Page 31 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-01.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 20

••• John Scott •••

economic analyses undertaken by Marx and Marxists had to be complemented by a
cultural analysis that gave appropriate autonomy to the cultural sphere. The most
general formulation of this argument was Adorno and Horkheimer’s jointly pro-
duced Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). They documented
a process of rationalization, which they saw in Weberian terms as an expansion of
the deliberate and systematic technical orientation towards and control over the nat-
ural world, other people, and our own selves. This rationalization was spreading
through all areas of social life. They found the origins of this in the philosophy of
the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment had begun a process of liberation from myth and fear through
its ongoing ‘disenchantment’ and demythologization. It continually undermined
the claims of religion, custom, and tradition in favour of promoting a rational,
instrumental knowledge of the world through the systematic accumulation of ratio-
nal, scientific knowledge. It was the product of a self-conscious group of intellectu-
als committed to rational social change, and the major early achievements of this
‘Enlightenment project’ were the rational organizational structures of capitalism and
industrialism. Contemporary society, Adorno and Horkheimer argued, had taken this
rationalization to a particularly high level, producing an increased centralization of
economic and political power and a growth in state intervention in the economy.
This trend was apparent in all capitalist societies, but it had reached its most
extreme form in German fascism during the 1930s and 1940s. Views differed within
the Institute as to whether this marked a new and more stable form of society.
According to Neumann (1942), National Socialism was a combination of monopoly
capitalism and a command economy in which all subordinate classes were frag-
mented and all intermediate groups had been destroyed. The proletariat had been
transformed into a dependent and subordinate ‘mass’ that was tied directly into the
state through its autocratic bureaucratic structures. As it remained a form of capital-
ism, however, Neumann argued that fascism would eventually be undermined by its
internal contradictions. For Pollock (1941), on the other hand, state intervention
marked the emergence of a new phase of ‘state capitalism’. The authoritarian or total-
itarian form of state capitalism found in fascism was marked by the dominance of a
new ruling group of industrial and state managers. State capitalism had resolved the
economic contradictions of private capitalism and had achieved a non-socialist form
of political stability.
There was, however, a common recognition that the expansion of human powers
of technical control had, at the same time, undermined human autonomy by sub-
jecting people to ever-stronger relations of power. This was most apparent in the
fetishism of commodities, through which human social relations of exchange had
been transformed into abstract monetary relations among things. Such domination
was spreading through all areas of life. All aspects of modern life tend to become
commodified or administered, and human beings become subject to ever more
intensive forms of domination. Whole areas of social life, outside the economy and
the political system, were subject to this same process of rationalization. The princi-
ples and mechanisms of ‘society’ were assimilated to those of the political economy,
• 20 •