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capacity to link affect and sensibility with the analysis and cognition afforded byrational discourse, to give coherence and direction to the rich and imaginativesymbolism generated by the playful return to the past. However, the potentiallyemancipatory rationality carried by critical theory has a tendency to cool down the'collective effervescence' that develops in playful forms of political activity. InGouldner's words, this rationality not only "entails an escape from... tradition but[also] imposes new constraints on expressivity, imagination, and play, and insists oncontrol rather than openness as the key to truth, on a certain domination of nature,including the self, rather than on a surrender to it."'7 The avoidance of theserationalizing and, indeed, elitist tendencies requires the formation of theoreticalcommunities.

Though grounded in rational discourse, the theoretical community—constitutingan open space, one without hierarchy and injustice where equals can entertain andenact new social arrangements and relations has much in common with thenonrational communitas grounded in play. Unlike communitas, however, thetheoretical community is always engaged with structure, and it is in this engagementwith structure, its own structure, that it becomes fully reflexive. By reflecting upon itsongoing practice, its own effort to constitute itself as a decent society, the theoreticalcommunity might be able to suggest the direction needed if the decent societyimagined and played in communitas is to be seriously pursued.

The theoretical community is capable of preventing the degeneration of a playfulpolitics into some kind of countercultural escapism. At the same time, an infusion ofplay will reinforce the reflexive capacity and the sense of equality and of fairnesswhich are necessary if the theoretical community is to avoid elitist developments thatmight transform it into a vanguard party. Of course, the theoretical community mustnever surrender its commitment to critical and rational discourse, but on occasion we,its members, must playfully celebrate the decent society which underlies and givesmeaning to this commitment. Only in this way can we prepare ourselves to helpmediate between the sense of a better society we experience in play and the truth ofthis society we discover as critical theorists and make as members of a theoreticalcommunity.

Frank Hearn

7. Gouldner, "Prologue to a Theory of Revolutionary Intellectuals," op.cit., p. 20.

Zoltan Tar. The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimerand Theodor W. Adorno. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1977. $17.95.

Tar's thesis is simple: the "Critical Theory" or "Theory of Society" is neitherMarxism nor sociology but rather an existential philosophy. With it he hopes toenlighten all those who have been duped into believing that the Frankfurt Schoolrepresents "a Marxist orientation in sociology" (p. 2). Tar wishes to exercise thisspectre of a radical sociology that he sees as haunting sociology. The book is,therefore, explicitly political in its value-committment to a "scientific sociology" that iscompatible with establishment thinking; it sees radicalism and radical sociologies asmerely infantile disorders of those headed for an establishment maturity (pp. 4, 12).

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Thus, Tar subscribes to that unwritten law that Jacoby criticized Jay of adhering to inrelation to the Frankfurt School itself: "that radicals become conservatives, andMarxists, liberals."1 However, Tar does not subscribe to this thesis in relation to thecritical theorists themselves; for him they were never particularly Marxist. Tar totallyassimilates their position to German Romanticism's critique of technology, as well asto certain elements of Judaic thought, thus justifying the labelling of "critical theory" asjust another existential philosophy.

The thesis is truly ground-breaking. Whereas both Jay and Slater see the FrankfurtSchool as sliding away from Marxism, they never denied its substantial Marxianinheritance. Yet, it is this inheritance that Tar wishes to deny through what Adornomight have described as transcendent criticism. That is to say, his book criticizes"critical theory" not through an investigation of its internal coherence orcontradictoriness and, thereby, its revelation of, or resignation to, reality. Rather, Tarseeks to establish external criteria of what constitutes the essence of Marxism and theessence of a "scientific sociology." With these criteria in hand, he is in a position towield the axe. Not surprisingly, this method turns its subject matter into dead matter.The critique is a reified one, to borrow from Jacoby, because it seeks to establishcriteria with which to measure cases of deviance.2 Thus, it cannot fail to become yetanother Frankfurt School interpretation which is, in fact, a distortion.

Another one of the main reasons for its distortion of the Frankfurt School lies in itsorganizational framework. Tar criticizes Jay for having stopped short by concludinghis study in 1950, as well as of presenting a court history, thus claiming superiority forhis own study by including critical theory's later stage, when supposedly, the Judaicinfluence became manifest (pp. 5,6). Yet, although Tar may cover a wider time-span,his study is nowhere near as comprehensive as Jay's, which was hardly a court historygiven its main thesis. Tar reduces the Frankfurt School to Horkheimer and Adorno,thus eliminating from consideration Marcuse, Benjamin, Pollock, and a host ofothers. In addition, he reduces their critical theories to their reflections on philosophyand sociology, thus almost eliminating the vital aesthetic moment of, especially,Adorno's thought (p. 8). Tar justifies this procedure by referring to Horkheimer andAdorno's textual pronouncements as to the identity of their philosophy; yet, althoughthis stance informs the organization of the book in its refusal to offer equal andparallel treatments of Horkheimer and Adorno's separate developments (Adorno'searly works are simply not treated), he is concerned to argue their ultimatedissimlarity, hence the subtitle of his book. Perhaps Tar is looking for the FrankfurtSchool's problematic, through which the various critical themes can be compared anddifferentiated. If so, the nearest he comes to finding it is in the term "existentialphilosophy," but for Tar this term is exclusively pejorative.

This leads to the most important reason for Tar's distortion of "critical theory:" heis a stranger to its mode of thought and to the Hegelian-Marxist tradition from whichit is derived. For Tar, the "critical theory" possesses no truth-content due to the factthat it is non-scientific. Because it is mere (existential) philosophy, the task becomesone of formulating the elements of a reductive explanation of this strange concoction.Tar employs three interconnected modes of reductionist explanation. Firstly, hebecomes a sociologist of knowledge concerned to argue critical theory's grounding inbeing: it is the manifestation of a group of intellectuals whose old social order wascollapsing and who were not at home in the new (p. 10, 204-7). Tar also tries to

1. R. Jacoby, "Marxism and the Critical School," Theory and Society, 2 (1975), p. 232.2. Ibid., p. 265.

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illuminate further the individual dimension in relation to Horkheimer by locating theexistential matrix of his throught. Here Tar discovers the old Oedipal conflict (p. 18).Closely connected with this is his emphasis on Horkheimer's Jewish origins, whichenables Tar to dabble in the sociology of religion and culture (p. 181-189). Herepresents a more extensive mauling of the Frankfurt School than Slater, whoacknowledged both its Marxism and limited truth-content before engaging in Marxistmetacritique. Tar acknowledges neither their Marxism nor their truth-content.Reductionism replaces metacritique; the going-beyond becomes a going-under.

Tar tries to locate the non-Marxist character of the Frankfurt School's thought inHorkheimer's early writings, which is generally where most people try to locate itsMarxism. He does not deny that Horkheimer's critical theory was an interpretation ofMarxism; he merely argues that it was a wrong interpretation. This is because itdeviates from basic tenets of Marxist epistemology and ontology, although he doesadmit, to be fair, they adhered to certain basic tenets of Marxian social theory. Thesebasic philosophical tenets of classical Marxism turn out to be nothing more than theEngels-Lenin misinterpretation of Marxism as an eighteenth century materialism—the total separation of subject and object, in which the object's predominance isaffirmed by the copy theory of knowledge etc.—all of which Horkheimer attacked inhis critiques of logical positivism. Tar realizes this, of course, yet maintains that theseare the classic criteria of Marxism and, therefore, Horkheimer is a case of deviance, anon-Marxist. Tar continues his criticism by arguing, in contradiction to what he saidbefore, that they eventually eliminated all traces of Marxism from their "CriticalTheory:" "Critical theory cannot qualify as Marxist because it deviates from the basictenets of Marxist social theory, on the one hand, and because it never represented asynthesis of theory and praxis on the other" (p. 43).

Tar proves the identity of opposites by handling the theory-practice question asbadly as Slater. Firstly, he explicitly reduces the theory-practice question to one of theuse of violence. Through the skillful use of Weber, it is suggested that both Luk4cs andHorkheimer stood on the wrong side of the ethic of absolute ends—ethic ofresponsibility dichotomy: Horkheimer was pacifist, passive-pessimistic-Messianicwhile Lukics was militant, active-progressive messianic (p. 47). In other words,Horkheimer's shortage of practice is linked to his pacifism, the influence of Scho-penhauer, of Judaic-messianism and so forth. It is not linked to the historicalsituation in which Horkheimer was writing, and it cannot be, for otherwise Tar wouldbe forced to recognize that the advocacy of violence is not equivalent to practice; andpractice itself, in the sense of a practice theoretically informed in an on-going debatebetween the intellectuals, the political avant-garde and the masses, as wasHorkheimer's original formulation, was at that stage not objectively possible. Whilethere is no doubt that Horkheimer and Adomo later came to reject the possibility ofsuch a practice, Tar's explanation of this resignation in terms of Horkheimer'sexistential determinants is unsatisfactory. Not only that, it is a distortion of his ownproject, which is to "uncover" the Frankfurt School itself, for he reads the FrankfurtSchool backwards; Horkheimer's reactionary departure governs Tar's interpretationof the whole Frankfurt School's project, trajectory, and finale. If the FrankfurtSchool's resignationism is, indeed, inherent in its original problematic, then neitherTar nor Slater has proved it.3

Thus, in Tar's account the diminution of the significance of Marxism for the

3. P. Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School, (London, 1977), p. 165.

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Frankfurt School is inevitable. In particular, the Marxian notion of reification, asrevived by Lukacs, is totally ignored. It is this concept, rather than Romanticism orJudaism (pp. 54-55), which is the basis of Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of thedomination of nature and their consequent compassion with the dominated. Taracknowledges Lukacs' influence (p. 23), but he does not relate it to Horkheimer andAdorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which is treated as one of the three phases in theFrankfurt School's interpretation of fascism. As to the first phase, fascism as thehighest stage of capitalism, Tar reduces Horkheimer's position to an expression ofDimitrov's definition of fascism, thus assimilating their theoretical position to theravings of the Comintern (pp. 74, 77). The second phase is that of the dialectic ofEnlightenment, which for Tar marks a "definite turn from a militant thoughsomewhat ambivalent Critical Theory to a social philosophy of despair" (p. 79). Hisinterpretation is similar to Jay's, where class conflict is replaced by the wider conflictbetween man and nature (p. 80).4 Yet, Tar takes the interpretation to its logicalconclusion, for if the Dialectic of Enlightenment is not linked to the Marxian notion ofreification, then it can be assimilated to traditional German philosophy of nature (p.95).

GyOrgy Markus has argued that Marx's use of the term reification can be found mostclearly expressed in the following passage of Capital: "In capital.. .the reification(Verdinglichung) of social relations, the immediate consequence of the materialrelations of production with their historical-social determination, is accomp-lished "5 The expression "material relations of production" only seems to be acontradiction in adjecto because it depicts a contradiction in reality. It conceptualizesthe fact that production is not a technically neutral metabolic relation between manand nature, but, because of the class nature of society, the social relations ofproduction "determine—in a spontaneous way—the specific content, the specifichistorical economic goal to be fulfilled within the limiting conditions imposed by thematerial—"technical" requirements of proportionality."6 The class-based aims ofproduction and their rational-technical implementation are interwoven; it is thiswhich makes possible the reversal of ends and means, which is a major theme of theDialectic of Enlightenment, the Eclipse of Reason, and Minima Moralia. To quotefrom the latter: "If uninhibited people are by no means the most agreeable or even thefreest, a society rid of its fetters might take thought that even the forces of productionare not the deepest substratum of man, but represent his historical form adapted tothe production of commodities. Perhaps the true society will grow tired ofdevelopment and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of stormingunder a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars."7 I have quoted thispassage because it provides the basis for the Utopian vision of "eternal peace" thatfollows, and which Tar refers to as an example of Adorno's own desire to "cop-out:""the wish and will" to have their peace and enjoy themselves," albeit with a badconscience, is an attitude that continued with the critical theorists" (p. 11). The"Grand Hotel" thesis cannot be treated at the level of textual misinterpretation andpersonal vilification.

Thus, "critical theory" clearly recognized it was the historical form of productionwhich has brought about this reversal of ends and means—the elevation of production

4. M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. (London, 1973). p. 256.5. G. Markus, Alienation and Reification in Marx and Lukacs, unpublished manuscript.6. Ibid., p. 9.7. T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, (London, 1974), p. 156.

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to the telos of man's existence, and not simply technology or the necessity of materialproduction as such. Yet, for Tar their position is a new naturphilosophie composed ofFreudian psychoanalysis and speculative historico-sociological dimension (p. 95). Theconclusion that "critical theory" has nothing to do with "real Marxism" is inevitable,for did not Marx admire natural science (p. 99)? For Tar, the Frankfurt School isneo-Romanticism posing as neo-Enlightenment; it "sees the roots of evil in thetechnological apparatus" (p. 101). Such a view leads Tar to challenge the Dialectic ofEnlightenment's most original thesis: that unrestrained instrumental rationality leadsnot to an enlightened world, but to a new barbarism. Tar, quoting Lukacs, arguesthat irrationalism, not reason itself, leads to fascism (p. 115). Yet, irrationalistthought is itself a product of a rationalized world, for if practical reason is robbed ofall validity by the dominance of instrumental reason, then philosophy's reaction hasbeen immediately to ground its ethical impulse in some quasi-biological or quasi-theological principle, thus trying to give itself a pseudo-scientific necessity it can neverpossess. As Adorno pointed out, this can lead to a rationalism or irrationalism, as inthe case of the early Husserl. In relation to the third phase of the Frankfurt School'stheory of fascism Tar has an ambiguous attitude, for the Authoritarian Personality isan academic classic, yet even here he tries to insinuate that perhaps a "true" Marxistwould have looked to Pavlov, rather than Freud, for a psychological theory; after all,only Trotsky had defended Freud (p. 111).

The Frankfurt School's middle period gives way to their late period, which Tar seesas dedicated to a codification of their sociology—a thesis he textually signifies byreplacing the label Critical Theory with "Theory of Society" (p. 137). Yet, the Theoryof Society turns out to be, in fact, not a theory of society, for it is non-scientific. Whatis a scientific sociology? Tar has all the answers, five to be exact: science is built on theidea of discontinuity—no evolutionism; the idea of complementarity—any and allexplanations are by no means mutually exclusive; relativity— cultural relativism;microcosm—small group studies; indeterminacy and statistical causality—empiricalsociology's research methods (pp. 166-68). The most one can say of these mistakenbanalities is that they are presented in an equally banal language (p. 196). Worse is tocome: "there is general agreement among sociologists on two additional canons ofmodern science: on verification and on the principle that the community of scientistsbe the sole judge of the validity of scientific findings" (p. 169). This is a completecontradiction; the two principles belong to two entirely different schools of thephilosophy of science: logical positivism and critical rationalism. The inductivistconcept of theory-formation of the former meant that the theories themselves canonly be verified by reference back to the reality which supposedly generated them. ThePopperian critique of inductionism stresses the presentation of bold conjectures thatare submitted to the criticism of fellow scientists; they are never verifiable, but onlyfalsifiable if a single instance is found to contradict the theory. Only such a deductivistconcept of theory-formation allowed room—from within the tradition of the modernphilosophy of science—for a community of scientists to act as judges of scientificfindings. Inductionism allows them no such right, for it makes truth acorrespondence, rather than a consensus—an error which critical rationalismultimately falls into and with which it does not reconcile its emphasis on problems andtheories. 8

8. J.A. Habermas. "Positivistically Bisected Rationalism," The Positivist Dispute in GermanSociology, (London, 1976), pp. 203-4.

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With these pseudo-scientific criteria in hand, Tar is now ready to wield hissociological axe: the "Theory of Society violates the canons of scientific sociologysignificantly and therefore cannot qualify as a sociology" (p. 170). What is the purposeof such a conclusion given the fact, which he notes, that the Frankfurt Schooldisdained sociology as a "child" of positivism? (This thesis Tar's book aptly, butunintentionally, demonstrates). It reads like an invocation to all SociologyDepartments to extirpate heresy. The book is not a critical investigation, it is asociological inquisition. Once again, as the "Theory of Society" is non-science, mere"artistic reflections combined with Marxian categories and elements, and a pessimisticphilosophy of history," the task becomes to explain it away, and here Tar speaks of"existential overdetermination" (p. 170). Put simply, this translates as: Adorno—theartist. Of course, it cannot be denied that the Frankfurt School was short on concreteempirical work and that the sociological work they did produce represents a reductionof the original project of a historical materialism to a social psychology; yet, it is to bedenied that Tar's scientific sociology could provide any satisfactory alternative.Besides, the empirical work they did produce stands, as previously implied, too close tothe academic tradition Tar supports; while their speculative work stands too far fromall empirical investigation, especially for Tar's value-free science that finds anyphilosophical moment detestable and artificial.

It is their refusal to separate philosophy from social theory which makes "criticaltheory" critical after the possibility of directly influencing practice disappears; and itis Tar's willingness to separate them that leads directly to his conclusion that criticaltheory is an existential philosophy. Through a total mis-reading of Hegel, whichassimilates his idea of philosophy comprehending its age in thought to an historicismHegel criticized in the very same Introduction, Tar argues that critical theory isanother existential philosophy that expresses the crisis of its age. It is a "specificexpression of a certain socio-historical condition and the situation of a social group,the marginal bourgeois-Jewish intelligentsia" (p. 205). They are no free-floatingintelligentsia, as in Jay's portrayal, for this sociology of non-knowledge; this sociologyof philosophy.

For Hegel, philosophy expresses not its age, but the truth of its age; it finds the idealin the real, the rational in the actual, unlike Plato who projects the ideal into thebeyond. In a certain way, this is a problem that also haunts Marxism, for although itconvicts the real of a rationalized irrationality, it still must discover the elements ofreason within the real which would explode the prevailing reality itself. If it does not,it collapses into Positivism or Platonism; perhaps, even into nihilism, which is whatTar accuses Adorno of adopting. Yet, this is simply untrue, for Adorno asserts thepossibility of stepping out of (negative) dialectics; the possibility of a micrology thatwould study the pieces of authentic art that remain, for it is only in these thatintimations of what lies beyond resides. This solution avoids nihilism, but it is still nosolution, for although capitalism may have invented the proletariat it did not inventart; it is in no way a determinate negation of existing reality and if pressed intoperforming what it cannot perform it risks lapsing into affirmativism. If the micrologyexists as a small step outside of dialectics, then it also exists as a small step outside ofmaterial exitence. Are not a material existence drained of possibility and an idealsphere filled with it, the two sides of the complex Marcuse termed the affirmativeculture? Of course, Adorno does not exhibit "the beautiful as present," but this is theproblem, for, unlike Benjamin, he does not assign the "image sphere" any potentiallyrevolutionary function at all; the beautiful is present only for the curator of the

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museum that micrology creates.9If the dialectic is defined as merely negative, as that which explodes the structure of

necessity by following its course, then the "ought" takes on a pure ideality. This isfruitful insofar as it refuses to give any material element a material necessity, but it isunfrutiful insofar as it is now only purely ideal elements that possess any possibility;any negating potential, any beyond. This distorts both the character of the real and thepotentiality of ideals: Adorno makes the distance between them unbridgeable.Adomo has constructed a negative Utopia for his negative dialectic, while thepossibility of real negation retreats into the authentic Utopias that authentic art-worksproject, and which micrology uncovers. The only thing that keeps this theory fromaffirmativism is the sense of "bitter resignation" (Arato and Piccone) with which it iscarried out. Yet, on the political level, there is no doubt that for both the laterHorkheimer and Adorno it results in a resigned affirmativism.

However, for a true believer of the "Church of Scientific Sociology," art andphilosophy lie outside the province of a value-free science that Tar has elected todefend. Critical theory was founded on a critique of the possibility of any such science,and the attacks on it by defenders of value-free science have been invariablyunfruitful. One could conclude that the two traditions have simply argued past oneanother, except for the fact that the depth of understanding and insight intopositivism that critical theory has shown, has in no way been reciprocated. Tar's bookdoes not confront critical theory with its own contradictions, but with positivism's owncontradictions. Tar simply argues past critical theory, and beneath it.

PaulHarrison

9. H. Marcuse, Negations, (London, 1968), p. 121.

Michael L8wy. Pour une Sociologie des Intellectuels Revolutionnaires:L'Evolution Politique de Luk&cs, 1909-1929. Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance, 1976. 319 pages.

As a materialist theory of history and society which has placed its hopes on theconsciousness and activity of the proletariat, Marxism has nurtured an endemichostility to those "idealists" who come to the left from outside the working class: theintellectuals. The intellectuals have, in turn, responded with an equally long lastingand endemic tradition: self-abuse, and guilt, a kind of permanant legitimation crisisof left intellectuals who yearn to join the collective identical subject-object of history.A primitive "sociology of the intellectuals" has been the theoretical handmaiden of theoften unhappy marriage of Marxism and the intellectuals. It postulates that becauseintellectuals are far removed from "material production" and or the proletariat, theyare susceptible to a number of "idealist" viruses such as humanism, individualism orcultural criticism. Conversely, because the proletariat is immersed in "material"production it "naturally" inclines toward (falls into?) materialism. Alvin Gouldner haspointed out that this scheme cannot account for the fact that all of the communistrevolutions of this century have been led by intellectuals, a lacuna he attributes to a