more Frankfurt school stuff - Jay

Authority

Although I am not employing psychoanalytic methods as such, it needs acknowledgement as a major influence on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
 
'In psychoanalysis nothing is true apart from the exaggerations' (Adorno, from Minima Moralia, quoted in Jay, 1996: 105) 

The Frankfurt school sought to align Marx and Freud (mainly through the work of Erich Fromm); in so doing characterising a dynamic approach to history: 'For Marx, the past is pregnant with the future.... For Freud, the future is pregnant with the past.... Revolution could only repeat the prototypal rebellion against the father, and in every case, like it, be doomed to failure' Jay, 1996: 86-7, quoting Rieff). Hence, Marx and Freud make strange bedfellows in one sense, but represent a useful dynamic approach on the other. Oedipal resistance to the father lent itself to the study of authority and by extension the relationship of the individual to society that resulted from shared interests in the connected and linked symbolic structure of unconscious processes. Furthermore, the disenchantment with the possibility of revolution seems to lie in these interconnections (here the idea of progress is set against the death instinct in Freud). Perhaps the obstacles to social change lay in the unconscious.

It is also in the work of Fromm that the connection between capitalism and anality is drawn. According to this logic, rationalism, possessiveness and puritanism are related to anal repression and orderliness (Jay: 1996: 94). [good quote for ordure] In other words, and at the risk of oversimplifying things, the capitalist is anally retentive. Using Freud's libido theory as a point of departure, Fromm also sought to investigate 'irrational authority' through a study of sado-masochism that de-emphasised the erotic elements. In response to alienation, he developed the idea that love depends on given socio-economic conditions; that for freedom to exist, there must be love in society. Freudian theory and its revisionist forms becomes repeatedly tied to society at large in the Frankfurt School approach (with its stress on the sociological in addition to the biological). For instance, Adorno stresses the anti-enlightenment character of Freud's work in debunking a sense of totality and the myth of the subject's unity as this is never realised in society. This is what Adorno calls 'an ideological cloak for the psychoanalytical status quo of each individual'. (Jay, 1996: 104, quoting Adorno's 'Social Science and Sociological Tendencies in Psychoanalysis') Adorno rejects Fromm's de-eroticisation as a means of 'social hygiene', and argues for the importance of the sexual elements of sadism so blatantly displayed through Nazism. He wrote: 'In the age of the concentration camp, castration is more characteristic of social reality than competitiveness' (Jay, 1996: 105).

The focus on problems of authority and the rise of Nazism was of fundamental concern to critical theory (partly to explain the social and psychological conditions in which workers rejected their historical role within Marxism and to accept Nazism). They were not simply rejecting authority, but actually stressing its positive role - like an educators role in relation to students (what Max Weber called 'legitimate authority'. Fascism, for Weber, was characterised by 'rationalised means and irrational ends', Jay, 1996: 121). Fascism, on the other hand, was 'the reason in which reason reveals itself as irrational' (Jay, quoting Horkheimer, 1996: 121). It should be added that for Horkheimer and the like, fascism was intimately related to capitalism (it was 'middle-class extremism' according to Seymour Martin Lipset, quoted in Jay 1996: 124). In dialectical terms, totalitarianism is both a reaction to and a continuation of certain trends in liberalism. There is perhaps further confusion in the term 'national socialism' as the fascist tendency towards nationalisation is the opposite of socialisation - so this is decidedly not the Hegelian state as the reconciliation of opposites. Moreover, these were trends that were indicative of Western civilisation as a whole, not merely Nazi Germany. (note: also breaking from classical Marxism, Klaus Theweleit, in Male Fantasies describes fascism as the male's incapacity to deal with his own body).  

Horkheimer emphasised the disjunction between the anti-authoritarianism of bourgeois ideology and the submission of the individual to irrational authority of the socio-economic order. The family (always a favourite subject for the social scientist) effectively demonstrated these conflicts with society. Taking this relationship between the family and society to be dialectical allowed for both Hegel's and Marx's positions on the family to be considered - a optimistic and pessimistic view respectively. The question remained as to whether the crisis and breakup of the traditional family and lines of parental authority would engender or inhibit social change. The Institut's view became increasingly pessimistic on this issue. An analysis of social agents like the family, were in keeping with a general trend to recognise the patterns of the current stage of capitalist development. It was argued that under monolopy capitalism, social relations had been widened and now extended beyond the interactions of employer and worker, or producer and consumer. According to Friedrich Pollock, 'the profit motive' had been transformed into 'the power motive' in more (sado-masochistic) social relations of 'commander and commanded' (Jay, 1996: 153 - more accurately, the profit motive can be understood as part of the power motive). 

Drawing upon the Institut's studies of authority and the family, Nazi version of state capitalism (ironically called national socialism) was a new order of a 'command economy', a capitalism in its extreme wherein politics or ideology had been seen to have triumphed over the economy - and therefore needed to be best understood in terms of the political economy. The term 'state capitalism' is in itself a contradictory term as it simultaneously implies the state owns the means of production and therefore it could not be capitalist - in fact, it was a private capitalist economy but regulated by the state for the most part opposed to nationalising industry. Neumann, goes further in describing National Socialism was a 'non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness and anarchy' (Jay, 1996: 165). The scarey implications were that the contradictions that were embedded within the economic system were unlikely to collapse as once believed because it was so carefully regulated. Forms of domination were more overt in the command economy perhaps (although it should be pointed out that these were also evident in Hegel's master-slave dialectical relationship) and this employed a technological rationality. Nazism could be understood in terms of a more widespread trend towards irrational domination. Adorno and Horkheimer assert: 
'A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself' (in 'The Culture Industry' in Dialectic of Enlightenment). Therefore, social transformation could only ensue if this technological framework itself was overturned (expressed both in state capitalism and soviet state socialism). A reliance on change at the level of the means of production did not go far enough, thought Horkheimer, and change could only come about through a 'rupture in the continuum of history' (in the spirit of Benjamin's thesis on the philosophy of history).