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••• Cultural Analysis in Marxist Humanism •••

potential. Liberation from class relations is one, albeit central, aspect of this process
of emancipation.
Marcuse most explicitly forged links between a critical theory and the heritage of
Hegel’s idea of negative, critical thinking (Marcuse, 1941; see also Marcuse, 1936 and
1937). Marcuse argued that Marxism was the true inheritor of the critical tendencies of
the early works of Hegel, of his so-called Jena system of philosophy. He drew specific par-
allels between the treatment of the early works of both writers. These early works were,
in each case, unpublished when written. Only in the 1920s and 1930s had scholars dis-
covered this work and made it available: Hegel’s earliest works were first published in
1923 and in 1931–32, while Marx’s early manuscripts were published in 1932. Marcuse
saw himself and the other Frankfurt theorists as recovering the critical Hegelian dimen-
sion in Marx’s thought that had been denied by orthodox and revisionist Marxism.
This emphasis on critical theory continued into the 1950s and 1960s. Adorno,
working mainly on aesthetics and philosophy rather than the sociology of culture,
engaged in a series of debates and discussions on methodology. Faced with the chal-
lenge posed by the growth of non-Marxist sociology in the post-war period, Adorno
and others at the Institute attempted to clarify the distinctive character of critical
theory and its relationship to ‘bourgeois’ sociology. With other members of the
Institute he produced a series of papers on methodology (Adorno, 1957; 1962b), a
collectively authored textbook (Horkheimer et al., 1956), and a series of introductory
lectures (Adorno, 1968). The context for much that he wrote was the so-called ‘pos-
itivist dispute’. This was a debate around the nature of social science method in
which Adorno defended the idea of critical theory in the face of the claim by Popper
and some interpreters of Weber that sociology was doomed unless it rigorously and
systematically followed the methodology of the natural sciences. Adorno pointed to
the distorting and destructive consequences of this ‘positivism’ and stressed, once
again, the importance of negativity for critical thinking.
Substantively, however, Adorno’s social theory had much in common with ortho-
dox sociology and with the classical German sociology of Simmel and Weber. He
sought to integrate these ideas with contemporary American work, while also show-
ing that their conclusions had to be grounded in the framework that only critical
theory could provide. Orthodox sociology, like orthodox economics, remained too
closely bound to superficial appearances, failing to see them as the expressions of
deep-seated contradictions that had their basis, ultimately, in the relations and forces
of production. ‘Society’, like the parallel concept of the ‘economy’, reified realities
that have their foundations in the sphere of production. Critical theory, then, was
not a simple alternative to conventional sociology but an extension and deepening
of it that approached more closely the character of the social whole.

Technology, Organization, and Domination

The substantive work carried out by the key members of the Frankfurt Institute dur-
ing the period of exile was organized around a fundamental insight: that the
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