Race & Ethnicity

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?