Anti-Semitism and Critical Social Theory: The Frankfurt School in American Exile

Eva-Maria Ziege’s Anti-Semitism and Theory of Society: The Frankfurt School in American Exile, which was completed in 2008 as her Habilitationsschrift ¹ in sociology at the University of Potsdam, provides an informative, insightful, well-researched and up-to-date overview of the history and work of the Institute for Social Research in the 1940s, with a particular emphasis on its little-known study on anti-Semitism among American workers and the much better known five-volume Studies in Prejudice. In the introduction she describes her four main aims as follows. First, she wants to reconstruct the political and academic ‘fields’ (here she draws explicitly on Pierre Bourdieu) which shaped the Institute’s work in the 1940s and which, somewhat later, were themselves shaped by it. Second, she is interested in the effect of American exile upon the development of the Institute’s work; what was its impact and to what extent are the changes and innovations that occurred attributable to the experience of exile? Next, she wants to re-examine the relationship of the members of the Institute to Jewish organizations in the US, but also to their own ‘Jewishness’; how did the Nazis’ imposition of rigid racial categories and the Institute’s own experience with widespread anti-Semitism in the US shape their work and their own self-understanding? Finally, Ziege wants to describe the complicated processes by which the main empirical studies of the Institute in the 1940s came into being, in order to recover what has been lost – such as the study on anti-Semitism among American workers – but also to determine the ways in which this work could still contribute to contemporary discussions of anti-Semitism, and prejudice more generally, especially among sociologists.

In the first chapter, Ziege provides an historical overview of the Institute in American exile and introduces some of her main arguments and conceptual distinctions. One of her most illuminating claims, which underlies the book as a whole, is that the Institute’s main theoretical premises had already been worked out by the end of the 1930s and that the 1940s were notable primarily for experiments and innovations in the area of empirical social research. Ziege argues that the Institute’s work during the 1940s existed at two distinct and relatively autonomous levels: the exoteric and esoteric. Consciously making this distinction allowed the Institute successfully to pursue empirical projects and to work with a wide variety of scholars without insisting that they share all, or even any of their ‘esoteric’ theoretical assumptions. ² This approach made possible the productive cooperation with non-Institute and non-European scholars that characterized the Studies in Prejudice, in particular. Ziege also poses the question here of why the Institute dedicated so much more of its energies in the 1940s to empirical research. She suggests that this shift was due in large part to a loss of autonomy caused by the financial crisis the Institute suffered in the late 1930s, which made it necessary to supplement its funds from outside sources. As a result, the Institute developed proposals for several different large-scale empirical research projects which it submitted to a number of large foundations. After repeated rejections from the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, substantially revised proposals for the study on anti-Semitism among American workers and the Studies in Prejudice were accepted by the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee, which allowed the Institute to continue its work. Ziege also poses the question of how and why the ‘philosopher’ Horkheimer was not just able but also willing to redirect the Institute’s labors toward empirical studies. Although she echoes Habermas’s misleading argument that it ‘was not possible for Horkheimer and Adorno’s generation to move out of the shadows of German transcendental philosophy’ (p. 32), her subsequent comments reveal that she does not really agree with it. She recognizes that Horkheimer was never a ‘pure philosopher’, and that empirically grounded social and historical research was essential to his model of Critical Theory from the beginning, which makes the Institute’s greater emphasis on empirical work in the 1940s much less mysterious.

The second chapter contains a lucid and well-researched overview of ‘anti-Semitism and anti-anti-Semitism’ in the US in the first half of the 20th century. Ziege focuses on the historical context out of which the principal American Jewish organizations emerged, with a particular emphasis on the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). Although these two organizations were very different in terms of their constituency and concerns, the Institute was able to cooperate productively with both. The AJC, which was founded in 1906 and represented a more affluent constituency, generally favored a policy of assimilation for American Jews. In response to the rise of National Socialism it had initially favored a policy of appeasement. Founded in 1934, the JLC emerged out of a militant labor movement which found expression in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and an extensive Jewish labor press in the 1920s and 1930s. Ziege points out that Horkheimer and the Institute warmed up only slowly to the idea of turning to Jewish organizations for funding, mainly due to the fear that their research would be dismissed as tendentious. Even though Horkheimer had explicitly criticized the policy of assimilation and appeasement, which was also pursued by the main organization for Jews in Germany, the Central-Verein der deutschen Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, the AJC would soon become the main funder of the Institute’s empirical work in the 1940s. Ziege cites this willingness to compromise with the AJC as a good example of Horkheimer’s separation of the esoteric from the exoteric. The Institute’s work with the JLC, which took place mainly in the context of the Labor Study, was a better fit and proved less contentious.

The third and fourth chapters are largely dedicated to answering the question of why and how anti-Semitism moved from the periphery to the center of the Institute’s work in the 1940s. The search for an answer begins with a re-examination of the excursus on ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ which, as Ziege demonstrates, has been neglected in the reception of Dialectic of Enlightenment. ³ She shows how the ‘Elements’ represented a much more complex and nuanced theory of anti-Semitism than the one that Horkheimer had put forth around 1940. In his 1939 essay, ‘The Jews and Europe’, Horkheimer argued that recent forms of virulent anti-Semitism were a reflex of the elimination of the sphere of circulation under state capitalism, that is, the sphere in which many European Jews had been forced to earn their living since the Middle Ages (Horkheimer, 1989). But just a few years later Horkheimer had come to the conclusion that this explanation was too simple and the ‘problem of anti-Semitism was much more complicated than he had thought’ (p. 150). At the same time, Ziege argues that Horkheimer and Adorno’s rejection of one-dimensional economistic explanations of anti-Semitism did not represent a turn away from Marxist theory tout court, as many commentators have claimed. Horkheimer still believed that anti-Semitism could only be explained through recourse to a critical theory of society, but he now also believed that anti-Semitism was the key to understanding modern capitalist societies, insofar as it expressed better than anything else the forms of social domination and ideology that characterized them. ⁴ This argument is stated most clearly in the third thesis of the ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’, which explains the appeal of what they call ‘bourgeois’ anti-Semitism in terms of its concealing the real source of social domination in the sphere of production, and its portrayal of Jews as ‘parasitic’ elements who survive through the exploitation in the sphere of circulation of ‘productive’ workers and capitalists. ⁵ This argument is certainly unthinkable without Marx and Ziege is correct, in general, to emphasize Horkheimer and Adorno’s unbroken indebtedness to Marx in the 1940s, even though these theoretical premises became increasingly ‘esoteric’ as the decade progressed. Yet one is also justified in asking, as Moishe Postone (1993: 84–120) and others have, in what sense exactly Horkheimer and Adorno’s Critical Theory remained Marxist after their adoption of Friedrich Pollock’s state capitalism thesis around 1940. ⁶ To what extent can theory which posits the ‘primacy of politics’ and which views politics in terms of a struggle for power among different organized ‘rackets’ still be considered Marxist in any meaningful sense? Is Ziege too quick to dismiss arguments that link Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory to new forms of state-centric capitalism that emerged in the 1930s, but are no longer with us today? Here and elsewhere, Ziege sometimes reduces Horkheimer and Adorno’s Marxism to a notion of ‘class struggle’, which does not do justice to the complexity of their interpretation of Marx or the ways in which it changed over time. ⁷ It would have been helpful to hear exactly which of Marx’s concepts (such as the appropriation of surplus value and commodity fetishism) were retained, and which were discarded (such as the independent dynamic of a transnational economy driven by the law of value) in the 1940s. In any case, the other main argument she introduces in chapter 3, that the ‘Elements’ cannot be fully understood apart from the empirical studies of anti-Semitism that were being conducted during this time, makes a lot of sense and is fully substantiated in chapter 5.

In chapter 4, Ziege moves from text back to context to further pursue the question of the increasing prominence of both empirical social research and analyses of anti-Semitism in the Institute’s work in the 1940s. She shows, as others have before her, how the financial crisis that the Institute suffered at the end of the 1930s played an important role in the new focus on empirical research. Her genuinely new contribution, which complements Thomas Wheatland’s (2009: 227–63) groundbreaking discussion of the same topic, is to show how and why the Institute’s various failed attempts to procure outside funding (discussed above) for their empirical projects gradually led to both an Americanization and a professionalization of their work. Ziege draws skillfully on archival sources to demonstrate how the focus of their research proposals shifted thematically from Europe to the US and how, in the process, they also became increasingly willing to work with American researchers who did not share their theoretical premises. This shift was evident in the transition in the mid-1940s from the study on anti-Semitism among American workers, which was designed and carried out exclusively by European exiles affiliated with the Institute, to the Studies in Prejudice, which was designed and carried out in cooperation with the AJC and a variety of American scholars. Rightfully calling into question both Eric Fromm’s claim that the Institute did not accomplish nearly as much as it should have, as well as Rolf Wiggershaus’s claim that it never succeeded in realizing Horkheimer’s programmatic aim of integrating theory and empirical research, Ziege reminds us of the vast scope of the Labor Study and the Studies in Prejudice, and the tremendous accomplishment they represented. An international team of fourteen authors from seven different disciplines collaborated on the two projects, which originally belonged together. As another commentator recently stated: ‘There has not been another theoretically informed, interdisciplinary research project like this since’ (Bergmann, 2004: 220, quoted in Ziege, p. 138). The shift from the Labor Study to the substantially larger Studies in Prejudice also brought with it a professionalization of the Institute. In response to their lack of success with large American foundations, Horkheimer had stated angrily that the Institute was a like a small family business competing against large corporations. Ironically adopting this same language, Ziege describes the transformation of the Institute in the mid-1940s as follows:

The Labor Study is the last major project that the Institute carried out itself. Afterwards the Institute’s controlling power became increasingly fragile, because it did not carry out the following studies directly itself and it gave writing assignments to ‘subcontractors.’ … Beginning in January 1945 it [the Institute] was transformed from a small business into a medium sized enterprise with ‘subcontractors.’ (p. 155)

As Thomas Wheatland also does in his recent study, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Wheatland, 2009: 248), Ziege asks if this professionalization was beneficial or detrimental to the Institute and Critical Theory. Ziege agrees with Wheatland that it was more beneficial than detrimental, especially insofar as it gave the members of the Institute the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the research techniques of American sociologists and social psychologists – knowledge that they would put to good use when they reestablished the Institute in Frankfurt in 1950. ⁸

The next chapter focuses on the study of anti-Semitism among American workers, which was completed, but was never published, and thus remains virtually unknown. Fortunately, Mark Worrell (2009) has recently written a full-length monograph on the anti-Semitism study, which provides an excellent overview of the main methods and findings of the study. ⁹ Ziege’s discussion of the study begins from different premises than Worrell’s and thus illuminates it in different ways. She argues compellingly that the Labor Study provides the ‘missing link’ between the esoteric theoretical reflections of Dialectic of Enlightenment and the exoteric, large-scale empirical investigations of the Studies in Prejudice. One of the most interesting findings of the Labor Study was that the ‘bourgeois’ forms of anti-Semitism analyzed by Horkheimer and Adorno in the third thesis of the ‘Elements’, which were related primarily to economic exploitation, were more widespread among American workers than the fantastic biological and conspiratorial notions of völkische anti-Semitism that were also propagated by the Nazis. ¹⁰ Whereas earlier and later studies by the Institute confirmed that anti-Semitism was more widespread among white-collar than blue-collar workers in Germany, the Labor Study demonstrated that the opposite was the case in the US. This significant difference was probably due primarily to the virtual absence of anti-anti-Semitic political education in the US, which many German workers had received in socialist and Marxist influenced labor unions. But, as Ziege emphasizes, one of the most important and sobering findings of the Labor Study was that, as the genocidal ideology and policies of the National Socialists became better known among American workers, the level and intensity of anti-Semitism increased, rather than decreased. Nearly 20 percent of American workers expressed open or thinly veiled support for Nazi policies. Indeed, one of the principal authors of the study, Paul Massing, argued that the rise of National Socialism was the single most important cause of the increasing levels of anti-Semitism in the US in the 1930s and 1940s – even more important than populist anti-Semitic agitators in the US, such as Father Coughlin. Just as Horkheimer and Adorno had argued in the third thesis of the ‘Elements’, many American workers were duped – due to their failure to recognize the genuine source of exploitation in the sphere of production – by the Nazis’ propagandistic claims that they were an anti-elitist and anti-capitalist movement, which was acting on behalf of ‘productive’ workers and capitalists against the ‘parasitic’ Jews.

Ziege describes the Labor Study as a ‘cultural anthropology’ of American society, which is justified insofar as the Institute relied on American workers to carry out the interviews of other workers, in order to eliminate the cultural (and status) differences that would have existed if European scholars had conducted them. Ziege rightfully gestures to the work of Ruth Benedict as a possible inspiration for such methodological sophistication in the Labor Study. Yet, when Ziege points out a few pages later that ‘anthropology, in the broadest sense of the term, not psychology or psychoanalysis, defined the conceptual parameters of the Labor Study’, she does not adequately distinguish Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectical anthropology from the tradition of American cultural anthropology. Horkheimer developed the concept of a dialectical anthropology in the 1930s as a critique of the tradition of philosophical anthropology, which sought to establish the most general traits of ‘man’ outside of history and social or cultural differences. Horkheimer’s important concept of the ‘anthropology of the bourgeois epoch’ represented a fundamental critique of philosophical anthropology, insofar as it rejected its ahistorical premises and insisted that the most essential human characteristics were socially and historically specific. ¹¹ At the same time, however, Horkheimer did not subscribe to the cultural relativism of Benedict. Although Horkheimer rejected economic or sociological reductionism by defending the relative autonomy of culture (in both the broad anthropological sense and the narrower sense of Kultur, as the ‘spiritual’ creations of the arts, religion and philosophy), he (and Adorno) also insisted that culture in modern capitalist societies was always mediated by deeper, underlying socio-economic relations (see, for example, Adorno, 1982). When Horkheimer and Adorno spoke of the advent of a new, ‘anthropological’ species of man in the 20th century, ¹² they viewed these new cultural forms and character types as a product of socio-economic relations that were historically specific but also diffused throughout all modern capitalist societies. Horkheimer and Adorno’s belief that the conditions for fascism also existed in the US – that ‘this can happen here’ – was, as Ziege points out, the most important motivation for the Labor Study and the Studies in Prejudice. She writes: ‘The pool of anti-Semites constitutes a possible mass basis for totalitarianism and fascism. They are the “potential fascists.” This assumption was the point of departure for The Authoritarian Personality’ (p. 227).

The Authoritarian Personality was the lengthiest and most substantial of the five different studies that constituted the Studies in Prejudice, which is the focus of the sixth and final chapter of Ziege’s book. She provides a lucid overview of the backgrounds of the authors, the main arguments and the reception (in both Germany and the US) of four of these five volumes. ¹³ She makes interesting and original observations about all of them. She points out, for example, that Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz’s study of prejudice among veterans, Dynamics of Prejudice, was intended to explore in more detail a tentative insight gained in the Labor Study: that prejudices against blacks and Jews serve a very different psychological function. Dynamics of Prejudice confirmed the original finding that prejudices against blacks were often related to the private sphere and involved the id (prejudiced whites viewed blacks as ‘dirty’ or ‘oversexed’; they were willing to work with but not live with blacks), whereas prejudices against Jews were more abstract and involved the superego (Jews seen as using their superior intelligence and guile to deceive and exploit honest, hard-working whites). In contrast to the Labor Study and Dynamics of Prejudice, The Authoritarian Personality was not intended to determine the difference between prejudiced and non-prejudiced subjects, but instead to identify ‘a potentially “fascist” individual, whose personality structure makes him particularly susceptible to anti-democratic propaganda’ (p. 271). Ziege argues that The Authoritarian Personality intentionally focused on lower-middle and middle-class whites, because the Institute had already determined in the Labor Study that this demographic was the most susceptible to prejudice. Although this argument makes sense in terms of race (the Labor Study determined that blacks were significantly less prejudiced towards Jews than whites), it seems to be at odds with the finding of the Labor Study that less educated, working-class whites were more prejudiced than more highly educated lower middle- and middle-class whites. Overall, however, Ziege’s use of the Labor Study as a constant point of reference illuminates not only the Studies in Prejudice but also her own main arguments. Drawing once again on Bourdieu, she demonstrates how the Labor Study, which was carried out with substantial help from the JLC, was much more closely related to the ‘political field’, whereas the Studies in Prejudice, in which the AJC served as the Insitute’s main sponsor and partner, was more deeply embedded in the ‘academic field’ and thus required a greater emphasis on the ‘exoteric’ than the ‘esoteric’ aspects of Critical Theory. Nonetheless, Ziege argues that even at its most ‘exoteric’, the Studies in Prejudice – or at least the volumes that were authored or co-authored by members of the Institute (i.e. Adorno et al., 1950; Lowenthal and Guterman, 1949; Massing, 1949) – were still guided by the critical, Marxist theoretical premises of the Institute. Ziege’s discovery in the Max Horkheimer Archive of a memorandum, in which Adorno spells out explicitly the theoretical underpinnings of The Authoritarian Personality, leaves little room to question her claim here (pp. 272–3), nor will it come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Horkheimer’s determination of Critical Theory, in which traditional theory always had an essential, albeit subordinate, role to play. Without the preparatory work of traditional theory, Critical Theory is not possible, any more than Marx’s theory would have been possible without the tradition of bourgeois political economy.

Overall, Ziege’s well-researched study succeeds in its aim of providing compelling answers to several key questions that have occupied scholars of Critical Theory for decades. Her explanations of why the Institute turned in the 1940s to empirical research, in general, and to anti-Semitism, in particular, as well as her portrayal of how the experience of American exile shaped the development of its work, all shed important and genuinely new light on these problems. As she herself notes, her study is part of a new generation of scholarship on Critical Theory, which draws on the much broader base of sources now available and has provided us with a more nuanced understanding of the complex history of the Institute. One of the innovations of this recent work has been to draw more attention to the central role of empirical social research, which was often downplayed or overlooked in the earlier reception of Critical Theory. Recent studies by Thomas Wheatland, Mark Worrell, David Jenemann, Matthias Benzer, Harry F. Dahms and myself, as well as a new English translation of Group Experiment – the first empirical study carried out by the Institute after its re-establishment in Frankfurt in 1950 – may indicate that a new reception of Critical Theory is under way among Anglo-American historians and sociologists. ¹⁴ One hopes that this renewed interest will also lead to an English translation of Ziege’s excellent book.