Adorno and Horkheimer
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were theorists ·who made similar. but more sophisticated, critical points about capitalism than did Reich; they are, along with Kovel and Lasch, the thinkers who come closest to what is aimed for in this dissertation. Adorno and Horkheimer were, from the 1920s through the 1950s, the intellectual nucleus of what is termed the Frankfurt School. Martin Jay (1973), historian of that movement and explicator of its thinking, points out that “although the two men did not write collaboratively until the 1940s, there was a remarkable similarity in their views from the first” (p. 65). Therefore, their thinking may be approached in a unitary way.
A survey of their direct use of the term “alienation” shows it to occur mostly descriptively, typically when they invoke Marx on the nature of capitalist labor. Alienation may be inferred to be an inherent co-product of that to which they do direct their attention. The increasingly commoditized nature of not just concrete things but of abstract thought and cognitive conceptualization. Furthermore, their notion of modern totality, in which crude processes of overt domination characteristic of earlier or less-developed societies are replaced by subtle processes penetrating the psychic makeup and cognitive reality of a society’s members.
Finally, their sophisticated theory of reification: That the specific features of a society became rigidified, and so simultaneously become over-concretized and mistaken for a universal nature of humanity; and d) their recognition of the fetishization of “rationality,” either as science or as empirical pragmatism (Jay, 1973). All these are major points of sustenance for the outlook of this work, and all will be later developed.
The philosophical methodology of this duo is, though, subject to critique. In a subtle and so potentially insidious way, their presentation often falls prey to the trap of fastening upon the logic of the discussion and upon nuances of philosophical language, and not so much on the phenomena of their ultimate subject matter–lives themselves, which are logical and extralogical, languaged and extralanguaged.
For instance, Adorno critiqued American jazz as spuriously spontaneous, and as “a commodity in the strictest sense.” Jazz, he argued, was highly regressive (As cited in Jay, 1973, p. 186). But, philosophical words about regression, even those as highly articulate and meaningful as these are, do not fully appreciate or convey regressive experience. In an aside, Adorno does approach a languaged portrayal of regression when he recalls his horror on first reading the word “jazz” and recognizes it may have produced in him an association with “the German word Hatz (a pack of hounds), which evoked bloodhounds chasing after something slower” ‘(Adorno, 1956, p. 117, as cited in Jay, 1973, p. 186).
Erich Fromm
Jay (1979) comments that “It was primarily through [Erich] Fromm’s work that the Institute [fur Sozialforschung] first attempted to reconcile Freud and Marx” (p. 88). Like Reich before him and Marcuse after, Fromm eventually left the Institute, and his major writings explicitly on alienation came following his departure. Richard Schacht (1970) notes that “Fromm has had a great deal to do with the popularization of the term ‘alienation’ in the United States” (p. 123). Christopher Lasch (1979) derisively observes that such popularization is at the expense of theoretical coherence—occurring in the service of Fromm’s “watery love for humanity” and his “eagerness to sermonize about the blessings of brotherly love” (p. 72).
