The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay
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had been severed.
In Paris, where the academic establishment was even more impenetrable than in England, the prospects seemed equally limited. Paul Honigsheim, who fled from Cologne and became head of the Institut’s Paris branch, has described the cold reception that normally greeted emigrés to France:
The typical French intellectual, who wanted security and a predictable future for himself and his family, found his way of life threatened by those damn German intellectuals, who did not spend their time drinking apéritifs with their friends but worked twice as hard as the Frenchman. They worked for the sake of God or, if they were not religious believers, for work’s sake, which for a true German scholar is almost the same. Accordingly, in contrast to the sympathetic attitude in the United States, the French did not welcome the appointment of German scholars in their midst. Thus it took courage to work openly on behalf of German refugees.117
Bouglé, Halbwachs, and their colleagues, Honigsheim stresses, had that courage, but they were in a small minority; as a result, France was ruled out as a possible new home for the Institut’s headquarters.
Despite the Institut’s Marxist image, at no time was the thought of going eastward to Stalin’s Russia seriously entertained, even by Grossmann, who made a short and unsuccessful journey to Moscow in the mid-thirties, or by Wittfogel. The only serious possibility left was America. Julian Gumperz was sent there in 1933 to explore the situation. Gumperz had been a student of Pollock’s since 1929 and at one time a Communist Party member, although he later gave it all up, became a stockbroker, and wrote an anti-communist book in the forties;118 he was born in America and thus was fluent in English. He returned from his trip with a favorable report, assuring Horkheimer and the others that the Institut’s endowment, which still brought in about $30,000 a year, would be sufficient to guarantee survival in a country still mired in economic depression.
Over the years, the Institut had made several contacts with prominent figures in the American academic world, such as Charles Beard, Robert Maclver, Wesley Mitchell, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Robert Lynd, all of whom were at Columbia University. Thus when Horkheimer made his first trip to the United States in May, 1934, he was able to gain access to Columbia’s patriarchal president, Nicholas Murray Butler. Much to his surprise, Butler offered the Institut affiliation with the university and a home in one of its buildings, at 429 West 117th Street. Horkheimer, fearing he had misunderstood Butler because of his limited command of English, wrote a four-page letter asking him to confirm and clarify his offer. Butler’s response was a laconic “You have understood me perfectly!”119 And so the International Institute for Social Research, as revolutionary and Marxist as it had appeared in Frankfurt in the twenties, came to settle in the center of the capitalist world, New York City. Marcuse came in July, Lowenthal in August, Pollock in September, and Wittfogel soon after. Fromm had been in the United States since 1932, when he came in response to an invitation to lecture by the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis. These men were among the first to arrive of that wave of Central European refugee intellectuals who so enriched American cultural life in the decades that followed.120
The transition was by no means without its difficulties. Still, in comparison with the members of Alvin Johnson’s “university in exile” at the New School for Social Research, who had few or no financial resources to make their resettlement easy, the Institut’s members were fortunate. In fact, the tensions that developed between the two refugee groups, although due in part to ideological differences,121 were also clearly exacerbated by their contrasting financial situations. It should be added, however, that in later years the Institut maintained a strong sense of responsibility to less well-off refugees. When problems did exist for Institut members, they were those of language and cultural adjustment, which plague any immigrant, but not of finances. The most difficult intellectual adjustment, as we shall see later, involved coordinating the philosophically grounded social research practiced by the Institut with the rigorous antispeculative bias of American social science. The use of American empirical techniques that its members learned in exile was an important lesson brought back to Germany after the war, but these skills had not been acquired without considerable hesitancy.
In general, the Institut was not especially eager to jettison its past and become fully American. This reluctance can be gauged by the decision to continue using Félix Alean as publisher even after leaving Europe. By resisting the entreaties of its new American colleagues to publish in America, the Institut felt that it could more easily retain German as the language of the Zeitschrift. Although articles occasionally appeared in English and French and summaries in those languages followed each German essay, the journal remained essentially German until the war. It was in fact the only periodical of its kind published in the language that Hitler was doing so much to debase. As such, the Zeitschrift was seen by Horkheimer and the others as a vital contribution to the preservation of the humanist tradition in German culture, which was threatened with extirpation. Indeed, one of the key elements in the Institut’s self-image was this sense of being the last outpost of a waning culture. Keenly aware of the relation language bears to thought, its members were thus convinced that only by continuing to write in their native tongue could they resist the identification of Nazism with everything German. Although most of the German-speaking world had no way of obtaining copies, the Institut was willing to sacrifice an immediate audience for a future one, which indeed did materialize after the defeat of Hitler. The one regrettable by-product of this decision was the partial isolation from the American academic community that it unavoidably entailed. Although the Institut began giving lectures in the Extension Division at Columbia in 1936, and gradually developed a series of seminars on various topics,122 its focus remained primarily on theory and research. Together once again in the security of its new home on Morningside Heights—of the inner circle, only Adorno remained abroad for several years more—the Institut was thus able to resume without much difficulty the work it had started in Europe.
Although sobered by the triumph of fascism in Germany, Horkheimer and the others were still somewhat optimistic about the future. “The twilight of capitalism,” wrote “Heinrich Regius” in 1934, “need not initiate the night of humanity, which, to be sure, seems to threaten today.”123 An intensification of their explorations of the crisis of capitalism, the collapse of traditional liberalism, the rising authoritarian threat, and other, related topics seemed the best contribution they could make to the defeat of Nazism. As always, their work was grounded in a social philosophy whose articulation was the prime occupation of Horkheimer, Marcuse, and to a lesser extent, Adorno, during the 1930’s. It was here that their reworking of traditional Marxism became crucial. It is thus to the genesis and development of Critical Theory that we now must turn.
* I am grateful to Dr. Weil for providing a full explanation of this and related German terms (used below) in the academic hierarchical system, as it was around 1920: “A Privatdozent was the first step in the academic career. It corresponds to assistant professor in the U.S. To become one, a candidate, usually then serving, after his doctor’s degree, as assistant to a full professor, to the dean of the department, or to a Seminar (study group), had to submit a new qualifying thesis, the Habilitationsschrift, sponsored by two full professors, and then defend it in a Disputation before the department consisting of all the full professors. (At Frankfurt University there were five such departments: philosophy, law, economics and social sciences, medicine, and natural sciences.) If he passed, the department granted him his venia legendi, the ‘permission to lecture’ which, however, was limited to a particular field. The Privatdozent was not a civil servant (Beamter) nor did he receive a salary, only a share in the tuition fees for his course.
“The next step on the ladder was the Ausserordentliche Professor, the associate professor. He was a civil servant, with tenure and salary, and also received a share in the tuition fees. He could sponsor Doktoranden and participate in the exams, but had no vote in the departmental meetings, although he could speak at these meetings.
“The Ordentliche Professor, the full professor, had all the rights of the Ausserordentliche, plus the vote in the meetings. But unlike the Ausserordentliche he could lecture on any topic he wanted, even