Page 39 - Cultural Theory

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••• John Scott •••

from those social forms by building alternatives that allow a more authentic
expression and satisfaction of their needs.
Personal differences between Marcuse and his former colleagues (rooted in minor
jealousies about his independence of thought) meant that Marcuse’s work was not
published under the auspices of the Institute. Nevertheless, Eros and Civilization and
his later books, were almost the only significant works of the 1950s and 1960s that
embodied the substantive ideals of critical theory and that articulated any deepening
of the Marxist humanist account of culture.

The Legacy of Marxist Humanism

While the critical theorists were first developing their ideas, other Marxists were also
setting out related ideas, though none of these achieved the impact enjoyed by those
of the Frankfurt theorists. Henri Lefebvre’s work Dialectical Materialism (Lefebvre,
1934–35) was poised somewhere between Lukács and Horkheimer. It was based largely
on Marx’s early manuscripts, which Lefebvre had translated for publication in France.
Lefebvre’s work was rejected by the Communist Party orthodoxy, and he remained a
marginal figure. It was not until much later that his application of these ideas to every-
day life and urban structures began to have a wider influence (Lefebvre, 1968; 1973).
Franz Jakubowski, from Danzig, studied under a former member of the Frankfurt
Institute and drew on Marx’s early manuscripts when writing his thesis on the idea of
base and superstructure (Jakubowski, 1936). Although this thesis was published in
1936, the Nazis imprisoned Jakubowski and his book had no real impact at the time. 15
In Italy, Gramsci was working on a related set of ideas. A Communist activist in the
1920s, Gramsci had been sentenced to prison for 20 years in 1926. Though this cut him
off from any active political participation, it did give him an unsought opportunity to
develop his own theoretical ideas. Drawing, in particular, on Labriola’s ‘philosophy of
praxis’, Gramsci used the Hegelian ideas of Croce to develop an account of the cultural
and political hegemony that he saw as an integral aspect of ruling class power and of
the part played by intellectuals in the formation of a proletarian counter-hegemony.
The surviving manuscripts from this period, now known as the ‘Prison Notebooks’
(Gramsci, 1929–35), were incomplete, unedited, and unpublished when Gramsci died
in his prison clinic. As a result, his ideas began to have a significant influence only after
others had established the framework of Marxist humanism.
The Marxist humanism that developed in the works of Lukács and the critical the-
orists themselves provided a remarkably powerful approach to cultural analysis.
Many of their central tenets, therefore, have been incorporated into the mainstream
of cultural sociology and have often found a place in work that is neither Marxist
humanist nor even Marxist. It is a sign of their success that their key concepts, along
with the more recently discovered ideas of Gramsci, have figured in the works of
structural Marxists, postmodernists, symbolic interactionists, and many others. They
have, for example, been central to influential arguments in cultural studies
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