Page 37 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-01.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 26

••• John Scott •••

Institute’s analysis of authoritarianism, but his main investigations into the links
between the early Marx and Freudian psychoanalysis (Fromm, 1942; see also Fromm,
1961) date from after he left the Institute in 1939. Marcuse’s early explorations into
pleasure and motivation (Marcuse, 1938) were also important, but his main engage-
ment with Freud dates from the 1950s. It was Adorno, however, who was principally
responsible for the Freudian dimension to the Institute’s work in the 1940s.
The Institute sponsored a number of investigations into the psychological sources
of authoritarianism and support for fascism during the early years of its exile, with
fieldwork carried out in France and Switzerland. Fromm’s research on German working-
14
class consciousness (Fromm, 1939) was one of a series of studies that he supervised
at the Institute during the 1930s. The focus of this work (Horkheimer and others,
1936) was the link between authority relations within families and structures of dom-
ination in the wider society. The initial publication was a rather poorly integrated
combination of theory and empirical data, but it set the agenda for the continuing
work. Its basic assumption was that the bourgeois family form – a family form found
in the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie as well as in the bourgeoisie itself –
generates a submissiveness that is central to the stability of organized capitalism in
its totalitarian form. This authoritarian character type embodies both the capitalist
spirit of acquisitiveness and the anal personality attributes studied by Freud. It is
worth noting the emphasis, once again, on the ‘forms’ of social life that Lukács and
the Frankfurt School have consistently regarded as the major insight that their work
derived from the sociology of Simmel and Weber. It is through the artistic forms that
artistic creativity is able to express itself, or can be denied, and the family form plays
a similar part in relation to the expression of domestic and political individuality.
During the Second World War, some broader research into anti-Semitism was
undertaken, some of this jointly with Robert MacIver at Columbia University. A
number of specialist publications were produced, including an account of the famous
‘f-scale’ of authoritarian (or fascistic) personality attributes, and the core ideas were
eventually presented in The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950). This work
set out the underlying character traits expressed in fascist, anti-Semitic, and other
authoritarian forms. Underpinning these arguments were specific psychological
arguments that connected the emphasis on authoritarianism, the analysis of the cul-
ture industry, and the biological basis of human action.
Marcuse’s argument shared many of the concerns of the ‘culture and personality’
approach, but he re-emphasized the Freudian recognition of the importance of
biology and, in particular, of instinctual drives. In his Eros and Civilization (1956),
Marcuse built on this psychoanalytical perspective to explore the deeper bases of
social stability. Freud had argued that repression is a necessary consequence of
technical civilization, but Marcuse took issue with this. He argued that the link
between civilization and repression is such that repression always takes historically
specific forms. He drew the conclusion that there could be non-repressive forms of
civilization: technology has the potential to liberate people from the class-specific
forms of repression that mark contemporary capitalist societies.

• 26 •