Page 27 - Cultural Theory

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••• John Scott •••

during this period of exile that Adorno became a full member of the Institute. He
joined Horkheimer to produce a series of ‘philosophical fragments’ that were later
published as Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944), which
Horkheimer then popularized in a book of his own (Horkheimer, 1947). Adorno,
meanwhile, brought together much of his work on music for publication as a book
(Adorno, 1949). Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt in 1950 to re-establish the
Institute and to become Rector of the University, and he secured a Chair in the
Philosophy Department for Adorno in 1953. Marcuse, who had left the Institute in
1942 to take up some work for the US government, chose to remain in the United
States when Horkheimer failed to support his return to an academic post at
Frankfurt.
Horkheimer did little to develop his own ideas following his return to Frankfurt,
and he taught only on the history of philosophy. While Adorno chose to concentrate
much of his attention on aesthetics, he did continue to develop his wider philoso-
phy (Adorno, 1951; 1955; 1966) and his sociology of culture, and he became heavily
involved in methodological debates on the character of empirical research in sociol-
ogy. The bulk of the Institute’s work at this time was contract research of an unin-
spiring kind, and Adorno withdrew from empirical research after the mid-1950s.
I will look at the ideas of the Frankfurt Marxist humanists in the following sec-
tions. I will look, first, at their views on knowledge and its relation to the social posi-
tion of the knowing subject. Then their accounts of rationality and technological
domination and of the culture industry will be explored. Finally, the investigations
into socialization and social control, which were central to the more general concept
of culture that they were developing, will be discussed.

Standpoints, Knowledge, and Critique

Hegel’s view of knowledge was the fundamental point of reference for virtually all
philosophical debate in Germany, and its influence led many sociologists to see their
main, or exclusive, concern as being the construction of a sociology of culture
(Weber, 1920–21). These issues were hotly debated in the Philosophy and Sociology
Departments at Frankfurt University, and the ideas of Horkheimer and Adorno devel-
oped, in particular, in relation to the arguments of Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim.
These writers thought it essential to see how sociology could escape the inherently
partial and relative character of all socially bound knowledge, and they explored this
in what they called a sociology of knowledge.
Scheler, who moved to Frankfurt shortly before his death in 1928, argued that a tran-
scendental realm of objective truth lay behind the historical relativity of actual values
and ideas, and he saw his task as defining this objectivity in the face of cultural rela-
tivism. Mannheim, on the other hand, rejected any view that postulated movement
towards absolute truth: there simply was no sphere of absolute truth. He did, however,
try to steer a course that also rejected any radical relativism while, at the same time,

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