Page 40 - Cultural Theory

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••• Cultural Analysis in Marxist Humanism •••

concerning cultural hegemony in contemporary society (e.g., Hall et al., 1978; Clark
et al., 1979) The corollary of this intellectual success, however, is the virtual exhaus-
tion of Marxist humanism itself as a distinctive paradigm for cultural analysis. The
deaths of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse brought an obvious end to their work,
though the former two had long since ceased to make or attempt any novel contri-
butions to a critical theory of culture.
Despite this diffusion of ideas and the dissipation of the paradigm, some have con-
tinued to try to develop a distinctively Marxist humanist approach. Even among
these writers, however, the most powerful and influential ideas have come from
those who have moved beyond Marxist humanism and have integrated the concerns
of Lukács and the Frankfurt School with wider theoretical arguments.
The most direct inheritor of the Frankfurt tradition of critical theory is Jürgen
Habermas, one-time teaching assistant to Adorno in the 1950s. His early work
(Habermas, 1962; 1965; see also Schmidt, 1962) is in the direct line of Frankfurt the-
ory, but he broke away from this during the late 1960s (Habermas, 1968; 1971). His
work now draws heavily on functionalism, systems theory, linguistic philosophy,
and symbolic interactionism (Habermas, 1981a; 1981b) and, for all its analytical
power, can no longer be regarded as distinctively Marxist humanist. Indeed, many
have argued that it should not even be regarded as distinctively Marxist. This theo-
retical work has, however, helped to generate the very important works of writers
such as Wellmer (1971), Offe (1970), and Eder (1993).
The most notable follower of Lukács was Lucien Goldmann, who studied under the
Austro-Marxist Max Adler and discovered the work of Lukács in the 1930s. Many of
his central concepts were taken from History and Class Consciousness and Lukács’s
later work on the novel (Lukacs, 1937), but Goldmann also took ideas from Piaget’s
structuralism. He set out some early methodological reflections on class conscious-
ness and the role of the intellectual (Goldmann, 1952) and he traced the develop-
ment and transformation of bourgeois class consciousness in French literature during
the seventeenth century (Goldmann, 1956; 1964). 16
Lukács also influenced a significant group of Hungarian writers. These included
Istvan Meszaros (1970; 1989; see also Meszaros 1971b and 1971a), Ferenc Feher
(1983), and Agnes Heller (1974; 1983). Of these, the most important is Heller, who
has developed her work in a very similar direction to the way in which Habermas
developed the critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno. She has, in particular,
drawn on a neo-Parsonian systems theory that borrows extensively from Niklas
Luhmann, and has gone well beyond Marxist humanism to look at what she calls the
dynamic of modernity (Heller 1982; 1984; 1990).
In Poland, Marxist humanist philosophical ideas were developed by Leszek
Kolakowski (1968; and see Kolakowski 1978) and Adam Schaff (1963). Kolakowski
particularly stressed the importance of individual and collective action in history and
the moral responsibility that individuals have for their actions. Influenced by theses
ideas, Zygmunt Bauman (1991b; 1991a; 2001) developed a powerful and indepen-
dent form of social analysis that now has similarities with the work of Habermas and
Heller and, like them, is not distinctively Marxist in character. 17

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