim]; it’s connected to power: power over nature, and power over each other.

The critique of subjectivity (the ability of a subject to be reflective and act self-consciously) is particularly important. H&A show us how the transcendental subject/self was effectively broken as society became more complex : in modern society the mind/ego/self are divorced from the body. This creates a false separation of the body from nature and matter.  The result is that man fears annihilation and compensates with a  desire to dominate and  survive, though such a process of living is ultimately a self-alienating activity.

Modern society elevates knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, as achievement that is synonymous with unequivocal progress.  We take the mythology that was once used to describe nature and do the same to science.

Science and reason are in danger of being subsumed under capitalism; they are no longer pursued for enlightenment purposes, but to dominate nature and to ultimately serve capital.

Sources

Blog post & Summary of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Last accessed March 2016.

Sandra L. Trappen – notes from lectures with Stanley Aronowitz

Discussion Questions

Do you think there is such a think as a “culture industry” or does the concept fail to fully articulate and/or describe the social dynamics of culture in our modern time?

How do we escape; that is, get outside culture?

How might you use Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry to critique developments in our contemporary culture (think about the Kardashians, or about professional sports, reality television, or anything really).

Do you think that being willing to critique or to examine the social, political and cultural structures within the society in which we all live (as done in the social sciences) is a radical “leftist” project? Does challenging authority make you uncomfortable?

The rise of fascism’s rise in Germany prior to World Wars I &II provides us with an example of passive revolution; important social institutions and structures were manipulated to such a degree that they fostered a false consciousness that ultimately prevented a leftist socialist revolution. In Italy, Mussolini made himself out to be socialist leaning populist, but upon assuming power he established a new capitalist hegemony. Hitler’s party was a nominal “Workers’ Party,” though by 1941 Germany was as right-wing (economically) as Italy. Social movements in both countries revolved around how Hitler and Mussolini reacted to the tragedy of WWI and its destruction of the techno-utopian and optimistic thinking of the period. The two leaders successfully converted populist anger into populist action against the enemies of the nation. The “collectivity” both nations represented constituted an effective subversion of the “collectivity” leftists at that time said would propel the proletarian revolution. With that, do you see any parallels in our current time period? If so, what role does culture potentially play in manufacturing passivity/consent and populist anger among members of the U.S. population?  

Ironically, conservatives in the United States tend to sneer and even mock science, even as they eagerly deploy it in the service of things that they value: war, torture, invasion, police intimidation and brutality, and the mass surveillance of American citizens. Universities are moving in the direction where they value positivism to the extreme – research methods and theories not deployed in the service of revealing probabalistic outcomes are considered inferior and not worthy of study and funding. The “arts” of the Liberal Arts are being expunged by administrators who pay lip service to “critical thinking” pedagogy. How can we call upon critical theory to show how “Enlightenment” is under attack again? How has reason itself become subverted yet again? 

Biography

Herbert Marcuse rose to fame in the US during the tumultuous time period of the late 1960’s when civil rights were being contested and the counter-cultural movement was ascendant. A German philosophy professor by trade, he emigrated to the US in 1934 in order to the flee the Nazis in Germany. Originally born in Berlin in 1898, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Freiburg. In the late 1920’s, after reading Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, Marcuse returned to Freiburg University, a school where he at one time attended lectures by Edmund Husserl, to study under Heidegger.

Marcuse’s first book appeared in 1932 with the title Hegel’s Ontology and the Foundation of a Theory of Historicity. Upon reading and reviewing Marcuse’s book, Theodore Adorno convinced Max Horkheimer of Marcuse’s potential as a critical theorist. Later, in 1933, Marcuse was recruited to work for the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research). Unfortunately for Marcuse and other members of the Institute, this was right around the time that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

After offering his services to United States government during World War II, Marcuse eventually went to teach at different American universities, including Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis before finally settling down to teach at the University of California, San Diego.

His “philosophy” – both then and now – was considered radical. His books and essays called for social transformation. He argued that human potential and emancipation were being prevented by capitalism and that even as liberal capitalist societies told themselves they were free and democratic, they had, in reality, become authoritarian.  Perhaps most important, the imperialistic tendencies of the U.S. had, in his view, evolved alongside the ever-expanding market economy. The “good war” and the “good life” were inextricably bound in the American psyche and it has remained that way ever since.

Intellectual Tradition

Marcuse’s intellectual forebears were not the dreamers and visionaries who populated the heritage of the American left and gave it moral authority (he was born, after all, into an assimilated Jewish middle-class family in Berlin).  Marcuse’s mentors were the towering figures of philosophy – Hegel, Marx, and Freud.

Why Do We Read Marcuse?

Should we even care about Marcuse today? The 60’s and 70’s are long gone, so why does it matter that we read Marcuse? Why bore us with the outdated ideas of another dead European male?

To be sure, Marcuse’s stature and interest in his work have diminished even as scholarly interest in other Frankfurt School figures has intensified. Consider Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, both of whom dealt directly, explicitly, and frequently with cultural questions, and far less with political ones. Marcuse, more than others, is associated with the crisis of Marxism. The “crisis” can be defined as Marxism’s historical entanglement with the tyrannies of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as its failure to explain capitalism’s assumed imminent demise, given how we see that capitalism retains a capacity to generate mass acceptance, even allegiance, despite evidence to the contrary; it continues to generate crises and promulgates human suffering as it stands in the way of systematic change.

Marcuse was viewed as the philosopher of sexual liberation. He embodied the zeitgeist of the era in his argument that, despite material affluence, there were deep patterns of class, gender and racial inequality and exploitation. These were held in place via the repression of sexual desire, and of emotional and creative expression. Marcuse was once asked to do an interview for Playboy magazine, though he turned down the magazine for reasons that are consistent with his philosophy. Sexual desire is structured by social norms. Marcuse saw the magazine as tending to objectify and commodify it participants – its readers and the women featured within it (the “bunnies”). In Marcuse’s view, this undermined the possibility of fully connecting our sexuality to our humanity.

Marcuse remains relevant as a social theorist for many reasons. One is his strong critique of consumerism, which he argues represents a form of social control. He famously argued that consumerism and the expansion of market economies led to a new kind of social pattern in which our deep drive for freedom and humanistic development was traded off for material comfort in an affluent society. Further, it is as a result of this as well as efforts to repress sexual desire, emotional expression and creative potential we had learned to “find [our] soul” in our “automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment”. And I might add here that many Americans find consumer comfort in guns. This authoritarian pattern led people to become increasingly alienated, some might even say they are in “pain” – physically and psychically, as they feel disconnected from themselves, their loved ones, their neighbors, co-workers, and fellow Americans.

Marcuse suggests that the system we live in may claim to be democratic, but it is actually authoritarian, as “the masses” are continually dictated to by powerful individuals, whose social positions permit them to shape our general perceptions of freedom. As a result, we are presented with choices – “false choices” – that encourage us to “buy” our happiness.

Freedom to choose does not produce the state of “freedom” desired by the masses; rather, it induces a profound state of “unfreedom,” as consumers act irrationally, working more than they are required to in order to fulfill actual basic needs. Within this destructive system, fostered by capitalism, they ignore the psychologically destructive effects of wasteful consumption, environmental damage and the damage to human health, as they strive to find a social connection through the acquisition of material goods.

Limitations

One limitation of Marcuse’s work should be obvious to students of history. Considering how One-Dimensional Man was written on the eve of what would become a wave of radical struggles and protests in the 1960’s – a movement that aimed to shake the foundations of the dominant system – it is apparent that Marcuse failed to foresee this rupture. Critics of Marcuse assert that he made this mistake because he gave insufficient attention to marginalized groups, both within America and worldwide; an oversight due to the fact that as a Marxist, his focus was on the revolutionary potential of the working classes. Alternatively, had he given more attention to issues of race and/or decolonization struggles, protest movements throughout the world (i.e. Africa), the theoretical contradictions of a theory based on systemic closure would have perhaps been clearer. Marcuse, it is fair to say, exaggerates to some extent the degree to which the system closure prevents imaginative escape and/or radical movements.

Another limitation is that like the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci before him, Marcuse risks being a Marxist who explains that others don’t become Marxists with the insulting answer that they’ve been indoctrinated and therefore cannot make their own decision to become Marxist. Nonetheless, he might not be entirely wrong, given how effectively he argues that modern technological society provides many pleasant benefits and entertainment diversions for those willing to forego the revolution and live lives of contentment within the status quo. Think about our present time period and how it appears that our contemporary media have lulled an entire nation into a mental torpor, where many are no longer capable of exercising critical consciousness. Students, in particular, are derided as “snowflakes” who need “safe spaces.”

Despite these shortcomings, if we value having a healthy democracy, we must read One-Dimensional Man. As Douglas Kellner notes, Marcuse “rarely discussed the theme of democracy or the democratization of society.” So why then insist on reading Marcuse if we value a healthy democracy? What Marcuse provides is not a ‘how to’ manual for establishing a flourishing democratic process; rather, he offers “comprehensive philosophical perspectives on domination and liberation [and] a powerful method and framework for analyzing contemporary society.” Marcuse, now as much as ever, is important because he offers a new way of looking at our contemporary world.

Technology and the Individual

Stanley Aronowitz offers a short summary of Herbert Marcuse’s thinking on this subject, where he explains Marcuse’s thesis is that “technological rationality has been transformed into a kind of domination.” Ironically, as Aronowitz points out, critique of such a system was to some degree foreclosed by the very successes of the repressive system; so much so, that critique presented itself as an absurdity to the general population.

In his essay “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Marcuse examines technology in a broad sense. He defines technology as more than just “the technical apparatus,” which he calls “technics.” For Marcuse, technology is “a social process” in which men are inseparably involved. The most significant implication of the technological process is the creation of dominative “technological rationality,” similar to but distinct from Horkheimer’s idea of subjective reason.

In this essay, Marcuse studies the impact of technology, which he traces to changes in the individual and his rationality. He constructs the rationality of the individual in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and contrasts this “individualistic rationality” with the modern “technological rationality.” Individualism was based on autonomous self-interest, whereas technology makes self-interest completely heteronomous, achieved only by “adjustment and compliance.” Individualistic, rational self-interest was motivated towards finding “forms of life”; therefore, in the service of the realization of this interest, reason was critical of the world as it is (Marcuse 139-40). Technological rationality is instrumental; it is motivated towards efficiency, and technology makes any critical protest irrational. Marcuse uses Lewis Mumford’s phrase, “matter-of-factness” to describe an attitude of empirical rationality that in the age of technology becomes a dominating force over man. Through these social dominations of technology over the individual, man’s autonomy is erased—not by force, but rather by his identification with the apparatus, by a fetish of technique.

Marcuse is primarily concerned with the fate of the individual. One of the methods by which technology removes the dignity of the individual is by sublimating him into a crowd. Marcuse is critical of the crowd, which reduces the individual to a “standardized subject of brute self-preservation.” That is, he is an atomic and standardized force whose only expression is self-interest. The specialization of professions does not contradict this standardization, because a man merely becomes one of several replaceable tools in the toolbox. Thus, specialization is simultaneously a force for standardization as well as division.

Truth, which as individualistic truth was once whole, is split into technological and critical truth. Technological truth is that set of values that “hold good for the functioning of the apparatus—and for that alone.” It is a truth concerned only with the goals of technological rationality, namely efficiency. Critical truth is antagonistic to the apparatus; it is autonomous and objective. However, Marcuse points out, the two truths are not completely contradictory, as technological truth often transforms critical truths for its own purposes. Critical truths are adopted by their opposition and thereby made impotent. This adoption is symptomatic of the way critical forces have been “incorporated into the apparatus itself—without losing the title of opposition.” Marcuse cites the example of the labor movement, which has changed from a truly critical force into a “business organization with a vested interest of its own” in the system.

But technological rationality does affirm critical rationality in two cases. First, technology “implies a democratization of functions.” Democratization is subverted, however, by hierarchical private bureaucracies that enforce division. Second, technics’ potential triumph over scarcity could allow for a “free human realization,” in which man can realize his true self in the freedom from “the hard struggle for life, business, and power.” Marcuse closes with an image of this state, in which humans “are nothing but human” and allowed to live on their own terms. This autonomy of man is Marcuse’s Utopia, characterized not by “perennial happiness” but by the affirmation of man’s “natural individuality.” Technology, though it constricts individuality in the many ways Marcuse describes, is also necessary for its full realization.

One Dimensional Man

One Dimensional Man was written in 1962, but much of it reads as if it could have been written about the state of the world’s problems today: the flattening of discourse, the pervasive repression behind a veil of ‘consensus’, the lack of recognition for perspectives and alternatives beyond dominant frames of thinking, the closure of the dominant universe of meaning, the corrosion of established liberties and lines of escape, total mobilization against a permanent Enemy built into the system as a basis for conformity and effort.

The largest difference from the present situation is that, contrary to thirty years of neoliberalism and the latest wave of cuts, Marcuse was writing at a time when the welfare state was growing and ordinary people were becoming more affluent. This gives a different sense to the repressive aspects of the context. Marcuse gives an impression of people lulled into conformity, rather than bludgeoned or tricked.

The ‘one dimension’ of the title refers to the flattening of discourse, imagination, culture, and politics into the field of understanding, the perspective, of the dominant order. Marcuse contrasts the affluent consumer society of organized capitalism with a previous situation of ‘two-dimensional’ existence. The two dimensions exist on a number of levels, but for Marcuse express a single aspect: the coexistence of the present system with its negation.

Put another way, Marcuse’s analysis introduces us to two ideal types that characterize advanced industrial society: the one-dimensional type and the dialectical type. Each of these two types corresponds to two dimensions of the advanced industrial society: civilization and culture.

The tone of One-Dimensional Man is doubtless pessimistic. History, in Marcuse’s view, seemed to be moving on the side of the “omnipresent system which swallows up or repulses all alternatives,” leaving us in a state of domination and perpetual “unfreedom.”

In a letter to the New York Review of Books, George H. Fromm and William Leiss et al. outlined the major themes of the book as follows:

1)The concept of “one-dimensional man” asserts that there are other dimensions of human existence in addition to the present one and that these have been eliminated. It maintains that the spheres of existence formerly considered as private (e.g. sexuality) have now become part of the entire system of social domination of man by man, and it suggests that totalitarianism can be imposed without terror.

(2)Technological rationality, which impoverishes all aspects of contemporary life, has developed the material bases of human freedom, though it continues to serve the interests of suppression.There is a logic of domination in technological progress under present conditions: not quantitative accumulation, but a qualitative “leap” is necessary to transform this apparatus of destruction into an apparatus of life.

(3)The analysis proceeds on the basis of “negative” or dialectical thinking, which sees existing things as “other than they are” and as denying the possibilities inherent in themselves. It demands “freedom from the oppressive and ideological power of given facts.”

(4) The book is generally pessimistic about the possibilities for overcoming the increasing domination and unfreedom of technological society; it concentrates on the power of the present establishment to contain and repulse all alternatives to the status quo.

The Two Dimensions

For Marcuse, human societies are made up of two dimensions that are in constant tension with each other. These two dimensions are civilization and culture. In our everyday language, we generally think of civilization and culture as synonymous. Marcuse asks us to consider them as two distinct concepts.

• Civilization is the current material structure of life in the society, the real existing society, the current political, economic, and social arrangements. It is the material state of affairs, the status quo.
• Culture is “the complex of distinctive beliefs, attainments, traditions, etc., constituting the ‘background’ of a society…[which] appears as the complex of moral, intellectual, [and] aesthetic goals (values)…a society considers the purpose of [its] organization.”

In the advanced industrial society, this tension between civilization and culture is systematically reduced. The tension is reduced by a type of colonization of the actual content of the culture. This difference between the two dimensions – the gap between them – is for Marcuse crucial to the possibility of social change. According to Marcuse, the gap separates the possible from the present, making it possible to imagine situations radically different from the current system. The elimination of the gap makes it impossible to think beyond the system’s frame, thus making it impossible to think of alternatives except as repeating current social relations. The two dimensions produce a gap or distance between what can be thought and what exists, a gap in which critical thought can flourish. They rely on an ‘unhappy consciousness’, discontented with the present and aware on some level of its problems.

Marcuse believes the gap has been closed by a process of almost totalitarian social integration through the coordination of social functions and the rise of consumerism and administrative thought. Marcuse portrays this process as happening in a number of ways. One of these is that consumer culture infiltrates lifeworlds and public opinion comes into the private sphere: the system’s perspective comes into the home through television, radio and consumed goods with particular messages; it comes into communities through the inescapable news headlines outside newsagents, the dominance of ‘public opinion’ and the interventions of state officials.

As Marcuse states, “the result is the familiar Orwellian language (‘peace is war’ and ‘war is peace’, etc.), which is by no means that of terroristic totalitarianism only”. Not only could such a reduction of the conceptual content of cultural values effectively restrain their humanizing potential, but these same concepts now having their inner content rewired can help to further support the civilization (i.e. the status quo) or work regressively.

The reason this absorption of the two dimensions into the one dimension (i.e. civilization/established order) is different in the advanced industrial civilization is because of their technological capabilities. Marcuse states:

This liquidation of two-dimensional [reality] takes place not through the denial and rejection of the ‘cultural values’, but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.

By looking at Marcuse’s framework for understanding the two general ways of thinking, we can see how inhabitants of advanced industrial society become subject to social forces that lead people to acquire one way of thinking about the other, we will see how his ideas are revelatory in such a way that they generate crucial insights into problems we face today.

With the more technologically advanced societies, the reduction of culture to civilization risks becoming totalized. With technology aiding an unprecedented ability for mass communication “the advancing one-dimensional society” threatens to sweep away all remnants of the historically meaningful content of cultural values.

Marcuse’s framework, where he sets up two poles that represent different ways of thinking – one-dimensional and dialectical – has in our current time fallen out of favor, because it reduces conflict to a binary social dynamic. His types, nonetheless, can still be useful if we think of them as ends of a spectrum. As social beings, we do not engage either one-dimensional or dialectical thought as a pure ideal type, but instead may drift from one to the other way of thinking, depending on the social context.

Characteristics of the Different Ways of Thinking

What are the characteristics of these types of thinking? Again, it is important to remember that Marcuse is not referring to the actual content of the thought here (i.e. what you think). Rather, he is concerned with the manner in which you think (i.e. how you think, the way you think). Thus, even though Marcuse’s political stance is Marxism, you need not believe these tenets to be a dialectical thinker. Marcuse cites conservatives and liberals, including Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill, as possessing dialectical ways of thinking. Dialectical thinking proceeds from the conflict and resolution of opposites, which comprise the person’s consciousness in these modes.

Dialectical thinking possesses historical consciousness, whereas one-dimensional thought lacks this habit of mind. Marcuse states that historical consciousness “discovers the factors which made the facts, which determined the way of life.” The one-dimensional type, however, cannot get beyond the ‘given’. The current status quo of the civilization reflects the prevailing economic, political, and social ordering of things. Thus, we see that the one-dimensional type lives in the dimension of civilization and not of both civilization and culture. One-dimensional thought can’t get beyond the given facts of the established status quo (i.e. civilization).

True Needs & False Needs

Marcuse argues that “advanced industrial society” created “false needs,” which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought. These are different from “true needs” that individuals need to maintain satisfaction.

Slaves With White Collars – The Philosophy of Fight Club

We can look at a film like Fight Club and read it as a Marxist/Marcusian critique of late capitalist society. The film’s narrator/protagonist starts out as a corporate functionary – someone not particularly important, who is working in the bureaucracy of techn0-rationality that Marcuse calls attention to in his work. The character defines himself through his consumer choices  that reflect false needs. Subsequently, we meet his alter-ego, Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), who emerges on the scene to show by example how he might live a more authentic life and thereby escape a life of conformity and endless unsatisfying consumerism. Durden warns in the first clip –  “the things you own end up owning you.” The second clip more succinctly expresses the same message; it calls attention to the dangers of advertising that create false needs.

While “Project Mayhem” in the movie aims to destroy conformity and mindless consumerism; the way it proposes to do so is not through a benign politics of rejection – it suggests a combination of anarchy, terrorism, and fascism as the preferred path of resistance.

Slaves Who Are Not People – Bladerunner

Although we do not often think of it this way, Harrison Ford’s character in the movie Bladerunner is a futuristic policeman who is essentially a “slave catcher.” In the words of writer Sarah Galiley:

“There are cops, and there are little people.

There is a whole class of slaves. It is illegal for them to escape slavery. The cops are supposed to murder the slaves if they escape, because there is a risk that they will start to think they’re people. But the cops know that the slaves are not people, so it’s okay to murder them. The greatest danger, the thing the cops are supposed to prevent, is that the slaves will try to assimilate into the society that relies on their labor.

Assimilation is designed to be impossible. There are tests. Impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. The tests measure empathy. It is not about having enough empathy, but about having empathy for the correct things. If you do not have enough empathy for the correct things, you will be murdered by a cop who does have empathy for the correct things. 

In Blade Runner, an absurdly young Harrison Ford is a hard-boiled, world-weary kind of man named Deckard, and he is given a choice. He can be exactly as small as everyone is, or he can catch some escaped slaves for the police. He decides to catch the escaped slaves.

Except that ‘catch’ means ‘retire,’ and ‘retire’ means ‘murder.’

Deckard feels that he has no choice in this matter. He says it himself, and the person giving him the choice confirms that he is correct: no choice. But of course, there is always a choice. Certainly, the escaped slaves who he is chasing see that there is a choice. He can be power or he can be vulnerable to power. He chooses power. And power means murder”

Ford’s character murders an escaped slave in one scene. Soon after a police vehicle is heard hovering overhead.  and the police vehicle repeats the same two words over and over, in the same tone the crossing light uses to prompt those who can’t see the walk signal: Move on, move on, move on.

The police vehicle repeats the same two words over and over, in the same tone the crossing light uses to prompt those who can’t see the walk signal: Move on, move on, move on.

So the crowd moves on. The story moves on. And Deckard moves on.

He still has work to do. One down. The rest to go.

He murders other escaped slaves before the end of the film. He finds where they are hiding, and he murders them.

It is important, in the world of the film, to remember that the things he is murdering are not people. That it is their own fault for seeking free lives. That the cops are just doing their jobs.

It is important to remember to have empathy for the right things.

Gailey goes on to explain that there is one escaped slave who Deckard does not murder. She asks him if he thinks she could escape to the North, and he says no. Whether that is true or not, we as the audience do not get to find out, because she does not escape. She does not escape because he decides to keep her. He is asked to murder her, and instead, he decides to keep her for his own.”

By the end of the movie, you find that if “you subtract the flying cars and the jets of flame shooting out of the top of Los Angeles buildings, it’s not a far-off place. It’s fortunes earned off the backs of slaves, and deciding who gets to count as human. It’s impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. It’s having empathy for the right things if you know what’s good for you. It’s death for those who seek freedom.

It’s a cop shooting a fleeing woman in the middle of the street, and a world where the city is subject to repeated klaxon call: move on, move on, move on.”

The Welfare State & The Warfare State

The form of political integration that takes place in advanced capitalist societies, according to Marcuse, is the Welfare-Warfare state. The Welfare-Warfare state, he says, creates in administered life for the individual, which makes it pointless for them to insist on self-determination. Freedom (as well as revolution) become superfluous.

Bear in mind now that Marcuse is questioning the Marxist doctrine that historical crisis/the crisis of capitalism is inevitable. He uses this particular construct to explain why individuals in mass capitalist societies have no interest in overthrowing those societies. Sadly, he implies that many people are no longer able to think for themselves. This is because man in mass society has no inner life. He is distracted. He thinks that he is happy. Or he may simply have become ambivalent. Either way, this type of person is a product of what Marx originally referred to as false consciousness. Individuals who suffer from false consciousness find it subsequently difficult to develop a revolutionary consciousness. No longer slaves bound by literal chains; the mind makes its own chains. People find ways to become content in their misery.

How Do We Achieve Freedom and Emancipation From Domination?

Marcuse was less committed to the status quo and far more willing to foresee that the eclipse of the liberal state might be positive – a way to discover and explore the instinctual life of freedom. Power to the people would enable them to snap open the notorious “mind-forg’d manacles” that had so horrified William Blake. Once the domination of technocracy was overcome, Marcuse believed, the people would be free to discover their authentic needs. What the people really wanted could not be reduced to the balloting in the Electoral College, or to other civic institutions that presumably recorded and validated public opinion. Yet there is something rather unsavory about Marcuse telling his readers (and their fellow citizens) that they are trapped in the coils of ersatz satisfactions and values, a condition that the author is smart enough to realize.

Systemic integration and/or social control is now based on satisfying rather than frustrating needs, the trick being that the social system satisfies needs that it itself creates. Marcuse could also have mentioned the ways in which work, family and consumption tend to eat up all the available hours in the day, so people no longer have time for introspection, creative pursuits, diversification of lifeways, or ‘functionless’ socializing – so that, as Hakim Bey puts it, simply finding the time for a group to be together without a basis in work, consumption or family is already a difficult task, and an act of resistance.

More theoretically, Marcuse also argues that prevailing needs can never provide a supreme basis for legitimacy, since the critique of a system also critiques its socially-produced needs. This system has various ways of managing dissent so as to maintain authoritarian closure. ‘Repressive tolerance’, for instance, is a practice whereby dissident perspectives are permitted only by being reduced to ‘opinions’ held as if as private property by individuals, ‘opinions’ the person is entitled to, but which have no pull on others, which nobody is obliged to take seriously as claims to truth, and which the dissident is not entitled to act on.

In 1964, Marcuse looked for the agents of change among those without stakes in an “advanced industrial society.” Three decades after the German proletariat had failed to stop Nazism, Marcuse’s revolutionary faith was limited. It was invested in “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted,” and even in “the unemployed and the unemployable.” To this list, he might add oppositionists who were marked neither by homogeneity nor unity: the middle-class white youth who formed the New Left in Europe as well as the United States; the black underclass in the ghettoes; the National Liberation Front in Vietnam; and the Cuban revolutionaries. Marcuse praised them all for subscribing to what he called “the Great Refusal.”

Scarcely a decade after the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale had topped the non-fiction best-seller list with The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), Marcuse invoked the virtues of negative thinking, as a counterweight to “the most efficient system of domination,” which was how he described democracy.

Most devastating for his reputation as a social prognosticator was his failure to anticipate the significance of the reaction to the sixties that the right would soon advance and benefit from. Two years after Marcuse’s death, Ronald Reagan would take his first oath of office. But just as noteworthy has been the rise, which Marcuse did not foresee, of the New Right in Europe. He had certainly grasped the significance of the failure of the working class to follow the Marxist script. But he may not have anticipated how effectively politicians like Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France and Jörg Haider of Austria’s Freedom Party would appeal to voters in that class.

Sources

Excerpts from this post appear in Stephen Whitfield’s article Dissent Magazine. Find the article here.  March 2016.

“This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017,” by Sarah Gailey

Additionally, content is provided by Michael Hartley’s article, “Marcuse on The Two Dimensions of Advanced Industrial Society and The Significance of His Thought Today.” Last accessed March 2016.

“In Theory – Herbert Marcuse: One Dimensional Man?” by Andrew Robinson. Last accessed March 2016.

Discussion Questions

Reflect on our present moment in time and as you think about politics and culture – what analogies can you make using Marcuse’s work to shed light on current events?

How might we see a vision of Marcuse’s man of mass society summoned by the former President Bush, when he exhorted everyone in th U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to go shopping?

How might you use Marcuse’s work to make sense of the presidential election? What about the rise of social media and computing technology?

How do you find the politics of conformity exert the most pressure on you?

How might we compare Marcuse’s argument to the arguments advanced by Communication Theorists like Marshall Mcluhan and Neil Postman?

Depicted here is the old Athens Lunatic Asylum (now a conference center and art gallery). An ominous structure, the complex of buildings remain standing today, situated high on a hill overlooking Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. As a college freshman in the early 1980’s, your professor was a volunteer here, where I worked in the locked men’s ward.

History

Early psychiatric asylums were imposing structures. Hundreds to hundreds of thousands of patients were held in these buildings for everything from depression to criminal behavior, and then there were those who, medically speaking, suffered from no mental condition at all. Historical records document one of the more common “afflictions” for which people were committed in the Athens Lunatic Asylum was “excessive masturbation.”

These were improvements, however, over no treatment or the condemnation to prisons, which had previously been the norm. Yet eventually many of these new psychiatric facilities saw an unmanageable increase in the number of patients. Staff and investigative journalistic reports indicated the overuse and unnecessary use of treatments in order to manage these growing populations. However, it was not until the 1990s when many of these expansive asylums were completely overhauled into modern medical centers or closed because of underuse, underfunding, or scandal.

Much was learned during that period in psychiatric history, but much remains to be done in terms of advancements and understanding of medical disorders globally. Stories of abuses, tragic deaths, and murders can be found in old newspaper archives for many of these buildings that remain as towering ghosts. Most of the structures have crumbled, but like the memories of their patients, they remain.

This particular asylum was built in 1852 and enlarged on several subsequent occasions in 1859, 1866, 1881 and 1902. Finally closed in 1989/1990, it was bought by a property developer, who a few years later converted half of the site into houses. The main asylum buildings are Grade II listed buildings, which means they are protected and cannot be changed or demolished [we used this lower-level corridor to move between the buildings when the weather was bad. imagine walking here at night!]

Erving Goffman

The full title of sociologist Erving Goffman’s work is Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. The book, although somewhat dated at this point, was considered during its time to be a key text in the development of deinstitutionalization in the United States; it represents one of the first sociological examinations of the social dynamics bound up in being a mental patient.

Theory & Methods

Goffman’s book conveys the substance of his participant observation field work and outlines a theory of what he calls the “total institution.” From Autumn 1954 to the end of 1957 Goffman was a visiting member of the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Goffman conducted field work at St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he posed as a pseudo-employee of the hospital (he was fired to assist the athletic director). This permitted him to make observations and collect ethnographic data on selected aspects of patients’ social life. As it is typically the case with most participant observation studies, controls, measurements, and statistical evidence were not used.

The focus of this book, as Goffman makes clear, is the world of the patient – not the world of the staff. To this end, Goffman made his personal bias a matter of record, for he admitted he arrived at the hospital with no great respect for the agencies involved with psychiatric practice nor for the discipline of psychiatry.

According to David Mechanic, “Goffman brought to the hospital his own personal biography and assumptions, which shaped how he saw events. To a middle-class, independent-minded professor, who strongly valued personal autonomy and the right to be eccentric, the regimentation of the mental hospital must have looked repressive indeed. Later in Goffman’s life, after he had to live through an episode of mental illness involving another person close to him, he is said to have remarked that had he been writing Asylums at that point, it would have been a very different book.”

The concept of the total institution is perhaps the most significant theoretical contribution of the book; students of social theory might notice that, as a construct, it shares much in common with Max Weber’s “Ideal Type.” For Goffman, a total institution is a place of work and residence where large numbers of similarly situated people, cut off from the wider community for a considerable time, come together to live an enclosed formally administered life [Note that as we move forward and later take up the work of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, we will see yet another example of how a theorist discusses total institutions, which Foucault describes as “complete and austere institutions”].

Goffman’s Typology of Total Institutions – 5 Types

1. Institutions established to care for people felt to be both harmless and incapable: orphanages, poor houses, and nursing homes.
2. Institutions established to care for people felt to be incapable of looking after themselves and a threat to the community, albeit an unintended one:leprosariums, mental hospitals, and tuberculosis sanitariums.
3. Institutions organized to protect the community against what are felt to be intentional dangers to it, with the welfare of the people thus sequestered not the immediate issue: concentration camps, P.O.W. camps, penitentiaries, and jails.
4. Institutions purportedly established to better pursue some worklike tasks and justifying themselves only on these instrumental grounds: colonial compounds, work camps, boarding schools, ships, army barraks, and large mansions from the point of view of those who live in the servants quarters.
5. Institutions designed as retreats from the world even while often serving also as training stations for the religious; examples are convents, abbeys, manasteries, and other cloisters.

Intellectual Focus

A key part of Goffman’s work can be described as “close observation of individual behavior in a social context.”  There are two important ends here — individual behavior and social context.  Goffman wants to shed light on both poles of this description.  In particular, he almost always expresses interest in the social norms that surround action — the expectations and norms through which other people interpret and judge the individual’s conduct.

In Asylums, Goffman is mainly focused on providing descriptive detail as he aims to account for the institutional socialization process that occured when someone was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital. He defines this process as “institutionalization.” He looks at the process and effort that is required in order to instill and maintain predictable and regular behavior on the part of both “guard” and “captive,” suggesting that many of the features of such institutions serve the ritual function of ensuring that both classes of people know their function and social role – this is how they are inescapably institutionalized.

The central feature of total institutions, in Goffman’s view, was that they broke down barriers separating sleep, play, and work. The totalistic features of asylums, he wrote, could be be found in other institutions, namely commercial and medical establishments [and I would add here prisons too].

The handling of many human needs is another key factor of the bureaucratic institution. According to Goffman, the institutionalization process socialises people into the role of a “good patient.” That is, someone who is ‘dull, harmless and inconspicuous’, which in turn reinforces notions of chronicity in severe mental illness. Related to this is a process that Goffman describes as the mortification of the self. A patient’s notions of self was subjected to a dramatic change for the worse due to the debilitating atmosphere in all total institutions, regardless of how therapeutic or non-therapeutic a hospital intended to be.

While people come from a social context in which they have some sense of a personal identity and occupy different roles, these aspects of their lives are systematically stripped from them as their sense of themselves are mortified, pathogolized and negated, leading to what Goffman defines as “disculturation.” Here, instead of curing or reducing the illness, this process leads to demoralization, skill deterioration and role dispossession and renders people less capable of managing life in the outward world. Goffman notes that in addition to disculturation from their identity and previous roles, acculturating patients and inmates to life in a total institution does little, if anything, to prepare them for the contingencies they will encounter again upon  discharge; it prepares them only for remaining within the institutional setting.

Goffman concludes from his investigation that taking a mentally ill person out of his or her life context, hospitalizing him or her to a psychiatric hospital and then returning the person to the same life context is similar to taking a drowning man out of a lake, teaching him how to ride a bicycle and putting him back into the lake.

During the “inpatient phase,” patients arrive at a realization that society has forsaken them.

Over time patient/inmates acquire strong feelings about their time spent there, which they tend to think of as time taken from one’s life or time wasted.

Human needs in the asylum are handled in an impersonal and bureaucratic mode.

The social distance between the staff and inmates is great; each group develops and antipathy, where they tend to be unfriendly toward the other.

The book concludes that adjusting the inmates to their role has at least as much importance as “curing” them. In the essay “Notes on the Tinkering Trades” Goffman concluded that the “medicalization” of mental illness and the various treatment modalities are offshoots of the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution; that the so-called “medical model” for treating patients was a variation on the way trades and craftsmen of the late 19th century repaired clocks and other mechanical objects.

Other Studies & Perspectives

Asylums is one of a number of books published in the 1950s and 1960s that explored the characteristics of psychiatric hospitals, which doubtless had a major impact on patients and affected the course of their illness. Other prominent works include studies by Stanton and Schwartz (1954), Belknap (1956), Dunham and Weinberg (1960), Strauss et al. (1964), and Scheff (1966). These studies all relied on qualitative data in describing the meaning of psychiatric hospitalization for patients, criticized the psychiatric hospital and charged that it had a harmful effect on them.

Belknap (1956), Dunham and Weifiberg (1960), Goffman (1961), Cumming and Cumming (1962) pointed out the fact that closed institutional regimes, with their common accompaniments of neglect, pauperism, and authoritarianism, were not only inhumane but harmful. As was the case in Goffman’s work, the hospital was portrayed as an authoritarian system that forces patients to define themselves as mentally ill, change their behavior and thinking, adjust to institutional life, accept restrictions and suffer humiliations.

Franco Basaglia, a leading Italian psychiatrist who inspired and was the architect of psychiatric reform in Italy also defined the mental hospital as an oppressive, locked and total institution, in which prison-like punitive rules are applied to patients, so that the person’s self-concept is gradually broken down in such a way as it eliminates its subjective contents. Patients, doctors, and nurses are all similarly subjected (at different levels) to the same process of institutionalism.

Critics, however, cast doubt on Goffman’s claims and question the acuracy of his critique. Numerous studies have been done relevant to Goffman’s depiction of the experience of the mental patient, using patient surveys. None of these studies has the theoretical brilliance of Goffman’s work or the quality of his insight, but they consistently fail to replicate his view of the patient’s experience (Linn 1968a, 1968b; Weinstein 1979, 1983, 1994).

One critic, Raymond Weinstein, reviewed the empirical literature and presented a report that examined the importance and applicability of Goffman’s Asylums three decades after its first publication. Goffman’s book, he writes:

“Achieved classic status due to its extensive academic citation, anthology reprinting, use in legal proceedings, and public influence. However, over the years the accuracy and generalizability of Goffman’s total institution model of mental hospitals have been seriously questioned.

An analysis of the criticisms of Goffman’s theories, methods, and conclusions suggested that his work was biased and deficient in a number of ways but at times was misinterpreted or misrepresented. As a research study Asylums may be outdated and of little value to mental health practitioners due to the revolutionary changes in psychiatry that have occurred since the mid-1950s. As an academic work, however, Asylums continues to enjoy a high reputation perhaps because of its theoretical utility and teaching value as well as the popularity of Goffman’s many other published works. The total institution model may have been limited from the start and doubts remain as to its validity today, but the longevity of Asylums is assured as Goffman’s picture of mental hospitalization is firmly planted in the minds of sociologists, psychiatrists, patients’ rights advocates, and students of formal organizations.”

It is the view of Weinstein and a number of other researchers that most patients did not report feeling betrayed; many, in fact, reported being helped by hospitalization, and viewed the hospital as a refuge from impossible problems and stresses. Moreover, some patients from disadvantaged backgrounds viewed the hospital experience as less coercive and less depriving than their usual life situation. The studies do provide evidence of stigma associated with mental illness but negate the profoundly negative conception of the experience depicted by Goffman.

Goffman’s observations, nonetheless, remain credible because readers of his analysis find his depictions meaningful and convincing, because he makes it easy for them to see themselves as the hypothetical patient in the context he describes. Goffman in this respect conveys a certain kind of “truth” that cannot be easily dismissed. This type of contextual credibility is often persuasive, having the quality of verstehen embodied in the methodology of Max Weber.

Sources

Erving Goffman (1961) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates.

Raymond M. Weinstein (1994) “Goffman’s Asylums and the Social Situation of Mental Patients.” Psychiatry, (Nov): 57 (4):348-67.

David Mechanic (1989) “Medical Sociology: Some Tensions Among Theory , Method, and Substance,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 30 (June): 147-160.

Cynthia Pelayo (2013) Essential  Guide: Abandoned Insane Asylums. Downloaded from http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/abandoned-insane-asylums  Last accessed Feb 13, 2016.

Discussion Questions

Institutional social settings establish the categories of persons that are likely to be encountered there; the routines and rules of social intercourse are established in these settings and they permit us to get on with our business without having to committ too much special attention or thought. What are some of the institutional social rules that govern social interaction in college that you picked up on? How did you become “institutionalized” and learn how to assume the role of the “good student?”

Describe a different social setting (using any or as many of Goffman’s concepts as you can) in which you have been a participant, such as at a hospital, prison, or any other structured institutional setting. Be sure to cite a specific concept and explain how it applied to your experience.

How might Goffman’s work be used to explain what academics refer to as the “School to Prison” pipeline?

How might our present patterns of incarceration in the United States reflect some of these echoes from the past?

For men of working age, not working tends to be a distinctly unpleasant experience. They exercise less than when they had a job, and they say that their relationships with family members worsen — despite having more time to spend with those relatives.

For women, the situation is more complicated. They’re more likely to say that their health and their relationships with friends and family have improved since they stopped working.

In a similar vein, the geography of female employment and nonemployment tends to be more complicated than the male geography.

The towns and counties where the lowest share of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are employed tend to be some of the tougher places in the United States to live, including Appalachia, Northern Michigan, the Deep South and the interior Southwest.

The places with low levels of female employment have a lot of overlap with these high-poverty places, as an Upshot analysis of census data shows. That’s hardly surprising: Lack of employment has a strong and obvious correlation with poverty. Yet the geographic patterns of female work also have more nuances than the male patterns.

Female employment rates are relatively low in some fairly affluent areas, including Utah and other heavily Mormon areas — as well as on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The East 80s and the suburbs of Salt Lake City may be very different places, but both have local cultures with a bent toward stay-at-home parenting, which still is far more likely to be done by mothers. In this way, they are extreme examples of a national trend: a modestly increased interest in full-time parenting in recent years.

On the other hand, female employment rates are notably high, especially compared with male rates, in New England and parts of the upper Midwest, which tend to be fairly well off. Female rates are also comparatively high in a swath of lower-income rural areas across the middle of the country. In all these places, education — the fact that women are now more educated than men — plays a big role in these contrasts.

Over all, the share of prime-age women with jobs rose throughout much of the latter decades of the 20th century, driven by the feminist movement. But the generally disappointing economy of the last 15 years — combined with the uptick in stay-at-home parenting — has caused the rate to fall since 2000.

Currently, about 30 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 54 are not employed, compared with 26 percent in 1999. By contrast, female employment rates have continued rising in most rich countries. The employment for prime-age men in the United States has been falling for most of the past half-century.

Throughout much of New England, employment rates for prime-age women — relative to their national average — are higher than rates for prime-age men. To be clear, men in New England between the ages of 25 and 54 are more likely to be working than their female counterparts. But female employment rates in some areas exceed the national average, while male rates tend to trail the national average. Why? New England is a highly educated region, with a large number of white-collar jobs, and women nationwide now are more likely to graduate than men.

New England also has a history as a center of manufacturing, which has long been male-dominated. As factories have closed in recent decades and white-collar work has expanded, women have been in a better position to take advantage. The pattern is evident in and around Boston and Burlington, Vt., but it’s especially strong in New Hampshire. In the northern part of the state, the prime-age nonemployment rates are nearly identical for the sexes, both around 25 percent.

For men, nonemployment rates tend to be higher in poorer areas. That’s true for women, too — but their nonemployment rates can also be high in the richest areas.

On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, about half of the women who live on the blocks adjacent to Central Park do not work. On this strip — one of the wealthiest areas of the city — the chance a woman does not work is about as high as it is in some of the poorest parts of the country.

Sources:

The full text for this article can be accessed at New York Times Interactive. Last access Feb 2015. Downloaded from http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/06/upshot/where-working-women-are-most-common.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0#/11/40.71/-74

Discussion Questions:

What do the women in your family do for work? Are they employed in a professional or semi-professional capacity or do they not work at all?

What social factors do you believe had the greatest influence on their choice (or lack of choice) of occupation?

If you grew up with a mother or mother figure in your household, did that person ever lose their job? If so, can you describe the impact on your family?

How might have the career choices of the women in your life impacted your decisions about what is possible and desirable for you, in terms of your own potential career trajectory?

There are still places in the United States where nearly all men in their prime working years have a job. In the affluent sections of Manhattan; in the energy belt that extends down from the Dakotas; in the highly educated suburbs of San Francisco, Denver, Minneapolis, Boston and elsewhere, more than 90 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are working in many neighborhoods. The male employment rates in those areas resemble the nationwide male employment rates in the 1950s and 1960s.

On the whole, however, it’s vastly more common today than it was decades ago for prime-age men not to be working. Across the country, 16 percent of such men are not working, be they officially unemployed or outside of the labor force — disabled, discouraged, retired, in school or taking care of family. That number has more than tripled since 1968.

This map allows you to examine nonemployment rates for prime-age men in every census tract and every county. (Census-tract borders typically follow city or town lines, although they are much finer in large cities.) The data is an average of surveys taken from 2009 to 2013.

You can see the low nonwork rates in those prosperous areas. More strikingly, you can also see sky-high rates across much of Appalachia, the Deep South, northern Michigan, the Southwest and the Northwest. In many towns across Clarke County, Ala.; Iosco County, Mich.; Malheur County, Ore.; and McKinley County, N.M., more than 40 percent of prime-age are not working.

Greater Appalachia — particularly in West Virginia and Kentucky — is on the wrong end of two big trends: It’s coal country, which is suffering amid the concerns about pollution and climate change, as well as the rise of fracking in North Dakota and elsewhere. And Appalachia has low levels of educational attainment at a time when education has become an economic dividing line.In parts of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky — like Magoffin, Breathitt, Leslie and Wyoming Counties — about half the men ages 25 to 54 are not working. In a few counties — including Clay in Kentucky and McDowell in West Virginia — the share exceeds 60 percent. The situation in McDowell seems unremittingly grim: Every census tract has a nonwork rate for prime-age men above 45 percent.Many of them are likely to remain out of work for months or years more, and some of them will never hold a steady job again.

If we shift focus to the Northeast and look at New York, notice how in the five boroughs, the percentage of men who are not working ranges from 17 percent in Queens to 28 percent in the Bronx. A few blocks near the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper East Side of Manhattan had rates around 3 percent. Rates are as high as 100 percent in some census tracts, like the one around Rikers Island, that include jails. (The government counts people in jail in two ways in two different surveys. They are not included in the Current Population Survey, which is used to compute the unemployment rate. But they are counted as being outside of the labor force in these maps, which are based on the American Community Survey.)

Sources:

The full text for this article can be accessed at New York Times Interactive. Last access Feb 2015. Downloaded from http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/12/upshot/where-men-arent-working-map.html

Discussion Questions:

What do the men in your family do for work? Are they employed in a professional or semi-professional capacity or do they not work at all?

What social factors do you believe had the greatest influence on their choice (or lack of choice) of occupation?

If you grew up with a father or father figure in your household, did that person ever lose their job? If so, can you describe the impact on your family?

How might have the career choices of the men in your life impacted your decisions about what is possible and desirable for you, in terms of your own potential career trajectory?