In the Twilight. Studies on the Pre- and Early History of Critical Theory) by Christian Voller, Matthes & Seitz, 2022, 414 pages, German.
Reviewed by Jonathan Roessler, Free University Berlin, 2023.
Pentecost 1923, Geraberg, a small village on the northern edge of the Thuringian Forest. Eight miles away, the mountain called ‘Kickelhahn’ where Goethe wrote his ‘Wanderer’s Nightsong’ onto the wall of a gamekeeper’s hut. Thirty miles away, Erfurt, Thuringian’s capital, where, for two years now, SPD and USPD have governed in coalition. Later that year, the Communists will join. A brief period of left unity and a singularity in Weimar Germany. It is the year of hyperinflation, the French occupation of the Ruhr district, and the Nazis’ first test of power. By mid-November, the Reichswehr will have deposed the left coalitions in Saxony and Thuringia, and Hitler will have tried to seize power in Munich. 1923 in Germany was, as Ernst Bloch puts it, a ‘mixed time of dusk and dawn’.[1]
In this fateful year, around twenty-five Marxists meet in a small train station hotel in Geraberg for what they call a ‘Marxist workweek’. It is the first seminar convened by the IfS at the University of Frankfurt which has only been established in February. Its aim: ‘to create an academic home for Marxism’.[2] The list of participants is illustrious. There is Karl Korsch, who later that year will become a professor of law and minister of justice in Thuringia’s short-lived Communist coalition. There is his wife Hedda Korsch, educationalist and granddaughter of the famous feminist Hedwig Dohm. There is Georg Lukács who has just published History and Class Consciousness, the institute’s financier, Felix Weil, as well as Richard Sorge, later known as ‘Stalin’s James Bond’. There is also Clara Zetkin’s son Konstantin Zetkin, the later Frankfurt School’s chief economist Friedrich Pollock and the sinologist Karl August Wittfogel.
In Voller’s book, Geraberg becomes the birthplace of critical theory. Here, two very different intellectual milieus converge and begin to form the particular synthesis of Marxian radicalism and philosophical rigour that would come to define the IfS and its periphery. These are, on one side, radical left council communists on the lookout for an alternative to both Social Democracy and Bolshevism. On the other, academics, mostly from assimilated Jewish backgrounds, who have been ‘socialised in the bourgeois tradition’ (p. 14). ‘Revolutionary communists’ thus meet philosophers who, inspired by Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, seek to break through the fetters of neo-Kantianism yet without relapsing into pre-critical metaphysics or joining one of the many irrationalisms of the interwar period (p. 14). Voller groups these thinkers under the term ‘Heidelberg syncretism’. It is a peculiar liaison. Both milieus, however, find common ground in their ‘return to Marx’. For the council communists, it is an attempt to renew historical materialism vis-à-vis Bernsteinian reformism and the creeping authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks. For the Heidelbergean philosophical milieu, Marx’s method represents a means to come to terms with the ‘transcendental homelessness’ (Lukács) of modernity (p. 197).
The book’s title alludes to a collection of aphorisms by Max Horkheimer called Twilight. Notes in Germany, published in 1934. Like Horkheimer, Voller means ‘dusk’ when he says twilight, not dawn. He does not tell the Frankfurt School’s formative years as the beginnings of a glorious institutional history (p. 16). Rather, he shows that they have been profoundly shaped by the misery of the failed revolution, the tragic defeat of Western Europe’s labour movement. From this perspective, critical theory becomes ‘theory of the failed, aborted, and distorted social revolutions’ (p. 359). Only against this backdrop, the author argues, can we appreciate the excess which distinguishes critical theory from other traditions. It is ‘the unfulfilled social-revolutionary desire, which social research, even critical social research, cannot fully capture, but which constitutes the true source of critical theory’ (p. 359).
The book consists of three parts. The first starts with a reconstruction of historical materialism ‘as it has been discussed among the early representatives of critical theory’ (p. 24). The second part explores council communism, ‘Heidelberg syncretism’, and their intersections. The third part comprises three case studies on different ‘interpretations of Marx and their fate’ (p. 26): Alfred Seidel, Georg Lukács, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel.
Voller centres his reconstruction of historical materialism on the manuscripts of the German Ideology and thus on the dialectic of productive forces and relations of production. In this context, his analysis of the interplay of integration and particularisation is noteworthy. The development of productive forces, which drives the process of socialisation, simultaneously leads to individual’s isolation (p. 44). While the development of the productive forces makes a ‘society synthesised by collective production’ possible in potentia, at the same time, it thwarts its realisation by splitting society into ‘competing interest groups’ and atomised individuals (p. 45). Also notable is Voller’s critique of the ‘ontological’ philosophy of technology in the Heideggerian tradition and the ‘rampant Latourianism in social theory’ (pp. 39, 363). Rejecting accusations of ontological dualism, Voller claims that historical materialism does not treat ‘culture and nature, man and nature, history and nature’ as ‘stubborn opposites’ (p. 39). Rather, in contrast to the ‘ontologising of technology’, it reveals ‘the primacy of human activity in the creation of social relations of production’, the precondition for any alienating mechanisation to arise in the first place (p. 46). Both Heidegger and Latour, in different ways and for different reasons, do away with the specificity of human activity. Yet the phenomena they decry, the detached progression of technological rationality (in Heidegger’s case) and the excesses of binary Western thinking (in Latour’s case) can both only be explained by looking at the social organisation of human action. Voller shows how bourgeois philosophies of technology either deny the rift between the development of technology and the satisfaction of human needs (the liberal version) or fully reject the means-ends relation, thereby placing human subjectivity in a precarious position (p. 68). Both the late Heidegger and Latour’s actor-network-theory fall into the latter trap. Critical theory, in contrast, retains an understanding of technology as a means for human ends while acknowledging the detachment of technological progress from the satisfaction of needs. It can thus confront society with its productive forces’ unrealised potential for liberation (p. 58). Voller argues that this utopian perspective is crucial to the project of critical theory in general. In the first place, he claims, ‘communism’, means nothing more (and nothing less) than replacing the irrational and unfree division of labour created by the capital-driven progress of the productive forces by voluntary, rational organisation (p. 61). This is, Voller argues, what the Frankfurt School’s thinkers mean, when they later speak of a ‘reasonably arranged world’. For the first generation of critical theorists, who had been communists in this sense, the rational organisation of the productive forces as catering to human needs rather than accumulation, had been the ‘point beyond the criticised conditions’ that guided their critique of the existing order (p. 62).
The second section of Voller’s reconstruction of historical materialism is concerned with the problem of what Marx calls ‘real subsumption’ and which, he argues, ‘decisively complicates’ the dialectic of productive forces and relations of production (p. 70). For, if the ‘dominant form of circulation does not simply enclose the existing means of production, but rather shapes them to a point where they cease to be productive forces and begin to become destructive forces’ (p. 69), then the ‘reasonable abolition of the capitalist mode of production’ could potentially be ‘rendered impossible’ (p. 73). Voller shows that this concern, key to the later Frankfurt School’s thinking, was already, incipiently, present in the early Marx.
This leads to the third section, in which the author turns to Marx’s critique of political economy. Quick and concisely, Voller explains the concept of the commodity form, abstract labour, value, and surplus value, eventually arriving at the infamous ‘tendency of the rate of profit to fall’, which, according to Voller, has misled interpreters to the idea that ‘the capitalist mode of production is pushing with necessity towards its own abolition’ (p. 90). This, he calls, a ‘schema of historical salvation’, the ‘theoretical flattening of historical materialism’ through its ‘scientification’ (p. 91). Voller’s verdict: ‘at Engels’ hand, historical materialism turns into bourgeois science and adheres to its ideal of objective, disinterested knowledge, but precisely through this adherence – and this is a significant example of the dialectic of enlightenment! – it turns into a technological myth’ (p. 97). With his critique of Engels, Voller’s reconstruction of historical materialism ends, and the history of critical theory begins. Its aim: to ‘reclaim historical-materialist theory as a critical theory of society’ (p. 107).
Before I move on to the second part, a brief critical remark. Voller’s aim of reconstructing historical materialism ‘as it has been discussed among the early representatives of Critical Theory’ (p. 24) makes it at times difficult for the reader to distinguish between what is reconstruction and what is Voller’s own interpretation. This particularly affects his discussion of technology, one of the strengths of the first part. While he rightly argues that what critical theory can mean for us today depends significantly on how we conceive of its relationship to technological progress (p. 35), the question of technology rarely resurfaces in the later parts of the book. It remains, further, unclear to what extent the problem of technology had really been an issue for the early critical theorists (except for their rejection of technological determinism). This creates a certain schism between the first and the subsequent parts of the book. If, instead, the chapter had been designed as an independent interpretation of Marx from the outset, Voller may have not only been able to avoid that problem, but may have also expanded on his intriguing observations on media and language theory (pp. 40-41, 50-51) as well as on the idea of a Blumenbergean ‘political metaphorology’ in Marx (pp. 94-101). His assertion that Marx presupposes a ‘primordial identity of humans and nature’ (p. 39) would have also warranted a more in-depth discussion (Søren Mau, for example, has recently argued that the very opposite is the case).[3]
*
The second part, ‘Returning to Marx’, starts with an exploration of the council communism movement, a small but ‘theoretically advanced’ movement that emerged in the 1910s in the German Reich and Holland (p. 122). Its most important proponents were the Dutch astronomer and physicist Anton Pannekoek and the economist Paul Mattick as well as Karl Korsch who Voller regards as the second ‘father’ of Critical Theory, next to Georg Lukács. The council communists’ central idea was that the ‘social administration of the means of production – the actual purpose of the communist revolution – ought to be locally realised through the councils’ (p. 123). Karl Korsch and his work Marxism and Philosophy link this movement to critical theory. Korsch argued that the revolution had failed not due to ‘objective conditions’, i.e., the development of productive forces, but due to failures in the ‘subjective factor’, i.e., proletarian consciousness (p. 132). Arguing for a ‘return to Marx’ while focusing on the ‘social forms of consciousness’ (p. 136), he puts the ‘ideology-problem’ onto the stage.
In the following, the author draws on Adorno’s endorsement of ‘council democracy’ (in ‘Theses on Needs’) to outline the ‘multifaceted network of political, economic, and personal affinities and interactions between the left-communist milieu and the representatives of critical theory’ (p. 142). He discusses the acquaintanceship between Korsch and Benjamin which had been facilitated by Bertolt Brecht, Felix Weil’s attempts to convince his teacher Korsch to work for the IfS, and the ‘Marxist workweek’ in Geraberg. This allow Voller to evaluate rupture and continuity in Horkheimer’s reorientation of the Institute when he becomes its director in 1931. After the early phase of the Institute, in which a ‘well-connected … communist faction’ had set the tone, a ‘programmatic integration of psychoanalytic and cultural-theoretical approaches’ opened up an entirely new field of topics (pp. 146-7). Nevertheless, with Henryk Grossmann, Franz Neumann, and Friedrich Pollock, a ‘political-economic’ faction remained at the Institute (p. 150) and the Frankfurt School’s particular ‘attempt at a synthesis [… ] with regard to the development of a critical theory of society’ can only be understood from the simultaneity of politico-economic analysis and a materialist philosophy of culture (p. 151).
The latter half of the book’s second part is dedicated to what Voller calls ‘Heidelberg Syncretism’. This term encapsulates the multitude of intellectual influences characteristic of the Weimar intellectual climate. A complex and conflicting climate that had one of its hotspots in 1920s Heidelberg. The Heidelberg circle comprised Lukács and Ernst Bloch, both of whom had already studied here with Max Weber in the 1910s, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Alfred Seidel, Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor W. Adorno (p. 156). Voller unravels what ‘Heidelberg syncretism’ stands for via negativa by showing how various intellectual movements quarrelled with the Neo-Kantianism (or what they perceived as Neo-Kantianism) dominating the German universities. In describing the peculiar intellectual atmosphere of 1920s Heidelberg and what he calls ‘the pre-Marxist phase in the development of critical theory’, Voller relies primarily on Leo Löwenthal’s memoirs who recalls: ‘At that time, I was in a mystical, radical, syncretic mood, which was a mixture of revolutionary radicalism, Jewish messianism, an indulgence in ontologically conceived phenomenology, an acquaintance with psychoanalysis […]’ (quoted on p. 167). Indeed, a heady brew. And this was only the tip of the iceberg. There was also the conservative cultural pessimism of Ludwig Klages and Oswald Spengler, neo-Catholic idealisations of the Middle Ages (which fascinated Lukács and Bloch for a while), the youth movement (in which the young Walter Benjamin had been active), Nietzscheanism (one of Adorno’s first philosophical encounters), vitalism, expressionism, avantgarde. All manifestations of a great cultural unease in postwar Germany, a tense intellectual atmosphere, and a vigorous rejection of anything that reeked of scholasticism. Accordingly, Neo-Kantianism became the centre of critique. It was perceived as dualistic and formalistic, capitulating in front of the ‘thing-in-itself-problem’, and as epistemologically restricting itself of accessing a ‘totality’, i.e., a whole that could bestow meaning and cohesion to individual phenomena (p. 180).
With this in mind, Voller argues that the Heidelberg version of historical materialism did not emerge as a critique of idealism and metaphysics but rather ‘sprang directly from the idealistic-metaphysical exaggerations of the Heidelberg discussion’ (p. 194, Italics JR). In contrast to the council communists, here, the origin of the development of critical theory was ‘not Marx and the critique of scientific socialism, but the dissolving neo-Kantian paradigm and the numerous philosophical currents that had formed in its shadow and now established themselves against’ it (p. 184).
For the Heidelberg thinkers, historical materialism, especially ‘the way Marx brings the phenomenon of a self-concealing totality to critical representation’, seemed to be a possible solution for overcoming neo-Kantianism’s philosophical shortcomings (p. 221). The different (future) representatives of critical theory thus turned to Marxism between 1917, the year in which Lukács ‘converted’ to Marx, and 1931, the year in which Adorno explicitly embraced a materialist standpoint (p. 213). Voller refers to this time as the ‘latency period’ of critical theory (p. 233). The crucial development during this period was that for the would-be critical theorists ‘the commodity form assumed the status of a key category through which the entirety of capitalist society could be interpreted and criticised’ (p. 213).
With this, we have reached the third and final part of the book, in which Voller traces how three representatives of the ‘Heidelberg milieu’ appropriated Marxism to come to terms with the problem of totality. These are Alfred Seidel, Georg Lukács, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel.
Alfred Seidel took his own life in 1924 and only two of his works remain: Productivity and Class Struggle (Produktitvität und Klassenkampf) (1922) and Consciousness as Fatality (Bewußtsein als Verhängnis, posthumously edited and published in 1927). In recent years, Voller has almost single-handedly rescued Seidel from obscurity, and he shows that Seidel’s work has vividly been discussed by Benjamin, Bloch, Kracauer, and other thinkers of the Heidelberg milieu. As late as 1965, Adorno still publicly mentioned Seidel as a ‘late friend of my youth’ (quoted on p. 248).
Seidel attempts to solve the problem of the missing totality by means of economic determinism. A ‘metaphysics of the productive forces’ which deduces the entirety of capitalist society from technological development (p. 241). Under the influence of Karl Mannheim’s sociological relativism, Seidel did not see Marxism as a path to understanding historical processes, but rather as ‘a political ideology whose mobilising effect alone was of importance’ (p. 244). As Voller shows, this culminates in an ‘attempt to restore a revolutionary metaphysics, whose reality he hopes for even if he no longer believes in its truth’ (p. 245). Seidel’s ‘nihilation of nihilism’ may come close to an ‘early form of negative dialectics’, but eventually collapses into ‘irrational and anti-enlightenment pathos’ (p. 255). In 1927, when Consciousness as Fatality was published, it was widely discussed. In a review/obituary, Margarete Susman called it the ‘purest example’ of the ‘barren truth of his time’.[4] Voller’s study of Seidel is fascinating not only as a testimony to the time’s ‘oppressive syncretistic mood’ (p. 256), but also because Seidel’s way of thinking represents one of the ‘impasses’ in the history of critical theory.
The chapter on Georg Lukács reveals his double significance for the development of the Frankfurt School. First as a major influence for the Heidelberg milieu, later by offering a Marxist way out of its ‘paralysing syncretism’ by means of the concept of ‘reification’. Lukács solves the ‘totality-problem’ by focusing on the process of reification, ‘through which social and historical processes and relations are condensed into […] unavailable elements of a destiny’ (p. 301). However, as Voller argues, with his concept of the proletariat as the ‘subject-object of history’, Lukács falls back into a ‘positive metaphysics of history’ (p. 305) where ‘anything deviating, non-identical, individual’ falls prey to a self-realising totality (p. 308). In his 1923 review of History and Class Consciousness, Bloch already accused Lukács of a ‘certain simplistic tendency towards homogenisation’.[5] Later, Voller argues, Adorno’s negative dialectics, a critique of any positive philosophies of history, found ‘its most recent object and opponent in Lukács’ Hegelian-Marxist apology of Bolshevism’ (p. 309).
The third case study is devoted to Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who can be considered a ‘typical representative of that free-floating intelligentsia’ which ‘settled in Heidelberg after the war’ (p. 315). Voller shows how Sohn-Rethel’s work on his ‘semi-intuitive insight […] that the transcendental subject is to be found in the innermost part of the formal structure of the commodity’, developed slowly throughout the 1920s and 1930s (p. 317). While Sohn-Rethel’s work on the real abstraction of value greatly impressed Adorno (p. 339), Sohn-Rethel’s ‘only true philosophical interlocutor’, as Alberto Toscano puts it,[6] Sohn-Rethel’s work was only published in 1970. With the rise of Nazism, his project had faded into the background. The urgency to conceptualise fascism and anti-Semitism had initiated a ‘transition to a second phase of critical theory’ (p. 346).
In a short conclusion, Voller summarises that there was a ‘remarkable consistency’ between the configurations of the 1920s and what would later be canonised as ‘Critical Theory’ (p. 359). He argues that there are two possible interpretations. A ‘weak’ interpretation would see the early history of critical theory as merely a ‘preview’ of what would later be elaborated in the work of the Frankfurt School (p. 359). A ‘strong’ interpretation, however, would regard the Frankfurt School as a continuation, ‘as theory of the failed, aborted, and distorted social revolutions’ (p. 359).
*
The great strength of Voller’s book is to bring to the foreground figures who, in other histories of the Frankfurt School, are usually relegated to supporting roles. Löwenthal and Sohn-Rethel, Korsch, and Seidel enter the stage while Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse largely disappear behind the scenes. Writing the history of critical theory also as a history of its ‘aberrations and impasses, sideshows, and impediments’ (p. 21) makes Voller’s book not only a prime example of critical intellectual history, but it also encourages us to re-interpret ‘mature’ critical theory in light of its formative years. From this strength derives, perhaps unavoidably, also a downside: the pre- and early history of critical theory misses a bridge to its later development. As, for varying reasons, the influence of Voller’s main characters on the more canonical thinkers of the Frankfurt School diminishes after the 1920s, the actual impact of critical theory’s ‘pre-history’ on later Frankfurt School thought becomes difficult to grasp. The ‘remarkable consistency’ which Voller posits remains somewhat elusive. The reason for this is that he largely brackets the intellectual development of the two main protagonists of both early and late(r) critical theory, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
While this may be an unavoidable consequence of Voller’s (otherwise highly insightful) shift of perspective from history to pre-history and from core to periphery, the rise of Nazism and the Jewish background of many of the early critical theorists arguably would have deserved more attention. The author argues that thinkers like Fromm, Löwenthal, Kracauer, and Benjamin who publicly discussed their being Jewish in the 1920s, were rather the exception than the rule. He also emphasises that the IfS never considered itself ‘Jewish’ and rightly points out that even the ‘best intentioned’ analysis of the ‘Jewish element’ in critical theory ‘runs the risk of reproducing an originally anti-Semitic topos’ (p. 148). Voller’s cautiousness might lead him however to neglect the fact that the rise of anti-Semitism was a concern for critical theory from the very outset. The anti-Semitic murders of Walther Rathenau and Matthias Erzberger were an important motive for Hermann and Felix Weil in founding the IfS.
Voller’s history of the emergence of critical theory is a fascinating read and an important contribution to the history of the Frankfurt School. The author has announced that he might write a sequel. Anyone interested in the history of critical theory should hope that he will do so, and that he will continue to unravel this history from its margins. For what his book so magnificently reveals is that critical theory-building is not a smooth, linear process, but messy, full of controversies and dead-ends, and always entangled in real historical circumstances. Much remains to be discovered in the ‘twilight’ of the 1920s. Bloch’s influence, for example, whose debut The Spirit of Utopia appeared in the same year as Marxism and Philosophy and History and Class Consciousness in a revised, Marxist edition. Or the role of the feminist, philosopher, poet, and journalist Margarete Susman, to whom Voller refers in a footnote (p. 268), and whose work has, of yet, received little scholarly attention.
Voller’s book is particularly interesting because he does not confine himself to write ‘history for history’s sake’. His reconstruction has implications for what it means to pursue critical theory today. Vis-à-vis depoliticised notions of ‘critique’, Voller insists that Critical Theory, with capital ‘C’, was – and ought to continue to be – a theory of social revolution. By digging up the half-forgotten council-communist heritage in the Frankfurt School and its intellectual environment, he places this social-revolutionary legacy right back at the heart of critical theory.
[1] Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit. Frankfurt am Main, 1985, pp. 17.
[2] Felix Weil, quoted on https://www.ifs.uni-frankfurt.de/schlaglichter.html#modal-schlaglicht-1-memorandum
[3] Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. London, 2023, 102.
[4] Margarete Susman, “Alfred Seidel: Bewusstsein Als Verhängnis.” Der Morgen, 3, 1927.
[5] Ernst Bloch, Philosophische Aufsätze Zur Objektiven Phantasie. Frankfurt am Main, 1985, 618.
[6] Toscano, Alberto. Late Fascism, London, 2023, 80.
