A comment on Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment by Jeffrey Herf, from his Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. It puts a finger on a notable silence in early Critical Theory. Herf says:
"Let us recall its first sentence: 'The fully enlightened world radiates disaster triumphant.'Adorno and Horkheimer went on to argue that implicit in the beginnings of the Enlightenment, in Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, was the synthesis of reason, domination, and myth that was revealed in all its truth in de Sade's orgies and Nietzsche's aphorisms, and then put into practice in Auschwitz. Auschwitz was the Enlightenment's truth: reason as total domination.
What is striking in rereading this now-classic work is how little, if any, space is allotted to the Enlightenment as a contributor to the liberal political tradition---political pluralism, parliaments, public discussion, the defense of individual liberty against the state---and how much the book focuses on scientific reason undermining universal normative claims to the good life.
The book is also striking in how little it has to say about the fate of the Enlightenment in Germany, discussing it instead as if it were a uniform development throughout Europe and America. Its authors' clear intention was to suggest that Auschwitz presented the possible fate of the modern world as a whole. Modernity in general, not only German modernity, combined myth and reason. Enchantment and disenchantment exist side by side. Auschwitz, not the proletariat, is the specter that haunts the modern world."(London: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
That absence of the political and the liberal political tradition--political pluralism, parliaments, public discussion, the defense of individual liberty against the state---in this text has always puzzled me too. In fact there is a suprising silence about that political dimension in the early Critical Theorists.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 15, 2005 10:31 PM | TrackBackCould it have something to do with the pan-Atlantic authority of Heidegger mid-century and the influence of German phenomenology upon the development of modernist criticism?
Posted by: jim on January 17, 2005 03:16 AMJim,
probably.
Then again Critical Theory was critical of Heidegger and phenomenology.
My feeling is that the liberal tradition and institutions were just dismissed rather than engaged with.
The account of the political that given was that of class,capitalism and fascism.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on January 17, 2005 10:49 AMCould it have something to do with the fact that the most enlightened State in the world, the U.S.A., in the territory of wh Adorno and Horkheimer were then living, dropping the A bomb on Hiroshima while they were writing the book? -- Which, to talk about odd silences, seems one of Herf's. As well as the silence on colonialism, which seemed, at least to the colonialists, very compatible with "the liberal political tradition---political pluralism, parliaments, public discussion, the defense of individual liberty against the state." Where, after all,one might ask Herf, did the term concentration camp come from? Wasn't it the liberal English, who let 25 thousand Boers starve to death in concentration camps during the Boer war? Even a conservative historican like Niall Ferguson acknowledged that defending the rights of the individual against the state was in synch with the rights of the state to redo the property laws on top of these various liberated individuals -- villagers in India and Ireland, for instance -- and that that resulted in the liberty to starve, a minor collateral casualty but one which we should perhaps consider. The numbers are large and undisputed -- 3 million in India in 1876, another couple of million in the 1880s, and maybe ten million in the first part of the twentieth century, according to Mike Davis' account in The Victorian Holocaust (and, if we mistrust such a notorious Marxist, the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica). In the case of the liberal Governor General of India in 1875, the lesson was that Indians in labor camp, given a ration comparable to that given in Auschwitz, were being given too much -- surely this charity would encourage laziness among the poor. The lesson for administrators was that a culling of the population would do them good.
The key, here, is the word dialectic, which seems to be ignored by a catalogue of ideological virtues as the summing up of a history that is, in its details, ignored. A and H. aren't tracking a linear history, but one that is fills its possible spaces in with actual facts -- such as the concentration camps, the military barbarisation that resulted in the commonplace use of terror bombing, etc., etc.
Posted by: roger on January 28, 2005 11:04 AM