The Vitality Of Critical Theory: Volume 28

For a scholar so young to have such a large coherent collection of papers that merit republication as a set – a first volume of The Collected Papers of … – is hardly ordinary. But Harry Dahms is hardly ordinary. Perhaps part of this latter fact can be attributed to “externalities” – for instance, that he is of two societies and two cultures, Germany and the United States; that he is also, if not so literally, of two eras, the present era and another much older, in developmental if not calendar time; that his own discipline reaches across departments of the university to incorporate topics of the historian, the philosopher, the sociologist, the political scientist, the institutional economist, the film critic, and more. No doubt real, those external factors have considerable impact as context and condition in the formation of the scholar's interests. The external comes to fruition in and as a person in various ways, however, and for Professor Dahms the hallmark of that personal process has been and continues to be a passion to discern that which has escaped attention, that which is concealed by the usual processes of conscious attention, perception, and evaluation. This is the passion of wonder – that sudden apprehension of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the ineffable in the confidence of an experience, the question in the comfort of an answer, the ludic in the sobriety of commonplace, the wound beneath the scab. It is wonder that puts in such peculiar relief the routines on which it depends for backdrop, even as routines (perhaps especially those of formal education) can stifle capacities for wonder. Dahms has somehow evaded that cost far better than most others I have known: while evidently a creature of higher education in the formal institutional sense, he parses in turn both wonderments and routinizations to which too many of us are insensitive. These capacities and actions are manifest in his writings, though one must listen carefully across carefully composed, often long, lines of syntax in which word selections leave traces of his agreement with Mark Twain and Ludwig Wittgenstein about choosing the correct word. Better yet, listen to his oral commentaries during a screening of a film by, say, Andrei Tarkovsky, or a pop-culture movie such as The Matrix.

The chapters included in this volume appeared over the course of 11 years, between 1997 and 2008. They reflect two central concerns. The first concern was whether the trajectory that had guided the development of critical theory since the linguistic turn of the early 1970s was as conducive to addressing the most important issues of the late twentieth century as the works of the first generation had been for their time, from the 1930s to the late 1960s. The second concern was how to confront the challenge of reconceiving the thrust and agenda of critical theory as a practically relevant analytical program, in light of societal conditions and trends in the early twenty-first century. The chapters in Part I were driven by the need to provide an accounting of the state of affairs in critical theory that took as its vantage point the program of the early Frankfurt School, rather than the communication-theoretical rendering Habermas has engendered. The chapters in Part II were inspired by the desire to circumscribe the kind of contributions critical theory should and can make to illuminating dilemmas and roadblocks in the social sciences and in social policy in the early twenty-first century that are contributing to a peculiar state of civilizational stasis – dilemmas and roadblocks that most of us have come to take for granted and internalized as integral elements of the fabric of societal life, and which obstruct creative theorizing beyond the social, political, and economic status quo.

Despite profound differences, both the German Historical School and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School have in common a theoretical and cultural heritage in Central European traditions of social thought and philosophy. Although both schools often are perceived as quintessentially German traditions of economic and social research, their methodological presuppositions and critical intent diverge strongly. Since the objective of the Frankfurt School was to carry the theoretical critique initiated by Marx into the twentieth century, and since its members did so on a highly abstract level of theoretical criticism, the suggestion may be surprising that in terms of their respective research agendas, there was a common denominator between the German Historical School and the Frankfurt School critical theory. To be sure, as will become apparent, the common ground was rather tenuous and indirect. We must ask, then: in what respects did their theoretical and analytical foundations and orientations overlap? How did the German Historical School, as a nineteenth-century tradition of economic thinking, influence the development of the Frankfurt School?

For Weberian Marxists, the social theories of Max Weber and Karl Marx are complementary contributions to the analysis of modern capitalist society. Combining Weber's theory of rationalization with Marx's critique of commodity fetishism to develop his own critique of reification, Georg Lukács contended that the combination of Marx's and Weber's social theories is essential to envisioning socially transformative modes of praxis in advanced capitalist society. By comparing Lukács's theory of reification with Habermas's theory of communicative action as two theories in the tradition of Weberian Marxism, I show how the prevailing mode of “doing theory” has shifted from Marx's critique of economic determinism to Weber's idea of the inner logic of social value spheres. Today, Weberian Marxism can make an important contribution to theoretical sociology by reconstituting itself as a framework for critically examining prevailing societal definitions of the rationalization imperatives specific to purposive-rational social value spheres (the economy, the administrative state, etc.). In a second step, Weberian Marxists would explore how these value spheres relate to each other and to value spheres that are open to the type of communicative rationalization characteristic of the lifeworld level of social organization.

In recent years, the concept of “reification” has virtually disappeared from debates in social theory, including critical social theory. The concept was at the center of the revitalization of Marxist theory in the early twentieth century generally known as Western Marxism. Georg Lukács in particular introduced the concept to express how the process described in Marx's critique of alienation and commodification could be grasped more effectively by combining it with Max Weber's theory of rationalization (see Agger, 1979; Stedman Jones et al., 1977).¹ In Lukács's use, the concept of reification captured the process by which advanced capitalist production, as opposed to earlier stages of capitalist development, assimilated processes of social, cultural, and political production and reproduction to the dynamic imperatives and logic of capitalist accumulation. It is not just interpersonal relations and forms of organization constituting the capitalist production process that are being refashioned along the lines of one specific definition of economic necessity. In addition, and more consequentially, the capitalist mode of production also assimilates to its specific requirements the ways in which human beings think the world. As a result, the continuous expansion and perfection of capitalist production and its control over the work environment impoverishes concrete social, political, and cultural forms of coexistence and cooperation, and it brings about an impoverishment of our ability to conceive of reality from a variety of social, political, and philosophical viewpoints.

For perspectives on globalization to do justice to its many facets, they must be informed by an understanding of modern societies as simultaneously complex, contingent, and contradictory – as modern capitalist societies. As is becoming ever more apparent, such an understanding of modern societies is the necessary precondition for identifying the defining features of globalization. Yet, for the most part, the history of the social sciences did not produce research agendas, theories, and methods designed to grasp complexity, contingency, and contradiction as core dimensions of modern social life that continually reinforce each other. The social sciences did not evolve as ongoing efforts to grasp the gravity each dimension exerts on concrete forms of political, economic, and cultural life, and how the force of each depends on the constant exchange of energy with the other two. To the extent that scrutinizing the impact of globalization on the future – find possible futures – of human civilization is the primary challenge for social scientists to confront today, the current condition presents a unique, and perhaps most unusual opportunity to conceive anew the promise of each and all the social sciences, as elucidating how the complex, contingent, and contradictory nature of modern societies, in the name of advancing social justice, has engendered a regime of managing “social problems.”

Marx's writings were the first sustained and rigorous attempt to identify and scrutinize inherent contradictions as a constitutive feature of early modern society – the society he referred to as “bourgeois” society.¹ In the related literature, scholars have paid ample attention to the fact that the German term Marx used, and which had been a key concept in Hegel's philosophy of right ([1821] 1967) – bürgerliche Gesellschaft – refers to early modern society as both a society in which wealthy “burghers” are the driving force and primary decision-makers – bourgeois society – and a society of equal citizens – civil society (see especially Cohen & Arato, 1992; Riedel, 1988). The conceptual differentiation of bürgerliche Gesellschaft into bourgeois society and civil society suggests that it is not possible to discern the nature of this emergent society according to one overarching principle. Instead, it is necessary to recognize underlying contradictions as a key structuring principle. The contradictions are most conspicuous in tensions between the values of democracy (as espoused most explicitly during and by the French Revolution, in terms of liberty, equality, and fraternity/solidarity) and the imperative of a market-based economy operating according to the capitalist mode of production and foreshadowing industrialization.

Any endeavor to circumscribe, with a certain degree of precision, the nature of the relationship between social science and critical theory would appear to be daunting. Over the course of the past century, and especially since the end of World War II, countless efforts have been made in economics, psychology, political science, and sociology, to illuminate the myriad manifestations of modern social life, from a multiplicity of angles. It is doubtful that it would be possible to do justice to all the different variants of social science, in an assessment of their relationship to critical theory. Moreover, given the proliferation of critical theories since the 1980s, the effort to devise a “map” that would reflect the particular orientations and intricacies of each approach to critical theory also would be exacting, in its own right.¹