The Frankfurt School in Exile

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Frankfurt School in Exile Hinrich C. Seeba The Frankfurt School in Exile. By Thomas Wheatland. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. xxi + 415 pages. $39.95. From the theoretical critique of instrumental reason to living in counter-cultural utopias, from insistence on aesthetic autonomy to mass culture as a channel for democratization, from "negative dialectics" (as Adorno's most famous book is entitled) to rebellion against the commodification of culture, from bourgeois elitism, complete with contempt for falsches Bewusstsein of the less educated, to popular proletarianism—the Frankfurt School provided the mantra for a politically engaged generation that needed a theoretical framework for rebelling against their fathers, especially when, in the case of Germany, many of these fathers had been Nazi collaborators or worse. Anyone who is seriously interested in the originally Marxist criticism of mass culture and its manipulative aesthetics should read at least some of the self-contained chapters of Thomas Wheatland's The Frankfurt School in Exile. Readers will be fascinated to learn, for the first time in an in-depth analysis, about the affinities and controversies between the New York Intellectuals of the 1930s and the exiled Frankfurt School's Critical Theory, as it was discussed, often adopted, and eventually rejected, among others, by the editors of the journal Partisan Review and by the leading American Marxist of the time, Sidney Hook, who as a student of John Dewey had developed his own brand of Pragmatic Marxism. But this book is not so much a discussion of the philosophical legacy as it is a detailed contribution to the institutional history of how European philosophy was practiced under adverse circumstances, after the mostly Jewish members of the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung (founded in 1923 by Felix Weil, whose merchant family's wealth provided the annual operating costs of 120.000 marks) were forced into exile by the Nazis. The study concentrates on Columbia University as a host to the members of the Frankfurt School from 1934 until Max Horkheimer (on doctor's orders) and Theodor W. Adorno moved to California in 1941, and on the institutional conflicts surrounding the adoption of social theory in the American academe. The author, Thomas Wheatland, an assistant professor of German history at Assumption College in Massachusetts, emphasizes that he is not a critical theorist but merely a historian of Critical Theory. Even though he wants to stay clear of both philosophical and ideological controversies, he was able to give a nuanced, often captivating account even of slight theoretical and ideological differences in the interaction of German exiles and American intellectuals. He is clearly indebted to Martin Jay (Dialectical Imagination, 1973) and to Rolf Wiggershaus (Die Frankfurter Schule, 1986), but in contrast to both of them he concentrates on the often contentious interactions of the Horkheimer circle with mostly empiricist American scholars, especially at Columbia University. While the question of possible Communist infiltration was first [End Page 636] raised by Lewis Feuer in a provocative article of 1980, the clandestine Marxist leanings of the Institute (and their failure to publicly condemn Stalinist terror), to be sure, had been under scrutiny for some time. More interesting, at least to the author of the present study, than the ideological debate following Feuer's accusation is the fact that Columbia's Sociology department, represented by Robert Lynd, invited the Frankfurt School in 1934 because it needed the international and the interdisciplinary outlook the exiles from Frankfurt would provide, as the latter in turn needed an institutional home for their continued work, especially as the ongoing Studien über Autorität und Familie (collectively authored, and completed in 1936) coincided with Lynd's emerging research interest in the family. The story of the Frankfurt School in exile is full of ironies, as this book makes evident without delighting in the obvious failures. Horkheimer, who directed the successful studies in the proto-fascist nature of the authoritarian character, was personally most authoritarian in running a tight ship. He kept the members of the Institute under strict orders not to divulge their Marxist penchant or to engage in political action, yet they needed to collaborate with Marxist Pragmatists and to engage even in positivist...