Critical theory and classical Marxism share a founder, a library and an enemy, and they are routinely mistaken for one another by readers who meet the second in summaries of the first. Both descend from Marx. Both hold that capitalist society is a historically specific order rather than a natural one, that its categories conceal as much as they reveal, and that theory which merely describes the order has already taken a side. Yet the two frameworks differ so deeply in what they analyse, how they analyse it and whom the analysis is for that placing them side by side changes the meaning of each. This comparison runs the two against one another across six differences: the agent of change, the object of analysis, the method, the role of economics, the theory of ideology, and the stance toward science. Two further differences, over the philosophy of history and over practice, receive their own sections, because each follows from the six and because the argument between the frameworks was largely conducted in those terms. The differences are not a list of independent choices. They hang from a single hook, and the hook has a name this article will use throughout: the agent absence.

The claim can be stated in one sentence before it is argued at length. Classical Marxism is a theory that knows its subject: it identifies the working class as the agent whose interest, position and organisation make it the carrier of social transformation, and every other element of the doctrine is arranged around that identification. Critical theory is what became of the same inheritance when a generation of Marxist intellectuals concluded, from evidence they had lived through, that the named agent was not performing the assigned role and that no substitute could honestly be named in its place. A theory with a subject and a theory that lost its subject and declined to invent another will differ in their objects, because the first studies the levers its subject must pull while the second studies the obstacles that neutralised the subject. They will differ in method, because the second needs instruments for explaining quiescence that the first never required. They will differ on economics, on ideology, on science, on the direction of history and on the relation between thought and action, and in each case the difference runs downhill from the same source. That is the organising argument of the comparison, and it is offered as the answer to the question the reader most often brings: not which framework is better in the abstract, but why the two, starting from nearly the same books, arrived at such different theories.

One boundary must be marked before the comparison begins, because readers arrive at this question from two directions and only one of them leads here. The question treated in this article is analytical: how two bodies of Marxist thought differ, and why. It is a separate question, treated in a companion article on the history of a contested term, whether a polemical label applied to the Frankfurt School describes anything real. The two questions share some names and dates and nothing else, and they are kept apart throughout what follows, deliberately and without exception.

Critical theory and classical Marxism: fixing the terms

Comparisons of this kind fail most often at the level of vocabulary, because both labels are loose. Classical Marxism, as the phrase is used here, means the doctrine formed from Marx and Engels and codified by the generation that organised it into a system: the historical materialism of the Second International’s theorists, the political economy of the three volumes of Capital, the theory of the party developed in the Russian tradition, and the expectation, held with varying degrees of confidence and patience, that the contradictions of capitalism would produce a revolutionary working class and that the class would produce socialism. The label covers a wide field, from the evolutionary confidence of Karl Kautsky to the voluntarism of the young Lenin, and it includes internal quarrels of great violence. What unifies the field is not a temperament but a structure: a named agent, a science of history that certifies the agent’s mission, a critique of political economy that locates the motor of change in production, and a practice, the party and the movement, in which theory expects to be embodied.

Critical theory, in the strict sense, is narrower and more datable. It is the name Max Horkheimer gave, in a programme essay of 1937, to the work of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and to the kind of theory that work embodied, as against what he called traditional theory. The school’s membership shifted across five decades, and its positions were never unanimous: Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno on one wing, Herbert Marcuse and the earlier Erich Fromm on another, with jurists and economists such as Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer and Friedrich Pollock doing work that the philosophical summaries often omit. The full institutional history is told in the companion guide to the Frankfurt School, and it is not repeated here. What matters for the comparison is the self-definition. Where classical Marxism understood itself as the theoretical expression of an existing movement, critical theory understood itself as a mode of thought that had to justify its own existence in the movement’s absence, and that justification, repeated and deepened across forty years, is the source of nearly everything distinctive in it.

A third term needs the same care, because it does heavy work in the argument and is often used as a synonym for the second. Western Marxism is the wider current to which the Frankfurt School belonged: the Marxism that developed in Western Europe after the failure of the revolutions that followed the First World War, in the work of Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt theorists, and their successors in France and Italy. Its defining experience, as the current’s most exact historian argued, was defeat, and its defining habit was a migration of attention from economics and politics toward philosophy, method and art. The wider current has its own companion treatment in the guide to Western Marxism, which also carries the fullest account of the internal critique on which this comparison leans. Here the current appears as context: critical theory is the most institutionally concentrated and longest lived form that Western Marxism took, and the comparison between critical theory and classical Marxism is the sharpest version of the argument the whole current had with its parent doctrine.

What does the word classical mean in classical Marxism?

Classical names a structure rather than a compliment. It marks the doctrine in the form in which the agent is named, history is held to certify the agent, political economy supplies the motor of change, and a movement exists in which theory expects to be embodied and tested.

The terminology matters because the comparison is asymmetrical in a way readers should notice from the start. Classical Marxism names a family that contains a movement; critical theory names, in the first instance, a method and an institute. Family quarrels of this kind are rarely fair, since one party is judged as a doctrine and the other as an episode. The grid that follows therefore applies a discipline: at each difference, both positions are stated in the strongest form their own texts support, the event or evidence that drove the critical theory position away from the classical one is identified, and the explanatory gain and loss on each side are recorded before any judgement is made. Comparison conducted under that discipline is slower than the polemical version, in which one framework is a hero and the other a symptom. It is also the only version that leaves the reader able to use either framework afterwards.

The six differences grid

The grid below compresses the comparison into six rows. It is a finding aid, not the argument itself: each row is unpacked in the sections that follow, and the two differences that would not fit the table’s discipline, the philosophy of history and the theory of practice, are treated at full length separately. Read the final column first if time is short. The pattern it shows, in which each framework’s blindness is the other’s field of vision, is the comparison’s most useful product.

Difference	Classical Marxism	Critical theory	Event or evidence behind the shift	What each side explains and misses
The agent of change	The industrial working class, organised by its party, is the revolutionary subject	No agent is named; the working class is held to be integrated into the order it was expected to overthrow	Fascism’s mass support, the Soviet outcome, postwar affluence and consumption	The classical side explains mobilisation; the critical side explains quiescence
The object of analysis	The capitalist mode of production: value, surplus value, accumulation, crisis	Domination as a whole: economy, state, culture, family, psyche and the structure of reason itself	The survival and stabilisation of capitalism beyond its predicted crises	The classical side explains the motor; the critical side explains the cement
The method	Historical materialism: dialectical analysis of production relations, certified as science	Interdisciplinary materialism: philosophy joined to psychoanalysis, sociology and empirical research	The failure of economic position to produce expected consciousness	The classical side explains interests; the critical side explains why interests go unrecognised
The role of economics	Primary and determining in the last instance; other spheres are superstructural	Retained but decentered; the political and the cultural acquire weight of their own	State intervention, monopoly organisation and the administered economy	The classical side explains crisis; the critical side explains administration
The theory of ideology	False consciousness: the ruling ideas of the ruling class, corrected by science and organisation	Ideology as an objective machinery of integration, working through culture and personality	Mass culture’s scale and the authoritarian character structure	The classical side explains whose ideas rule; the critical side explains why they are believed
The stance toward science	Marxism is itself a science, the science of history and society	Science is double: an instrument of liberation and a form of domination to be criticised	The positivist self-image of orthodox Marxism and the administered uses of expertise	The classical side explains confidence; the critical side explains complicity

Two features of the grid deserve emphasis before the detail begins. The first is that every entry in the fourth column is an event or a body of evidence, not a taste. The critical theory positions were not adopted because their holders preferred culture to economics or psychology to politics; they were adopted, in documentable sequence, as responses to things that had happened: a workers’ movement that voted for war credits in 1914, revolutions in the West that failed between 1918 and 1923, a fascism that drew mass support from the class the doctrine relied on, a revolutionary state that produced a new bureaucracy, and a postwar capitalism that raised working class living standards instead of collapsing. A reader who wants to refute the critical positions has to argue with that evidence, and the classical replies that matter are the ones that do exactly that. The second feature is the symmetry of the final column. Neither framework is a completed version of the other. Classical Marxism explains how change is supposed to happen and is weakest exactly where the twentieth century was most surprising, in the capacity of the existing order to absorb, integrate and administer its opposition. Critical theory explains that capacity in unmatched detail and is weakest exactly where its parent was strongest, in saying what could displace the order it describes. The comparison is therefore not a coronation. It is a map of two incomplete instruments, drawn so that a reader can see which incompleteness matters for which question.

The agent absence: the difference that organises the rest

Begin with the classical architecture, because the absence is only legible against the presence it replaced. In the founding texts the agent is not an assumption but a discovery, arrived at by an argument. The young Marx, introducing his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right in 1844, looked for a class whose emancipation would be the emancipation of society as a whole, and identified it by a logical property: a class with radical chains, a class that suffers not a particular wrong but wrong in general, that can claim no traditional status because it embodies the dissolution of all statuses. The proletariat occupied that position because its condition was the concentrated form of the social order’s injustice, and because it owned nothing but its capacity to work, its liberation required the abolition of the property relations that defined the order itself. The Communist Manifesto gave the argument a historical narrative, Capital gave it an economic mechanism. Concentration of capital gathered workers in masses, disciplined them in production, ruined the intermediate strata and drove the system’s contradictions toward crisis; the class formed by the process would, in the famous image, produce its own gravediggers. Organisation and theory completed the circuit: the party would bring consciousness of the mission to the class that the economy had prepared to receive it.

Notice how much of the doctrine that circuit carries. The philosophy of history is inside it: history moves by contradiction toward the point where the agent acts. The theory of ideology is inside it: the agent’s false beliefs are the obstacle, and they are removable by the science the party carries. The primacy of economics is inside it: the economy forms the agent, so the economy is studied first. Practice is inside it: theory and movement are two moments of one process, and a Marxist text is, in principle, a document of that movement, written for it and answerable to it. Remove the agent, and each of those elements loses its anchor at the same moment. That is what happened, on the critical theorists’ own account, between 1914 and 1945, and the rest of this article is the itemised consequence.

Did critical theory abandon the working class?

It concluded that the working class in advanced capitalist societies had been integrated and no longer functioned as a revolutionary agent, and it did not identify a reliable substitute. That conclusion was drawn from fascism’s mass support, the Soviet outcome, and postwar consumption, not from philosophical preference.

The wording of the answer matters, because the common charge, that the school abandoned the working class, reverses the direction of the movement as the theorists experienced it. In their telling, it was the historical process that withdrew the agent, and the theory that registered the withdrawal, belatedly and against its own hopes. The distinction is not a courtesy; it changes what the theory is. A philosopher who tires of the proletariat and chooses aesthetics instead has committed an act of taste, and taste is refutable by exhortation. A body of researchers who spent the 1930s measuring workers’ attitudes in Germany, who ran an institute whose early programme was the study of the labour movement’s failure, and who concluded from surveys, elections and catastrophes that the expected subject was not appearing, has made an empirical claim, and empirical claims are refutable by evidence. The later sections take up the evidence and the strongest reply to it. Here the point is architectural. Critical theory did not misplace the agent. It preserved the space the agent had occupied, empty, and built the rest of its theory around the space, which is why the theory reads, to readers formed on the classical texts, like a cathedral organised around a vacant altar.

The vacancy had a second consequence that is easy to miss. Classical Marxism’s agent carried a guarantee: because the proletariat’s interest coincided with the general interest, theory aligned with the class was aligned with the direction of history, and its truth claims drew confidence from that alignment. A theory without an agent can borrow no confidence of that kind. It must justify itself case by case, by the quality of its explanations, and it must entertain the possibility that the order it criticises is permanent. Nearly every feature that readers find strange in critical theory, its difficulty, its pessimism, its fascination with culture and psychology, its refusal of system and programme, becomes intelligible when read as the working style of a doctrine that has surrendered its guarantee and kept its critical intent. The sections that follow take the differences one at a time, in the order of the grid, and show the descent from the vacancy in each case.

How the classical framework derived its agent

The agent was derived, not asserted, and the derivation is worth following because critical theory’s break came at a specific joint in it. The derivation has three links. The first is positional: the working class is created by capital itself, concentrated in factories and cities, disciplined by cooperative labour, and stripped of any stake in the existing distribution of property. The second link is dynamic: the same process that forms the class also immiserates it, subjects it to crises it did not cause, and demonstrates to it, in the daily experience of production, that society is run by collective labour while its fruits are privately appropriated. The third link is organisational: scattered experience becomes class consciousness when organisation and theory generalise it, when the class in itself becomes the class for itself. Each link was held to be checkable. Union density, strike waves, party membership and electoral growth in the decades before 1914 seemed to confirm all three at once, which is why the doctrine’s confidence was not foolishness. It was an induction from the most dynamic social movement of the age.

The party question sits inside the third link and deserves a paragraph of its own, because the later quarrel passes through it. If consciousness arose spontaneously from position, organisation would be a convenience. The classical tradition, in its most influential formulation, held otherwise: left to itself, the working class develops trade union consciousness, the demand for better terms within the system, while socialist consciousness, the understanding of the system as a whole, is elaborated theoretically and brought to the movement by its intellectuals and its party. Kautsky stated the formula and Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? built a politics on it in 1902. The formula matters here because it quietly installs a division of labour between the class that acts and the theory that knows, and because both sides of the later comparison exploit it. Classical orthodoxy reads it as the party’s charter. Critical theory, in its darker moments, reads it as the first draft of a substitution, in which an apparatus claiming to embody the agent’s consciousness ends by replacing the agent, a substitution whose Soviet outcome became the school’s standing exhibit of what the classical circuit could produce when it worked as designed.

What did the classical framework expect history to do?

It expected the contradictions of capitalism to do double work: to concentrate and discipline the working class inside production, and to generate the crises that would teach the class its mission, so that economic development itself prepared both the agent and the occasion of transformation.

Rosa Luxemburg’s dissent inside the classical camp is instructive at exactly this point, and it shows that the derivation was contested before the Frankfurt School existed. Luxemburg accepted the agent and the derivation but distrusted the organisational link when it hardened into a bureaucracy’s property; her mass strike writings treat spontaneity as a resource rather than a defect, and her critique of the Russian Revolution’s authoritarian turns, written from a prison cell in 1918, warned that a party substituting itself for the class would strangle the very life the revolution needed. The warning is a classical Marxist warning, issued from inside the circuit, and it matters to this comparison because it shows the parent doctrine contained the instruments of its own criticism. What classical Marxism did not contain, and what no internal correction supplied, was a procedure for the case in which the first two links failed together: a working class that grew more organised and more prosperous while growing less revolutionary. That case is the twentieth century’s central surprise for the doctrine, and it is the case critical theory was built to think about.

The evidence that displaced the agent

The displacement was a process with dates, and the dates should be stated plainly, since the school’s critics and defenders alike benefit from vagueness here. In August 1914 the great socialist parties of Europe, whose growth had been the doctrine’s Exhibit A, voted the war credits of their respective governments and dissolved international solidarity into national armies. Between 1918 and 1923, revolutions and near revolutions in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Italy failed, and the German working class, the most organised on earth, divided between parties that could neither unite nor prevail. In 1933 that same class, with its parties, unions, newspapers, sports clubs and choirs, was destroyed by National Socialism without the general strike or insurrection the theory led its members to expect, and a significant part of the class’s own constituency had voted for its destroyers. In the Soviet Union, the one successful revolution produced a bureaucratic order whose official doctrine called itself Marxism while imprisoning Marxists. And after 1945, in the advanced capitalist countries, the predicted immiseration gave way to rising real wages, mass consumption, welfare states and the absorption of labour parties into the management of the system. Any one of these events could be absorbed by a flexible doctrine, and classical Marxists absorbed several of them with ingenuity. Their accumulation, across thirty years, in the lifetime of one institute, is what has to be explained.

The Institute for Social Research did not receive these events as headlines. It studied the first of them as its founding problem, lived the third as its own exile, and measured the second and fifth with instruments it built for the purpose. Founded in Frankfurt in 1923 with an endowment from the Weil family, its first director, Carl Grünberg, oriented it toward the history of the labour movement and the documentation of its defeats. When Max Horkheimer took the directorship in 1930, his inaugural programme redirected the institute toward the question the defeats had posed: why the economic and social position of subordinate groups was no longer producing the consciousness the classical derivation predicted. The studies on authority and the family that followed, published in 1936, were designed as an investigation of the psychic cement that held an irrational order together. Erich Fromm’s contribution drew on a survey of German workers and employees conducted at the decade’s opening, whose returns, analysed years later, found that only a minority of socialist and communist voters held convictions that matched their party allegiance in depth, while a large stratum combined left voting with authoritarian dispositions of character. The finding, in plain terms, was that the agent’s consciousness could not be read off its economic position or even its party card, because an intervening structure, the character formed in the patriarchal family, filtered everything. That is the empirical seed of the whole critical theory enterprise, and it is a seed planted in the classical framework’s own garden.

How did fascism change the question the theory had to answer?

Fascism made quiescence an insufficient puzzle and turned consent into the central one. A movement of the radical right had won mass support, including from workers, against the interests the doctrine assigned them, so theory had to explain attraction to domination and not only resistance to it.

Exile converted the research programme into a biography. The Institute’s endowment was moved abroad in time, its library and staff scattered to Geneva, Paris, New York and Los Angeles, and its journal continued in German from American addresses, an institute in the condition of its subject: preserved, articulate and without a social base. In the United States the theorists confronted the fifth event at first hand, a capitalism of unprecedented productivity whose working class was being integrated not by terror but by goods, entertainment and credit. The studies of those years, on the culture industry, on the authoritarian personality, on propaganda and prejudice, are usually read as a change of topic from the German work. Read in sequence, they are the same investigation continued in a new laboratory: by what mechanisms does an order that the classical derivation marked for supersession secure the loyalty, or at least the compliance, of those it subordinates. The pessimism for which the school is famous is the emotional register of that investigation’s results. It is not a prior temperament, and treating it as one is the first misreading this comparison exists to correct.

Integration: the mechanics of the postwar settlement

The word integration does more work in the critical framework than any other except domination, and it deserves a section of its own, because it is the mechanism that connects the agent’s absence to everything else and because the classical framework’s handling of the same facts is the comparison’s sharpest practical test. The phenomenon to be explained is precise. In the decades after 1945, the advanced capitalist societies delivered to their working classes rising real incomes, cheapening consumer goods, expanded welfare provision, longer schooling and shorter hours, while the organised expressions of the class, its unions and parties, were drawn into the administration of the settlement as recognised partners. Nothing in the classical derivation forbids improvement in workers’ conditions; Marx himself documented rising wages within accumulation. What the derivation did not anticipate was improvement functioning as the solvent of the class’s oppositional identity, affluence arriving not as a concession extracted by strength but as a medium in which the very wants that might have fuelled transformation were re-formed around private consumption. Marcuse gave the mechanism its canonical statement: the needs satisfied by the settlement are, in large part, false needs, superimposed on the individual by the apparatus that profits from their satisfaction, and their gratification, however real the pleasure, reproduces the labour and the loyalty the system requires. The television, the car and the fitted kitchen are not bribes in a crude sense. They are the material form of a reconciliation, the means by which the order’s beneficiaries experience its continuation as their own biography.

The classical framework’s responses to the settlement form a spectrum that honesty should map rather than summarise. At one end stood denial by periodisation: the boom was a long wave’s upswing, exceptional and self exhausting, and its end would restore the classical script, a reading Mandel’s work gave its most learned form and the 1970s partially vindicated when the settlement cracked. In the middle stood the labour aristocracy and embourgeoisement theses, attempts to confine integration to a stratum or a generation. At the other end stood the quiet concession of the Western communist and social democratic parties themselves, whose practice, whatever their programmes said, treated the settlement as the terrain of politics rather than its antechamber. The critical framework’s analytical advantage in this terrain is real and should be granted without varnish: it alone possessed, from the start, a theory of why satisfaction pacifies, rooted in its psychology and its culture analysis, where the classical replies were, at their weakest, a promissory note drawn on the next crisis. Its corresponding weakness is equally real. A theory in which satisfaction integrates cannot easily specify what would count as satisfaction refusing to integrate, and the postwar decades’ genuine gains, in health, in education, in the taming of the labour market’s cruelty, sit in its pages under a permanent suspicion that the recipients’ own testimony, that their lives were better, cannot quite overcome. The comparison leaves the tension where the evidence leaves it: integration is the century’s central fact about the agent, both frameworks know it, and neither has fully earned the right to be comfortable with what it knows.

Are false needs real needs?

In the critical account they are real in their satisfaction and false in their origin: the pleasure of the purchased good is not feigned, but the want was manufactured by the same apparatus that sells its remedy, so the satisfaction binds the buyer to the process that produced the hunger.

The object of analysis: from the mode of production to the administered whole

The second row of the grid follows from the first with unusual directness. A theory that knows its agent studies the terrain the agent must cross: the mode of production, its laws of motion, its crises, the state that guards it. A theory whose problem is the agent’s absence studies whatever it is that fills the space between the agent and its mission, and that inquiry has no natural boundary. If the economy alone no longer explains the order’s stability, then the stabilising work must be located wherever it is done: in the family that forms compliant character, in the school and the examination that sort and reconcile, in the entertainment that occupies leisure and models satisfaction, in the administrative state that plans and provides, in the very structure of a rationality that reduces every question to technique. The object of critical theory is therefore not culture instead of economy. It is the totality of mediations, the whole circuitry through which domination is produced and reproduced, with the economy as one province, still central, no longer sovereign in the old way.

The classical object deserves its full dignity before the contrast is drawn. The critique of political economy, as Marx practised it, is not a specialism. It claims that the categories of economic life, value, labour, capital, money, are the real abstractions by which a society organises itself, and that following their movement discloses the society’s structure and its historical limits. The 1859 preface to the Critique of Political Economy compressed the claim into the model every schoolchild of the tradition memorised: the economic structure as foundation, legal and political superstructures arising on it, forms of social consciousness corresponding to it, and the relations of production turning, at a certain stage, from forms of development into fetters. Generations read the model as an architecture with load bearing walls. Political and cultural phenomena had their reality, but their explanation terminated in the foundation, and the science of the foundation was the doctrine’s crown.

What survives of the base and superstructure model inside critical theory?

The model survives as a warning against idealism rather than as an architecture. The Frankfurt writers kept the conviction that consciousness is socially produced and materially conditioned, and dropped the confidence that each cultural fact could be traced to an economic address by a short route.

Critical theory’s revision of the model proceeded in two steps, one methodological and one substantive. The methodological step was taken in Horkheimer’s programme writings of the 1930s: the division of intellectual labour by which economics, sociology, psychology and philosophy each guarded a province was itself a product of the society under study, and an institute that wanted the whole had to work across the divisions, letting each discipline correct the others. The substantive step followed from the research. If character structure mediates between economic position and political belief, then the superstructure is not a reflection that arrives after the real business is done. It is part of the mechanism by which the real business continues to be done at all. A family form that produces submission is not an effect of the economic order in the way smoke is an effect of fire; it is one of the order’s working parts, and removing the metaphor of levels was the price of seeing the working. Adorno’s later formula, that society forms a totality whose moments interlock and mutually condition one another, and his refusal to grant any single moment, including the economic, an unconditional priority, is the mature statement of the revision. It appalled the orthodox, for whom determination in the last instance was the thread by which the doctrine hung. The Frankfurt reply, rarely stated as a slogan but present throughout the work, was that a last instance which never arrives in any concrete analysis is a metaphysical comfort rather than a tool, and that the concrete analyses, of fascism, of mass culture, of the administered economy, required the mediations to be treated as real.

Balance requires recording what the widened object cost, because the classical objection on this row is not a misunderstanding. A theory of everything risks explaining anything, and the charge that critical theory dissolved the hard edge of the economic critique into a general lament over modernity has been pressed, from within Marxism, by critics who note how rarely the later work returns to value, accumulation or crisis as mechanisms rather than as backdrops. The charge lands on some texts and misses others, as the next section shows, but it identifies a real gradient: the further the analysis travelled from the economic nucleus, the more its claims depended on the brilliance of individual readings rather than on a checkable theory of the whole. The grid’s verdict on this row, that the classical side explains the motor and the critical side the cement, is therefore not a diplomatic split. It records an actual division of explanatory labour, in which each side’s chosen object was the one its central problem required, and each side’s characteristic failure is the shadow of its choice.

The economics that stayed: Pollock, Grossmann and the decentering of the economy

No correction in this comparison is more often needed than the answer to the question whether the Frankfurt School abandoned economics. It did not, and the record is a matter of personnel and publications. The Institute’s first generation included economists of standing doing recognisably classical work. Henryk Grossmann, whose study of the law of accumulation and breakdown appeared in 1929 as the Institute’s flagship publication, attempted nothing less than a rigorous derivation of capitalism’s breakdown tendency from Marx’s reproduction schemes, arguing the orthodox case with a mathematician’s patience. Friedrich Pollock, Horkheimer’s closest collaborator and the Institute’s administrative spine, spent the 1930s on the economics of planning and on the Soviet experiment’s economic order. Franz Neumann’s Behemoth of 1942, the school’s great study of the Nazi system, is a work of political economy as much as of law, arguing over the heads of totalitarianism theorists that the Third Reich remained a monopolistic capitalist economy whose ruling groups divided the spoils. Otto Kirchheimer anatomised the Weimar constitution’s collapse and the transformation of the European party state with a lawyer’s tools put to materialist use. A school that abandoned economics does not produce this shelf.

What changed was the economy’s explanatory rank, and the agent of the change was Pollock’s most consequential argument. In essays of the early 1930s and in a pair of 1941 papers that the school treated as reference points, Pollock proposed that capitalism was passing into a phase he called state capitalism, in which the market’s automatic discipline was being displaced by political administration: prices, investment and distribution increasingly set by state decision, crisis managed rather than suffered, and the primacy of the economic yielding to a primacy of the political. The thesis was deliberately double edged. It explained the Soviet and fascist orders and the New Deal with one instrument, and it pulled the rug from the classical expectation that economic collapse would deliver the political opening. If the state could plan enough to prevent breakdown, then the mechanism by which the agent was to be summoned by crisis was jammed, and politics became a contest conducted by administrative means among organised powers, among which the working class appeared as one constituency to be managed rather than as history’s appointed subject. Horkheimer and Adorno absorbed the thesis so thoroughly that it rarely gets cited in their later work; it is the premise under the prose, the reason the crisis whose arrival the orthodox awaited is treated, in Dialectic of Enlightenment and after, as a permanent possibility that the system had learned to defer.

What did Pollock’s state capitalism thesis do to the classical object?

It removed the automatic pilot. If political administration could plan investment, manage demand and suppress the crisis mechanism, then the economy no longer guaranteed the sequence on which the classical theory of the agent depended, and politics had to be analysed as a power in its own right.

The classical rejoinder to Pollock, made at the time and refined since, is that state capitalism overstated the escape: planning displaces contradictions rather than abolishing them, profitability reasserts itself through the state’s own accounts, and the postwar boom’s end in the crises of the 1970s vindicated the older crisis theory against the administrators’ confidence. Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism of 1972 is the rejoinder’s monument, a classical reconstruction that reasserted the laws of motion against both the state capitalism thesis and the managerial theories of the postwar settlement. The comparison’s discipline requires noting the score on this exchange, since it is one of the few places where the two frameworks made rival predictions with dates attached. The critical side was right that crisis would be politically managed for a generation and wrong if it implied management had abolished the cycle; the classical side was right that the cycle survived and wrong about the political use the returning crisis would be put to, since the upheavals of the 1970s strengthened the order’s right wing more than its gravediggers. The row in the grid records the decentering of economics as a fact about critical theory. It does not record a verdict that the decentering was an error, because the evidence ran in both directions and continues to.

A quieter consequence deserves mention, since it shapes how the two literatures feel to read. Classical economics in the Marxist line is a theory of laws, stated in the indicative and tested against tendencies; the Frankfurt decentering replaced law talk, in the school’s philosophical wing, with talk of tendencies, constellations and configurations, forms of claim that are harder to falsify and easier to enrich. Adorno’s hostility to the very idea of invariant laws of society, and his insistence that the economic concepts themselves were historically indexed, belong to the philosophy of science quarrel treated later in this article. For the grid’s purposes the point is simpler. Economics in critical theory became one language among several in which domination could be described, where for the classical framework it was the language into which all others finally had to be translated. Everything else the school said about culture and psyche presupposes that demotion, and every classical complaint about the school’s wanderings is, at root, a complaint about it.

Method I: the marriage with Freud

The method row of the grid names two additions, psychoanalysis and the sociology of rationalisation, and they require separate treatment because they answer different gaps. Psychoanalysis answers the gap the Fromm survey had opened: the space between a person’s objective interest, as the doctrine computes it, and the person’s felt allegiances. Classical Marxism possessed a theory of that space’s contents, the theory of ideology, but its mechanism was thin: ruling ideas rule because rulers control the means of mental production, and the ruled believe them because the alternative has not been organised. The mechanism explains the supply of false belief better than its demand. It does not explain why a worker might love the order that exploits him, fear the freedom the doctrine offers him, and experience the agitator, not the employer, as the threatening figure. Those were the phenomena of the 1930s, in the Institute’s reading, and Freud was the thinker who had built instruments for exactly that territory: the formation of character in the family, the binding of destructive and erotic energies to authority, the relief that submission can bring to a self too weak to bear its own freedom.

Fromm’s analytic social psychology was the bridge. Its proposal, worked out in the authority and family studies, was that a society’s economic structure shapes, through the family as its psychological agency, a social character shared by the members of a class: a structure of drives and anxieties that makes people want to do what their position requires them to do. The authoritarian character, submissive upward and domineering downward, craving the strong hand it also fears, was the type the German research kept finding, and the concept did specific work in the comparison. It explained why fascism’s appeal was not a trick played on the class but a satisfaction offered to it, why propaganda fell on prepared ground, and why the classical remedy, correct information organised by a correct party, addressed only the surface of the obstacle. When Fromm left the Institute at the end of the 1930s, over money and doctrine both, the psychoanalytic element did not leave with him. It migrated into the school’s mature work: into Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization of 1955, which read Freud against Freud to argue that the prevailing organisation of instinctual renunciation exceeded what survival required, and into the empirical design of The Authoritarian Personality of 1950, where the F scale attempted to measure the disposition the German studies had described.

Why did the Institute turn to Freud?

Because its founding problem, the gap between economic position and actual consciousness, had a psychological floor that the inherited doctrine could not reach. Psychoanalysis offered a mechanism by which domination enters character itself, forming people who desire the authority they also resent.

The classical objections to the marriage were serious and should be recorded in their strong form. Psychoanalysis, the critics argued, naturalises what history made: drives replace relations, the family replaces the factory, and a therapy of the self quietly displaces the transformation of society. Wilhelm Reich’s expulsion from both the psychoanalytic and the communist movements in the 1930s, after attempting a similar synthesis from the other direction, stood as the era’s warning about the union’s instability. There is also a methodological quarrel: the Freudian case study and the Marxist law do not obviously belong to one science. The school’s mature answer, most fully in Adorno, was to refuse the synthesis as a system and to use Freud critically, as an account of the damaged subject that capitalism produces, true exactly where it is darkest, in its picture of a self formed by renunciation and prone to project its rage onto the powerless. Whether that answer is a reconciliation or a brilliantly managed tension is a question this comparison leaves open, noting only that the addition changed the method’s centre of gravity for good: after Freud, a Marxist theory of society that had nothing to say about the inner life of the dominated was, for the Frankfurt writers, simply incomplete.

Method II: rationalisation, reification and the Weber inheritance

The second addition came from sociology, and through a Marxist intermediary. Max Weber had argued that the master process of the modern West was rationalisation: the spread of formal, calculative, means and ends rationality from the economy into law, administration, science and conduct, until the world stood disenchanted and life was conducted inside structures he compared, in a famous image, to a shell hard as steel. Weber was no Marxist, and the classical tradition mostly treated him as the bourgeois alternative. The bridge was Georg Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness of 1923 took Weber’s category, renamed it reification, and replanted it in Marxist soil: the commodity form, generalised, teaches every participant to contemplate social relations as things with laws of their own, and consciousness itself takes the shape of the contemplative spectator. Lukács drew the revolutionary moral, that the proletariat, as the commodity that knows itself, could break the spell. The Frankfurt writers took the diagnosis and declined the moral. Reification, in their hands, becomes a condition without a designated escape artist: the process by which thought itself is formatted by the exchange principle, the reduction of qualities to quantities, the identification of the concept with the thing it masters.

This is the point at which critical theory’s method visibly parts from its parent’s, and the parting explains a stylistic fact readers notice at once. Classical method is architectonic: it builds from the commodity outward, each category generating the next, in the confidence that the order of the exposition reproduces the order of the reality. Critical method, at least in its Adornian maturity, is constellative and negative: it arranges concepts around a phenomenon to illuminate what the phenomenon’s own self description hides, it trusts the telling detail over the completed system, and it treats system building itself as a symptom of the rationalising drive it studies. The aphorism and the essay, forms classical doctrine regarded as literary preliminaries, become serious instruments. Minima Moralia, Adorno’s book of aphorisms written in American exile, is not a holiday from the theory; it is the theory practising its method on damaged life, on the ground that a false whole cannot be truthfully represented in a seamless one.

What does rationalisation add that Marx did not supply?

A theory of domination that operates inside reason itself. Marx explained how men are ruled by the products of their labour; Weber and his Marxist readers explained how they come to rule themselves by procedures, metrics and expertise, and to experience that rule as neutrality rather than power.

The inheritance carried a cost the classical critics were quick to total. If rationalisation is the master process, the specific weight of capital, of ownership and exploitation, risks dissolving into a general fate of the West, and several of the school’s texts, Dialectic of Enlightenment most notoriously, do read at times as if Odysseus and the film studio were stations of one calamity stretching from the first cunning of self preservation to the administered world. The defence, and it is the same defence that runs through this whole comparison, is that the widening was an attempt to explain a datum: domination in the societies the school studied had in fact overflowed the factory gate, and a method confined to the relations of production kept arriving too late to the places where consent was manufactured. The grid’s method row records the exchange honestly. Classical method explains interests, the bedrock without which the rest is weather. Critical method explains why interests, objectively present and even felt as grievances, so reliably fail to become the politics the doctrine predicted for them.

Ideology: from false consciousness to the machinery of integration

The classical theory of ideology is more subtle than its caricatures, and the comparison is worthless unless the subtlety is on the table. The German Ideology figures ruling ideas as the ideas of the ruling class, produced and distributed by those who control the means of mental production, and figures consciousness itself as an inverted image, a camera obscura in which men and their circumstances appear upside down because the material process that generates the image is hidden from them. Engels, writing to Franz Mehring in 1893, supplied the tradition’s canonical phrase and also its refinement: ideology is a process accomplished with a false consciousness of its real motives, and the ideologist’s sincerity is no defence, since the falsehood is in the structure of the thinking, not in the thinker’s honesty. Two mechanisms do the work in the classical account. The first is interest: ideas that serve the rulers spread because the rulers command the presses, pulpits and universities. The second is appearance: the surface forms of capitalism, the free contract, the equal exchange, systematically misrepresent the relations beneath them, so that even an honest observer begins inside an illusion the object itself generates. Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism belongs to the second mechanism and is the classical account’s deepest stratum, the one on which everything built later, by both frameworks, stands.

What the classical account lacks, in the Frankfurt diagnosis, is a theory of the believer. It explains why flattering ideas are supplied and why appearances deceive, and it predicts that experience, crisis and organisation will burn the illusion away. The German catastrophe refuted the prediction in its simple form: sections of the population held their illusions the more tightly as experience contradicted them, and some illusions were not beliefs at all in the propositional sense but gratifications, defences and identities. Critical theory’s theory of ideology is the classical account rebuilt for that refutation. Ideology, in the rebuilt version, is less a set of false propositions than a machinery with several working parts. There is the culture industry, which does not argue with its audience but formats its pleasures, standardising the products whose pseudo individuality lets each consumer feel personally addressed by what millions receive identically. There is the authoritarian character, which experiences the ruling ideas not as impositions but as the voice of strength it wishes to join. There is the administered integration of protest itself, the process Marcuse anatomised in which opposition is absorbed as a market niche, a style, a career. And there is, at the foundation, the exchange principle’s quiet instruction that everything has its equivalent and nothing is owed beyond the price, an instruction that wears the mask of fairness while dissolving every standpoint from which the whole could be judged.

Why does the culture industry belong to political economy rather than to taste?

Because its products are commodities manufactured by concentrated capital under the same imperatives as any other line of production, and their uniformity is a business result before it is an aesthetic one: standardisation lowers risk, pseudo individuality segments the market, and amusement reconciles the buyer to the working day that resumes after it.

Two qualifications keep this section honest. The first is that the Frankfurt theory of ideology never discarded the classical mechanisms: the culture industry chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment is unintelligible except as political economy, an account of monopoly capital in the entertainment sector, and the analyses of antisemitic propaganda treat the demagogue’s technique as a business with a balance sheet. The second qualification cuts the other way. Where the classical theory expects truth to be ideology’s solvent, with the party’s science as the solvent’s carrier, the critical theorists grew steadily more doubtful that any institution, including their own, stood outside the machinery. Adorno’s verdict that ideology had become the very form of social integration, less a veil over reality than reality’s own cement, implies that unmasking, the classical gesture, loses its leverage when the mask is load bearing. The consequence for the comparison is severe and should be stated without flinching: on the ideology row, the critical framework does not merely add mechanisms to the classical list. It withdraws the classical theory’s confidence that exposure cures, and that withdrawal is one more footprint of the missing agent, since exposure was supposed to cure by arming the class that would act on it.

The philosophy of history: progress, catastrophe and the broken guarantee

No row was left off the grid with more reluctance than this one, because the disagreement it records is the emotional core of the whole comparison. The classical philosophy of history is a doctrine of directed contradiction. Human societies pass through forms, each generating the forces that supersede it; the motor is the conflict between developing productive powers and the relations that constrain them, fought out as class struggle; and the present order’s place in the sequence is knowable, which is what makes the doctrine a science of history rather than a hope. The doctrine’s confidence was not naive cheerfulness. It rested on the agent: history has a direction because a class exists whose victory would end the sequence’s motor, class society itself, and whose interest therefore coincides with the universal. Remove the agent, and direction becomes assertion. That removal is what the critical theorists performed, under the pressure of the same events catalogued earlier, and the philosophy of history they built on the cleared ground is the classical doctrine read in a mirror.

Dialectic of Enlightenment, composed in Californian exile while the war the authors had fled consumed Europe, states the mirrored doctrine in its bleakest form. Enlightenment, the process by which myth was to be dissolved by reason, is shown reverting to mythology: the rationality that mastered nature by abstraction and calculation returns as a new fate, administered, total, and incapable of the self reflection that would correct it, while myth itself was always already a kind of enlightenment, a first attempt to classify and thereby control. The book’s infamous trajectory, in which the history of reason from Odysseus’s cunning to the culture industry appears as one deepening entwinement of liberation and domination, is not a lapse of morale. It is the philosophy of history that results when the classical sequence loses its terminal agent: if no class stands outside the process to redeem it, then the process itself, progress included, must be suspected of carrying the domination it was supposed to end. Walter Benjamin, the school’s most original affiliate, gave the suspicion its enduring images in the theses he wrote in 1940, in flight, months before his death at the Spanish border: the angel of history blown backward into the future by the storm called progress, and the warning that there is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

How does each framework read the same catastrophe differently?

The classical reading treats fascism as a convulsion of a dying order, the last card of a bourgeoisie whose system had exhausted its progressive role, and therefore as evidence for the sequence. The critical reading treats it as a revelation of what the sequence concealed: that barbarism was a possibility stored inside civilisation’s own rationality, available at any stage.

The classical reply to the mirrored doctrine is the strongest argument the orthodox tradition produced in the whole quarrel, and it deserves its full force here. A philosophy of history that sees domination reproducing itself through every apparent advance, the reply runs, has quietly exchanged explanation for metaphysics: if enlightenment always reverts, if integration always absorbs, then nothing that happens can count against the theory, and a theory that nothing can refute has stopped describing the world and started describing its author’s despair. The reply gains strength from the school’s own silences, its difficulty in registering the genuine emancipations that occurred within its lifetime, the defeat of fascism itself, the welfare settlements, decolonisation’s first wave, as anything but new forms of administration. The Frankfurt defence is equally characteristic: the point of the totalising suspicion was never that nothing changes, but that change administered from above, without a subject capable of owning it, reproduces the structure it rearranges, and that the century’s improvements arrived, almost without exception, in forms compatible with the continuation of domination. Readers must judge the exchange themselves; the comparison notes only that the two philosophies of history are, once again, the same evidence organised by the presence or absence of the agent. A theory that expects its subject reads catastrophe as birth pang. A theory that has lost its subject reads progress itself as the catastrophe’s disguise.

The stance toward science: a science of history against the critique of reason

The science row conceals a paradox that repays attention: the framework that doubted science filled its institute with empirical researchers, while the framework that proclaimed science produced, in its Soviet codification, a catechism. Begin with the classical claim. From Engels’s popularisations onward, the tradition’s pride was its scientific status: socialism had passed from utopia to science when it discovered the laws of history as Darwin had discovered the laws of organic development, and the party’s authority rested in part on its custody of that science. The claim did real work. It distinguished the doctrine from moral protest, it licensed prediction, and it gave militants a reason to endure defeats, since a science can survive its adherents’ lifetimes. Its cost appeared wherever the science hardened into dialectical materialism as state doctrine, a philosophy of nature and history whose conclusions were known in advance and whose function was certification rather than inquiry. Critical theory’s founding generation had watched that hardening happen to the doctrine of their own movement, and their wariness of science talk begins there, in politics, before it becomes philosophy.

Horkheimer’s 1937 programme essay draws the distinction on which the school’s position rests. Traditional theory, on his account, models itself on the mathematical natural sciences as Descartes had codified them: it stores classified facts, stands outside its object, takes the existing social division of labour as given, and prides itself on a neutrality that in fact ratifies the order that houses it. Critical theory refuses the posture. It knows that the theorist and the categories are products of the society under study, that the facts arrive preformed by the apparatus that collects them, and it holds that a theory of society is adequate only when it includes its own genesis and its interest, the abolition of social injustice, in the account. The refusal is not a refusal of rigour or of evidence. The same essay insists on the specialised disciplines and on empirical work as the theory’s indispensable ballast, and the Institute’s practice, surveys, content analyses, group experiments, matched the insistence. What is refused is a specific self image: science as a view from nowhere, whose social function is innocent because its method is clean.

Where does critical theory’s suspicion of science actually stop?

It stops at the laboratory door and resumes at the ministry door. The school attacked the claim that method guarantees innocence, and the uses of expertise as administration, while conducting empirical research of its own for four decades and defending its results as knowledge, not as testimony.

The quarrel came to a head a generation later, in the positivist dispute that divided German sociology in the 1960s, when Adorno and his allies faced Karl Popper and Hans Albert across the question whether social science should imitate the critical rationalism of the natural sciences, with falsifiable hypotheses and value freedom, or whether the social object, being itself contradictory and historically mutable, required a dialectical method that treated facts and values as internally related. The dispute matters to this comparison because it shows the science row is not a disagreement about whether to do research. It is a disagreement about what knowledge of society is: for the classical tradition at its best, a mirror accurate enough to guide an agent; for its orthodox degeneration, a certificate; for critical theory, a form of self knowledge by a society that damages the knower, valuable exactly insofar as it refuses the comfort of both mirror and certificate. The grid’s compressed verdict stands: the classical side explains the confidence with which a movement can act on knowledge, the critical side explains the complicity by which knowledge, certified and administered, becomes one more department of the order it was gathered to change.

Praxis: the broken unity and the defence of theory’s autonomy

The eleventh of Marx’s theses on Feuerbach, the sentence about philosophers having only interpreted the world, functions in the classical tradition as a constitution. Theory and practice are one process: the doctrine arises from the movement, is tested in the movement’s struggles, and returns to the movement as its clarified self consciousness. The unity is the doctrine’s answer to the charge of utopianism and its warrant for the party’s authority. It is also, read coldly, a hostage. A theory whose credentials are issued by a practice stands or falls with the practice’s character, and when the practice is a defeated movement, a bureaucratic state, or a labour bureaucracy negotiating the terms of integration, the theory that insists on the unity must either bless what exists in the movement’s name or break the unity and survive as something else. Critical theory is what the second choice looks like when it is made deliberately, argued philosophically, and maintained for forty years.

The school never renounced the thesis. It reinterpreted its timing. Horkheimer’s writings of the 1930s already distinguish between a theory that serves a going concern and a theory that, in a period when the concern is not going, preserves the critical impulse in the only form available, as thought that refuses reconciliation with the given. Adorno gave the position its canonical formulations after the war: theory, driven back from practice, must not make a virtue of its exile, but neither may it counterfeit a practice by gesture; its truth lies in determinate negation, in the exact articulation of what in the existing order contradicts the order’s own claims, held ready for a practice whose hour no theorist can schedule. The notorious consequence, the school’s distance from the movements that did arise, followed with something like logic. When students occupied the Institute’s building in Frankfurt in January 1969, demanding that the theory become the practice it theorised, Adorno called the police, and the scandal of that telephone call is the agent absence rendered as biography: the theorist of emancipation defending his institute against the young people who believed they were its addressee, each side able to cite the tradition against the other, and the breach closing, months later, over the theorist’s grave.

Did critical theory have a theory of practice at all?

It had a theory of practice’s absence, which is a different and easily mocked possession: practice was redefined as the preservation and sharpening of critical consciousness during a period in which organised transformative action was judged unavailable, so that theory itself, autonomous and unreconciled, became the form practice took under blockade.

The classical verdict on this row was delivered early and has not softened: a Marxism that converts the unity of theory and practice into the autonomy of theory has, whatever its intentions, resigned the doctrine’s defining office, and the resignation is dressed in the very sophistication that performs it. The verdict will be weighed in full later in this article, alongside the strongest statement of the case against the school. The comparison’s duty here is narrower: to register that the praxis difference, like every other row, descends from the agent question by a short stair. Practice in the classical sense requires a practitioner. Where the practitioner cannot be found, the unity of theory and practice cannot be performed, only remembered, parodied or counterfeited, and the school’s entire later posture, its difficulty, its negativity, its refusal of programme and audience alike, is the ethics of a tradition that chose memory over counterfeit. Whether the choice was integrity or abdication is the question the rest of this article exists to make answerable.

Evidence: the empirical record the caricature denies

The grid’s rows have treated the two frameworks as bodies of doctrine, but one of the commonest claims in circulation about the comparison is a claim about conduct: that classical Marxism dealt in evidence while critical theory dealt in moods, that the school abandoned the empirical study of society for the essay and the aphorism. The claim survives because the school’s most famous books are philosophical and because its critics have often preferred the caricature to the catalogue. The catalogue is easily checked. The Institute’s 1936 volume on authority and the family assembled surveys, interviews and expert reports from several countries. Fromm’s worker survey, designed before the exile, analysed the political psychology of the German working class from hundreds of questionnaires. In America the school produced, with university partners, the studies in prejudice series, of which The Authoritarian Personality, with its scales and clinical interviews, became the most debated work of empirical social psychology of its decade. Adorno worked, unhappily and instructively, inside Paul Lazarsfeld’s radio research project, and the friction between the dialectician and the great empiricist of communications research is itself a document of the science quarrel treated above. Neumann and Kirchheimer spent the war years analysing the enemy’s state and law for American agencies, work grounded in documents and institutions rather than in speculation. The group experiment of the 1950s, conducted after the return to Frankfurt, probed German attitudes toward the war and the occupation with methods borrowed from the American research the school is accused of scorning.

None of this makes the school’s empirical reputation its essence, and two concessions belong in the record. The philosophical wing’s later work did withdraw from field research into textual and aesthetic analysis, and the Institute’s empirical projects were concentrated in its first two decades and in the psychology of prejudice thereafter. Nor was the empiricism innocent of the doctrine: the F scale’s critics charged, with some justice, that its items were built to find the authoritarianism they then found. The comparison’s point stands nonetheless, and it is the one the grid’s evidence row was designed to carry. The difference between the frameworks on evidence is not presence against absence. It is a difference in what evidence is for. Classical empiricism, at its most characteristic, gathers the facts of exploitation and organisation that an agent needs: union numbers, wage series, crisis indicators, the balance of class forces. Critical empiricism gathers the facts of consciousness under integration: the dispositions, gratifications and defences by which the agent’s absence reproduces itself. Each body of evidence is the other’s blind spot rendered in method, which is why the two literatures, read together, describe the twentieth century more completely than either does alone.

The quarrel before Frankfurt: Lukács, Korsch and the parting of the ways

The comparison is usually dated from Horkheimer’s directorship, but its decisive arguments were first staged a decade earlier, inside the classical camp itself, and recovering that staging changes the quarrel’s meaning. In 1923 two books appeared within months of each other: Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy. Both were works of party intellectuals, a Hungarian commissar and a German minister of justice in a coalition government, and both argued, against the orthodoxy of the Second International’s legacy, that Marxism had been impoverished into a doctrine of economic laws by custodians who treated consciousness, philosophy and the dialectic as decorative. Lukács rebuilt the doctrine around totality and class consciousness, borrowed Weber’s rationalisation and renamed it reification, and located the revolutionary subject in a proletariat whose imputed consciousness, the awareness appropriate to its position, could diverge indefinitely from its empirical opinions. Korsch insisted that the theory’s philosophical dimension was not an ornament but a component, and that the degeneration of Marxism into a positivist science of society mirrored the degeneration of the movement that carried it. The Comintern’s response, delivered at its Fifth Congress in 1924, was condemnation: the two books were denounced as professorial revisionism, their authors disciplined, and the official philosophy of the movement set on the road toward the catechism described earlier in this article.

The episode matters to the comparison for three reasons. It shows that the founding gestures of critical theory, the centrality of consciousness, the suspicion of positivist science, the turn to philosophy as a weapon against orthodoxy, were not inventions of an endowed institute in the 1930s. They were the suppressed position of 1923, driven out of the organised movement and preserved, by a chain of readings and personal transmissions, until an institution existed that could house them. Horkheimer’s generation read Lukács and Korsch as students; the Institute’s programme is, in one of its lineages, the 1923 programme with a research budget. The episode also complicates the classical side’s preferred genealogy, in which a pure doctrine was abandoned by straying intellectuals. The doctrine’s own authorised custodians helped produce the straying, by defining fidelity in a way that made the philosophical questions unaskable inside the movement, so that whoever needed to ask them had to leave the hall to do it. Anderson’s anatomy, to its credit, begins exactly here: his Western Marxism is born in the defeat of the revolutions and in the divorce proceedings of 1923 and 1924, and the Frankfurt School, in his telling, is less an inventor than an heir, the best funded executor of an estate the movement had already renounced. A comparison that starts in 1937 mistakes the reading of the will for the death.

There is a further, quieter lesson in the hinge year, concerning the agent. Lukács’s solution to the consciousness problem, imputed consciousness, is the classical architecture’s most elegant repair: the agent’s mission is preserved by distinguishing what the class thinks from what its position entitles and obliges it to think, with the party as the trustee of the difference. The repair worked as philosophy and failed as politics, because a trustee that cannot be dismissed by its beneficiary is a sovereign, and the century supplied several demonstrations of where that sovereignty ends. Critical theory can be read, from this angle, as the refusal of the repair: rather than imputing a consciousness the class did not have, it set out to study the consciousness the class did have, in its families, its amusements and its terrors, and to let the agent’s file record the findings whatever they cost the doctrine. The cost accounting is the rest of this article, but the refusal itself begins in 1923, in the quarrel between a philosophy that would save the agent by definition and a research programme that would go and look.

The state: committee, exception and the authoritarian state essay

One topic deserves extraction from the grid’s rows, because both frameworks revised themselves on it under pressure and the revisions cross in instructive ways. The classical theory of the state begins from the Manifesto’s executive committee, the state as the instrument by which the economically dominant class manages its common affairs, with Marx’s own Bonapartism analysis supplying the standing exception: where classes balance, the executive can raise itself above them and rule by manoeuvre while preserving their property. The tradition’s later development, through the colonial state, the fascist state and the welfare state, is a series of attempts to hold the instrumental core while absorbing the exceptions, culminating in the Miliband and Poulantzas exchange of the late 1960s, in which one classical heir defended a refined instrumentalism against another’s structural account of the state’s relative autonomy. The debate is often assigned to political science syllabuses and forgotten by theory, but for this comparison it is precious evidence: the classical framework, alive, arguing with itself about the state’s independence of manoeuvre, in terms a Frankfurt jurist would have recognised as home ground.

The Frankfurt contribution to the same problem came from its lawyers and from one extraordinary essay. Neumann’s Behemoth denied that the Nazi order was a state in the classical sense at all, describing a non state of competing empires held together by plunder and terror, while Kirchheimer tracked the Weimar republic’s legal self destruction and the transformation of the mass party under monopoly conditions. Horkheimer’s essay The Authoritarian State, circulated in 1942 in a memorial volume for Benjamin, drew the threads into the school’s most scandalous single argument: that the authoritarian state, whether in its fascist, its Soviet or its interventionist democratic form, represented a single emerging type, the integral statism toward which the administered economies were converging, in which the old liberal separation of state and society, and with it the classical object of analysis, was being abolished from above. The essay was too hot for the school’s own journal politics and lived a half public life for decades. Its importance for the comparison is that it shows the critical framework, at its most daring, applying the classical method, the derivation of political forms from economic transformation, more ruthlessly than the classical tradition’s custodians dared to apply it to the tradition’s own state. The pupil’s heresy was an excess of the master’s method, which is why the essay embarrassed everyone and why it remains the single best document for a seminar that wants the quarrel in one text.

A worked case: the two frameworks read the Great Depression

Abstract comparison sharpens when both instruments are pointed at one event, and the crash of 1929 and its aftermath is the fairest test available, since it arrived after the classical doctrine was complete and before the critical one had formed. The classical reading, in its Comintern form, treated the crisis as the system’s terminal convulsion: the third period’s doctrine predicted intensifying misery, the collapse of reformist illusions and the rapid approach of revolutionary situations, with social democracy identified as the chief obstacle, the moderate wing of fascism in the fatal phrase. In Germany the prediction’s practical yield was a divided labour movement facing the one enemy that mattered, and the doctrine’s theoreticians spent 1933 explaining that the catastrophe was a stage. In the United States the same crisis produced the New Deal: neither revolution nor fascism but a reconstruction of capitalism by its own state, with organised labour incorporated as a junior partner of the settlement. The classical framework’s resources for the American outcome were thin at the time and had to be built afterward, in the theories of state capitalism and long waves that this article has already credited.

The critical reading was assembled in real time, from inside the event, and it shows the framework’s method at its most characteristic. Fromm’s survey data, gathered as the crisis broke, suggested that economic catastrophe did not mechanically radicalise: the authoritarian dispositions laid down in the family could route despair toward submission as readily as toward revolt, and the Studies on Authority and Family generalised the finding into a research programme. Pollock, watching the New Deal and the planned economies together, drew the state capitalism conclusion: crisis had become administrable, and the political form of the administration, democratic or dictatorial, was the real variable the age would decide. Horkheimer’s aphorisms of the period, later gathered in his book of the mid 1930s, register the third element, the subjective one: the unemployed man’s shame, the clerk’s terror of descent, the small proprietor’s hunger for a strong hand, the raw materials from which the decade’s politics were actually manufactured. Set the two readings side by side and the comparison’s whole argument is visible without commentary. The classical instrument measured the crisis’s depth and mistook depth for direction. The critical instrument measured the crisis’s reception and mistook reception, at times, for the whole event. A complete history of the 1930s needs the measurements of both, and a theory of the next crisis, whenever it matures, will need them in the same binding.

Two canons: the young Marx and the old

The frameworks differ even in which Marx they read, and the bibliographical fact explains several of the doctrinal ones. The classical canon, as the orthodoxies stabilised it, centred on the mature economist: Capital at the summit, the 1859 preface as its constitution, Engels’s syntheses as the authorised commentary, and the writings of the 1840s treated as a gifted youth’s preliminaries, interesting to biographers and dangerous to doctrine. The critical canon formed around a publication event of 1932, when Marx’s early manuscripts of 1844, the Paris manuscripts with their theory of alienated labour, reached print in full for the first time, in editions prepared by scholars in the Institute’s wider orbit. The effect on the generation that received them was electric. Here was a Marx of estrangement, species being and the human senses, a philosopher of the damaged subject, whose concerns ran directly to the questions the Western Marxists were already asking, and whose authority could be set against the catechism’s. Marcuse’s long essay greeting the manuscripts, published in 1932, announced the programme in its first enthusiasm: the young Marx supplied the philosophical foundation the doctrine’s economists had mislaid. Fromm built his humanist socialism on the same texts, and the humanism wars of the 1960s, in which Althusser’s anti humanist reading of a break in Marx’s development fought the Frankfurt inheritance for the master’s meaning, were the canon quarrel become open war.

The comparison should resist the temptation to award the manuscripts to one side. The young Marx is genuinely continuous with the old in ways the break theorists understated, and genuinely different in emphasis in ways the humanists overstated. What the canon difference reveals is the mechanism by which each framework recruits its founder. A doctrine that needs a science of history reads the economist and treats the philosopher as juvenilia; a doctrine that needs an account of damaged subjectivity reads the philosopher and treats the economist as scaffolding. Both readings are documented, both are partial, and the founders’ actual corpus, restless and unfinished, sustains each against the other indefinitely. The practical moral for the reader is the one the Institute’s own scholars, who worked on the editions and knew the manuscripts’ state, could have supplied: any comparison of the two frameworks that quotes Marx as a settled authority for either has mistaken a battlefield for a bench.

Dialectics without a guarantee: the quarrel over method’s core

Underneath the method row of the grid lies a deeper quarrel that the table cannot hold, because it concerns the single word both frameworks claim as their centre. Dialectics, in the classical codification, is a doctrine of laws: the unity and struggle of opposites, the passage of quantity into quality, the negation of the negation, generalised by Engels from history to nature itself and taught, in the Soviet manuals, as the science of the most general laws of motion of the world. Its function in the architecture is certification. A history that moves by knowable laws can be trusted to arrive, and the agent’s mission is underwritten by the same necessity that moves the stars and the seasons. The Western recovery of dialectics was, from 1923 onward, a revolt against exactly this function. For Lukács, dialectics was not a cosmology but the logic of a historical totality and of the class positioned to know it; for Korsch, a principle of the unity of theory and practice; and the Frankfurt generation inherited the revolt and carried it to the point where the classical custodians would no longer recognise the inheritance. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics of 1966 is the endpoint: a dialectics that proceeds by determinate negation without the synthesised resolution, that suspects every achieved identity of being the concept’s violence against the thing, and that holds the whole to be the false, in his pointed inversion of Hegel. The negation of the negation, the law on which the guarantee rested, is declined: that a condition is negated does not mean its successor redeems it, and a dialectics honest about the century will let negations stand unreconciled rather than forge them into a ladder.

The classical reply to negative dialectics was ready and is not contemptible. A dialectics without synthesis, the orthodox argued, is scepticism wearing the tradition’s clothes: if every resolution is suspect and every identity a coercion, then thought can never legitimately arrive anywhere, including at the critique’s own conclusions, which arrive with considerable confidence for a method that forbids arrival. The reply identifies a real strain, visible in Adorno’s prose, between the prohibition on system and the systematic force of the prohibitions. The Frankfurt defence replies in kind: the synthesis was the point at which the classical dialectics had always cheated, converting history’s open wounds into a curriculum of stages, and the guarantee the synthesis issued was spent, in practice, by institutions that used necessity as an alibi. Between a dialectics that guarantees too much and one that permits itself too little, the comparison does not find a synthesis of its own to offer. It notes the genealogical fact, that both descend from Hegel’s logic read through Marx’s critique, and the functional fact, that the difference between them is, once again, the agent in disguise: a movement that expects to act needs its dialectics to end in a resolution it can organise around, while a theory that has lost its movement experiences every proposed resolution as a premature closing of the file on the suffering that made it think.

Nature: the domination that precedes class

One province of the comparison has grown in importance since both frameworks were formed, and it tests them in an unexpected order. The classical doctrine’s attitude to nature is productivist to its foundations: nature is the reservoir of use values and the field of labour’s metabolism, history is the story of the productive forces’ development, and socialism inherits the bourgeoisie’s industrial achievement and removes its fetters. The attitude was the common sense of the nineteenth century left and it survived, in the orthodoxies, into the age of the Five Year Plans’ cult of output. Critical theory, by one of its deepest intuitions, dissented at the root. The Dialectic of Enlightenment reads the domination of external nature and the domination of human beings as one process with two faces: the self that masters nature by abstraction and calculation must master its own nature first, repressing impulse into character armour, and the price list of civilisation, from Odysseus bound to the mast to the administered consumer, is a single ledger. Alfred Schmidt, the school’s most exact student of the master’s texts, gave the intuition its scholarly form in his 1962 study of the concept of nature in Marx, arguing that Marx himself, read carefully, held nature to be socially mediated through and through without ceasing to be material, a position from which the orthodox productivism and the romantic anti industrialism both fall away.

The ecological reckoning that arrived after both frameworks had set gives this section its point. Measured against the crisis of the natural world, the critical framework’s suspicion of the productivist project, its refusal to identify emancipation with the expansion of output, and its insistence that the mastery of nature reproduces itself as the mastery of persons, read as the more prescient inheritance, while the classical tradition’s developmental confidence requires, at minimum, the extensive repairs its own heirs have been attempting. The classical counter remains available and should be recorded: a theory of the metabolic relation between society and nature, of the soil and the town, exists in Marx’s own pages and was recovered by later scholarship from within the classical archive, so that the province may belong, on a longer view, to whichever framework’s readers do the recovering. The comparison notes the exchange rate without settling the account: on nature, the school’s heresy looks less like a departure from the founder than like an early withdrawal from an account the orthodoxy had overdrawn.

Crisis: the event both frameworks were built to interpret

Crisis is the classical framework’s home event, the moment its theory was designed for, and the comparison is incomplete without a direct account of what the two frameworks make of it. In the classical architecture, crisis is the system’s truth told aloud: overproduction exposes the contradiction between social production and private appropriation, the reserve army swells, the intermediate strata are ruined, and the agent receives its education in the only school the doctrine fully trusts, experience. Every element of the architecture leans on the pedagogy, which is why the orthodox prediction of radicalisation through crisis was not an incidental error but the architecture running as designed. The critical framework’s revision proceeded from the observation that the pedagogy had failed its examinations too often to be trusted unrevised. Crises, in the school’s record, taught whatever the character structure and the available ideologies permitted them to teach: in Germany, the lesson drawn by millions was submission to the strong hand; in America, the lesson was administered by a reforming state that converted crisis into a renewal of the order’s legitimacy. The school’s second generation formalised the relocation in the theory of legitimation crisis, Habermas’s argument of the early 1970s that the administered economy displaces crisis tendencies from the economy into the political and cultural systems, where they appear as deficits of legitimacy and meaning rather than as gluts of commodities. The displacement thesis is the crisis row of the grid stated as a mechanism: the event did not disappear from the theory; it changed its address, from the market to the state’s stock of belief, exactly as the decentering of economics predicts.

Neither framework should leave this section unmarked. The classical pedagogy recovered some credit in every subsequent crisis, since downturns do reliably produce the questioning of the order that prosperity suspends, and the movements of the crisis years after 2008 spoke, in part, the classical grammar of banks, bailouts and the one percent. The critical revision recovered credit in the same years, since the questioning issued, again, in every political direction at once, and the order’s legitimacy, though damaged, was repaired by the familiar instruments of administration, resentment and entertainment. The comparison’s finding on crisis is therefore the finding of the whole article in its most concentrated form: the classical framework explains what crisis does to the system, the critical framework explains what crisis does to the people, and the history that results is written by the interaction, which neither framework, alone, has ever quite managed to narrate in one voice.

Machinery and automation: the fragment on machines read twice

A single fragment of Marx’s manuscripts, the passage in the Grundrisse where he imagines production so automated that direct labour shrinks to supervision and the worker steps to the side of the process, functions in the two frameworks as a Rorschach for their deepest difference. The classical reading takes the fragment as prophecy and programme: the development of the productive forces, driven by capital against its own intention, builds the material premise of emancipation inside the old order, free time as the true measure of wealth, and the agent’s task is to inherit the machinery by expropriating its owners. The reading supports the tradition’s confidence in development and its impatience with every Luddite or romantic hesitation: the machine is the ally, fettered. The critical reading lingers over the same pages and finds the ambiguity the confidence skips. Automation, in the administered world the school inhabited, had not visibly shrunk necessary labour into freedom; it had refined labour’s discipline, exported its dirtiest forms and returned the saved time as administered leisure, while the machinery’s owners converted productivity into the integration dividend described earlier in this article. Marcuse, who made the fragment a centrepiece of his most hopeful book, held both readings at once with unusual honesty, arguing that automation had created the technical possibility of abolishing toil and that the possibility was being deliberately refused by an order whose survival required the continuation of the performance principle. The same text, the same machinery, the same author: the difference lies in what each framework believes about the direction inscribed in the technology itself, whether the productive forces carry their emancipation within them as a tendency, or whether every tendency is decided, each time, by the relations of domination that own it. It is the philosophy of history quarrel at the level of the lathe, and it is still being fought wherever a new machine is introduced as a promise.

The intellectual: functionary, trustee or splinter

Both frameworks are theories about intellectuals as much as by them, and their accounts of the intellectual’s office condense the master difference into a job description. The classical office is functional and proud of it: the theorist is the agent’s organ of self knowledge, whether as the party intellectual who elaborates the line, the movement journalist who agitates and educates, or the organic intellectual a rising class secretes to give its experience coherence. The office’s dignity comes from its service, and its characteristic corruption is the trustee’s corruption examined earlier, the organ that begins to mistake its custody of the class’s consciousness for ownership of the class. The critical office is defined by the withdrawal of the commission. The Frankfurt intellectual serves no movement, certifies no line and answers, in the last instance, to the damaged life his work takes as its evidence. Adorno’s images for the office are consistently ones of estranged usefulness: the splinter in the eye as the best magnifying glass, the emigrated consciousness that sees the homeland’s features precisely because it no longer lives inside them, the message in a bottle thrown to a finder who does not yet exist. The office’s dignity comes from its refusal, and its characteristic corruption is the one Anderson catalogued, the refusal hardened into a residence, critique as the furnishing of a comfortable exile from every consequence.

The contrast disciplines a question readers bring to both literatures and rarely formulate: by what right does the theorist speak? The classical answer is institutional and testable in principle: by the mandate of a movement that can recall its servants, judged by the movement’s fortunes. The critical answer is epistemic and lonely: by the quality of the seeing, judged by readers not yet organised into a jury. Each answer fails in its own way in the record. The mandate degenerated, wherever the movement held power, into the licensing system this article has described, and the recall mechanism proved to be the theorist’s cell. The lonely seeing degenerated, wherever the academy prospered, into a citation economy in which the splinter’s magnification was certified by other splinters. The comparison cannot restore either office’s innocence. It can only observe that the two corruptions are the agent presence and the agent absence wearing their professional dress, and that a reader who knows which corruption to watch for in a given text is already reading it in the comparative spirit this article has tried to teach.

The totally other and the end of utopia: what hope each framework permits

The last province of the comparison is the one both frameworks handle with uncharacteristic tenderness, and it is fitting to end the analytical sections here, because what a theory permits itself to hope is the agent question translated into theology’s old language. The classical treatment of religion is usually summarised by a phrase torn from its sentence. In the same introduction of 1844 that derives the proletariat, Marx calls religion the sigh of the oppressed creature and the heart of a heartless world before he calls it the opium of the people, and the sequence matters: religion is first the register of suffering and the protest against it, and only thereby the consolation that reconciles. The tradition built on those sentences mostly kept the opium and dropped the sigh, making religion a department of ideology to be dissolved by enlightenment and organisation, while its founder’s text held the more interesting position that the demand for a real happiness was stored inside the illusory one. Utopia received the tradition’s other famous dismissal, in Engels’s contrast of utopia with science: the socialism that matters is not designed from ideals but derived from laws, and hope, to be respectable, must present its credentials as knowledge.

The critical framework, formed in a century when the credentials office had burned down, handled the inheritance with a delicacy that surprised its enemies. Benjamin’s first thesis on history makes theology the hidden dwarf inside the puppet of historical materialism, small and ugly and necessary to its victories, an image no orthodox catechism could have survived printing. Horkheimer’s late work speaks, with increasing directness, of the longing for the totally other, the refusal to accept that the murderer should triumph over the innocent victim as history’s final word, and grounds the critical impulse itself in that longing rather than in any philosophy of history that might certify it. Adorno maintained the discipline of the prohibition on images: the reconciled condition must not be pictured, since every picture drawn from inside the unreconciled one falsifies it, and utopia survives only as determinate negation, the exact knowledge of what must not be. Marcuse, characteristically, broke the discipline in the other direction, announcing in a Berlin lecture of 1967 that utopia had ended in the only sense that mattered, since the material conditions for a free society now existed and only the order’s continuation stood between humanity and them. The four positions map the school’s whole range, from theology as secret to utopia as engineering report, and they share one negative premise that separates the entire school from its parent: hope is no longer underwritten. It must be carried without a guarantee, as longing, as prohibition, as technical possibility, anything but as a debt history owes the hopeful. The classical tradition regards that carriage as a confession of defeat. The critical tradition regards the guarantee itself, after its century, as the one consolation a serious theory can no longer afford. On this province, as on all the others, the comparison declines to promote one grief over the other, and notes only that the difference between a hope that is owed and a hope that is merely kept is, in the end, the difference this entire article has been about.

The internal critique: Perry Anderson and the diagnosis of a whole current

Every comparison of this kind has a strongest critic, and fairness requires choosing the one the school’s defenders find hardest to answer rather than the one easiest to defeat. The external polemics against the Frankfurt School, including the conspiracy narrative quarantined at this article’s opening, are not candidates: they misdescribe the school’s personnel, programme and influence, and refuting them exercises nothing. The strongest criticism came from inside Marxism, from a historian of the classical tradition itself, and it was aimed not at Frankfurt alone but at the entire Western Marxist current of which the school was the most durable institution. Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism, published in 1976, remains the critique that any honest account of the comparison must pass through, because it does what the grid attempts at greater length and with an historian’s evidence: it explains the characteristics of a body of theory by the history that produced it, and finds the explanation damning.

Anderson’s argument can be stated in four movements. First, the phenomenon: after 1918, Marxist theory in the advanced capitalist West underwent a common mutation, visible across countries and temperaments, in the work of Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Sartre, Althusser and their peers. Second, the mutation’s shape: a steady migration of theoretical energy away from the classical terrains of economics and politics, away from the critique of political economy and the strategy of revolution, toward philosophy, epistemology, method and aesthetics; together with a change of language, from the accessible prose of the classical generation to an esoteric idiom addressed to specialists, and a structural pessimism foreign to the tradition’s founders. Third, the cause: the mutation was not a series of intellectual choices but the determinate product of a political condition, the defeat of the revolutionary wave after the First World War and the long subsequent separation of Marxist theory from any mass working class practice. Theory severed from practice, Anderson argued, obeys a logic of its own: it inverts the hierarchy of the classical doctrine, putting method before content and interpretation before intervention, and it drifts toward the idealism it defines itself against, because thought without a material addressee consoles itself with its own profundity. Fourth, the exception that proves the anatomy: Gramsci, the one major figure of the current who remained a practising revolutionary leader, is also the one whose work stayed closest to politics, strategy and the classical questions, while the purest philosophers of the current were those whose distance from any movement was most complete.

Applied to the Frankfurt School specifically, the critique closes like a hand. The Institute’s trajectory, from the study of the working class to the philosophy of history, from the worker survey to the aphorism, from the economics of planning to the aesthetics of the fragment, is Anderson’s migration in its most documented form, with the added severity that the school possessed money, staff and forty years in which to reverse it and did not. The aesthetic turn, the esoteric idiom, the pessimism, the substitution of culture for economy and of interpretation for strategy: all of it, on this account, is the autobiography of an intelligentsia whose movement had died before it did, written in the only genres left to it. Nor is the critique dismissible as orthodoxy’s revenge, because Anderson wrote as an admirer of much of the work and as a participant in the New Left’s attempt to rebuild a classical Marxism for the West; his later writings complicate the verdict, and his long study of Gramsci’s antinomies applies the same standards to the exception. The criticism is precise, historical and fraternal, which is exactly why it is the one to beat.

What is the core of Anderson’s diagnosis of the Western current?

He argued that the entire current, Frankfurt included, was deformed by a single cause: its separation from a revolutionary working class practice after the defeats that followed the First World War, which drove theory from economics and politics into philosophy and aesthetics and fixed its pessimistic tone.

Two features of the critique demand emphasis before the defence is heard, because they determine what a defence would have to show. The first is that Anderson explains the theory he criticises better than the theory explains itself, on its own preferred terrain: his account is materialist in method, deriving ideas from conditions, and it thereby challenges the school to answer in kind rather than by reiterating its doctrines. The second is that the critique concedes the defence’s opening premise. Anderson does not deny the defeats; his whole argument presupposes them. The quarrel is over what the defeats licensed. For the critique, they explain the school’s character without excusing it, since other responses to the same defeats, Gramsci’s above all, remained possible, and since the school’s consolations hardened into a tradition that trained generations to mistake the absence of an agent for a discovery about the world. For the school’s defenders, the same defeats did not merely permit the turn; they compelled it, because a theory that continued to address a vanished agent in the classical manner would not have been fidelity but ventriloquism. The next section states that defence at the strength it deserves.

The defence: a theory answering events rather than fleeing them

The defence begins by accepting the critique’s facts and disputing its bookkeeping. Yes, the school migrated from economics toward philosophy and culture; yes, its idiom grew difficult and its tone dark; yes, it produced no strategy and addressed no movement. The defence’s question is what the alternative, concretely, was. The classical posture in the same decades was not a fiction: it existed, in the communist parties and their institutes, and its products are available for inspection. There, the agent was affirmed on schedule, the crisis predicted at every congress, the science certified, and the theory’s unity with practice maintained in the form of apologetics for a bureaucratic state’s foreign policy, its trials and its camps. A comparison that scores Frankfurt for abandoning the practice must also score the practice that was available to be kept, and the school’s members, several of whom had buried friends the Soviet order murdered and all of whom had fled a fascism the communist parties had fatally misjudged, can be forgiven for concluding that the unity of theory and practice, under those management conditions, was the unity of the ventriloquist and the dummy. The defence does not claim the school chose well in every instance. It claims the choice was among damaged options, and that Anderson’s anatomy, read carefully, sometimes writes as if an undamaged one had been on the table.

The defence’s second layer is methodological, and it turns the critique’s own weapon. If theories are to be explained by the conditions of their production, then a theory produced by fascism’s mass support, by exile, by the spectacle of a working class integrated through consumption, should be read first as evidence about those conditions. The migration toward culture and psyche is, on this reading, not a flight from the object but a pursuit of it: the object had migrated. Domination in the societies the school inhabited was in fact exercised increasingly through the culture industry, the administered media, the therapeutics of adjustment and the management of demand, and a Marxism that refused to follow, on grounds of classical propriety, would have preserved the doctrine’s map by declining to survey the territory. The school’s defenders point, in support, to the accuracy of the pursuit: the concepts forged in the migration, the culture industry, the authoritarian personality, one dimensional integration, the totally administered society, have proved usable by readers who share none of the school’s politics, which is the pragmatic signature of concepts that found something real. A theory’s consolations do not usually survive export. Its discoveries do.

The third layer concedes the critique’s centre and reframes it, and this is where the honest defence ends, because the concession is large. The school did convert a research programme into a holding operation. Its negative discipline, the refusal to affirm the given, to name the agent, to draft the programme, protected the critical impulse from corruption at the price of making protection the impulse’s main activity, and a later generation inherited the posture without the catastrophe that had justified it, as a style of radicalism compatible with a university career and a clear conscience. Anderson named that inheritance before it fully ripened, and nothing in the defence dissolves his naming of it. What the defence can say, and says finally, is that the holding operation held something: through decades in which the classical alternative was, in its organised forms, either complicit or marginal, the Frankfurt texts preserved the questions themselves, about domination’s depth, culture’s function, reason’s complicity, in forms exact enough to bequeath. A tradition may fairly be judged for keeping the questions alive in a season when it could not keep the movement alive, and the judgement will still fall short of the standard the tradition set itself. Both halves of that sentence are the defence’s real position, and the comparison adopts it as the fairest available verdict on the critique: Anderson’s diagnosis is correct as anatomy and incomplete as judgement, because it measures the school against a practice that, in the places and decades in question, had already ceased to exist in the form the measurement assumes.

Each framework explains its own moment

The instruction that each framework explain its own historical moment sounds like a courtesy and functions as a test, because a framework that cannot narrate the conditions of its own plausibility fails by its own standard. Classical Marxism passes the test with ease, and the ease is diagnostic. It arose with the first mass labour movement in history: rising union density, socialist parties growing at every election, a working class visibly constituting itself as a political nation inside the nations. Its categories are that experience theorised. Crisis, because the century’s commercial crises were the movement’s recruiting sergeants. The party, because organisation was the form the experience took. Class consciousness, because the conversion of crowds into movements could be watched happening in a single lifetime. The agent, because the agent was, for once, not a postulate but a crowd that filled the streets of every industrial capital. The doctrine’s confidence is the confidence of a theory whose subject kept showing up.

Critical theory passes the same test in the opposite register, and the opposition is the whole comparison in miniature. Its categories are the theorisation of the agent’s non appearance under escalating pressure: of 1914, when the crowd filled the streets in the wrong uniform; of 1933, when the most organised working class in the world was dissolved without the battle its doctrine had rehearsed; of the exile decades, when the theorists measured, in the freest society on earth, the manufacture of consent by entertainment and expertise; of the postwar settlement, when the class whose immiseration was to have radicalised it bought cars and televisions on credit and voted for the managers of the system. Reification, the culture industry, the authoritarian personality, one dimensionality: each category names a mechanism by which the expected subject was unmade or kept from forming. A framework’s categories are its biography abstracted, and the two bibliographies of concepts, read side by side, are a history of the twentieth century told twice, once by the movement that expected to inherit it and once by the movement’s orphans.

What does each framework say about the age that produced it?

The classical framework explains its moment as the education of its agent: the growth of industry, crisis and organisation were visibly assembling the class that would transform society. The critical framework explains its moment as the obstruction of that assembly: fascism, bureaucracy and affluence are the events its every category was built to think.

The symmetry has an edge worth pressing, because it disciplines both sides’ triumphalism. If classical confidence was an induction from a lucky half century, then the doctrine’s scientific self image owes more to its moment than its method admits, and the orthodox habit of treating the twentieth century’s second half as a mere delay, an intermission in a script already written, is the survival of the induction after its conditions lapsed. If critical pessimism is likewise an induction, from a catastrophic half century, then the school’s darker generalisations, about enlightenment, integration and the fate of reason, may be its moment’s local weather mistaken for climate, and its heirs owe the same scepticism to its despair that its founders applied to their fathers’ hope. The comparison does not award the point to either side. It observes that a framework honest about its own moment has taken the first step toward knowing which of its claims are laws and which are memoirs, and that on this test the critical theorists, for all their faults, were the more relentless self historians, since their theory had the theory’s own situation built into it from the 1937 programme onward, while the classical tradition, in its organised forms, met the demand for self explanation mainly by denouncing it as revisionism.

The mutual accusations: resignation and economism in their own terms

Each framework’s account of the other is a small masterpiece of partial truth, and the comparison’s method requires stating both at full strength before judging either. The classical account of critical theory is the charge of resignation. It runs as follows. A doctrine that begins by announcing the agent’s absence will find confirmations everywhere, since absence is the easiest hypothesis to keep; it will refine its instruments for detecting domination until domination becomes the only detectable thing; it will mistake its own refinement for radicalism while the world is arranged by people with fewer scruples and simpler theories; and it will end, as Lukács sneered in his image of a grand hotel, in comfortable contemplation of the abyss, radical in vocabulary, pensioned in fact. The charge’s evidence is the school’s own record: the caution of its political pronouncements, the mandarin difficulty of its prose, the telephone call of January 1969. Its force is the force of a prophecy the behaviour kept fulfilling.

The critical account of classical Marxism is the charge of economism, and it is older than the school, having been the common property of every Western Marxist from Lukács onward. It runs as follows. A doctrine that assigns consciousness to position will forever be surprised by actual consciousness; it will interpret every setback as a delay and every betrayal as an accident, because its schema contains no place for the possibility that the dominated might love their domination for reasons internal to their formation; it will reduce culture to a reflex and psychology to a luxury, and then wonder why the reflex does not fire and the luxury decides elections; and in power, lacking any theory of domination that survives the abolition of private property, it will reproduce domination in the state’s name while sincerely calling the reproduction socialism. The charge’s evidence is likewise the record: the surprises of 1914 and 1933, the bureaucratic outcome in the East, the orthodox parties’ chronic misreading of fascism as a mere mask for finance capital, at the very moment when the mask was recruiting the millions.

Judged together, the accusations are asymmetric in an instructive way. The resignation charge is about the theory’s will: it grants the analysis and deplores the conclusion’s effect on the analyst. The economism charge is about the theory’s map: it denies the analysis and predicts its recurring surprises. A theory can recover from a failure of will by an act of decision, and indeed the classical tradition repeatedly produced militants whose practice refuted the resignation charge for their own case. A theory cannot so easily recover from a recurring predictive surprise, because each recurrence is a datum the schema should have contained. That asymmetry is why, in the long seminar of the twentieth century, the economism charge did more work: it is the charge that generated new concepts, while the resignation charge generated, mostly, denunciations. But the asymmetry is not total, and honesty requires the remainder. The critical framework’s map, for all its richness about consciousness, offers no account of how the mapped territory is ever crossed, and a map that cannot be crossed by is a portrait. The classical framework’s map, for all its blindness about the traveller, at least depicts a road. The two accusations, taken together, are the comparison’s true conclusion in embryo: each framework is the other’s most accurate critic, and the accuracy is purchased by standing exactly where the other cannot see.

The strongest objection: a theory without an agent is criticism, not theory

The brief for this comparison names one objection as the strongest, and the comparison has been building toward it through every section. It is not Anderson’s objection, though it is compatible with his; Anderson explains the school, while this one indicts its product. Stated at full strength, it runs as follows. What distinguished Marxism from every other tradition of social criticism was never its indignation, which it shared with moralists and romantics, nor its unmasking of ideology, which it shared with the Enlightenment, but its claim to explain society as a process with a direction and a bearer: to show how the order produces, out of its own contradictions, the force that will transform it. Explanation of that kind is what makes a social theory a theory, a connected account of how things work and therefore of how they could work otherwise. A body of writing that surrenders the bearer and suspends the direction, however refined its diagnoses, has by that surrender changed its genre. It has become social criticism: commentary on a condition it can describe with unmatched precision and cannot, even in principle, connect to the condition’s supersession. The tell, on this objection, is the school’s relation to its own findings. The classical theory’s findings accumulate toward a politics; the critical theory’s findings accumulate toward a mood. Its masterpieces end in aphorism, in negation, in the preservation of a possibility they cannot locate, because the logic of the enterprise permits no other ending. To call such writing Marxist theory is, the objection concludes, a courtesy title, extended by universities to a literature whose real achievement is to have given the experience of defeat a philosophy.

The school’s answer, assembled from across its work since no member stated it in one place, has three parts, and the comparison gives them in ascending order of strength. The first is a distinction between the theory’s office and the century’s performance: a theory of transformation is not refuted, as a genre, by the non arrival of the transformer, any more than a seismology is refuted by a quiet decade. The concepts, the objection’s target concedes this much to the reply, were built to explain a blocked situation, and a theory of blockage is still a theory, with mechanisms, evidence and falsifiable implications about what integration does to those it integrates. The second part presses harder. The classical alternative, the reply notes, did not in fact preserve the explanatory ambition the objection celebrates; in its organised forms it preserved the ambition’s vocabulary while subordinating explanation to legitimation, so that the agent’s existence was affirmed by definitional courtesy long after the evidence thinned. Between a theory that names an agent it cannot find and a theory that reports the agent missing, the second is not obviously the less theoretical. It is merely the less usable, and usability to a movement is a political virtue that the objection smuggles in as an epistemic one. The third part is the school’s own concession, and it is the comparison’s duty to record that the concession grants the objection its core. Adorno’s late reflections on theory and practice, and Horkheimer’s on the longing for the totally other, acknowledge that a critical theory cut off from practice becomes a message preserved against a future it cannot summon, and that the preservation is a diminished thing compared with what the tradition intended. The reply’s final position is thus a held contradiction: the genre charge is correct about the cost and wrong about the alternative, since the cost was paid to avoid a worse one, the conversion of theory into the ideology of an apparatus. A holding operation is not a research programme fulfilled. Neither is it nothing, and the objection, to remain at full strength, must say what should have been done instead, in Frankfurt in 1933, in exile in 1941, in the administered prosperity of 1958, by men and women whose movement was dead and whose murderers were in office. It has never quite said.

The substitute search: Marcuse, the outsiders and the refusal to appoint

If the agent absence is the theory’s wound, the search for substitutes is the record of its attempts to heal, and the attempts divide the school against itself in ways the comparison should map. The senior figures mostly declined the search. Horkheimer’s late work withdraws toward a negative theology of longing, and Adorno’s position, maintained against importunate students, was that appointing a substitute subject, students, the colonised, the marginal, from the theorist’s desk repeats the original sin of the doctrine, the confusion of the class one wishes existed with the class that does. The refusal was principled and it was also, the classical critics noted, convenient: a theorist who will not name the agent can never be refuted by the agent’s conduct. The refusal’s dignity and its evasiveness are the same quality viewed from two sides, and the comparison declines to pretend otherwise.

Marcuse is the great exception, and his exception proves the rule’s importance by showing what it cost to break it. One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964, closes its analysis of integration with a famous gesture toward the outside: beneath the integrated majority, he wrote, there persists a substratum of the excluded, racial minorities, the unemployed and unemployable, the colonised peoples, whose opposition stands outside the administered consensus and preserves, in their very exclusion, the negativity the working class had surrendered. The gesture made the book the New Left’s breviary and its author the movement’s philosopher, a role Marcuse accepted with an energy his Frankfurt colleagues found alarming. His lectures and letters of the later 1960s defended the student movement against the charge of adventurism, argued that the universities had become one of the few sites where the system’s contradictions were experienced undiluted, and speculated, in An Essay on Liberation, about a new sensibility forming among the young as the biological foundation of a different practice. The classical critics’ response was swift and not stupid: a substratum defined by exclusion is not a class defined by position in production; it lacks the leverage, the organisation and the universal interest that made the proletariat a candidate for the role; and a theory that appoints it has not solved the agent problem but sentimentalised it, mistaking sympathy for analysis. Marcuse’s own text half concedes the point, since the outsiders are offered as a catalyst and a hope rather than as a subject with a mission certified by history. The comparison records the episode as the school’s most instructive internal experiment: the one major attempt to fill the vacancy produced, even in sympathetic hands, an agent by designation rather than by derivation, and thereby confirmed what the vacancy meant. The classical agent had been an argument. Its substitutes were nominations.

Where does Marcuse look for the agent his colleagues would not name?

Outside the integrated class structure: to the excluded and the colonised, to racial minorities and the unemployed, and later to the student movement, groups whose exclusion from administered affluence, he argued, preserved the refusal that prosperity had bought off in the majority.

The aftershock of the substitute search reached the school’s second generation and produced its most consequential defection, which belongs in outline here and in detail to the companion article on the thinker concerned. Jürgen Habermas, Adorno’s assistant and the Institute’s heir apparent, concluded that the agent problem was not to be solved by finding a new bearer but dissolved by rebuilding the theory’s foundations: if the classical paradigm located emancipation in production and its subject, a reconstructed theory would locate it in communication and its structures, in the presuppositions of undistorted speech that every speaker already honours. The reconstruction, elaborated across the 1970s and gathered in his theory of communicative action, is the most ambitious attempt from inside the school to escape the holding operation without returning to the catechism, and its price is the one the grid predicts: the agent is replaced by a procedure, the revolution by an idealisation built into language itself. Readers who want the ledger of what Habermas kept and what he surrendered, item by item, will find it in the companion study of Habermas and the turn from Marx, which this comparison deliberately does not duplicate. Here it is enough to mark the shape of the whole terrain. Faced with the vacancy, the tradition produced three responses: preserve the space and wait, nominate occupants for it, or rebuild the theory so the space is no longer needed. Classical Marxism’s verdict on all three is that each concedes its point. The critical tradition’s verdict on the classical position is that it never faced the vacancy at all. The comparison, having given both verdicts their evidence, leaves them facing one another, which is where the historical record leaves them too.

The silent third party: the Soviet codification and what it did to both sides

Comparisons of two positions usually hide a third whose presence distorts both, and in this quarrel the third is the official Marxism of the Soviet state. Its relevance is not incidental colour. The codification of dialectical and historical materialism into a state doctrine, taught in party schools, enforced by censorship and examination, and exported as the condition of fraternal recognition, acted on the comparison from outside in two directions at once. It discredited the classical framework’s science claim for a whole generation of Western intellectuals, who watched a purported science of history function as a licensing system for conclusions reached on other grounds. And it supplied the critical theorists with their most intimate evidence about the unity of theory and practice, since the unity existed, in the East, in a form they regarded as the doctrine’s refutation by its own success: theory embodied, practice theorised, and the result an apparatus that shot its theorists. The Frankfurt writers’ insistence on theory’s autonomy cannot be understood as a seminar preference. It was the position of people for whom the alternative’s embodiment had a secret police.

The codification also distorted the classical side’s self defence, in a way the comparison should make visible because it still operates. Western classical Marxists who answered the Frankfurt critique could rarely answer it cleanly, because their tradition’s good name was mortgaged to a state whose conduct they spent their energy explaining, minimising or denouncing in a vocabulary the quarrel had already used up. The Trotskyist tradition is the partial exception and its trajectory is instructive: holding the classical architecture entire, agent, crisis, party, science, it explained the Soviet outcome as a degeneration requiring political rather than theoretical revision, and it produced in Mandel a political economy of genuine power. Yet even that tradition’s history confirms the comparison’s theme from an unexpected angle, since its fidelity to the architecture was preserved in organisations whose scale never matched the theory’s claims, a classical Marxism in the condition of a garrison awaiting a relief column. The point is not mockery; several of the century’s most honourable political lives were lived in that garrison. The point is that the vacancy this article has tracked was not the Frankfurt School’s private neurosis. It was the general condition of Marxist theory outside the states that claimed its name, and the school was simply the institution that made the condition its explicit object, at the price of every other ambition. Anderson’s critique, it should be noted, knows this: his history of the current begins from the same defeats, and his complaint is aimed at the consolation, not at the noticing. The third party’s role in the comparison is to remind the reader that noticing was, at the time, a rarer and braver act than the retrospective literature admits.

Is critical theory still Marxist? The criteria test

The question in this section’s heading is the one readers type into search engines, and it deserves a better instrument than a verdict. The instrument used here is a criteria test: a framework counts as Marxist to the degree that it retains the commitments that make the tradition a tradition, and the comparison’s value lies in watching the score vary by criterion rather than in the total. Four criteria are proposed, each drawn from the classical architecture itself. The critique of political economy as the indispensable analysis of the social order. The theory of ideology as the account of how the order secures belief. The orientation to emancipation as the theory’s interest, distinguishing it from neutral sociology. And the identification of a collective agent whose practice the theory serves and by which it expects to be judged. On the first criterion, critical theory scores a qualified pass: it retained the critique’s categories, decentered their sovereignty, and in its economic wing continued to practise the analysis outright, while in its philosophical wing the categories recede into presupposition. On the second, it scores the highest marks in the tradition’s history, having rebuilt the theory of ideology for conditions its founders never faced. On the third, it scores a full pass with a shadow: the emancipatory interest is the school’s explicit self definition from 1937 onward, and the shadow is that emancipation, severed from any bearer, thins toward an orientation of the theorist’s conscience, a longing that Horkheimer’s last writings state with disarming honesty. On the fourth criterion, it fails by its own confession, and the failure is the subject of this article.

A score sheet of that shape explains why the question has no stable answer and why the disputants talk past one another. Readers who weight the second and third criteria see the school’s Marxism as the tradition’s living core and its orthodoxy as the tradition’s preserved shell. Readers who weight the fourth see a departure, since the agent criterion is not one commitment among others in the classical architecture but the keystone: remove it, and the arch stands, if it stands, by a different engineering. The comparison’s own resolution of the question is architectural rather than verdictive. Critical theory is Marxism in the state the agent absence produces: the same building, honestly surveyed, with the keystone missing and the load redistributed onto ideology critique, cultural analysis and the philosophy of history, which is why those parts of the structure are so much more elaborate in Frankfurt than in the classical original. Whether a building so redistributed deserves the family name is a question about names. Whether it stands is a question about arguments, and the arguments have been given their evidence in the sections above.

What should a reader separate when judging a framework’s Marxism?

Its questions from its answers. Critical theory kept the classical questions, about domination, ideology, crisis and emancipation, while surrendering several classical answers, above all the answer about who would act, and most quarrels over its credentials are really quarrels about which of the two inheritances defines the tradition.

One more consideration belongs to this section, because the identity question has a sociological shadow that fools many inquirers. The school never excommunicated itself: its members described their work as materialist theory in Marx’s succession, quarrelled with the orthodox as insiders quarrel, and treated the classical texts as a patrimony to be interpreted rather than a creed to be repeated. At the same time, the school’s name for itself was never simply Marxism. Horkheimer’s chosen label, critical theory, and the earlier preference for the discreet phrase materialism, were partly protective colouring under conditions of exile and partly a genuine marking of distance: the work claimed the inheritance while declining the identity papers, because the papers, in the form the century issued them, came with a party card attached. Readers who arrive asking whether the school was really Marxist are therefore asking a question the school spent fifty years declining to answer in the form posed, and the criteria test is offered as the respectful substitute: not a yes or a no, but a map of exactly where the continuity runs and where it stops.

The material basis of autonomy: endowment, institute and audience

A materialist comparison should apply its method to the theories themselves, and the material circumstances of the two frameworks differ as sharply as their doctrines. The classical theorist wrote for a movement. His publisher was a party press, his readers were organised workers and their functionaries, his income, if he had one from writing, arrived through the movement’s institutions, and his severest critic was the congress that could expel him. The critical theorist wrote for an institute. The Institute for Social Research existed because Felix Weil, heir to a grain trading fortune, endowed it, and because its administrators, Pollock above all, husbanded the endowment through exile with such skill that the school enjoyed what almost no other Marxist formation has ever possessed: financial independence from parties, states, universities and the market for its entire active life. The independence purchased the autonomy the doctrine celebrated. Theory could afford to be unreconciled, patient and difficult because its material base asked nothing of it except continuation. The classical critics who called the school’s radicalism a pensioner’s radicalism were pointing, however rudely, at this line in the accounts, and a materialist account of the comparison must enter the line rather than flinch from it: the agent absence had an institutional form, and the form was an endowment.

The observation cuts in more directions than the critics usually take it. The endowment also purchased the empirical work, the library that crossed the Atlantic twice, the journal that appeared through the exile years when party presses across Europe were being smashed or absorbed, and the salaries that let Neumann write Behemoth and Fromm design his survey. Independence is a means, and the school’s use of it compares favourably, in the record of works produced, with the movement presses whose output was hostage to every turn of a party line. Nor was the classical side’s material base as pure as the contrast implies: the movement theorist’s dependence ran to apparatuses whose discipline could be as hostile to inquiry as any market, and the tradition’s gravest falsifications were committed not by pensioned independents but by salaried custodians of a going concern. The comparison’s balanced finding on the material row is therefore double. The Frankfurt formation’s independence explains both its integrity and its irresponsibility, its refusal to lie for a movement and its freedom from ever having to answer one. The classical formation’s dependence explains both its seriousness and its servitude, its orientation to real forces and its temptation to certify them. Neither material base produced truth by itself. Each produced a characteristic temptation, and each framework’s history is, among other things, the record of its resistance to its own temptation, a resistance in which, on the evidence assembled here, honours are more even than either side’s mythology allows.

The language of the two theories: movement prose and the defence of difficulty

Anderson’s anatomy included a stylistic charge that deserves its own hearing, because style in this quarrel is not decoration. The classical generation wrote to be read by the class it theorised: Kautsky’s popularisations, Lenin’s pamphlets, Luxemburg’s speeches assume a reader who is busy, unschooled in philosophy and entirely capable of following an argument that respects her intelligence by being clear. The Frankfurt generation wrote prose that excludes that reader by design: Adorno’s sentences, with their nested qualifications and refusal of every resting place, are the extreme case of a general tendency in the current toward the esoteric, the mandarin, the seminar German that even sympathetic translators approach with dread. For the critique, the idiom is the separation made audible: a theory that has lost its addressee writes for other theorists, and the difficulty functions socially as a fence, whatever its intellectual justifications. The charge is strengthened by the school’s own origins, since the Institute’s early publications were models of empirical plainness, and the difficulty deepened in step with the exile and the agent’s recession, exactly as the diagnosis predicts.

The defence of difficulty, which Adorno mounted explicitly, is not a plea of guilty with an explanation. It holds that the clarity prized by movement prose is itself historically compromised: the plain style, the slogan ready paragraph, the text that yields its meaning at a glance, are the native forms of the administered world’s communication, shaped by the newspaper and the advertisement, and a thought that consents to those forms has surrendered its content before the argument begins. Difficulty, on this account, is the prose form of the refusal to reconcile: the sentence that resists consumption enacts, at the level of reading, the same non identity the theory asserts at the level of society, and the reader’s labour is the point, since a truth that costs nothing to receive changes nothing in the receiver. There is real force in the defence, and anyone who has watched a difficult Adorno paragraph suddenly disclose its mechanism knows the experience it describes. There is also a plain evasion inside it, which the comparison should name: a theory that explains its unreadability as a virtue has made itself immune to the most obvious test of a materialist doctrine, which is whether the people whose condition it describes can recognise themselves in it. The classical reader test is crude and it is not nothing. The two idioms, weighed together, repeat the master difference in miniature. Classical prose is a theory with an addressee writing to reach him. Critical prose is a theory without one, writing so as not to be mistaken for the world’s own voice, and each style is exactly as defensible, and exactly as costly, as the situation that produced it.

Why is Adorno so difficult to read?

Partly by conviction: he held that a seamless style would falsely reconcile what his analysis showed to be unreconciled, and that the reader’s effort was the form attention takes in a culture of distraction. Partly by formation: the prose of German academic philosophy, crossed with the aphoristic habits of exile, set the instrument he played.

Aesthetics: why art became a theoretical battleground

Anderson’s charge sheet gave aesthetics a prominent line, the migration of Marxist energy from the factory to the gallery, and the comparison owes the reader the school’s account of why art could carry theoretical weight at all. The account begins with a distinction. Most of what the school wrote about culture concerns the culture industry, art’s administered opposite, and belongs to the theory of ideology. A smaller and stranger body of work, Adorno’s above all, and Benjamin’s at its origin, treats authentic modern art as a form of knowledge: the difficult artwork, by refusing the conventions through which the audience expects to be pleased, preserves an experience of non identity, of the world not exhausted by its exchangeable description, that discursive prose under administered conditions can no longer state directly. On this account the aesthetic turn is not a retreat from cognition into sensibility. It is a relocation of cognition to the one workshop where the material still resisted the concept’s routine violence, and Aesthetic Theory, the vast unfinished summa published after Adorno’s death, is the relocation’s full map: art as the social antithesis of society, true exactly in its refusal to be useful, and therefore the last licensed residence of the utopian impulse in a theory that had struck the impulse’s political address from its records.

The classical tradition’s aesthetics, by contrast, is a minor province: reflections on realism, on the novel as the bourgeois epic, on partisanship in literature, policed at its border by the doctrine of socialist realism in the decades when the tradition had a state. Lukács again stands at the hinge, since his defence of the classical realist novel against modernism was the classical position’s most sophisticated statement and Adorno’s critique of it, in their exchange over commitment and form, the critical position’s. The quarrel’s terms prefigure the whole comparison in miniature. Lukács held that form answers to totality and that the artwork which registers the social whole, however critically, performs the cognition the doctrine needs. Adorno held that under a false whole, the artwork that renders totality smoothly has already lied, and that fracture, difficulty and refusal are the forms honesty takes. Neither position is a taste. Each is the master theory applied to poems and quartets, which is why the aesthetic province, small as it looks on the map, is where seminar students often feel the two frameworks’ difference most physically: the same modernist text, evidence of decadence in one reading and of truth in the other, with the verdict decided in advance by everything this article has discussed.

Why did art become evidence in a theory of society?

Because the school’s theory of ideology required a control case: if administered culture showed consciousness reconciled to the given, then somewhere the unreconciled remainder had to be observable, and the autonomous artwork, useless, difficult and unbought, was the one product of the society that systematically refused the reconciliation.

The party and the institute: two organisational forms of theory

Underneath the doctrinal rows of the grid lies an organisational contrast that the comparison has touched repeatedly and should now state directly, because Anderson’s critique is at bottom a claim about organisational form. Classical Marxism’s theory lived in a party: an organisation with members, a programme, a discipline and a claim on the future. The form imposed virtues and vices in a single package. It forced theory into contact with events at the speed of politics, corrected abstractions against the resistance of real constituencies, and gave ideas consequences, so that a mistaken line was paid for in lost strikes and lost members. It also subordinated inquiry to the organisation’s needs of the hour, punished the theorist who followed an argument past the leadership’s comfort, and, at the limit reached in the East, converted theory into the organisation’s liturgy. The Frankfurt theory lived in an institute: an organisation with a budget, a journal, research divisions and no members to answer for it. The package was likewise single. It protected inquiry across four decades and three continents, let arguments mature at their own pace, and assembled the interdisciplinary teams the method required. It also removed every external check that could tell the theorists their questions had stopped mattering, and it let a collective research programme age, in the end, into two men’s philosophy of history guarded by an endowment.

The contrast disciplines a lazy habit in the literature, which is to treat the school’s turn inward as a choice of temperament by Horkheimer and Adorno. Organisational forms have logics. A party that loses its revolution must either dissolve, lie, or become a state; a theory housed in it shares the fate. An institute that loses its object of hope must either close, sell its services, or refine its understanding of the loss; the Frankfurt institute, uniquely, chose the third and made the refinement a life’s work. Gramsci stands at the comparison’s hinge here as he does in Anderson’s, because his formation was the party and his masterpiece was written in a cell, in the condition of theory severed from organisation by force rather than by endowment. The notebooks’ peculiar combination, classical in their questions, critical in their situation, is what the comparison would predict from his organisational biography, and it is one more reason the Italian’s work functions, for readers of both frameworks, as the standing proof that the two tempers can inhabit one body of thought when history, rather than preference, does the severing.

The Grand Hotel Abyss: the jibe and what survives it

Every long quarrel condenses into an image, and this one’s image was supplied by Lukács, who wrote in a later preface of a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, and assigned the Frankfurt theorists its best rooms. The jibe has outlived most of the arguments it summarised because it is funny, because it is cruel, and because it contains a splinter of truth that the school’s defenders have never quite extracted. Its history repays precision. Lukács, who had himself supplied the school with reification, its master category, spent his maturity inside the movement the school had withdrawn from, recanting his own masterpieces on demand and surviving, by accommodations the hotel’s residents were never asked to make, inside a state that imprisoned his comrades and, briefly, himself. The jibe thus issues from a biography as compromised, in the opposite direction, as the one it targets: contemplation on one side, accommodation on the other, and the twentieth century offering its Marxist intellectuals a choice of corruptions more often than a choice of integrities. Stated so, the image loses its power to end arguments and resumes its proper function, which is to mark the genuine discomfort the school’s position should cause. A theory of emancipation that ends as the furnishing of a comfortable despair has failed at something, whatever the circumstances, and the residents knew it, which is why the abyss in their own writing is never a view. It is a vertigo they reported from inside, in prose that keeps trying to climb down.

Democracy: the province where the reputations reverse

A reader meeting the two frameworks through their reputations expects the classical side to supply the democrats and the critical side the mandarin sceptics, and on the subject of democracy the record reverses the expectation often enough to deserve a section. The classical tradition’s democratic theory is genuinely radical at its root: the Paris Commune as the discovered form of working class rule, universal suffrage defended by Engels as the gauge of the class’s maturity, Luxemburg’s insistence that freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently and her warning that a revolution which strangles public life strangles itself. The same tradition, in power or in waiting, repeatedly subordinated those texts to the trustee logic this article has tracked: the party that embodies the agent’s consciousness may suspend the agent’s expressed opinions in the agent’s name, and the distance from that doctrine to the one party state is measured in circumstances rather than in principle. The classical balance sheet on democracy is thus double in a way its heirs still dispute among themselves, democrats in the founding texts, trustees in the organisational inheritance.

The critical school’s balance sheet is the mirror image. Formed by men who had no illusions about Weimar’s collapse, it treated the liberal Rechtsstaat not as the class enemy’s mask but as a conquest under threat, and its jurists, Neumann above all, wrote the era’s most exact defences of the rule of law’s generality against the prerogative state that dissolved it. In exile the school worked inside the democracies’ war effort and their study of prejudice without converting to a faith in either, and its postwar German writings perform the comparison’s most poignant reversal: the theorists of emancipation as the schoolmasters of a republic, lecturing a student generation that accused them of conservatism for defending institutions their grandfathers had expected history to dissolve. Adorno’s radio talks on education after Auschwitz, with their insistence that the premier demand is that the catastrophe not repeat itself, belong to the founding documents of that republic’s self understanding, and they are the work of a critical theory that had decided, from its evidence, that the barbarism it theorised was not a metaphor. The comparison draws the section’s moral without exaggeration: on democracy, the framework with the agent kept the more dangerous doctrine of the two, because trusteeship is a standing temptation, while the framework without one became, by elimination, a guardian of the forms within which agents, should any form, would have to act. The reputations survive the record in neither direction.

The verdict of the grid: what each framework can and cannot explain

The comparison has deferred its verdict long enough, and the grid’s final column now has to be cashed out in cases. Take the framework’s home questions in turn. Why did the German working class, the most organised in the world, fail to resist its destruction in 1933? The classical framework, in its official Comintern form, answered with the theory of social fascism and the treachery of leaders, an answer that explained the defeat as a failure of will at the top and predicted, catastrophically, that the Nazi episode would be brief and would radicalise the class. The critical framework answered with the structure of character, the authoritarian family, the longing for submission built by a century of patriarchal and bureaucratic formation, and with the fragmentation of the class’s own organisations into milieus that could be closed one by one. On this case the critical explanation is not marginally but categorically superior, and the classical tradition’s own later historiography has quietly absorbed much of it. Why did the postwar decades in the advanced countries bring rising wages, full employment and political stability instead of the predicted polarisation? Here the score reverses in part. The critical framework’s answer, integration through consumption and administration, describes the surface with unmatched fidelity but struggles to say why the settlement was economically possible at all. The classical answer, refined by Mandel and others into a theory of long waves, permanent arms expenditure and the rising organic composition of capital, supplies the economic machinery the description lacks. The complete account of the postwar decades requires Pollock’s administered economy and the crisis theory he thought he had retired, operating together, which is as neat a demonstration as the comparison affords that the two frameworks are partial instruments facing one object.

Extend the cases and the pattern holds with instructive exceptions. Why did the Soviet order, having abolished private ownership of the means of production, reproduce domination in forms its founders’ categories could not name? The critical framework, with its widened concept of domination and its suspicion of administration as such, has the more natural language for the case, and the classical framework’s contortions on it, degeneration, bureaucracy, the transitional epoch indefinitely extended, are the agent architecture attempting to survive its own outcome. Why did the crisis that returned in the 1970s strengthen the political right across the advanced countries rather than the movement the classical theory designated? The case is the agent question in modern dress, and both frameworks strain: the classical, because its subject declined the role at the very moment the script offered it; the critical, because its theory of integration explains the decline so well that it cannot explain the exceptions, the moments and places where subordinate classes did act as subjects, in the strikes and movements that punctuate even the administered decades. A theory of why the agent does not appear owes its readers, eventually, a theory of the appearances, and the school’s work, Marcuse’s honourable attempts aside, never supplied one.

What would count as the agent’s return?

Evidence that economic position is again generating durable, independent organisation with transformative aims at scale: sustained union growth outside state sponsorship, parties rooted in workplaces rather than in media markets, and movements whose demands exceed the terms the existing order can grant without changing its nature.

The verdict, assembled from the cases, is the one the grid announced. The classical framework is the stronger theory of motion: of how the order’s contradictions develop, of what a transformative politics would require, of the stakes. The critical framework is the stronger theory of rest: of why the order persists through its contradictions, of how consent and character and culture do the persisting, of what any transformative politics is actually up against. Motion without rest produces the surprises of 1914 and 1933, repeated at intervals ever since. Rest without motion produces the hotel. A reader equipped with both instruments will still have to judge, case by case, which condition the moment is in, and that judgement, uninsurable by either doctrine, is what the comparison has been training from its first page.

A second worked case: the movements of the late 1960s read twice

The comparison has used the 1930s as its laboratory; the late 1960s supply the second laboratory, and the experiment there ran in the opposite direction, which is what makes it valuable. For a few years, across the advanced countries, the agent question appeared to reopen of its own accord: universities occupied, factories struck in waves that the official unions had not called and could not at first control, a general strike in France in May and June of 1968 that brought the continent’s most administered society within sight of a vacuum of power. The classical framework read the moment as its script resuming after intermission. Its militants, many of them young converts to one or another orthodoxy, supplied the movement with its vocabulary of vanguards, programmes and transitional demands, and where the movement’s mass base was industrial, as in France and Italy, the classical categories genuinely organised the experience of millions. The critical framework read the same moment through its founder generation’s suspicion, and the reading split the school in public. Marcuse, in California, greeted the students as the catalyst his theory had been waiting for and wrote for them with undisguised hope. Adorno, in Frankfurt, saw in the movement’s theatricality and its impatience with theory the lineaments of the administered world’s own activism, action as a product, and his refusal to bless the occupation of his own institute completed the breach between the theory and the only claimant to its practice that ever presented itself in person.

History’s grading of the two readings is, characteristically, mixed enough to instruct. The classical reading was right that the moment was real: the strikes were not simulations, the French state did totter, the Italian autumn of the following year did extract concessions on a scale the settlement had never before granted, and the movements’ defeats were defeats, not exposures of their nonexistence. The critical reading was right about the moment’s metabolism: the energies were absorbed with a speed that vindicated the integration thesis almost experimentally, the revolutionary organisations reproduced the authoritarian structures their theory existed to oppose, and within a decade the revolt’s most durable products were cultural and professional, a generation’s march through the institutions it had meant to abolish, into tenured custody of the critique itself. A seminar that wants the whole comparison in one episode could do worse than to stop here, because the episode contains the comparison’s final asymmetry. The classical framework supplies the grammar in which such moments are lived by their participants; no one occupies a factory in the vocabulary of the culture industry. The critical framework supplies the grammar in which such moments are understood afterward, when the occupation has become a reunion and the vocabulary needs auditing. A living tradition would need both grammars in one speaker. The century, which distributed them between two institutions that could barely address one another, did not produce the speaker, and the reader who feels the lack has understood the article.

America as the test site both frameworks had to face

Every European Marxism eventually had to answer Werner Sombart’s question of 1906, why there is no socialism in the United States, and the two frameworks’ answers amount to their theories in national miniature. The classical answers ran through exceptionalism: a working class without feudalism’s memory, bought by high wages, divided by immigration and race, its radicalism wrecked, in Sombart’s image, on reefs of roast beef and apple pie. The explanation was embarrassed from the start by the violence of American labour history, which suggested not an absent class struggle but a repeatedly defeated one, and the classical tradition’s American organisations lived the embarrassment as their biography. The critical framework encountered America not as a question but as a residence. The Institute’s exile moved its centre of gravity to New York and Los Angeles for a decade and a half, and its American experience is written into the work at the level of evidence: the culture industry chapter is a report on Hollywood and network radio, the authoritarian personality a study of American subjects, the analyses of prejudice and propaganda commissioned by American Jewish organisations confronting American demagogues. What the school found in the freest and richest capitalist society was the refutation of the consolation that domination required dictatorship: here was integration without terror, consent manufactured by abundance, the administered world in its benign form, which is why the American writings are at once the school’s most empirical and its most despairing. The comparison draws the moral the two answers suggest together. America was the classical framework’s anomaly, the place its agent most conspicuously failed to form, and the critical framework’s laboratory, the place its theory of the failure was built. A framework is often best understood by the country it cannot explain, and by that measure the United States made critical theory as surely as Germany unmade classical Marxism.

A third worked case: the end of the Soviet order

The collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1991 is the last of the comparison’s great natural experiments, and the grading of the two frameworks against it is delicate, because both claimed the result and both claims contain a portion of truth small enough to be dangerous. The critical framework’s claim is the more straightforward. It had argued, from Horkheimer’s authoritarian state essay onward, that the Soviet order was a form of domination irreducible to its property forms, that abolishing private capital had not abolished the separation of the producers from the direction of their lives, and that the system’s official Marxism functioned as ideology in the school’s exact sense, a machinery of legitimation whose collapse would reveal how little belief it had commanded. The events obliged with uncomfortable fidelity: the doctrine’s custodians abandoned it with a speed that suggested the integration had always been thinner than the apparatus, and the population’s response confounded, one final time, every prediction made from the classical script, in several directions at once. Against this, the classical framework’s heirs entered their explanations: the collapse as the crisis of a degenerated formation, as the revenge of the law of value on an economy that had suppressed it, as the defeat of a besieged experiment by encirclement and arms races. The explanations are not worthless, and the economic strand among them, concerning the system’s declining capacity to innovate and provide, belongs to the critique of political economy’s genuine territory. But the comparison’s verdict on the case must record the asymmetry of embarrassment. The framework whose theory of ideology predicted that a legitimating doctrine could evaporate overnight was confirmed in its specialism. The framework whose agent and direction were supposed to be embodied in the state concerned spent the event explaining why its own flagship had never truly flown its flag, an explanation it had been rehearsing, by then, for sixty years.

Reopening the agent question: composition, evidence and the standing invitation

The agent question is not closed by either framework, because it is not, at bottom, a doctrinal question at all. It is an empirical one about the composition and conduct of subordinate classes, and it reopens whenever the composition changes. The classical agent was specified by a particular industrial structure: large factories, homogeneous skills, dense urban communities, a lifetime’s employment under one roof and one union. That structure has been dissolving in the advanced economies for two generations, under pressures of automation, relocation and the shift to services, and the question whether a working class in the doctrine’s sense persists through the dissolution is a genuine research problem, treated on its own evidence in the companion study of whether the working class still exists. The comparison’s interest is narrower: what each framework does with the compositional facts. The classical response, in its careful versions, redescribes the class: wage dependence, not the factory, was always the criterion, and by that criterion the class has grown to include most of the population of the advanced societies, a redefinition that saves the agent by enlarging it while quietly dropping the properties, concentration, discipline, homogeneity, that were supposed to make it revolutionary. The critical response notes that the enlargement dissolves the agent’s classical virtues precisely as its predecessors’ integration did, and that a class coextensive with the population is a constituency, not a subject.

Marcuse’s integration thesis, whose fullest statement is anatomised in the companion guide to One-Dimensional Man, is the point at which the two responses meet and can be tested against each other, because integration makes a prediction the compositional debate can check: if affluence and administration genuinely neutralise antagonism, then periods of stagnation and insecurity should, by the same mechanisms, de integrate, releasing the negativity the affluence had bound. The decades since the postwar settlement ended offer a natural experiment, and the results are the mixed kind that honest comparison exists to report. Insecurity returned; antagonism returned with it; but the antagonism’s political expressions ran in several directions at once, toward the defence of the old settlement, toward nationalism and the politics of cultural injury, and only partially toward the classical destination. That distribution is the critical framework’s home terrain, the filtering of grievance through character and culture, and it is simultaneously the classical framework’s standing reproach, since a grievance that goes everywhere has not yet found the form in which it could go somewhere in particular. The agent question, reopened by events, thus returns the reader to the exact spot where the comparison began: a vacancy, two theories of the vacancy, and a world that keeps supplying evidence to both. The frameworks do not settle the question. They are, at their best, the two most disciplined ways of not settling it prematurely.

Afterlives: how the two frameworks travelled

A framework’s afterlife is evidence about it, and the two afterlives diverge in a pattern the comparison should record. Critical theory travelled by translation and by syllabus. Its texts crossed into English slowly and selectively, a generation after their composition, carried by a history of the school published in 1973 that gave Anglophone readers the institute as a narrative before they had most of the books, and its natural home became the university’s humanities and social theory programmes, where its concepts, reification, the culture industry, instrumental reason, circulate as instruments for reading texts and media. The classical framework travelled by organisation and by historiography. Its political carriers dwindled, but its scholarly progeny include the great Marxist historians of the postwar decades, E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm above all, whose work demonstrates, against any obituary, that the classical architecture could still organise empirical inquiry of the first rank when wielded by minds formed before its custodians froze it. Thompson’s assault on Althusserian theoreticism in The Poverty of Theory deliberately exempted little, yet its heroes are the classical virtues: evidence, agency, the moral economy of real people, against every philosophy that dissolves them. Set the two afterlives side by side and a final irony of the comparison appears. The framework that theorised the agent lost its organisations and kept its readers; the framework that theorised the readers’ entrapment lost the argument about agency and inherited the academy. Each afterlife is, in the other’s vocabulary, a symptom, and the symmetry should make partisans of both traditions slower to celebrate.

The transmission history also carries a warning for users of either framework, which the research literature illustrates abundantly. Concepts that travel by syllabus arrive without their evidence: reification without the commodity analysis, the culture industry without monopoly capital, class consciousness without the factory. Concepts that travel by organisation arrive without their questions: the line without the inquiry that produced it. The comparison’s discipline, grid, evidence column, criteria, is offered as a prophylactic against both arrival states, since a framework is healthiest in the hands of a reader who knows what its author was trying to explain and what the explanation cost. That is, in the end, the only form in which the inheritance of either tradition is safe.

The shared blind spots: what neither framework saw well

A comparison that ends in a scored draw between two frameworks owes the reader one further honesty: the list of things both handled badly, since a shared blindness is more instructive than a divided one. Two stand out across the whole century the article has surveyed. The first is gender. The classical tradition inherited from Engels a genuine theory of the family’s origin in property and then largely shelved it, treating the woman question as a department of the social question that the revolution would settle in passing; the Frankfurt school, despite placing the patriarchal family at the centre of its psychology, studied it almost exclusively as the factory of sons, and its account of authority rarely asks what the structure cost the women who operated it. The feminist Marxists who rebuilt the topic from the 1970s drew on both frameworks and were answerable to neither, which is the usual fate of a blind spot once it is named. The second is empire. The classical tradition possessed an imperialism theory and a colonial practice, in the Comintern’s theses, that sat awkwardly together, and its European heartland theorists wrote as if history’s stage were the North Atlantic. The critical school, an institute of refugees from a racial state, analysed antisemitism with unmatched depth while saying remarkably little about the colonial empires whose wealth underwrote the Europe it fled, or about the colonised subjects whose revolutions were proceeding, in its decades, on other continents. Marcuse’s late gestures toward the Third World are the exception that outlines the silence. Neither framework’s heirs can afford the silences, and the comparison records them here not as a fashionable coda but as a control on its own verdicts: two instruments may divide a field of vision between them and still share the same edge, beyond which neither was looking.

A caution against the grid: the plurality inside each framework

The grid method has one systematic defect, and intellectual honesty requires ending the analytical sections by exhibiting it. Frameworks do not hold positions; people do, in decades, against opponents, and both sides of this comparison contain ranges wide enough to embarrass any table. Classical Marxism includes Kautsky’s patient evolutionism and Luxemburg’s revolutionary spontaneity, Lenin’s voluntarism and Plekhanov’s determinism, the Austro Marxists’ democratic road and the Comintern’s insurrectionary one, and several of its internal quarrels, over the party, over the state, over imperialism, were more consequential than its quarrel with Frankfurt. Critical theory includes Fromm’s humanist optimism, expelled from the inner circle by the decade’s end, and Horkheimer’s trajectory from the militant programme of the 1930s to a late conservatism of longing that disowned much of the New Left in terms the classical critics could have drafted; it includes Benjamin’s messianic Marxism, which the Institute’s directors handled like a live wire, and Marcuse’s willingness, unique among the seniors, to go looking for the missing agent in person. A reader who has absorbed the grid should therefore treat its rows as centres of gravity, not as party lines, and should expect every strong claim in this article to be counterexampled from inside the framework it describes by a text the comparison has not had room to grade. The defect is real and the method survives it, for the same reason a map survives the confession that coastlines are fractal: the question is never whether the simplification exists but whether it is placed where the territory’s main forces run. The agent absence is offered in that spirit, as the line along which the maximum explanatory work gets done, and a reader who finds a text that breaks the line has not refuted the comparison. That reader has begun to continue it.

Combination and its price: what a synthesis would have to surrender

Readers who have followed the comparison this far usually ask whether the two frameworks can be combined, and the question deserves a more disciplined answer than the ecumenical shrug it usually receives. Combination has been attempted, repeatedly, and the attempts teach the price list. Gramsci is the great precedent inside the tradition: a classical revolutionary whose prison work absorbed the superstructures into the centre of the analysis without surrendering the agent, because his party, his defeat and his cell let him hold both ends of the problem at once. His example shows combination is possible, and its conditions: it required a thinker formed by practice, working on the materials of a specific national history, in enforced leisure. It has not proved mass producible. The academic combinations of a later period, which set the culture industry beside the labour theory of value in a syllabus and call the juxtaposition a synthesis, evade the difficulty, because the frameworks do not merely emphasise different topics. They contradict one another at the load bearing points: on whether history has a direction guaranteed by a subject, on whether the economy determines in the last instance, on whether theory’s truth is certified by a practice. A combination that keeps all the comfortable parts of both has not combined them; it has anthologised them.

An honest synthesis, on the evidence of this comparison, would have to be built as a division of labour under a stated rule, and the rule the cases suggest is temporal and diagnostic: use the classical framework for the theory of the order’s dynamics and for the criteria by which a genuine agent would be recognised; use the critical framework for the theory of the order’s persistence and for the mechanisms that decide whether a candidate agent is one in fact. Each framework then polices the other’s characteristic vice: the classical side forbids the critical side its drift toward totalised despair, by demanding the evidence of motion; the critical side forbids the classical side its drift toward wishful designation, by demanding the evidence of consciousness and character. What must be surrendered is considerable and should be named, since a synthesis that advertises no losses is a brochure. From the classical side: the guarantee, the philosophy of history as a certificate, the science claim in its strong form. From the critical side: the totalisation of domination, the refusal of programme as a principle rather than a predicament, the aesthetic of the fragment. What survives the surrenders is recognisably descended from both and identical to neither, which is what a synthesis is. Whether the result should still be called Marxism is the identity question of an earlier section returning by the back door, and the answer is the same: judge it by its handling of the questions, and let the name follow the work.

Misreadings the comparison exists to correct

Five misreadings circulate so reliably around this material that correcting them is a service in itself, and each correction is a compressed version of a section above. The first holds that the Frankfurt School rejected Marx. It did not: Marx remained its decisive source, its members understood their work as his tradition’s continuation under changed conditions, and what they rejected was the custodianship of the tradition by parties and states, together with the answers those custodians forbade anyone to revise. A reader who cannot distinguish rejecting a doctrine’s heirs from rejecting the doctrine will misread every page of the school’s work, and much of its century.

The second misreading holds that the school replaced economics with culture. The correction is bibliographical before it is interpretive: Grossmann’s breakdown theory was the Institute’s first flagship, Pollock’s state capitalism its working economic hypothesis, Neumann’s Behemoth an economic anatomy of the Nazi order, and the culture industry itself an analysis of a branch of monopoly capital. What the school replaced was not economics but economics’ monopoly: the claim that the cultural and psychological provinces are waiting rooms where nothing is decided. The third misreading treats the school’s pessimism as temperament, a disposition its members brought to the evidence. The correction is chronological: the pessimism accumulates across the work in step with the events, is mildest in the confident programme of 1930 and darkest in the texts written while Europe’s Jews were being murdered and the working class movements of the continent lay destroyed, and a disposition that tracks the century’s catastrophes that closely is more plausibly called a finding. Temperament may have selected the finders. It did not manufacture what they found.

The fourth misreading infers, from the surrender of the proletariat as agent, that the school abandoned the analysis of class. The inference confuses a role with a topic. The Frankfurt texts are saturated with class: with the transformation of the middle strata, the proletarianisation of white collar employees, the integration of the organised working class as a process with mechanisms and managers, the recomposition of ruling groups under state capitalism. What vanished is not class but the class’s assigned part in the philosophy of history, and the distinction matters practically, because readers who believe the school ignored class skip the parts of its work, on the family wage, on white collar resentment, on the sociology of the administered employee, that a revived class analysis most needs. The fifth misreading is the one this article fenced off in its opening paragraphs, and it returns here because the fence needs a gatekeeper’s summary. The internal Marxist criticism of the school, Anderson’s and its relatives, and the external narrative that casts the school as a conspiracy against Western civilisation are not stronger and weaker versions of one claim. They contradict each other at every load bearing point: the internal criticism faults the school for abandoning a politics the narrative says it was secretly executing; the internal criticism documents an institute of exiles with a publishing programme, the narrative requires a apparatus of hidden influence; the internal criticism is checkable against the record and has been checked, refined and partly answered from it. Conflating the two does not strengthen either. It merely relieves the reader of the labour this comparison has been at pains to make unavoidable, the labour of distinguishing an argument from an atmosphere.

A sixth confusion, of a different and milder kind, deserves a sentence because it arrives with the search traffic and misdirects genuine readers. Critical theory and the critical legal studies from which critical race theory later grew are distinct formations with distinct problems: the first a German institute’s response to the crisis of Marxism, the second an American legal academy’s response to the limits of civil rights jurisprudence, sharing an adjective, a loose inheritance of suspicion toward liberal neutrality, and little else. Neither is a synonym for the other, and using the Frankfurt record to settle questions about American legal scholarship, or the reverse, produces errors in both directions at once. Precision about which critical theory is under discussion is the beginning of every other precision this article has attempted.

The quarrel in seven stations

A comparison conducted by themes can lose the thread of time, so the whole argument is gathered here into the sequence that produced it. The first station is 1844, when a twenty five year old exile in Paris derives the proletariat as the universal class from the logic of its chains, and the architecture exists complete in embryo: agent, direction, critique, hope. The second is 1902, when the party formula is codified and the trustee enters the architecture, consciousness henceforth something an organisation carries to its class. The third is 1923, when Lukács and Korsch attempt the philosophical rescue of the doctrine from inside the movement and are condemned for the attempt, and the questions they asked begin their migration out of the hall. The fourth is 1937, when Horkheimer names the migration’s destination, critical theory defined against the traditional kind, in the same decade that the agent’s file fills with the survey returns, the exile and the camps. The fifth is 1944, when two exiles in California write the philosophy of history of the whole experience, enlightenment reverting to myth, and the guarantee is formally surrendered. The sixth is 1964, when the missing agent is sought one last time among the excluded and the young, and the search’s mixed fortune demonstrates, in the school’s own house, what the vacancy costs anyone who tries to fill it by nomination. The seventh is 1976, when the tradition’s own historian delivers the anatomy of the entire development, and the quarrel achieves the form in which this article has presented it: two frameworks, one evidence, and an absence at the centre that each explains by the other’s lights. The stations are not a progress and they are not a decline. They are the record of an idea being kept alive, at rising cost, through a century that was determined to test it to destruction, and a reader who holds the seven dates holds the comparison.

Reading the two literatures: a protocol

Comparisons end, and reading begins, and the article closes its argument with the practical discipline its sections imply. Read the classical literature first in its own strongest order: the 1844 introduction for the agent’s derivation, the Manifesto for the architecture in motion, the first volume of Capital for the object in its purity, and the political writings on France for the state in its exceptions, resisting the manuals that digest the sequence into laws. Read the critical literature against it in pairs, since its texts are answers and sound like riddles without the questions: Horkheimer’s programme essay of 1937 against the orthodoxy it refuses, the culture industry chapter against the political economy it presupposes, the studies of authority against the consciousness problem they were built to solve, Anderson’s anatomy last, as the audit of the whole estate, with the defence’s evidence, the catalogue of the Institute’s empirical decades, kept open beside it. Two suspicions should accompany the reading throughout, one for each side. Suspect every classical text of knowing the ending in advance, and check its predictions against the dates. Suspect every critical text of declining to imagine an ending at all, and check its diagnoses for the exits they forbid themselves to name. A reader who keeps both suspicions in working order has acquired the comparative instrument this article exists to transfer, and will find, in the rest of the series, a dozen further quarrels in which to use it.

In which order should a beginner read the two frameworks?

In the order history imposed: the classical architecture first, because the critical theory is unintelligible except as its revision, then the hinge texts of 1923, then the programme and the research of the 1930s, then the exile masterpieces, with the internal critique reserved for the end, when the reader can grade it.

For students and exam candidates

Build every answer to a comparison question on the single difference from which the others follow, and say so in the opening lines: examiners reward the candidate who can show that the object, the method, the economics, the ideology and the science all shift because the agent shifted, over the candidate who lists contrasts like exhibits. The six differences grid in this article is designed to be memorised as a structure rather than as six facts, and the quickest way to fix it is to copy it into a study card system such as the VaultBook study notes for this series, one card per row, with the evidence column on the reverse: fascism’s mass support, the Soviet outcome and postwar consumption are the three exhibits that answer half the questions this topic generates. Two traps account for most lost marks. The first is the caricature that the school swapped economics for culture, refutable in one sentence by naming Grossmann, Pollock and Neumann. The second is treating the pessimism as a personality trait rather than as a conclusion with premises that can be examined. Timed practice and annotated model answers for the whole cluster are gathered in the Frankfurt School exam guide, which applies the grid discipline under examination conditions.

For teachers and seminar leaders

The comparison teaches best as a structured controversy, and the grid is built to be issued as one. Give the seminar the six rows in advance, assign the classical statement of each difference to one group and the critical statement to another, and reserve the evidence column for plenary argument, since the column is where the frameworks stop being vocabularies and become rival readings of the same century. Anderson’s diagnosis then works as an assessment instrument: a strong seminar will notice that his explanation of the school is itself a piece of classical method applied to the school’s history, and that the school’s best defence, that it followed the object as the object migrated, is a claim about evidence that the seminar can test against the catalogue of the Institute’s empirical work. Set the two accusations, resignation and economism, as paired essays, and require each essay to concede the strongest sentence of the opposing charge before answering it; the exercise reproduces, in miniature, the method of the whole topic. The common failure mode to warn against is the debate society version, in which positions are adopted for the afternoon. Insist instead that every claim be tied to a date: 1914, 1933, 1937, 1964, 1976. The dates are the argument.

For researchers, historians, and journalists

Three cautions govern serious work at this junction. First, the primary literature is stratified in ways that punish quotation from memory: the school’s positions changed across five decades, the canonical texts exist in competing translations and editions, and a sentence from the exuberant programme of 1930 cannot be conscripted to gloss the negations of 1966 without argument. Cite by text and year, and treat the secondary literature’s Frankfurt, a single dark sage dispensing cultural pessimism, as a reception artefact rather than a source. Second, keep the analytical question of this article separate from the polemical career of the label so often attached to the school. That career has its own documented history, of usages, revivals and a conspiracy narrative whose claims collapse against the personnel record, and it is treated in full in the companion history of how the term cultural Marxism travelled; journalists who merge the two questions will find they have answered neither. Third, the empirical claims in play are checkable and should be checked: the Institute’s surveys, scales and studies survive with their methods exposed, Anderson’s anatomy can be verified against publication histories, and the strongest version of every position in this comparison was built, by its author’s intention, to be argued with on evidence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the difference between critical theory and classical Marxism?

The two differ across six connected points: the agent of change, the object of analysis, the method, the place of economics, the theory of ideology, and the stance toward science. Classical Marxism names the working class as history’s transformative subject, studies the capitalist economy as the order’s motor, proceeds as a science of history, treats ideology as false consciousness dispelled by organisation, and unites theory with a movement’s practice. Critical theory, while descending from the same texts, concluded that the designated subject had been absorbed into the order, widened its object to culture, psyche and reason itself, joined psychoanalysis and sociology to its method, decentered the economy without dropping it, rebuilt ideology as a machinery of integration, and defended theory’s independence when practice was unavailable.

Q: Did critical theory abandon the working class?

The direction of the verb is the disputed point. The school’s own account is that history withdrew the agent before theory registered the loss: the class that was supposed to overthrow the order voted for war in 1914, failed to defend itself in 1933, and after 1945 was absorbed into rising consumption and administered prosperity. The Frankfurt writers measured this process in their research rather than merely lamenting it, and they refused to nominate a replacement subject on wishful grounds. Critics inside Marxism answer that registering a defeat became, over decades, a way of ratifying it, and that a theory which stops expecting its agent will reliably stop finding one. Both positions are argued from the same evidence, which is why the question remains the live centre of the comparison.

Q: Did the Frankfurt School abandon economics?

No, and the shelf of work refutes the claim directly. Henryk Grossmann’s 1929 study of accumulation and breakdown was the Institute’s first major publication and an orthodox piece of Marxist crisis theory. Friedrich Pollock, the school’s economic organiser, developed the state capitalism thesis that quietly governs its later philosophy. Franz Neumann’s Behemoth analysed the Nazi system as a monopolistic capitalist economy, and Otto Kirchheimer’s work joined law to material interest throughout. What changed was rank, not presence. Economics lost its position as the single explanatory foundation from which everything else was derived, becoming one province of a wider analysis of domination. The caricature persists because the school’s famous books are philosophical, but its economics continued underneath them, in Pollock’s case as the very premise that made the philosophy necessary.

Q: What did Perry Anderson argue about Western Marxism?

In Considerations on Western Marxism, published in 1976, Anderson argued that the Marxism of Western Europe after 1918 formed a single, recognisable deformation with a single cause. Cut off from any mass revolutionary practice by the defeats that followed the First World War, the theory of Lukács, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and their successors migrated from its classical ground in economics and politics toward philosophy, method and aesthetics. Its language grew esoteric, its tone pessimistic, and its questions became the questions of intellectuals separated from the class their doctrine concerned. Anderson wrote as a Marxist, not an enemy, and his exception proves the argument’s precision: Gramsci, the one figure who remained a practising party leader, stayed closest to the classical concerns of strategy and power. The essay remains the strongest internal criticism the current has received.

Q: Is critical theory still Marxist?

It depends on which inherited commitment is made the test. By descent, self understanding and the critique of political economy, yes: the school worked from Marx’s texts, called its enterprise materialist, and never surrendered the emancipatory interest that separates the tradition from neutral sociology. Its theory of ideology is arguably the most developed the tradition has produced. By the test of the agent, no: classical Marxism is built around a named collective subject whose practice theory serves, and critical theory confessed that it could not find that subject and declined to invent one. The cleanest verdict is architectural. Critical theory is the same building with the keystone removed and the load redistributed onto ideology critique, cultural analysis and the philosophy of history, which is why those parts are so much more elaborate in Frankfurt than in the original design.

Q: What did critical theory add to Marx?

Four additions stand out. It added a psychology: through Fromm’s social character and the later authoritarian personality research, it explained how domination gets inside the dominated, forming people who can desire the authority they resent, something the classical theory of ideology could describe only from outside. It added a theory of mass culture as an industry, in which standardised entertainment performs political work. It added the critique of instrumental reason, the argument that the rationality of means and ends, generalised, becomes itself a form of rule. And it added an account of the state administered economy, from Pollock, in which crisis could be managed and politics displaced economics as the decisive arena. Each addition was an answer to a failure of prediction in the inherited doctrine, which is the school’s own account of why the additions were necessary.

Q: Why does critical theory seem so pessimistic?

Because its conclusions were drawn during the worst decades its tradition has known, and because it refused the consolations available on both sides. Its theorists watched the most organised working class in Europe collapse before fascism, fled into exile, observed a victorious revolutionary state become a bureaucracy, and then studied a prosperity that integrated the opposition it was supposed to radicalise. A theory formed on that evidence will not sound like the doctrine of 1900, when the movement grew at every election. The pessimism also has a methodological source: the school held that a false consolation is worse than none, since premature optimism about the order’s critics disarms them more reliably than despair. Whether the darkness is proportionate is arguable, and the internal Marxist critique argues it is not. That it is a conclusion rather than a temperament is the record’s plain showing.

Q: Did critical theory have a theory of practice?

It had a theory of what practice becomes when its classical form is blocked, which its critics regard as an evasion and its defenders as the only honest option on offer. The classical doctrine unites theory and practice in a movement; the school replied that, in the absence of a movement capable of the role, the unity cannot be performed and can only be counterfeited, usually by subordinating thought to an apparatus. Its alternative was the preservation of critical consciousness in autonomous theory: exact, unreconciled negation of the given, held against a future practice no theorist could schedule. Adorno insisted this was a diminished thing, a message kept against a time its keeper would not see. The position’s dignity and its sterility are the same fact, and the comparison between the frameworks is, in large part, an argument about which of those two words deserves the emphasis.

Q: Which of the two frameworks is more useful today?

Usefulness divides by the question being asked, and a reader who chooses once for all purposes will misuse both. For analysing how the economic order develops, where its crises gather, and what a transformative politics would materially require, the classical framework remains the stronger instrument; nothing in the critical literature replaces the critique of political economy. For analysing why the order persists through its crises, how consent is manufactured, why grievance so rarely becomes the politics the grievance seems to imply, the critical framework has no rival inside the tradition. The practical rule the comparison suggests is diagnostic: establish first whether the puzzle in front of you is a puzzle of motion or a puzzle of rest, of change failing to be explained or of stability failing to be explained, and then take the framework whose home ground the puzzle occupies.

Q: Can critical theory and classical Marxism be combined?

Yes, but only at a price that honest combination should declare. The frameworks contradict one another at load bearing points: whether history carries a guarantee, whether the economy determines in the last instance, whether theory is certified by practice. A merger that preserves every comfortable element of both is an anthology, not a synthesis. What the cases support is a disciplined division of labour, in which the classical framework supplies the theory of the order’s dynamics and the criteria for recognising a genuine agent, while the critical framework supplies the theory of the order’s persistence and the tests a candidate agent must pass in consciousness and character. Each then restrains the other’s characteristic vice, despair on one side and wishful designation on the other. Gramsci, who held the party and the prison cell in one biography, remains the precedent that the combination can be lived, and the difficulty of repeating him is the measure of its cost.

Q: How does the agent absence organise the other five differences?

Because each of the other differences is a working adjustment to the same vacancy. Without an agent to act on the economy, the object of study widens from production to everything that prevents action, which brings culture, family and psyche into the frame. Without an agent whose consciousness follows from its position, the method needs instruments for recalcitrant consciousness, which brings psychoanalysis and the sociology of rationalisation. Without an agent summoned by crisis, economics loses its eschatological function and the state’s management of crisis becomes central. Without an agent to be armed by unmasking, ideology stops being an error awaiting correction and becomes a structure of integration. And without an agent to wield science, science itself becomes an object of suspicion, one more administered power. Remove the keystone and every arch in the building has to be re engineered, which is exactly the Frankfurt record.

Q: What should a student separate between a framework’s questions and its answers?

Separate the inventory of problems a framework teaches you to see from the solutions it historically supplied, because the two inheritances age at different rates. Critical theory kept the classical questions almost entire: how domination reproduces itself, why the dominated consent, what crises do to consciousness, what emancipation would require. It surrendered or suspended several classical answers, the guaranteed agent, the directional history, the science that certifies in advance. Most examination errors, and most polemical ones, come from grading a framework on the fused package, so that a student either swallows the answers with the questions or discards the questions with the answers. The grid method exists to prevent exactly that fusion: row by row, it lets you credit a framework with the sharpest formulation of a problem while disputing, on evidence, the solution it proposed.

Q: Why did critical theory turn toward culture and psyche?

Because the evidence drove it there, in a sequence that can be dated. The Institute’s founding problem, under Horkheimer from 1930, was the failure of economic position to generate the consciousness the classical doctrine predicted. Its German research located part of the missing mechanism in the family, where character is formed, and named the result the authoritarian character. Fascism then demonstrated that the psyche was not a private matter but a political battlefield, since a movement of domination had mobilised longing, resentment and submission at mass scale. Exile added a second exhibit: a culture industry that organised leisure and desire as branches of production. Culture and psyche were not chosen as more congenial topics than political economy. They were the locations where the order’s stability was actually being manufactured, and the theory followed its object.

Q: How does each framework explain its own historical moment?

Each framework’s categories are its moment, generalised. Classical Marxism arose with mass labour movements filling the streets and the ballot boxes, and its confidence, its party form and its crisis theory are that experience written as doctrine: history appeared to be assembling its agent in public, on schedule. Critical theory arose from the same movement’s wreckage, from the war votes of 1914, the failed revolutions, the fascist victory over the strongest working class in the world, the bureaucratic outcome in the East and the consumer integration of the postwar West. Its signature concepts, integration, the culture industry, the authoritarian personality, are obstruction reports: each names a mechanism by which the expected subject was unmade or prevented. Read side by side, the two bodies of concepts amount to a double history of the same century, told once in expectation and once in retrospect.

Q: What evidence would make the classical framework’s agent reappear?

The classical claim is empirical at root, so its revival would be an empirical event, and its shape can be specified in advance. The decisive evidence would be durable organisation arising from economic position itself: sustained growth of independent unions rooted in workplaces rather than sponsored from above, political formations whose membership and discipline come from the class’s daily institutions, and collective action whose demands press beyond what the existing property order can concede without ceasing to be itself. Episodic protest, however large, would not settle the question, since neither framework doubts that crowds gather; the classical agent is defined by the conversion of position into consciousness and of consciousness into a durable counter power. Were that conversion to recur at scale, the critical framework’s central premise would lapse with the conditions that produced it, and its own method, which insists that theories answer to events, would be the first to say so.