PHILOSOPHY

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND CRITICAL THEORY

Harry Cowen, University of Gloucestershire, on 1 April 2003

Introduction.
The underlying theme in this paper is the continued contemporary relevance of critical thought, not least the work of the Frankfurt School. I attempt to show that the issues they raised should still concern us, especially in an epoch of a somewhat woolly postmodernist thought. The School was founded in 1923, the first institute for Marxist studies in the Western world. Its key figures were Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). Also connected with the school were Walter Benjamin, Robert Lowenthal and Erich Fromm (major post-Freudian social theorist).
All were Jews, and most of them had to flee because of the Holocaust; the Institute was re-formed in 1934 at Columbia University, New York. (Whilst Jurgen Habermas, possibly the major social theorist writing today, was greatly influenced by the School as a student, he is critical of its underlying assumptions relating to dialectical thought).
The central themes and issues they raised were motivated by the power of Nazism and fascism between 1930 and 1944: hence, their explicit mood of pessimism. David Held (1980) usefully articulates the questions they raised:
What blocked the development of the European labour movements?
How could the crises in capitalism be better understood? What was the relationship between the economic and the political?
How could authoritarianism and the development of bureaucracy be comprehended?
How did the Nazi and fascist movements attract mass support?
How were social relationships, including the family, changing, and what were the impacts upon individual development?
Were cultural formations, subject to manipulation, becoming a new type of ideology? And if so, how was this bearing upon everyday life?
Was Marxism, as witnessed in Russia and Western Europe, now just another stale orthodoxy, and did this mean the death of socialist practice? (Held, p.35).
In attempting to answer these 'big' questions, the Frankfurt School's work spanned critical theory and political economy; critical theory and the philosophy of history; critical theory and aesthetics; critical theory and psycho-analysis. This paper concentrates on two aspects of critical theory: the broad approach of the critical theorists as a whole, in certain respects compressed into the seminal work of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, followed by a more detailed examination of the ideas of Herbert Marcuse which, I will contend, still resonate at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

What is Critical Theory?
In the first place, how might we define critical theory? Basically, it is anti-positivistic, considering positivism (fact based) as too narrow, and probes a range of areas of discourse:
a. The varied different meanings attributed by subject-object to their own actions (this concern reflects the work of Max Weber, the nineteenth century sociologist).
b.The way aspects of social relations might be structured so as to evade certain kinds of actions and the expression of certain kinds of interests, i.e., the mode in which relations of domination systematically suppress (through ideolology and repression) certain sets of meanings, claims or demands which might otherwise be expressed in everyday life.
c.The feasibility of events taking a different direction.
Such a scenario needs to be implemented through explanation of the constitution of ideas in consciousness and interaction, in the dialectics of experience; via the analysis of the shaping, maintenance, and shifts in people's inter-subjective, historical concepts; by challenging the denial of contradictions in the social system; and by allowing for the possibility of a critically reflexive grasp of history and tradition. We have to accept the significance of an understanding of how tradition is structured, but also we must not idealise tradition (since it might also embody relationships based on deception and distortion).
Through this overall approach, the aim is to be able to assess competing accounts of 'reality' and to unearth their ideological roots (a task for which positivism is ill-equipped). In discussing these concerns further, it is useful to turn to a seminal work by Horkheimer and Adorno, reflecting a pre-occupation with some of the key questions raised above by Held.

Horkheimer and Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Published in 1944 and written during the grim years of Nazi terror, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment raises particular themes developed by various Institute members individually: first, the mass culture industry; second, the philosophy of enlightenment, positivism, and the power of instrumental reason; and, third, anti-semitism, fascism, authoritarianism and the applications of psycho-analytic theory.
With respect to mass culture and cultural production, they argued that art has been 'hi-jacked' by capitalism and the needs of the market (a much recognized tendency by any student of power and the media today!). New forms of culture create conditions of dependency by the powerful, and produce dependency needs in the consumers of such culture. They then argue that the goal of commercial 'art' is to be received uncritically; its products are hence essentially ideological, in that they reproduce, reinforce and strengthen the dominant interpretations of reality. Much of Adorno's later writings addressed this 'flattening' of culture and the ideological underpinnings of the aesthetic (as did Marcuse, as we shall see later in this paper).
In formulating a philosophy of history and a major critique of positivism, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the Enlightenment and science, stemming from the ideas of Francis Bacon, has been about dominating nature, and thus other humans. Indeed, the domination of nature is at the heart of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. A once liberating reason has been transformed into a regressive orthodoxy: the Enlightenment has turned into totalitarianism. Why? This is because of factors integral to this very form of enlightenment itself, which becomes a new form of myth.. Instrumental reason has come to invade a growing number of spaces in our everday living, through science and philosophy, so that reason per se becomes myth. Horkheimer and Adorno further argue that the development of capitalism's economic growth led to the systematic exploitation of new forms of knowledge. The domination of nature became an interest of the whole economic system. This denotes a particular type of relationship between human beings and nature, a necessary relation between our concept of nature and the domination of nature.
The ideological entities of the Enlightenment, the authors suggest, may be most clearly identified in the thought of Kant, the Marquis de Sade, and Nietzsche (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1972, pp. 81-119) since in their works it is transparent that : "the radical separation of subject and object, humanity and nature, legitimizes the subjugation of the natural world and the treatment of men and women as objects" (Held, 1980,p.157). In this regard, Horkheimer and Adorno maintained that a continuity obtains between elements of liberalism (in Kant) and totalitarian thought and practice (see de Sade) - reiterated by Marcuse, and a highly contentious thesis pounced upon by his liberal and social democratic critics, (see MacIntyre,1970) whilst Nietzsche's contributions were viewed as lying somewhere in between.
In their assault upon positivism in science and social science, they propose that the Enlightenment found its fulfillment in the foundation of modern science, which came to take on a technical function, becoming an instrument for environmental domination, rather than a critical tool.
An explanation of anti-semitism is offered in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (pp.168-201). Bourgeois anti-semitism, it contends, has a specific economic motivation: the concealement of domination in production. Non-productivity is blamed for society's ills by capitalists. And thereby Jews in Nazi Germany bore the brunt of the accusation. Hence, it became acceptable to heap on the Jews the blame for a host of injustices perpetrated by the whole class system as such. However, contend Horkheimer and Adorno, the economic rationale constitutes an insufficient explanation in itself. Psycho-analytic theory helps to explain what Jews represented to the masses. Anti-semitism is built upon the projection of fears and repressed wants, for example, feelings of frustration and impotence in handling life are projected onto people who are seemingly capable and effective. The Jews were 'selected' to be victims, simultaneously viewed as no better than animals and a threat. Anti-semitism was seen in part, then, as a manifestation of unconscious, regressive processes (to be fully comprehended in conjunction with changes in the family, culture and the economy). Anti-semitism is not only a bourgeois phenomenon, and may be traced back to the pre-bourgeois period, early Christian beliefs and to overall developments in the nature of reason.
In summarising, how might we assess the significance of Dialectic of Enlightenment? Certainly, there is no denying the bleakness of the picture that Horkheimer and Adorno paint of middle Europe in the mid-1940s. But for Bronner (20002) Dialectic of Enlightenment "remains a landmark in radical thought". (p.86) It turned "conformism into more than a merely bohemian concern and the instrumental colonization of everyday life into a political issue". (p.86). Whilst Horkheimer and Adorno saw the Enlightenment as an ideological conduit for the ambitions of the rising middle classes, they nevertheless did not lose sight of the Enlightenment project's massive role in counteracting "superstition, myth, and prejudice." Having said this, recurring critiques of the work have stressed the arbitrary and one-sided picture of the historical Enlightenment (yet, one might add,, could it have been otherwise at the time of writing?) Emphasising its connection with technological rationality, they never undertake a genuine political analysis. "Horkheimer and Adorno", affirms Bronner, "ignore how the Enlightenment concern with universality became the foundation for republicanism, socialism, and internationalism". (2002,p.87).

The next part of the paper looks at the critical theorist whose writings became celebrated in a very different era from that of 'D.of E.', namely Herbert Marcuse, whose ideas were belatedly yet swiftly taken up in the nineteen sixties.

Herbert Marcuse: One Dimensional Society.
Herbert Marcuse, political critic and philosopher, was born in Berlin in 1898, and died in California in 1979. During the 1930s, along with other Jews of the Frankfurt School like Adorno and Horkheimer, he was forced to flee the Nazis. For the remainder of his life he taught philosophy and political thought in the USA.
In later life, Marcuse's ideas met the needs of the time. Whilst his political analysis addressed the state of American capitalist society in an age of affluence, the alleged pessimism of his over-arching critique found its roots in the Frankfurt School's earlier experience of the fascist and Nazi totalitarian states in the 1930s. Steeped in the tradition of Hegel and the ideas of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georgy Lukacs, Marcuse drew attention in 1933 for the first time to the importance of the newly published 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Karl Marx, which acted as a more humanistic antidote to Marx's later economics-dominated works such as Das Kapital. Marcuse's aim was to demonstrate the rigid orthodoxy of Leninist and Stalinist interpretations of Marxism, and through his own later writings he advanced the status of the individual in critical thought by his own critical deployment of Freud's psycho-analytical insights.

Marcuse's Critical Theory and Hegel.
Reason and Revolution was written in 1941, but was reprinted and became widely read in 1968. It attempted the forging of a critical examination of human relations in capitalist society, through an exposition of Hegel's concept of the dialectic and Marx's concept of labour. In Hegelian philosophy, objects are multi-faceted, and incessantly in the act of becoming - i.e., becoming something else. To understand the positive, one needs to grasp the negative qualities. Negative thinking has to be historical, critical thought. The dynamic impulse towards critical thinking lay for Marcuse in the contradiction of things in life and objects generally, and in the social system. This Hegelian notion of negativity, and all things becoming self-contradictory in the journey towards grasping the essential truth of human endeavour, had been manipulated by Marx. Marcuse made the crucial connection between Hegel's philosophically-grounded concept of freedom and the dialectic, and Marx's more socially and economically based concept of alienated labour, which Marcuse identified as a crucial moment in the rise of social theory. But such a transition from Hegel to Marx is "in all respects, a transition to an essentially different order of truth" (Marcuse, 1960, p.258). For Marx, the existing order needs to be overthrown. The "negativity of reality" becomes a "social condition, associated with a particular historical form of society" (p.258). What is significant for Marcuse's interpretation of Marx's analysis is that the transition from capitalism's inevitable death to socialism is necessary "...only in the sense that the full development of the individual is necessary". (p.317). Accordingly, theory and critical thought for Marcuse is essential for exposing the ideology and negativity of capitalism, and prior to practice. Marcuse's own specific contribution to Marxism was to focus much more than the Soviet Marxists had done on the ways in which individuals' development - the range of human and social needs - are hindered by capitalism's dynamic. His later works offer a revolutionary twist, from a Hegelian Marxist foundation, to the psychological insights of Freud and his psycho-analysis of human needs (particularly in Eros and Civilisation, but also in One Dimensional Man- both discussed below).

Alienation, Eros and Civilisation: Freud and Marx.
Although written in the more 'Freudian' decade of the 1950s, Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation (1955) addresses most directly the generation of 1960s student activists in Europe and North America, reflecting his standing with the student power movement (although a number of others, including the Austrian socialist humanist Erich Fromm had been striving for a Freud-Marx theoretical synthesis). Marcuse provided an eloquent critique of capitalism's effects on human instincts at great human cost. In common with Freud, Marcuse interpreted the alienation of Western humanity as manifested in its repression. However, unlike Freud, Marcuse realised that since the repression of the individual enabled greater human productivity to eliminate economic scarcity in the industrialised nations, there no longer remained reason to believe that repression is inevitable. A Freudian analysis was clearly inadequate for defining the roots of repression. Alienation of labour, in the Marxian sense, seemed the crucial link in the chain between Freud's individual and the external environment. Marcuse re-interpreted Freud by integrating his insights with those of Hegel and Marx. Instead of Freud's pleasure principle necessitating control by the reality (or 'performance') principle, it was now feasible, in the light of the long economic boom and the powers of new technology, to eliminate that 'surplus repression' imposed upon humanity by those dominating the distribution of resources. The amount of time required for satisfaction of the reality principle can be reduced to a minimum and even totally eliminated through technology and automation. As such, humans - the chief sufferers from the surplus repression imposed for purposes of domination - may 'realise' themselves by allowing free scope to the pleasure principle - a loosening of the supposed biological constraints. To cite Marcuse's essay articulating the concept of 'repressive tolerance':
"The real possibilities of human freedom are relative to the attained stage of civilisation. They depend on the material and intellectual resources available at the respective stage and they are quantifiable and calculable to a high degree. So are, at the stage of advanced industrial society, the most rational ways of using these resources and distributing the social product with priority on the satisfaction of vital needs and with the minimum of toil and justice" (Marcuse, 1969b, p.105).
The message was a revolutionary one. Repressed beings, alienated by fellow beings in society, can be liberated by humankind and the forces it creates. Domination of one person over the other can be reversed by a reversal of the social process. Since humans' repression is not rooted in their nature, then they can remove that repression. Because technology can allow human beings in western society to regulate their primary needs onto a lower plane, then technology can be used for liberating humans in the psychological and not biological sense. Work can be reduced to a minimum, through the labour-saving processes of new technology, with more space created for the fulfilment of the 'pleasure principle' in a greatly enhanced 'leisure time': the creation of a new totality of life, personifying the eroticisation of a human's whole being. In this respect, Marcuse later on noted a more marked, certainly spontaneous 'refusal' among the hippies of the day, a greater degree of politicization, than among the working class, whose idealistic aspirations had become muted by the wealth of western capitalism. In the Hippies "sexual, moral and political rebellion are somehow united...a non-aggressive form of life" (Marcuse, 1968b).
Repressive Tolerance (Marcuse, 1965) is a contribution to a group of essays entitled 'A Critique of Pure Tolerance' arguing that "pluralism is a philosophy of equality and justice whose concrete application supports inequality by ignoring the existence of certain legitimate social groups" (Woolf, 1965, p.48). Marcuse's specific contribution turns on its head the received 'democratic' notion of tolerance, showing that what is claimed to be tolerance as a liberating force is indeed its opposite, "serving the cause of oppression. And given such, it is the duty of the intellectual… to break the concreteness of oppression in order to open the mental space in which this society can be recognized in what it is and does" (Marcuse, 1965, pp.81-2). Such a reversal is in the tradition of the Hegelian-Marxian dialectic, where what 'is' distorts the truth that tolerance toward the 'radically evil' appears as good because it serves the purpose of continued affluence.
Marcuse's thesis hinges on his claim that pure tolerance can only exist in an equal society, and in a world where tolerance is "truly universal, practised by the rulers as well as by the ruled" (p.84). This was clearly not the case in the industrial USA of the 1960s, where the establishment was a small coterie pursuing profit through the stimulation of consumerism, the pursuit of war and militarism and closed government, yet received by a willing, unaware, uninformed majority:
"Universal toleration becomes questionable when its rationale no longer prevails, when tolerance is administered to manipulated and indoctrinated individuals who parrot, as their own, the opinion of their masters, for whom heteronomy has become autonomy' (p.90).
In a 1968 postscript to the essay, Marcuse makes apparent his support for minorities dissenting by violent means if necessary, and advocates not a dictatorship of an educated, informed 'elite' (along the lines of J.S. Mill's thought) as an antidote to public opinion ('The People') but of "the struggle for a real democracy" embracing "an ideology of tolerance" (pp.122-3). For such sentiments Marcuse was branded 'Enemy of the People' by the US media.

Industrial Capitalism and Technicism: The Disappearance of the Great Refusal.
One Dimensional Man (1964) represents, along with Eros and Civilization, Marcuse's most recognised and influential work: an iconic statement of the student and black liberation movements. It strives to demonstrate how Freudian insights have been effectively manipulated by the capitalist ruling class, in that Freud "discovered the mechanism of social and political control in the depth dimension of instinctual drives and satisfactions." Technology is so utilised to "institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social cohesion" that it becomes, ironically, a "totalitarian tendency" (Marcuse, 1964, p.xv). The total mobilisation of technology combining both a 'warfare state' and a 'welfare state' leads to "the closing of the political universe"; social change is contained by a technical rationality of mechanisation, scientific management: "a 'new technological work-world' which enforces the weakening of the negative position of the working class: the latter no longer appears to be the living contradiction to the established society" (1964, p.31). The workers have been 'softened' in all respects, not least in their ability to be critical of the existing socio-political system: the latter produces a one-dimensional thought which can only see what is, not what can and indeed ought to be. The theme of technical rationality was one which Marcuse had worked on much earlier, and under greatly different social and political conditions. The essay, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology" (Marcuse, 1998), only recently published in book form along with a number of Marcuse's hitherto unpublished essays, first appeared in 1941, in the journal Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, and observed that "(technics) by itself can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil"; and in this respect the Third Reich was a form of "technocracy". "National Socialism is a striking example of the ways in which a highly rationalized and mechanised economy with the utmost efficiency in production can also operate in the interest of totalitarian oppression and continued scarcity." (Marcuse, 1998, p.41). The thesis of the inter-connection between Nazi oppression and technical rationality anticipates sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) which argues that the events of the Holocaust, far from being irrational, represent the ultimate in instrumental rationality. Marcuse analyses Max Weber's discourse on reason and industrial capitalism, which orients itself towards systematic, methodical calculation - capital accounting. Values in the system turn on calculable efficiency, which transforms itself into the calculated domination of humans and nature:
"The reason envisaged by Weber thus is revealed as technical reason, as the production and transformation of material (things and men) through the methodical-scientific apparatus". (Marcuse, 1968a, p.205).
But where Weber was presenting such phenomena as being 'value free', in that the necessary developments are abstract and purposeless, Marcuse reveals such 'abstractions' as a specific, profit-motivated capitalist 'rationality', and in its unfolding, it is irrationality which becomes reason: "reason as frantic development of productivity, conquest of nature, enlargement of the mass of goods...irrational because higher productivity, domination of nature, and social wealth become destructive forces". (Marcuse,1968, p.207). The rationality of capitalism calculates and computes everything, including the 'benefits' of destruction. Interestingly, Marcuse's remarks on such calculability, published first in German in 1964, precede the 'practical' calculations of the US Secretary of State for Defence, Robert McNamara, in his computerisation of fatalities among American soldiers in the Vietnam War. Marcuse is scrupulous in distancing himself politically from Weber by ironically advancing an optimistic account of the possibilities for change and opposition to the 'system', which Weber had earlier dismissed as utopian.

Utopias and the New Oppositional Movements.
A wave of pessimism seeps through the pages of One Dimensional Man. Yet underpinning the analysis rests a sense of hope in a critique of Weber's stress on 'fate'. And the later Essay on Liberation (1969a) more transparently communicates the spirit of optimism in its alignment with the rebellious events of the time. Marcuse perceived the 'outcasts and outsiders' to be a dynamo of rebellion which would finally contribute to capitalism's demise. The Essay, which was largely written before May 1968, empathised with the philosophy of the1968 rebellions and the anti-Vietnam War protest, as well as the rising black power movement. It denied the characterisation of any 'great refusal' in corporate capitalism as utopian. On the contrary, "what is denounced as 'utopian' is no longer that which has 'no place' and cannot have any place in the historical universe, but rather that which is blocked from coming about by the established societies" (Marcuse,1969a, pp.3-4). Marcuse perceived the new oppositional forces as emerging from small social groups, including students, no longer aligned to the traditional labourist, class-based organisations. Indeed, the revolt against the old societies represents the emergence of "a new, spontaneous solidarity" (1969a, p.52). The working class has become conservative, not least due to its changing composition because of technical and occupational restructuring - leading to the arrival of a 'new working class' integrated into the capitalist system (1969a, p.55). But, in re-assessing the oppositional possibilities within advanced capitalism in the "hangover period after the party of the late 1960s" (Geoghegan,1987, p.105), Marcuse became more convinced of the revolutionary potential of the aesthetic sensibility, although not in the crude economistic Marxist sense (whereby the 'best' art reflects the rising class, i.e., the proletariat). A substantial proportion of his Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972) confronts the relationship between art and revolution, and the drive towards the 'emancipation of sensibility' (p.129). By 1977, the Aesthetic Dimension represented Marcuse's major hope for transforming a society by now saturated in commodity culture. "Art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience", but not in a one-to-one relationship of the art reflected in the political: "I see the political potential of art in art itself, in the aesthetic form as such." (Marcuse, 1979, p.ix).
Part of Marcuse's analysis of industrial capitalism and technicism implicitly rejects the idea of an abstract neutrality, since "the 'market-place of ideas' is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and individual interest"(Marcuse,1969, p.110). In Marcuse's 1968 postscript to this essay on repressive tolerance, he argues that "under the conditions prevailing in this country (USA - h.c.), "there is no protection of dissent. The only way this can be achieved is by repressing the forces of the Right, justifying the use of 'extralegal means' of protest should the legal ones prove inadequate" (Marcuse, p.116). Such justification of the use of violence, (akin to Sartre's during France's Algerian War ) proved one of the most contentious of Marcuse's ideas, given its direct attack on the shibboleths of liberalism: free speech, rights for all and rights to peaceful protest, and the challenge to that 'split' thinking which allows the expression of socialist ideas, but not their implementation.

A Critical Assessment of Marcuse.
What of the critiques of Marcuse's work? A number of criticisms have been levelled against his ideas, with varied intensity. In the first place, Marcuse is accused of an implicit technological determinism which seems to infer a deep pessimism vis-a-vis change in social and political structures. In MacIntyre's assessment (1970 ) Marcuse, most notably in One-Dimensional Man, construes technological progress as integral to a total system of domination and co-ordination, creating forms of life (and power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and "to defeat or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom from toil and domination" (MacIntyre, p.63), a pessimism "only very loosely supported by an appeal to evidence" (p.63). On this count, Marcuse's dismissal of the modern welfare state's historical roots epitomises his misreading of the complexity of liberal societies. "The institutions of welfare", says MacIntyre, "not only could not have come into being without continuous struggle, especially by organized labour, but they are only maintained in being by continuous pressure" (p.69). Such facts directly contradict Marcuse's picture of the one-dimensional state.
And indeed, sudden, unpredictable upsurges led Marcuse to a rapid shift in political theoretical direction: what Geoghegan (1987) refers to as Marcuse's "eclectic impulse" leading to an "excessive concentration on marginal rebelliousness and an inadequate concentration on the complex dynamics of advanced capitalism in general" (p.103). The speed of reorientation from One-Dimensional Man to Essay on Liberation a mere three years later is puzzling. Just what is the revolutionary subject? The various new categories, such as students, intellectuals or women seem not to have been carefully enough related to changing capitalist structures, especially the nature of class, and thus are simply too contingent to be revolutionary social subjects (Lichtman,1988). On the other hand, it may also be argued in defence of Marcuse, that the dynamism of his thought lay not in the accuracy of his predictions, but in the critical thrust of his analysis.
Marcuse's commitment to Freud represents another difficulty: the grafting of Freud's usually conservative cast onto an ostensibly Marxist analysis of capitalist society reflects the shallower side of Marcuse's utopian project (Geoghegan,1987, p.109). The assumptions of each are internally inconsistent. For Kolakowski, Marcuse's grasping at Freud's 'pleasure principle' to create the liberated society stands opposed to the Marxist values of creative work (Kolakowski,1978, p.415).
Perhaps a more serious criticism is Marcuse's eliding of the features of vastly dissimilar political regimes which range from the Nazi Third Reich to the American liberal state into one amorphous 'totalitarianism', logically culminating in the attack on values of tolerance democracy and free speech (Kolakowski,1978, p.420).
Nevertheless, taking into account the alleged defects and inconsistencies in Marcuse's work, the uncompromising incisiveness in his analyses of ideology, modes of domination and oppression in industrial capitalism have raised his ideas above the fray. His commitment to challenge the status quo represented 'the engaged but independent intellectual' who had become frighteningly rare by the last years of the twentieth century. The years of the Cold War had frozen the illusion that only two camps existed: 'Communism' and 'Democracy'. Marcuse was prepared to lambast the hypocracies of both.Widgery (1979) observed that the philosopher's predictions may have been faulty, but his force lay in the "blistering attack on the brain police, on the state of unfreedom known as 'normality' and the moral squalor of the affluent society" (p.25). Marcuse's bonds with the revolutionary new left became a cause for nervousness among his liberal academic critics, more accustomed to protection behind the walls of academe. The concept of utopia traditionally in the mould of a Thomas More or a Bishop Butler was no longer safe when hitched to emancipation from the current status quo (Bronner, 1988, p.121). Finally, the durability of Marcuse's thought is evident, not least because, "in an era of globalization in which the restructuring of capital and technological revolution are changing all aspects of life…Marcuse's thought provides a mode of global theoretical analysis and addresses issues that continue to be significant for contemporary theory and politics". (Marcuse, 2000, Introduction by Douglas Kellner, p.29).

Conclusions.
To conclude this paper, the issues raised by Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, and their theoretical positions adopted for unearthing the ideological drives for power and conformity in the capitalist system, can scarcely be labelled passé, despite attempts to the contrary. Today, in 2003, we confront the evident hegemony of American capitalism's economic and political power since 1989, the unashamed monopoly over 'mass' media (and hence the transmission of ideas and 'desirable' images) by multi-national corporations, the perpetuation of wars to 'defend' freedoms, the resurgence of the political far right, and racism (including anti-semitism). Fortunately, such developments have not gone completely unopposed. Yet clearly, critical thought was never more imperative!

Harry Cowen

References.
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1972), Dialectic of Enlightenment, transl. Cumming, J., London: Verso, (1944).
Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust , Cambridge: Polity.
Bronner, S. E. (1988) 'Between Art And Utopia - Reconsidering The Aesthetic Theory of Herbert Marcuse', in Pippin R., et al. (eds) Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, London: Macmillan.
Bronner, S.E. (2002) Of Critical Theory and its Theorists, 2nd.ed. London: Routledge.
Geoghegan, V. (1987) Reason & Eros: The Social Theory of Herbert Marcuse, London: Pluto Press.
Held, D. (1980) Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kolakowski, L. (1978) Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3, 'The Breakdown', Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lichtman, R. (1988) 'Repressive Tolerance' in Pippin, R., Feenberg, A., Webel, C. P. (eds) Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, London: Macmillan.
MacIntyre, A. (1970) Marcuse, London: Fontana.
Marcuse, H. (1955) Eros and Civilisation, Boston: Beacon Press.
Marcuse, H. (1958) Soviet Marxism, N.Y.:Columbia University Press.
Marcuse, H. (1960) Reason and Revolution, Boston: Beacon Press, 1941.
Marcuse, H. (1964) One Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press.
Marcuse, H. (1968a) 'Industrialisation and Capitalism in Max Weber' in Negations, Boston: Beacon Press.
Marcuse, H. (1968b) 'Liberation from the affluent society', lecture given in July 1967, in Cooper, D. (ed) Dialectics of Liberation, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Also in Bronner, S. E. (ed) Twentieth Century Political Theory, London: Routledge,1997.
Marcuse, H. (1969a) Essay on Liberation, London: Allen Lane Press.
Marcuse, H. (1969b)'Repressive Tolerance', in Woolf, R., Moore, B., Jr., Marcuse, H. A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Boston: Beacon Press.
Marcuse, H. (1972) Counter-Revolution and Revolt, London: Allen Lane Press.
Marcuse, H. (1979) The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, London: Macmillan.
Marcuse, H. (1998) Technology, War and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 1, ed. D. Kellner, London: Routledge.
Marcuse, H. (2000) Towards a Critical Theory of Society, Vol.II, ed. D. Kellner, London: Routledge.
Widgery, D. (1979) 'Goodbye Comrade M: Obituary of Herbert Marcuse', London: Socialist Review, June.