My last post
was bout the recent book - Grand
Hotel Abyss – whose title refers to the accusation of the Marxist
philosopher György
Lukacs (and others) that the Frankfurt School “lived in a
beautiful and comfortable hotel on the edge of an abys”.
I am
indebted to a reviewer on the Amazon site for the further clarification that -
- they were Marxist or neo-Marxist theoreticians who lived a comfortable academic life but, with the exception of Marcuse, kept aloof from party politics and political struggle; part of the reason for this was that both in the United States and later in Germany they did not want to provoke the government or imperil funds they received from some wealthy supporters or research contracts they received from government departments;
- they contented themselves with analysis and understanding, but did not believe it was possible to change society because they thought the working class was not capable of revolution (explained partially in psychoanalytical terms by Erich Fromm);
- they distrusted the political left for an authoritarianism that was as bad as that of the Right; - in exile in America, they saw some similarities not only between the control mechanism of Hitlerian fascism and Stalinist communism but even between them and those of Roosevelt’s America – it was merely that Goebbels and Zhdanov were more open about what they were doing;
- they thought that capitalism was no longer likely to self-destruct; - the task now was to study these control mechanisms that kept it in place - mechanisms which went far beyond merely economic ones and that to understand them required a wider interdisciplinary cultural approach
This approach was the essence of Critical Theory. Not least by giving the book its title, Jeffries seems to agree with many of these charges, although he values many of the insights, critiques and influences of the School. Jeffries shows us the divisions within the Frankfurt School – notably that between Marcuse on the one hand and Adorno and Horkheimer on the other over the student revolt of 1967 to 1969, and that between the older founding generation with its profound and radical pessimism and the younger, more cautiously optimistic one, represented by Habermas, who, as Jeffries’ chapter heading has it, pulled the School “back from the abyss”.The pragmatic Brits were impervious to the writings of the Frankfurt School – although they were, for reasons I fail to understand. seduced in the 80s by the charms of such Gallic poseurs as Sartre, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida and the improbably-named Lyotard.
But Adorno
was in fact one of the authors, in 1950, of a famous book The
Authoritarian Personality (1950) which was one of the first of a stream of books produced in the immediate
post-war period to try to make sense of the power of the totalitarian model.
- Hannah
Arendt’s The
Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and
- JT
Talmon’s The
Origins of Totalitarian Democracy; (1952) were required reading on the
small Political Sociology class I took under Zevedei Barbu - a Romanian who had defected in 1948 from the
Romanian Legation in London (despite being an avowed communist who spent a couple of years in prison for the cause)
- and
who had himself produced in 1956 Democracy
and Dictatorship, attempting to explore the insights from combining both
social psychology and sociology….You can read the entire book at the link but,
be warned, the mixture of the depth and (linguistic) width of his reading;
personal style; and awareness of the scale of his ambition does not make for
easy reading. This is an original work which requires slow reading!! The opening pages describe the contents in detail - and my advice is to select what seem to be relevant sections for you....
He was
a great teacher – it was he who introduced me to Weber, Durkheim and Tonnies –
let alone Michels and Pareto – all of whose insights still resonate with me.
Indeed it
was almost certainly Barbu’s lectures which led me to register at the LSE in
1964 for a one-year MSc in Political Sociology – focusing on the development of
post-war democracy in Germany. But I had also been powerfully influenced by
Ralf Dahrendorf whose “Class
and Class Conflict in Industrial Society” had come out in 1959 and who was
just about to publish his “Society and Democracy in Germany” (1965) and,
indeed, found myself registered with no less a figure than Ralph Miliband – of Parliamentary
Democracy fame.
Sadly, I
blew this opportunity – I was so lonely in London that I soon scurried back to
the family hearth and then had 3-4 jobs (including, ironically, a couple in
London) before landing an academic position back in the West of Scotland…. And I regret never establishing any personal
link with Barbu – admittedly quite a private person in those days. As students
we never knew of his background – we never asked, of course – but, as this
vignette (which I discovered recently) indicates, he was not someone to
flaunt his distinctive experience.
Apparently he left Britain in 1973 – to take
up a Professorial post in Brazil where he died in 1993 – somewhat marginalised
it seems…....
However I’m glad to say that Barbu seems remembered in modern Romanian
academia – with this 2015 intellectual biography and a
2014 tribute here (in Romanian)
