The long march that never happened. Some facts about the Frankfurt School that hurts the Alt Right’s feelings
Andrew Breitbart, Jordan Peterson, Pat Buchanan, Ben Shaprio, Douglas Murray, Paul Joseph Watson, John Anderson, Joseph Lindsay (even MMA star Josh Barnett) all agree that the problems of Western culture can be traced back to the work of a group of “cultural marxists” known as the Frankfurt School.
For those who don’t know, the Frankfurt School, or Institute for Social Research, is an endowed social science research centre that was established in Germany in the early 1920s. Their early work documented the German labour movement and, following the rise of Nazism, the School moved to America and shifted its interest to prejudice and authoritarianism. Prominent members of the School include Adorno.
How did this group of thinkers have what Nick Griffin, then British Nationalist Party MEP, called ‘a catastrophic destructive effect on our entire civilization’?
The Conservative Lie (Parts 1 & 2)
According to what Anwesh Satpathy calls “the conservative lie”, the Frankfurt School’s influence is meant to come from its reworking of Marx. They are meant to have switched the basis of Marx’s oppressor vs oppressed perspective from economic class to cultural and identity categories such as race. In the process, they paved the way for those woke post-modernists to come in and make everything about identity politics. This has claim is hotly contested by anyone who has actually read their work and has caused one of the most successful writers about the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay, to publish a new book on the matter.
But there’s another thread to the cultural marxism conspiracy that also needs to be addressed — what we can call the conservative lie part 2. Right-wing commentators like to tell us that the Frankfurt School saw the working class as a ‘letdown’. According to this narrative, the Frankfurt School thought the working classes were duped away from revolution by the stable cultural institutions and national identities of West. In response, the Frankfurt School set out to ‘attack the cultural underpinnings of Western society’ to wake the working class from its false consciousness and even to take over the role of revolutionary agent themselves. If the working class was too dumb, so the story goes, the Frankfurt School thinkers thought they were smart enough to revolt for them. They did this, supposedly, by embarking on a long march through American institutions starting with an ‘infiltration of American universities’.
The evidence for this? The Frankfurt School ‘went over to America and took their ideas with them and were greatly fated in institutions there and key intellectual networks’. They were, after all, housed at Columbia University and, today, their dreams of a ‘long march has succeeded’. As Marc Sidwell claims, public broadcasters, the media, cultural producers, public bureaucracies, corporations and brands as well as academia are staffed by intolerant, rabid, feminist, trans, woke, leftists who spend their time silencing free speech and no platforming everyone they disagree with.
Is all this true? Or are the right-wing commentators and MMA stars over-reaching? Remember all that stuff about facts not caring about feelings? Let’s look at some facts.
The Facts
Fortunately, we have a really good set of documents about this issue. The FBI and other intelligence agencies investigated the Frankfurt School from the moment they stepped foot in America. Here’s an example from Adorno’s file.
What do these documents tell us about the Frankfurt School’s march through American academia? Basically, that it never happened.
- The School was ‘above suspicion’… except for tax evasion
In the late 1930s, the New York FBI Office recommended that the FBI stop investigating the School for Communist or un-American activities due to a lack of evidence. J Edgar Hoover over-ruled. He wrote: ‘The present activities of the [School] which would in any way show a Communist connection should be carried to their logical conclusions’. Following this, in May 1940, two detectives visited the School’s offices at Columbia demanding to know the origin, attitudes and activities of its members. The School’s mail was surveyed and confidential informants quizzed about the interests and working of the School. In 1944, the business manager of the School, Pollock, was interviewed by the FBI. Two reports were prepared by Special Agent Frank Brooks Bielaski — one dated January 1944, the other undated — that ‘purported to contain information concerning the transfer of One Million Six Hundred Thousand Dollars’ to the Frankfurt School ‘for the benefit of the Communist Party’.
But ultimately, no link was found. A letter to the Director of the FBI from the New York Office concluded that their investigations ‘failed to detect Communist activities’.
Indeed, reflecting on the politics of the School to the FBI in the mid-1940s, Robert McIver, then Professor in Sociology at Columbia, commented that he found members of the School ‘to be serious-minded, cooperative and scrutinizing in their attitude without revealing any particularly aim of objective except by way of scientific analysis of social problems and trends organized activities’.
These sentiments were confirmed in an FBI interview from an unnamed source who claimed to have worked closely with the School in America. They stated: ‘The [School], as a scientific organization, and some of its members have, from time to time come under attack as being a Communist organization and radicals. I even have heard speculation about the origin of its funds … I want to say categorically that I am absolutely sure of the [School’s] bona fide nature as a scientific group, and I am, likewise, absolutely certain that none of its members is disloyal to the United States … the [School] is above suspicion’. In fact, members of the School were noted by this informant as having ‘done a good job with some starry eyed American liberal professors in destroying illusions they had about Stalinism and Communism’.
Rather than worry about their political views, by the end of the 1950s, the FBI’s investigations moved on. They were more concerned about the School’s interest in tax avoidance than its hopes for political revolution. In 1948, for example, the FBI received an anonymous tip-off which claimed that, the Institute, “BESIDES HARBOURING COMMUNISTS, IS A COVER-ALL FOR TAX EVASION’.
So, the FBI’s observation couldn’t find any evidence that the School was revolutionary, committed to Communism or anti-American politics nor engaged in any suspicious activities. This, to emphasise, was the conclusion of J EDGAR HOOVER’S FBI (not exactly a friend to the revolutionary cause) based on interviews, observations, surveillance and full investigations. Could the FBI be so wrong and these social media commentators so right? I doubt it.
2. They published in German for German speaking scholars living outside Germany
The School had no interest in infecting USA culture nor academia during its time in America. Until 1941, the School published almost exclusively in German. In 1944, after nearly a decade in New York, a Columbia librarian reported to the FBI that no material was provided by the School after 1941 and that the ‘greater part of the material previously furnished to the Library by [them] had been in the German language’.
This means that many of the texts, such as Horkheimer’s 1937 essay on critical and traditional theory, much quoted by Joseph Lindsay, were not written for American thinkers. Rather, the School’s work was, in their own words, primarily targeted at ‘German-speaking scholars living outside Germany’. Martin Jay, observes: ‘Its calculated decision to write in German meant, among other things, the impossibility of a large American following’. Still, the Institute ‘refused to alter its original notion of the audience for whom it was writing’.
These are strange moves for a supposedly revolutionary group seeking to infect American academia. Do we really think they sat around and said “I know how to have best seller in America, publish it in German”?
Indeed, if the School wanted to march through academia, isn’t it strange that when Colbumia University asked them to formally merge into the University, they declined and moved to California instead. Well, that’s what they did.
What about it’s work outside of academia? The historical evidence suggests that the School had almost no connections with political or cultural groups during its time in America. Marcuse reported that relationships with political groups ‘was strictly forbidden. From the very beginning Horkheimer has insisted that we were guests of Columbia University, philosophers and scholars. … Such ties were out of the question’.
Similarly, if the commentators are correct, and the School was hell-bent on seeding its ideas in American culture, how do we explain what happened when the War ended? Leading members such as Adorno and Horkheimer returned to German pretty quickly. Adorno arrived in Paris at the end of October 1949 and moved to Frankfurt shortly after to take up teaching duties in the Arts Faculty at Frankfurt in the winter semester. Horkheimer returned to his Chair in 1950 and in 1951 was elected as Dean of the Arts Faculty at Frankfurt University.
Perhaps this was because they hated America so much — as Andrew Breitbart suggests — but the School wrote in a 1944 report that, in America, they were ‘protected from the ravages of way and assured of civil liberties’. They acknowledged that America provided ‘the conditions essential for [the School’s] survival’.
So, the historical evidence simply does not support the idea that the School’s agenda was to infect American academic culture through its academic institutions. At least, if this was what they wanted to do, they weren’t very good at it.
3. Talking among themselves
What about the School’s intellectual influence? The School’s members might not have marched through institutions, its ideas could have.
The FBI files include a 1944 report from American academics assessing the Frankfurt School’s work and influence during its first decade in America. Bear in mind many of its leading intellects left America by 1950, having arrived around 1934, so these reports reflect the School’s influence for the majority of its time in America.
What did these contemporaries think of the School? We already know they wrote mainly in German. Did that hold them back?
An unnamed New York University academic stated that School’s work the ’exceedingly deep and intellectual … far beyond the scope of any except one highly trained in philosophical study methods’. This academic observed that [the School] ‘is not well known, either in the field of economics or social science and thus could not possibly exert an influence over the faculties of American colleagues’.
A second unnamed academic at Fordham University School of Social Sciences ‘advised that he had never heard of [the School]’. He said that he knew ‘definitely that [the School] held no place of influence in the field of social science’. He forwarded the FBI to a colleague who described their work ‘as so philosophically theoretical that he doubts more than 200 social economists in the United States are able to understand it’. A final referee said the School ‘has absolutely no mass appeal and therefore could not possibly serve as a vehicle for Marxist propaganda. He described the work … as being esoteric in that through their writing the members of [the School] virtually talk among themselves’.
This suggests, in pretty stark terms, that the Frankfurt School did not have much of an influence on American academia when it operated there.
This changed in the 1950s with the publication of ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ which was highly influential. But this was not a work of critical theory. It was an empirical investigation of authoritarian attitudes that built on the School’s earlier studies of German workers — with American social scientists adding some statistical rigour. Largely ignored now, it demonstrates the psychodynamics of political leaders and a tendency towards authoritarianism among both left- and right-wing political sympathisers.
Again, then, the historical evidence just doesn’t support the cultural marxist conspiracy. The School was not well known and its influence primarily developed in American social psychology not cultural studies, gender studies or the humanities — after the School had relocated to German.
The long march never happened
So there we have it. Did Frankfurt School ideas get picked up and used as the basis for Cultural Marxism? Maybe. Did the Frankfurt School thinkers actually start the long march through the institutions? Definitely not.