The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism

Abstract

Lars Rensmann describes his book, The Politics of Unreason, as “the first systematic study of the Frankfurt School's research on and theories about antisemitism in English” (ix). Rensmann contends that despite the massive influence of the Frankfurt School on contemporary intellectual life, their analysis of antisemitism has yet to be widely received, nor has the centrality of this analysis to the overall project of early critical theory been sufficiently appreciated. The aim of this book is thus twofold: first, to reconstruct the analysis of antisemitism at the core of early Frankfurt School critical theory—particularly the work of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Löwenthal—in the interest of enriching our understanding of that project; and, second, to retrieve from that reconstruction useful tools for analyzing and critiquing modern antisemitism. In this way the project seeks to change both “our understanding of the Frankfurt School, and … our understanding of antisemitism through the Frankfurt School” (2).Rensmann sets out to correct five interpretive misunderstandings of this group of thinkers and their theorization of antisemitism and authoritarianism. These five interpretive mistakes are presented as a series of failures: the failure to fully appreciate or understand (1) the sociological and philosophical breadth of their project; (2) the distinctiveness of early critical theory's analysis of authoritarianism; (3) the centrality of the group's empirical studies to their theoretical work; (4) the deeply political nature and implications of their analysis; and (5) the important differences between the early Frankfurt School and “postmodernism.” In connection with this last point, Rensmann emphasizes that the early Frankfurt School is “deeply universalistic in its outlook and, even if critically, indebted to the enlightenment project and cosmopolitan intentions” (10). For reasons I'll discuss further below, I think that the book is largely successful in making its case for the breadth, distinctiveness, empirical richness, and political relevance of the Frankfurt School's analyses of authoritarianism and antisemitism. If I'm less convinced by the last claim, this is because it seems to me to rest on a caricatured portrait of “postmodernism”—as anti-Enlightenment, irrationalist, and anti-universalist—that critical theorists would do well, in my view, to leave behind. However, since this last point does not seem to me to be central to Rensmann's argument or to the achievement of his book, I'll leave further discussion of this issue aside.1The bulk of this rich and detailed study is dedicated to reconstructing the critical analysis of antisemitism that is spread across a range of important empirical and theoretical studies of the early Frankfurt School. Rensmann begins by helpfully situating this work in the context of early critical theory's reception of Freudian psychoanalysis. Of particular importance here is the Freudian idea that both civilization and the psyche are founded on the repression of instinct. In the hands of early critical theory, this universal Freudian claim was transformed into a historically specific diagnosis of liberal, bourgeois subjectivity. The paradox of this form of subjectivity is that, although it is founded on what the early Frankfurt School called the domination of inner nature, it at least allows for the possibility of autonomy and sublimation. However, in the emergent postliberal capitalist society that was the target of their critique, even this paradoxical form of liberal subjectivity began to disappear. In its place, more direct and unmediated forms of individual domination arose that resulted in a decrease in individual autonomy and thus an increasing susceptibility to social conformity (see 55–57).This Freudian background sets the stage for early critical theory's diagnosis of the authoritarian personality, a Weberian ideal type of modern subjectivity that is particularly prone to endorsing fascism, racism, and modern antisemitism (68). Despite widespread reception of The Authoritarian Personality study and its influence in some fields, Rensmann contends that “there has been little work reconstructing and thoroughly discussing the psychoanalytic and social theoretical grounding and presuppositions of the Frankfurt Schools studies of the subject” (82-83). Rensmann offers an exhaustive account of these issues, centering on what he characterizes as the “essential link” among the various elements of the authoritarian personality—conventionalism, submissiveness to authority, aggression, coldness, love of power, cynicism, tendency to stereotypical thinking and projection, and fixation on sexuality (83–84)—which is the weakness of the ego in postliberal subjectivity (84). Ego weakness renders the individual incapable of mastering internal conflict including, most notably, the demands of the superego. Under such conditions, individuals are more likely to externalize their conscience in the form of blind submission to an authoritarian leader.Rensmann turns next to the Frankfurt School's ‘labor study’—Antisemitism among American Labor—an extensive qualitative study of anti-Semitic ideology commissioned by the Jewish Labor Committee. With this discussion, Rensmann links the Frankfurt School's specific analysis of antisemitism to their broader claims about the social-psychological underpinnings of modern authoritarianism. Because antisemitism is, on their understanding, rooted in a psychic structure of false projection whereby the authoritarian subject splits off despised features of itself and projects them onto an external object, it is immune to factual correction, experiential feedback, and rational argument. As such, “antisemitism works well in the presence of Jews—and even better without them” (162). “By projecting them onto ‘the Jews,’” Rensmann explains, “the problems of deeply conflicted and weak subjects are externalized. This may offer a kind of sociopsychological relief. This operation is possible without ever drawing the social order into question, Critical Theory maintains, and it works best if such projective externalization is fully socially accepted, that is, if antisemitism is the dominant social norm” (184).Having excavated the psychic origins and structures of modern authoritarianism and antisemitism, Rensmann next zooms out to put these sociopsychological dimensions in the context of a macro social theory. This part of the story places antisemitism in the context of the Frankfurt School's well-known critique of modern instrumental rationality and its expression in capitalist modes of exchange. Although the analysis of antisemitism is often thought to be peripheral to this critique, Rensmann argues compellingly for its centrality. After all, as he reminds us, in the modern imagination Jewishness is identified not only with capitalism but also with the Enlightenment and its emphasis on rationality, universal norms, and individual emancipation. In that sense, “the image of the Jews thereby comes in handy to personify all possible crises of capitalism and modernity” (248). The bulk of this analysis is devoted to a discussion of the oft-overlooked “Elements of Antisemitism” chapter of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Rensmann contends that this chapter “represents the Critical Theorists' most focused, theoretically rich, and complex account of antisemitism: its features, social-historical embeddedness, transformations, and rise in modern society that negatively culminated in the Nazi Holocaust” (275). Although he is critical of Horkheimer and Adorno's tendencies to falsely universalize their analysis of antisemitism, to underplay the agency of anti-Semitic subjects, and even occasionally to engage in a deeply troubling form of victim-blaming (290-91), Rensmann nonetheless maintains that “there is indeed no richer, more profound theoretical and philosophical source for scholarship on antisemitism, whether historical or contemporary” (319).Having situated the Frankfurt School's macrosocial analysis of antisemitism in the context of their social-psychological account of authoritarianism, Rensmann turns next to politics. Aiming to challenge what he characterizes as the dominant interpretation of the early Frankfurt School as deeply apolitical—a view made popular by Jürgen Habermas's influential critique of his Frankfurt predecessors—Rensmann focuses on their analysis of political propaganda. This analysis forms the flipside of the social-psychological account of the authoritarian personality explored in earlier chapters. Anti-Semitic political propaganda exploits the ego weakness of the postliberal subject and thus “‘harmonizes’ with several psychosocial needs of the authoritarian personality: for a destructive unleashing of the drives, for an ideology to explain the world, for a bundling of disparate projections into social paranoia, and for narcissistic uplift” (333). Based on a study of the hate speech of American right-wing agitators during the Nazi period, this study convinced the Frankfurt School of the pervasiveness of anti-Semitic ideologies and authoritarian tendencies that lurk beneath the surface of American democratic culture, just waiting to be reactivated. In this, the Frankfurt School proved remarkably prescient, even if it took some sixty-five years for that to become glaringly apparent. As for what Rensmann identifies as the more optimistic corollary to this claim—the view that democratic institutions and political culture also provide an effective bulwark against the resurgence of authoritarian racism (352)—I fear that the jury is still out.Rensmann's discussion of the political aspects of the Frankfurt School's analysis of antisemitism continues with a consideration of their postwar studies of German guilt for Nazi atrocities. Based on a reading of Adorno's monograph Guilt and Defense, which he contends forms the unexplored empirical basis for his justifiably famous late radio addresses, Rensmann focuses on the emergence of “secondary antisemitism”: “a new form of Jew hatred that originates in the need to split off, repress, and downplay the memory of the Holocaust, which threatens the unhampered identification with one's national identity” (374). Again, Rensmann sees a positive lesson here: even if the public process of working through the legacy of antisemitism and guilt for Nazi atrocities has been “slow and arduous,” it has nonetheless been “crucial for the evolution of postwar Germany's political culture, and cultural democratization” (387). Democratic political culture requires citizens who are capable of engaging in critical public debate about historical guilt and taking responsibility for past atrocities. Working through the past and the project of critique thus go hand in hand.Although the majority of this book is devoted to the patient, detailed, and historically contextualized reconstruction of the Frankfurt School's groundbreaking analysis of modern antisemitism, the book concludes with an impassioned plea for its ongoing relevance and importance. Whatever limitations their analysis may have, “the Critical Theorists arguably provide more insightful theoretical models to explore the subject [of antisemitism] than any other single ‘school’ or research institution has produced thereafter” (399). Especially in light of the contemporary resurgence of authoritarianism, early critical theory seems more important and relevant than ever. By exposing the persistent appeal of an authoritarian politics of resentment, particularly in the wake of progressive social and political change, the Frankfurt School contributes to the analysis of what Rensmann calls “a new age of global authoritarianism” (405). However, in order to appreciate the contemporary relevance of the early Frankfurt School, we have to understand that despite their critique of the politics of unreason, these thinkers remained committed to critical rationality and to the project of the Enlightenment. Thus, the true political and intellectual legacy of the early Frankfurt School is, Rensmann argues, a critical cosmopolitanism that vigorously defends universal human rights (413–20).Rensmann displays an impressive mastery of a wide range of both theoretical and empirical works by the early Institute for Social Research and its key members and he shows convincingly how the much less frequently discussed empirical studies serve, in many cases, as background source material for the better-known theoretical works. For this reason alone, The Politics of Unreason will no doubt provide an invaluable resource for scholars and students who are attempting to find a foothold in this large and complex body of work. I found his discussion of the paradox of the liberal subject to be particularly illuminating. He does an exemplary job of showing how what often seems paradoxical or contradictory in Adorno's work—his critique of the ego's repressive tendencies, on the one hand, coupled with his lament for the ego weakness that renders modern subjects susceptible to authoritarian manipulation, on the other—is actually revelatory of a paradox in the social world: liberal, bourgeois subjectivity may be held together by repression, but it at least was able to generate a capacity for individual autonomy that enabled critical reflection. However, it seems to me that Rensmann might underplay the implications of this social-psychological aspect of the Frankfurt School analysis. Does it imply that the return to a repressive, liberal mode of subjectivity—and the bourgeois, patriarchal family structures in which such modes were embedded, according to Horkheimer and Adorno—is needed in order to facilitate the critical democratic political culture that Rensmann envisions as the bulwark against authoritarian antisemitism? And if so, (how) does this complicate the claim for the contemporary relevance of the Frankfurt School's analysis?Nevertheless, it seems to me that the real strength of Rensmann's book is its sympathetic yet not uncritical reconstruction of the distinctive and complex social psychology underlying the Frankfurt School's analysis of antisemitism. In comparison, the more overtly political aspects of the book are somewhat less well developed. For example, the chapter that claims to be devoted to politics has a rather narrow focus on political propaganda, which turns out, upon closer inspection, to be not much more than the mirror image of the social-psychological sketch of the authoritarian personality. However insightful this account may be, surely there is much more to be said about the politics of antisemitism than this?Still, Rensmann's book largely succeeds on the terms that it sets for itself. That said, some readers—perhaps especially readers of this journal—might be disappointed by the relative lack of emphasis on the value of the Frankfurt School's analysis of antisemitism for broader critical discussions of racism and colonialism. Rensmann occasionally notes the broader implications of the Frankfurt School's account of the social, psychological, and political origins of authoritarianism for thinking about race and racism, but usually without exploring those implications in detail. For example, according to the Frankfurt School, the virulent antisemitism that found its most horrifying expression in the Holocaust was rooted not in the particularities of German culture, nationhood, or history, but rather in tendencies that are endemic to modern society itself. This means, as Rensmann puts it, that “it could happen here” in the United States as well—and he notes that the rise of “anti-Jewish agitators and racist mass movements, such as the KKK” served as political reminders of this fact (71). It seems strange, however, to think of genocidal racism rooted in a complicated authoritarian social psychology as an abstract, hypothetical possibility in the context of the United States. To talk about the relationship between modern antisemitism and other forms of racism in this way is to elide the long, brutal history of legally sanctioned and codified anti-black racism in the United States—which, it has recently been argued, the Nazis may even have taken as a model for their own antisemitism.2To be sure, the root cause of this elision lies in the work of the Frankfurt School theorists themselves. In that sense, Rensmann is certainly not to blame for it, though one might have hoped that he would have done more to interrogate it. His failure to do so may stem from a desire to read the Holocaust as a singular and singularly awful historical experience. Indeed, he is critical of the Frankfurt School for failing to answer the question of why modern authoritarian antisemitism took hold in Germany and not elsewhere. In a related vein, although he notes similarities between antisemitism and colonial racism (173ff), Rensmann also insists on the distinctiveness of antisemitism. “While all racisms are highly irrational and intrinsically contradictory and false,” he notes, “antisemitism has traditionally pushed the inclusion of conflicting images to the extreme” (176). Although it would be too much to expect for this book to offer a conclusive account of the relationship between antisemitism and other forms of racism, especially given that its primary aims lie elsewhere, nevertheless it seems to me that such claims may constitute obstacles to the kind of conversation about the relations and interactions between antisemitism and racism that Rensmann hopes to generate (178).