The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School by George Friedman (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 451 tions" (p. 36) ~ Aquinas holds that the passiones animae depend on their subject's recognition of things as good or bad (S.T. la, 2ae, 22, 2), which means that he does not sharply distinguish between feeling and believing in the way implied by Lyons. These criticisms aside, however, I think it must be said that Lyons has done his job very well indeed. Extraordinarily well, in fact. His book is a model of clarity and it abounds in careful and balanced reasoning. And, as far as I can see, it advances a first-rate defence of the theory for which it argues. Though its tone is constru0tive rather than polemical, it also manages some very effective swipes at a number of dubious pronouncements , notably ones by Descartes, Skinner, Freud, and Sartre. At several points in his text Lyons also offers some useful correctives to Anthony Kenny's .Action, Emotion and Will (1963), with which it must now be included in any serious bibliography on the question of emotion. It might be worth adding that anyone unconvinced by Lyons on emotion and feelings could fruitfully ponder on the following quotation from Pepys's Diary, which is missed by Lyons but cited to good effect in C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1965) : With my wife to the King's House to see The Virgin Martwr, and it was mighty pleasant ... But that which did please me beyond anything in the whole world was the wind musick when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me and, indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife ... and it makes me resolve to practise wind musick and to make my wife do the like. (27th February, 1688.) According to Lyons, " it seems impossible to assert that one is in the grip of such and such an emotion just by introspecting the quality or type of one's present feeling" (p. 133). Pepys would presumably have agreed. BRIAN DAVIES, O.P. Blackfriars, Oxford The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School. By GEORGE FRIEDMAN. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981. Pp. 312. $17.50. Like a guest at a disappointing dinner party, a reader sometimes finishes a book thinking it a splendid failure. Such is my reaction to George Friedman's The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School. Since Friedman views the work of the Frankfurt School as itself a failure, there is 452 BOOK REVIEWS more than a little irony in this. By assuming that the Frankfurt School intended to produce a recipe for overcoming " the bankruptcy of modernity ," Friedman manages to turn what could have been food for thought into a dining disaster. There is much that is inviting in Friedman's bill of fare. The book is well-written, lucidly presented, and vigorously argued, qualities which rarely come to mind when considering the merits of other discussions of the Frankfurt School. Even more appetizing is the promise of a fresh perspective. First, Friedman advertises his thesis as something other than intellectual history, which Martin Jay, of course, has already done. Instead , his recipe calls for "a systematic treatment of the thought of the Frankfurt School " (p. 21), a reconstruction of their fundamental doctrine about politics. Second, he does not present this on an hors d'oeuvres tray, as if the Frankfurt School were significant merely in preparing an agenda for the critical theory of Jiirgen Habermas. Wellmer, Schroyer, Bernstein, McCarthy, and Held, all have taken a turn at that arrangement. By contrast, Friedman focuses exclusively on the first generation, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse. Third, his menu is less restricted than most. There is more here than just one more footnote to the increasingly ponderous tradition of neo-Marxism. \Vhile Friedman does not deny Marxism's formative influence in defining the " problematic" of the Frankfurt School, he insists that " what makes ... [it] ... interesting is the non-Marxist origins of its thought" (p. 49). Having whetted the reader's appetite with such promises, Friedman serves up his thesis...