Book review essay: The Budapest School: Beyond Marxism

Can democracy survive? A new book returns to the question from Budapest

J.F. Dorahy’s The Budapest School: Beyond Marxism addresses a world changed in the year since its publication. Democratic politics in Hungary, as well as the United States and parts of Western Europe, more openly work against the liberal separation of powers. Liberal democracy is deconsolidating (Foa and Mounk, 2016). As I write this review, much of the world is confined in fear of COVID-19, with the powers of government spiked for mobilization, even where, as in the US, actual mobilization is inept. Since the book emerged, the Mueller Report determined that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 US election; Bolsonaro’s regime opened the Amazon unreservedly to mining and logging; and Australian bushfires intensified by climate change destroyed a magnitude of life which defies enumeration. Ágnes Heller, the most widely known member of the erstwhile Budapest School, died this last year. As a girl she’d survived the Nazi Holocaust, and as a young woman, the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and subsequent authoritarian repression in Hungary. Heller died without dimming in intellectual might, and not before sharing her assessment of a world ceding to a level of degradation and totalitarian exploitation she had not expected to see again in her lifetime (Heller, 2018; Grumley, 2019).

If there ever was a good time for academic analysis detached from the realities of everyday life, this isn’t it. Fortunately, Dorahy’s investigation of the Budapest School manages a balance between close scholarly scrutiny and matters that never left the minds of his subjects: the autonomy of individuals and cultures, and the challenges of living within modern social polities, pulled (as Heller tells it) by the contending logics of political power, of science and technology, and of social stratification and privilege; or of democracy, industrialization, and capitalism. Early in her career, Heller worked with a number of thinkers, foremost György Márkus and Ferenc Fehér. These three are the primary subjects of Dorahy’s book. The three were young colleagues of György Lukács, who christened ‘The Budapest School of Marxism’ in a 1971 letter to The Times Literary Supplement (Lukács, 1971).

Insofar as the Budapest School was an association committed to jointly developing a critical social theory, it ceased to exist decades ago. This book uncovers the concerns that spurred the group’s formational salvos, and then its members’ increasingly diverse analyses of modern life. But Dorahy also locates a living proposal which is characteristic of the Budapest School’s radicalism in hindsight: the design for an ethics of planetary commitment, and for a critical theory fixed upon incorporating the vigorous rootstock of radical democracy with a multidimensional, pluralistic social order.

Márkus, Fehér, and Heller cut their teeth reading Marx under the mentorship of Lukács, but each had moved beyond doctrinaire Marxism and were critics of ‘actually existing socialism’ almost from the beginning of their mutual association. ¹ Thus, to classify their work as ‘beyond Marxism’ is both truth and truism. Even where Márkus went to lengths to detail errors in Marx’s model of production, and with his fellow Budapest thinkers thrashed the grand narratives of metaphysics, redemptive politics, and religious escapism, including Marxism and socialism as messianic doctrines, they all continued to read Marx (and Lukács) as guiding lights in the analysis of capitalist production, alienation and reification, and as philosophical sources of an emergent existential-humanism (Pickle and Rundell, 2018). Dorahy returns to Márkus’s reliance on Marx in his assessment of the dialectics of history, and to Heller’s lifelong occupation with Marx in his treatment of Heller’s study of the technological and historical imaginations. But the philosophical occupation is generalized. ² By way of getting to his conclusions about the nature of Heller’s proposals, Dorahy glosses Heller’s active utilization of Marx, as well as her reliance on a number of other philosophers. The philosophical reader might be frustrated by how slightly Kant, Kierkegaard, and Marx make it into Dorahy’s evaluation, given their centrality in Heller’s self-assessment. Then again, a political theorist might be relieved by the annotation.

Throughout the bulk of its three parts, The Budapest School interprets key initiatives developed by Márkus, by Heller and Fehér writing together, and by Heller working alone. ³ To my knowledge, there is no other thoroughgoing book-length treatment that juxtaposes Heller and Márkus, and that systematically clarifies their differences. As I suggested, the book also salvages pragmatic manoeuvres from Márkus’s philosophy of culture, and it retreads Heller’s ethico-political recommendations. In what follows, I will name a couple of the Budapest School initiatives that Dorahy treats in detail. Readers interested in these initiatives will find Dorahy to be a fantastically attuned guide through them. Then, I will return to the elements of Dorahy’s achievement which are most compelling to me at this dim pass in modern political culture, namely his presentation of Márkus’s and Heller’s enterprises as models for a democratic transfiguration.

The heart of the Budapest School endeavour is the delineation of modernity, understood as our present moment and its hereditary development, and converging on an analysis of the antinomies of modern life. Characteristically modern antinomies (or antinomies that play out in a unique way in modern social and political arrangements) are, for example, those between binding norms and human agency; between social alienation and personal independence; between alienation from nature and vulnerability to it; and between the technical and ideological demands of science and those of critique. Márkus and Heller take modernity to be the ultimate condition of their social theory, as well as their reconstruction of Marx’s and Lukács’s projects. Initially, they also see the antinomies of modern life as problems to which they must offer diagnostic solutions. As their work evolves, especially Heller comes to see the antinomies’ irresolution as a condition of cultural and personal development. Learning to cope with the pressures of the antinomy-driven life is just the sort of learning necessary for the growth of resilient personalities and cultural forms, as the mature Heller has it. Márkus and Heller also share a resolve to demystify ideologies; Heller is especially prolific in turning the demythologizing hose upon the very need for tidy difference-resolving solutions, upon the alleged choice between capitalism or socialism, and even upon the idea that there really ever was a functioning school behind her mentor’s naming of her and her friends’ projects.

Heller’s understanding of ‘postmodernity’ belongs to this practice, by which she delineates the terms of the modern condition, and then historicizes the very categories she’d called upon for a better view. Early on, when poststructuralism and deconstruction were first capturing the imaginations of European and American thinkers, Heller embraced the concept of postmodernity as a designation which allowed her to hold tight to humanistic commitments, while affording viable interpretations of modernity’s better insights. This postmodernity was supposed to be a sharpening and galvanizing of the modern. Relatively quickly, Heller understood both that the term was used so differently by others as to render her preferred usage infirm, and that her preferred usage relied upon naïve assumptions she would do better to abandon. In part, the postmodern in art and social theory really was an amplification of modernity – modernity’s savvier self-recreation. At the same time, Heller found, the works that gained recognition for being decisively postmodern exploited a kind of nihilistic ahistoricism; they exhibited bad faith, declaring the end of progressive history while staking their flags in its ground. And yet, as Dorahy shows, Heller never fully cedes the field. In fact, in much of her published work, she ignores the efforts of her postmodern contemporaries altogether. But she offers a demarcation around ‘naïve postmodernism’, and she holds a space open for critical theories that would actualize its maturation.

Dorahy is a direct if sympathetic critic of the prevarication (and jargon) in Heller’s position on the postmodern. The only place this critique looks the other way, where I wish it would have deepened, is as Dorahy recounts Heller’s remarks on the domain of science as a cultural form – a form now enjoying undeserved ideological pre-eminence. That both the functioning of everyday science and the ideological lens through which we value science should be understood as aspects of the wider sphere of culture is self-evident. Or if not obvious off the cuff, it becomes manifest in light of Márkus’s study of cultural production. Accordingly, our grasp of the historical march of science, as well as working scientists’ grasp of the forms available for scientific inquiry and communication, advance insofar as we all notice the ideological inflections that can shade, and have often marred, scientific conjectures. The depersonalization of authorship, the affectation of objectivity, and the authoritarian vein that threatens to accompany expertise are at least as damaging to science as they are to philosophy, political theory, and any other intellectual endeavour.

None of these evident claims justify the conclusions that modernity to date privileges science exclusively as its dominant imaginary, or that science insists upon the correspondence theory of truth as its sole paradigm, or that scientific explanation has fully supplanted the religious or mythic, or that technology and the technological imagination are defined solely within the same dominant institution of science (all of these claims show up in assorted Budapest School writings). ⁴

It’s hard to make a convincing case about the lock-in of the scientific imagination with over 33 per cent of US citizens disbelieving in evolution (57% of US Republicans), a rising global population disbelieving in global warming (58% and 51% in Israel and Russia, respectively), and, as a direct result of anti-vaccination campaigns, measles resurgent in the United Kingdom, Albania, the Czech Republic, and Greece (the US has also suffered increasingly intense outbreaks) (Pew Research Center, 2013, 2019; Davis, 2019). Like most of their postmodern contemporaries and many critical theorists, members of the Budapest School indulged in clichés regarding the rift between science and allegedly savvier modes of explanation, denying of science the sceptical impetus toward criticality, demystification, and rational demonstration with which they credited philosophy. Heller sometimes referred to science at a level of such generalization that no living scientist would recognize her own pursuits in Heller's descriptions, and humanists who didn’t know better would be left with the impression that the scientific method, reasoned scepticism, evidence as a value, and studies of the observer-effect were all Enlightenment-age residuals paid out exclusively in the humanities.

Dorahy is a discerning critic of other Budapest School positions which exhibit dated tendencies, but here I wish he had said more about how broadening scientific literacy must belong to the core Budapest School project of radicalizing democracy. He does, however, lay the groundwork for future articulation of this recognition. Authentic scientific literacy comes up in Heller’s later comments on the possibility of making global commitments, and further differentiates her position from other critical theories (Grumley, 2019; see also Heller, 2009). Likewise, going forward, the recognition would allow for a return to Márkus’s delimitation of hermeneutics and natural sciences, which Dorahy shows to be ready for utilization. A return to the topic of science and scientific literacy could help explain how critical theories which study the different kinds of human alienation and reified life- and imaginary-worlds have come so late and badly outfitted for an awareness of the reification by critical theory of scientific resourcefulness.

That said, no other thinkers to date so thoroughly examine the corrosive husk over alienated life, or as judiciously lay out the footing for countermanding it. Dorahy gestures to where the Budapest School’s accounts of alienation outpace those of the Frankfurt School, early and late. This book follows the path by which early Budapest School accounts of alienation come to ground their later studies of structural, institutional technics of control. Dorahy assesses Márkus’s and Heller’s extension of Lukács’s work on the de-fetishizing of art. He considers Heller’s analysis of the alienated individual, insofar as the self-assurance requisite for overcoming alienation hinges on an individual’s access to communal resources, informing her of diverse perspectives. Lukács had seen how art affords access to these perspectives. Heller goes further, describing how philosophy, science, political activism, and reflection on the demands of daily life present individuals with a range of interpretative possibilities and an irreducibly pluralistic breadth of valuable commitments. Access to the range of possibility allows us to grade values and to endorse our own. Ways of life become available for reflective consideration in and though an appreciation of the pooled resources of an inter- or trans-subjective collective; one of Heller’s greatest achievements lies in her account of this dynamic.

Likewise, Dorahy brings together the major wings of Heller’s project to recount the manner in which her philosophy of history becomes itself a metaphilosophy, or a historicized standpoint on why, in coming to accept our historicity and experience of contingency, we become heirs to the modern narratives which dissociate necessity and moral agency. Dorahy argues that Heller’s increasingly nuanced view of reflective generality, or that adeptness for accessing the diverse perspectives of the species, seizes upon the concept of freedom, insisting that personal freedom really is essential to modern people’s self-understanding, while returning it to the context of practical reasoning. Readers who would like to reconsider the imperative link between Heller’s ethics of existential self-choice and her theoretical position on social and political commitment will be here again grateful for Dorahy’s examination.

I have been sketching some of the ways that Dorahy brings representative Budapest School initiatives to attention, but in conclusion, I’d like to highlight the most potentially transformative factors that Dorahy treats. In Márkus, this launching point builds from the question of how any tradition is made. Márkus assessed the pragmatic and symbolic relations between people and the things and systems we make, take for granted, and utilize – our ‘cultural objectivations’. He studied how the norms and evaluative criteria informing the relations between people and functioning objects become institutionalized, for example, as ways of eating, or of making money. He studied what must go into mastering these forms, both in terms of authoring them and working within them. Now, Márkus spent most of his effort imagining so-called high culture, but I believe that his insights apply to whatever shared cultural traditions are indeed, at any given juncture, being shared. Imagine, for example, the different dominant narratives on gun culture in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Imagine the sex-gender revolution as it is now becoming newer forms of gender fluidity, or the way that transgender and non-binary idenitites are opposed in behaviours newly called ‘transphobic’. Recall our now-standard platforms of digital communication, and indeed the whole domain of social media as it is affecting modes of correspondence. Keeping current cultural objectivations in mind helps test the strength of Márkus’s evaluation.

Márkus realized that transformations or novel appearances in cultural forms are, as Dorahy describes it, less related to new technologies of their communication, and more related to the ways that a given society distributes the competencies required to make use of such technologies. Cultural transformations stem less from new intellectual techniques, and more from socially-bound forms of cultural literacy or aptitude. People might begin to engage in cultural practices independently, but once their practices are institutionalized, they charge already-existing social pressures, and can adapt and revolutionize them. With Dorahy’s reframing, Márkus is even now telling us about the social actions and practical attitudes we should be undertaking to fathom and help guide technologies of control and communication.

Heller’s critical-theoretical project, as Dorahy aptly portrays it, centres on repositioning democracy as the dominant imaginary of leftist critique. The repositioning requires pluralization of our understanding of modernity itself, which itself requires historical imagination. What does this pluralization look like, and what is historical imagination? At the heart of our modern democratic ethos, for Heller, is the desire for interpretative self-understanding. In wanting our freedom, we want the tools to define ourselves. Sharing this desire with others, we are reminded of the power of publics for meaning-creating practices. Heller’s idea of reflected generality (which she also associates with ‘postmodern historical consciousness’ and ‘radical universalism’), i.e. the ability to explore and define oneself in reference to collective cultural understandings, comes to include the sense that we have too long deferred taking planetary responsibility. Taking planetary responsibility requires an articulation of the guiding ideals of justice. This articulation is the task of individuals, and we issue it though ‘cultural objectivations’, or institutions. Given our current, historical situation, objectivations will include reconsidering the institutional role to be played by markets, private property, liberal rights, and legal systems. ‘Actually existing democracy’, as Heller called it, has failed to live up to the potential of modern democracy, but the failure is ours to understand and transform. The historical imagination, then, is that which must guide efforts to reorder institutions and their binding organizational logics.

Dorahy argues that Heller’s elaboration of the historical imagination is initially a response to and a move away from Heidegger’s position on technology. Whereas the technological imagination invents efficient death camps and mass incarceration, the historical imagination invents the Jewish question (the immigrant problem, the notion of deviant populations, etc.). The historical imagination creates the problems technology solves; it also pronounces new problems. In so doing, the historical imagination operationalizes its ideological system.

Heller shows us that we are at war over historical imagination. Reimagining the questions we address technologically will require us to reimagine the pragmatics of social and cultural reproduction. If our goal is autonomous, rich personalities, living in deliberate, sustainable ‘metabolic exchange’ with the natural world, then it is the historical imagination which must grapple with barriers to our reformulated goal, and the technological imagination which thereby goes to work on them. Taken together with Márkus’s account of how tradition is made and remade, the position suggests how to move toward the untapped potential of modern democracy. It’s an almost indescribably difficult task, but Dorahy’s book evenly returns us to the footholds carved out by a brilliant trio of friends.