In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews

3. Against Social Science: Jewish Intellectuals, the Critique of Liberal-Bourgeois Modernity, and the (Ambiguous) Legacy of Radical Weimar Theory

24 Three Against Social Science Jewish Intellectuals, the Critique of LiberalBourgeois Modernity, and the (Ambiguous) Legacy of Radical Weimar Theory . . . the Social Sciences, an abominable discipline from every point of view. —Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy, 21 December 1968 W. H. Auden coined that delightful injunction: “Thou shall not commit social science.”1 But much of its animating spirit, its diverse theoretical articulations and various ideological impulses, seems to emanate from a number of Jewish thinkers whose intellectual worlds were molded in and by the Weimar Republic and whose biographies and subsequent thought were, in quite different ways, indelibly marked by the catastrophic experience of National Socialism. I want here to consider the genesis and the later, more nuanced elaborations of these varied critiques of social science. These constitute an important part of Weimar’s ongoing and ambiguous legacy that, I would suggest, has become part of our own latetwentieth -century cultural sensibility. Under investigation here is a disparate group of thinkers whose intellectual stock has dramatically risen over the years and whose thought—each in its own very different fashion—is now regarded in some way as seminal or foundational. I am referring to the work and worlds of Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and what has become known as the Frankfurt School (especially Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse). At first glance the differences seem more glaring than any commonalities . Leo Strauss has come to embody, perhaps misleadingly so, a militantly elitist neo-conservatism;2 Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse are recognized as crucial formulators of what is now termed “Western Marx- 25 Against Social Science ism,” albeit of a highly refined culturally and philosophically re-tuned variety ;3 and Hannah Arendt is today regarded above all as a determinedly post-traditional, anti-ideological political thinker.4 The ideological differences between these thinkers are compounded, moreover, by a remarkable absence of reciprocal reference and public acknowledgement. Almost no statements of mutual recognition, let alone indebtedness, can be found.5 Indeed, there was often a nasty, profound dislike.6 Thus Arendt not only rejected Strauss’s attempt to court her when they met at the Prussian State Library, but acerbically criticized his conservative political views. As her biographer points out, the “bitterness lasted for decades . . . Strauss was haunted by the rather cruel way in which Hannah Arendt had judged his assessment of National Socialism: she had pointed out the irony of the fact that a political party advocating views Strauss appreciated could have no place for a Jew like him.”7 In return, Strauss openly agitated against Arendt upon the appearance of Eichmann in Jerusalem and encouraged students and acquaintances to pan it.8 Arendt’s dislike for Adorno was, if anything, even more intense. When he rejected her first husband’s (Guenther Stern) musicological work on what Arendt took to be tendentious Marxist ideological grounds, she declared: “That man is not coming into our house!”9 On the basis of the discovery of an obsequious 1934 piece Adorno wrote in a semi-official Nazi journal praising a song-cycle with words from Baldur von Schirach’s poetry, Arendt declared that he was amongst those Jews who “would have gone along with Hitler if they had been allowed to.”10 (It is, perhaps, the crowning irony that recently Arendt herself has been berated similarly for her continuing loyalty to and defense of another apparently unrepentant Nazi, Martin Heidegger.)11 For all that, the similarities between these seemingly disparate figures are striking, all the more so for thus far having gone relatively unnoticed and unanalyzed.12 All were acculturated German Jewish intellectuals, philosophers whose formative sensibilities were shaped in the Weimar Republic and whose personal biographies and subsequent worldviews were decisively stamped by Nazism and the experience of exile in the U.S. In one way or another they all experienced the travails described by Arendt in her “We Refugees.”13 (Their view of American society was exceedingly narrow, Walter Laqueur has observed laconically, because none of them had driving licenses!)14 All in quite different—yet quintessentially Weimarian —ways were attracted to heterodox, radical, and even subversive modes of thought. They thus inhabited what can only be described as a post-Nietzschean universe,15 and all of them, regardless of subsequent criticisms, came under the bewitching spell of Martin Heidegger.16 Like so many of the Weimar intelligentsia, they were all critics of “mass soci- 26...