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    Towards a New Manifesto
    Towards a New Manifesto
    Towards a New Manifesto
    Ebook61 pages51 minutes

    Towards a New Manifesto

    By Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

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    About this ebook

    A thrilling example of philosophy in action, Towards a New Manifesto reveals the fathers of critical theory, Adorno and Horkheimer, in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas.

    A record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to writing a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto, this conversation ranges across its central themes—theory and practice, labor and leisure, domination and freedom—in a register found nowhere else in their work. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded resulting in a thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVerso Books
    Release dateOct 24, 2011
    ISBN9781844678945
    Towards a New Manifesto
    Author

    Max Horkheimer

    Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) was a philosopher and sociologist and director of the Institute for Social Research from 1930 to 1959.

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      A transcription of a series of conversations between Horkheimer and Adorno in 1956, riffing on the dialectical relationship between theory and practice in the wake of the failure of communism and the rise of fascism.

    Book preview

    Towards a New Manifesto - Max Horkheimer

    Dynamics

    Introduction to Adorno & Horkheimer

    A life-long intellectual partnership between two major thinkers, so close that their most celebrated single texts were co-authored and their names are difficult to dissociate, is rare enough to rank as virtually a sport of history. There seem to be only two cases: in the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels, and in the twentieth century, Horkheimer and Adorno. Might they be regarded as prefigurations of what in a post-bourgeois world would become less uncommon? Their patterns differed. Marx and Engels, born two years apart, were contemporaries; once their friendship was formed, collaboration between them never ceased. Adorno was eight years Horkheimer’s junior, and a close working relationship came much later, with many more vicissitudes: initial meeting in 1921, intermittent friction and exchange up to the mid-1930s, concord only in American exile from 1938 onwards, more pointedly distinct identities throughout. The general trajectory of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research is well known, as over time ‘critical theory’—originally Horkheimer’s code-word for Marxism—confined itself to the realms of philosophy, sociology and aesthetics; to all appearances completely detached from politics. Privately it was otherwise, as the exchange below makes clear.

    This unique document is the record, taken down by Gretel Adorno, of discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, with a view to the production of—as Adorno puts it—a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. In form it might be described, were jazz not anathema to Adorno, as a philosophical jam-session, in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work—theory and practice, labour and leisure, domination and freedom—in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency. In substance, each thinker reveals a different profile. Horkheimer, historically more politicized, was by now the more conservative, imbibing Time on China, if not yet to the point where he would commend the Kaiser for warning of the Yellow Peril. Though still blaming the West for what went wrong with the Russian Revolution, and rejecting any kind of reformism, his general outlook was now close to Kojève’s a decade later: ‘We can expect nothing more from mankind than a more or less worn-out version of the American system’. Adorno, more aesthetically minded, emerges paradoxically as the more radical: reminding Horkheimer of the need to oppose Adenauer, and envisaging their project as a ‘strictly Leninist manifesto’, even in a period when ‘the horror is that for the first time we live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better one’.

    Publisher’s note

    1

    The Role of Theory

    MARCH 1956

    1.   Never was sociology as bankrupt as it is today with the idea of the doubling of the world.

    2.   Sub specie aeternitatis: all will be well (even if the party no longer exists).

    3.   Work has been called on to replace the belief that all will be well.

    AD 1 [Never was sociology as bankrupt as it is today with the idea of the doubling of the world.]

    HORKHEIMER: What we see today is a doubling of the world.

    ADORNO: That is exactly Marx’s epistemology. He said that the task of theory is to reflect reality. ¹

    HORKHEIMER: Indeed, reflect the way it looks from the situation of the proletariat. Developments in this so-called Western hemisphere have led to the growing tendency to translate thought into scientific statement. You end up with nothing more than a few clichés, such as freedom or religion. A further factor is that we no longer have either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, which might have taken its place. From a certain point on the bourgeoisie has to double itself. In contrast, the workers still had a utopia. Then Marx came along and took away their utopia with

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