The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism

13. Critical Theory, Scientism, and Empiricism

13 Critical Theory, Scientism, and Empiricism I shall here sharpen my critique of the Hegelian Marxism of the Frankfurt school, arguing that theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno failed to repoliticize Marxism once they had perceived that the working class would not become a successful revolutionary agent. The redevelopment of Marxism by certain original members of the Frankfurt school exaggerated the extent to which political rebellion could be isolated and contained by dominant interests. I argue that the early Frankfurt school's thesis of the decline of human individuality forced them to deny the possibility of political radicalism largely because it prevented them from recognizing resistance at the level of the lifeworld. This needs to be corrected if critical theory is successfully to challenge the depoliticization of public life today. I set two tasks for a critical theory that endeavors to repoliticize its orientation to social change, my main project in this book. First, we must develop a concept of human nature that grounds the possibility of political struggle in the capacity of the human being to perceive his or her own exploitation and to envisage and work toward alternative institutions, a project begun by Marcuse. I believe that the assumption of active, constitutive subjectivity must be the foundation stone of contemporary critical theory. In eliminating this assumption and supposing that the human 239 240 BEYOND THE END OF IDEOLOGY being has become totally dominated, Horkheimer and Adorno deny the possibility of emancipatory struggle. My second task is to reground the theory-practice relation in Marx's concept of the advisory role of critical theory. In this sense, theory follows and guides practice, locating it in an analytic totality and explicating its transformative significance. Horkheimer and Adorno severed the theory-practice relation in arguing that theory could only take the form of ideology critique because human subjectivity was no longer perceived to be capable of revolt. As I argued in my earlier Marcuse chapters as well as the preceding chapter, Marxism today must not, under the influence of historical pessimism, prematurely abandon the possibility of social change. I reject the thesis of the decline of subjectivity and challenge the overly defeatist attitude of Horkheimer and Adorno to the actuality of constructive change even though I learn a great deal from their dialectical critique of civilization, notably their theory of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972). I apply my insight about critical theory's failure to reengage empirical social research and a praxis orientation to the actual redevelopment of a social science with political implications (of the kind done by the Frankfurt theorists during their most "empirical" phase in the 1940s, e.g., Adorno et al. 1950; Adorno 1945, 1954). I examine certain historical aspects of Marx's theory and suggest ways it could be amended in the light of recent political and economic developments. The result will be a concept of radical empiricism that renews Marx's revolutionary science by enhancing the political significance of contemporary struggle to destroy authority structures and the division of labor (see Marx and Engels 1959, 37-39). Radical empiricism will become a political strategy of dialectical sensibilities who refuse to separate thought and action, even beginning to "live" social change in their own daily activity. Origins of Critical Theory: Marxism Redeveloped As I have explored in chapter 2 and elsewhere in this book, Lukacs and Korsch in the 1920s took issue with the Marxism that evolved in the Second International under the influence of theorists like Bernstein and Kautsky. Lukacs and Korsch opposed the neo-Kantian reconstruction of Marxism that separated the political from the scientific dimensions of Marx's theory of capitalism. Lukacs polemicized against tendencies to 241 CRITICAL THEORY, SCIENTISM, AND EMPIRICISM conceive of Marxism as a variant of natural science that merely charted "laws" of social motion. In a broader sense, Lukacs and Korsch opposed economism, a theory of change that stresses the economic determination of sociocultural and ideological forms. Economism, they believed, degraded the human being's purposeful contribution to the revolutionary process, suggesting instead that capitalism will inevitably collapse, given certain "contradictory" economic circumstances. Lukacs and Korsch rejected "automatic Marxism" (see Jacoby 1971, 1975a, 1976, 1981) because it gave too little weight to subjective and ideological factors in social analysis, and thus-they felt-it tended to reinforce a passive, even fatalistic attitude toward social change, eliminating the role of active subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The philosophical...