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How Utopian is Marcuse?
(1971)
The prevalent interpretation of the work of the Frankfurt Sch has been that it can be placed squarely in the camp of the Marxist Humanists. This view is challenged in an examination of the views of H. Marcuse, E. FROMM, T. W. Adorno, and M. Horkheimer, some of whom might classify as humanist Marxists, others not. By refusing to rest its entire theoretical position on the foundation stone of labor and by rejecting the total soc'ization of the world as a desideratum, the Frankfurt Sch expressed perhaps its key anti-metaphysical insight: the rejection of identity theory, whether idealistic or materialist. By identity theory is meant the belief that the ultimate oneness of subject and object, essence and appearance, particular and universal underlies the contradictions of the apparent world either inherently or potentially. Critical theory's rejection of this assumption was the primary reason why it could not be included among the variants of Marxist Humanism. Horkheimer and Adorno were hostile to the identity theory from the beginning, while Marcuse was far less so. It was this rejection of identity theory which underlay their hesitation about reducing culture to a function of the priority of labor. Psychoanalytic theory, particularly Freudianism, may have contributed to the Frankfurt Sch's distance from Marxist Humanism. The Sch came increasingly to see S. Freud as a bulwark against the false identity which threatened man in the post-World War II period. To Horkheimer and Adorno, writing in the 1960's, contingent man, not species man, was the real locus of human freedom. But absolute isolation and absolute solidarity were equally anathema. The individual was always to be understood as mediated through the non-identical totality, never as an end-point in himself. The Frankfurt Sch preserved the hope of a more truly humane society inhabited by concrete men rather than by the abstract subjects of the humanists, with whom they have so often been confused.