CRITICAL THEORY‘‘just’’ or ‘‘equal’’ situation—as well as to uncover
internal tendencies with a potential for change
including new sources of resistance and opposi-
tion to repressive institutions.
Frankfurt School theorists found a paradig-
matic example of immanent critique in the works
of Karl Marx, including both his early writings on
alienation and his later analyses of industrial capi-
talism. Best articulated by Marcuse (1941), their
reading of Capital interpreted Marx’s text as oper-
ating on two levels. On one level, Capital was read
as a historical analysis of social institutions’ pro-
gressive evolution, which resulted from conflicts
between ‘‘forces’’ (such as technology) and ‘‘rela-
tions’’ (such as class conflicts) in economic produc-
tion. Scientistic readings of Marx, however—espe-
cially by the generation of Marxist theorists
immediately after the death of Marx—essentialized
this dimension into a dogma that tended to neg-
lect the role of human agency and stressed eco-
nomic determinism in social history. But the Frank-
furt School also read Capital as a ‘‘negative’’ or
‘‘immanent’’ critique of an important form of
ideology, the bourgeois pseudo-science of econo-
mics. Here, Marx showed that the essence of capi-
talism as the exploitation of wage slavery contra-
dicts its ideological representation or appearance
as being a free exchange among equal parties (e.g.,
laborers and employers).
Members of the Frankfurt School interpreted
the efforts that Marx devoted to the critique of
ideology as an indication of his belief that freeing
the consciousness of social actors from ideological
illusion is an important form of political practice
that potentially contributes to the expansion of
human agency. Thus, they interpreted Marx’s theo-
ry of the production and exploitation of economic
values as an empirical effort to understand the
historically specific ‘‘laws of motion’’ of market-
driven, capitalist societies. At the same time, how-
ever, it was also interpreted as an effort—motivat-
ed by faith in the potential efficacy of active oppo-
sition—to see through capitalism’s objectified
processes that made a humanly created social
world appear to be the product of inevitable,
autonomous, and ‘‘natural’’ forces and to call for
forms of revolutionary activism to defeat such
forces of ‘‘alienation.’’
Members of the Frankfurt School attempted
to honor both dimensions of the Marxian legacy.
On the one hand, they sought to understand
diverse social phenomena holistically as parts of an
innerconnected ‘‘totality’’ structured primarily by
such capitalistic principles as the commodity form
of exchange relations and bureaucratic rationality.
On the other hand, they avoided reducing com-
plex social factors to a predetermined existence as
shadowlike reflections of these basic tendencies
(Jay 1984). Thus, the methodology of immanent
critique propelled a provisional, antifoundationalist,
and inductive approach to ‘‘truth’’ that allowed for
the open-endedness of social action and referred
the ultimate verification of sociological insights to
the efficacy of historical struggles rather than to
the immediate observation of empirical facts
(Horkheimer 1972). In effect, they were saying
that social ‘‘facts’’ are never fixed once and for all,
as in the world of nature, but rather are subject to
constant revisions by both the conscious aims and
unintended consequences of collective action.In their concrete studies, members of the
Frankfurt School concentrated on the sources of
social conformism that, by the 1930s, had under-
mined the Left’s faith in the revolutionary poten-
tial of the working class. They were among the first
Marxists to relate Freud’s insights into personality
development to widespread changes in family and
socialization patterns that they believed had weak-
ened the ego boundary between self and society
and reduced personal autonomy (Fromm 1941).
After they emigrated to the United States, these
studies culminated in a series of survey research
efforts, directed by Adorno and carried out by
social scientists at the University of California, that
investigated the relation between prejudice, espe-
cially anti-Semitism, and ‘‘the authoritarian per-
sonality’’ (Adorno et al. 1950). Later, in a more
radical interpretation of Freud, Marcuse (1955)
questioned whether conflicts between social
constraints and bodily needs and desires might
provide an impetus for revolt against capitalist
repression if such conflicts were mediated by pro-
gressively oriented politics.
Once in the United States, members of the
Frankfurt School emphasized another important
source of conformism, the mass media. Holding
that the best of ‘‘authentic art’’ contains a critical
dimension that negates the status quo by pointing
in utopian directions, they argued that commer-
cialized and popular culture, shaped predomi-
nantly by market and bureaucratic imperatives, is