The Frankfurt School in Exile (review)

Thomas Wheatland offers a striking overview of the experience of the Frankfurt School of leftist German–Jewish émigrés, who took refuge on Morningside Heights at Columbia in New York during the 1930s and 1940s. Its director, Max Horkheimer, arranged for the Institute of Social Research, with most of its books and property intact (unusual for most Jewish–German émigrés), to find a temporary home. This ambivalent but fruitful entry of German scholars versed in Hegelian– Marxist dialectics and having escaped the darkness of the Holocaust into the brightly lit American world of positivist science and essentially optimistic outlook created some extraordinary intellectual achievements. Rather silently at first as they barely spoke English and published mostly in German, this group greatly influenced postwar American intellectual life, including such luminaries as Irving Howe (the journal Dissent), Philip Selznick, Seymour Martin Lipset, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and C. Wright Mills, the latter of whom reviewed Max Horkheimer’s classic work, the Eclipse of Reason (1947) for publication. Most of the book concentrates on the 1930s and 1940s, but Wheatland also details the Frankfurt School’s legacy on the 1960s New Left student movement such as Mike Davis, Tom Hayden, and Todd Gitlin. In contrast to earlier portrayals that stressed the Frankfurt School’s relative isolation, Wheatland argues that the Frankfurt School had a quietly pervasive influence on American intellectuals in the 1940s after they abandoned their deliberate “splendid isolation” of the mid-1930s when their funding began to run out, perhaps even more long-term influence than when Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization, 1955; One-Dimensional Man, 1964) became the apparent “guru” of the New Left in the 1960s. Wheatland convincingly shows that Marcuse was as much caught up by the attention of the student movement rather than being a sort of father figure to it. Mike Davis, editor of New Left Review and author of City of Quartz (1990) admitted: “I tried to read One Dimensional Man, but understood not a word” (p. 321); in an interview Todd Gitlin thought “Since Herbert Marcuse was theoretically so disinclined to find grounds for strategy or action, he was not terribly useful—except to confirm gloom (p. 316).

Wheatland offers a “social history of ideas” (p. 1) about this profound transatlantic exchange that helped instill the intellectual traditions of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Max Weber into American academic life. It transformed at least some members of the Frankfurt School into American public intellectuals (Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse), while others (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno) honed their main intellectual legacy of “Critical Theory” partially in response to American criticism. It has to be one of the great ironies of intellectual history that Horkheimer and Adorno penned their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), a bleak portrayal of the dangers of instrumental reason that linked the Enlightenment to industrialized mass murder, in sunny Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles.

The Frankfurt School grew out of a small group of leftwing (mostly Jewish) intellectuals interested in providing a comprehensive theory of modern society through an analysis of capitalism. Forged in the intense debates of the failed Weimar Republic, the Institute for Social Research attracted not only Max Horkheimer but also Erich Fromm, who fused Freud and Marx into a psychoanalytical method of analyzing human motivations and became the most accessible and popular figure in America, Leo Lowenthal, a sociologist of literature, Theodor Adorno, a philosopher–critic of aesthetics and music, and Herbert Marcuse. Walter Benjamin, an influential philosopher of aesthetics and art, was also a member, but did not escape the Nazis.

Wheatland’s book is based on superb archival research and numerous interviews with key figures such as Daniel Bell or Tom Hayden. Wheatland offers a particularly excellent, broad social network history of ideas in the 1940s as the Institute struggled to find an intellectual home; later the book shifts its focus more narrowly to Herbert Marcuse’s influence on the New Left. Wheatland argues that...