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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 77

Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

at a distance from everyday practices, precisely so as to preserve
its politically subversive potential. In Adorno, Horkheimer and
Marcuse, as in the Leavises, high art is privileged as the site of
authenticity, mass culture anathematised and sociologically
‘explained’ as the site of manipulation. Only in the so-called
‘second generation’ of Frankfurt School critical theorists, repre-
sented paradigmatically by Jürgen Habermas, Adorno’s successor
to the Chair of Sociology and Philosophy at Frankfurt, do we
finally encounter a growing awareness of the institutional bases
of all culture.

HABERMAS: FROM CRITICAL THEORY TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE

The biographical connections between Habermas and Adorno
are as direct as those between Williams and Leavis: Habermas
was Adorno’s assistant from 1956 to 1959 and, aside from a
10-year hiatus at the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, he taught
at Frankfurt from 1964 until his retirement in 1996, when he
was in turn succeeded by Honneth. Habermas subscribes to a
radical-democratic critique of contemporary capitalism, inspired
in part by Weber, in part by Marx. More specifically, he has
explicitly affirmed his indebtedness to ‘Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci
and the Frankfurt School’ (Habermas, 1979, p. 83); that is, to the
expressly humanist elements within western Marxism. This is
a debt he was willing to reaffirm even after the collapse of
Eastern European Communism, even in discussion with a Polish
intellectual (Habermas & Michnik, 1994, pp. 9–10). Insofar as
Habermas refers to the base/superstructure model, he regards
it, as did Williams, as a historical rather than an ontological
proposition: ‘the mark of a seal that must be broken’ (Habermas,
1990, p. 16). This, then, is a distinctly Weberian ‘Marxism’.
Indeed, both Weber’s rationalisation thesis and his elaboration
of the different types of rational action are central to Habermas.
The latter’s defence of Enlightenment reason can thus be read
as resuming the earlier preoccupations of Weber as much as
those of Marx.

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