Page 27 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

16 Chapter One

sovereignty. 22 Through the doctrine of Pareto optimality, 23 moreover, the
new political economists eschew assessing the distribution of wealth and
income as that, they claim, would require value judgments on their part,
which would be contrary to their aim of providing “positive” or value-neu-
tral analyses. 24 Professing an unwillingness or inability to make interper-
sonal utility comparisons, the new political economists cannot even ap-
prove measures that would benefit millions if but one person would
become less well off as a result. The ultra-conservative stance of the new
political economy is readily apparent.

Critical Political Economy

The new political economy is to be contrasted with a second contemporary
approach—namely, critical political economy. The term, critical, originated
with the Institute of Social Research, established in 1923 at the University of
Frankfurt. Upon the appointment of Max Horkheimer as director in 1930, the
Institute turned from its initially “hard-nosed brand” of Marxism; rather than
presuming strict economic determinism, it began taking seriously “the claims
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of culture and consciousness.” This transformation, according to Martin Jay,
entailed shifting the focus from society’s socio-economic base to its cultural
superstructure. 26 Stephen Crook proposes that it was by injecting Marxism
with Freudianism that the critical theorists were able to turn from “the rigidi-
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ties . . . of their earlier reductionist accounts.” We will have occasion below
to spend considerable time on the issue of economic determinism and inter-
actions between base and superstructure, as that has proved contentious in
contemporary media studies generally and has figured prominently in the
split between political economy and cultural studies. For now, though, three
points seem essential. First, as just noted, after 1930 critical theorists at
the Frankfurt School eschewed the hard economic determinisms (“vulgar”
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Marxism ) characterizing the early Frankfurt School as well as Chicago/
neoclassical political economy! Second, the Frankfurt theorists denied that
knowledge can ever be “value-free, a position distinguishing them again from
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conservative (Chicago) political economists”; hence, they self-consciously
appraised (critiqued) both social/economic conditions and practices, and
mainstream theorizing about those practices and conditions. Among the nor-
mative criteria they explicitly invoked was fairness in the distribution of
wealth and income. Finally, they maintained that culture is key to under-
standing power relations in society, and hence this second wave of critical
theorists often addressed mass media, thereby inaugurating critical media
studies. It was much later (as we will see) that critical political economy and