The Marxist Origins of Political Correctness

[Myrhaf]

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Strategikon has a great video up on the origins of political correctness and the New Left in the Frankfurt School.

The New Left's cultural critique of capitalism has been a fabulous success compared to the Old Left's economic emphasis. Marxist economics was demolished by the Austrian economists and Marxist politics was ruined by its own bloody history of totalitarianism. But the New Left is now our cultural ideal and is indoctrinated into children in government schools. It has infiltrated every aspect of our culture to the point that it is hard to see because there is nothing else to distinguish it from.

The New Left was able to evolve so easily from the Old Left because they shared the same goal: the destruction of capitalism. It should be remembered that the first faction to fight for that goal was the religious conservatives. Marx secularized their arguments against capitalism. A big story in the coming decades could be the rapprochement of the New Left and the religious conservatives as they find common ground in their struggle against selfish, worldly capitalism.

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View the full article

[lidryn]

Video just isn't my medium of choice for scholarship, I guess. I have a hard time with audio too, so that might put me at odds with some authorities...

Anyway, the origins of PC have fascinated me for some time. If you want to pursue a print study, please consider these.

first, William Lind's remarks (which are no doubt the substance of the video):

Lind, William S. The Origins of Political Correctness: An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind. n.d. retrieved 29 May, 2007 http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html.

This seems to be a more complete treatment, however:

“Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology. Edited by William S. Lind.

A Product of the Free Congress Foundation. November, 2004. retrieved 29 May, 2007

http://www.freecongress.org/PC_Essays/B_In...chapter_one.pdf.

Includes this quote most relevant to the question of origins:

"Just what is “Political Correctness?” “Political Correctness” is in fact cultural

Marxism – Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. The effort to translate

Marxism from economics into culture did not begin with the student rebellion of the

1960s. It goes back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist

Antonio Gramsci. In 1923, in Germany, a group of Marxists founded an institute devoted

to making the translation, the Institute of Social Research (later known as the Frankfurt

School). One of its founders, George Lukacs, stated its purpose as answering the

question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilization?” The Frankfurt School gained

profound influence in American universities after many of its leading lights fled to the

United States in the 1930s to escape National Socialism in Germany...."

However (which precipitated this pedantic little reply)....

JSPES [Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies], Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter 2002 )

pp. 409-444

Political Correctness and the Ideological Struggle: From Lenin and Mao to Marcuse and Foucault

Frank Ellis

ABSTRACT:

The first use of the term political correctness can be traced to the period between 1895-1921 when Lenin was trying to achieve two goals: first, to secure ascendancy over his revolutionary peers; and second, after 1917, to consolidate the party's control over the new Soviet state. This article explores the Leninist origins of political correctness and its evolution since 1917. The author analyses the exceptional importance of "correctness" in the Maoist variant and, subsequently, through Maoism, its influence on the New Left and the contemporary manifestation of political correctness which emerged as a public issue in the West at the end of the 1980s.

ACCESS:

by subscription http://www.jspes.org/online.html, Proquest, or Wilson Select (libraries).

by interlibrary loan OCLC 39109338 [222 libraries subscribing]

being all about libraries...

[Cogito]

Video just isn't my medium of choice for scholarship, I guess. I have a hard time with audio too, so that might put me at odds with some authorities...

Anyway, the origins of PC have fascinated me for some time. If you want to pursue a print study, please consider these.

first, William Lind's remarks (which are no doubt the substance of the video):

Lind, William S. The Origins of Political Correctness: An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind. n.d. retrieved 29 May, 2007 http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html.

This seems to be a more complete treatment, however:

“Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology. Edited by William S. Lind.

A Product of the Free Congress Foundation. November, 2004. retrieved 29 May, 2007

http://www.freecongress.org/PC_Essays/B_In...chapter_one.pdf.

Includes this quote most relevant to the question of origins:

"Just what is “Political Correctness?” “Political Correctness” is in fact cultural

Marxism – Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. The effort to translate

Marxism from economics into culture did not begin with the student rebellion of the

1960s. It goes back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist

Antonio Gramsci. In 1923, in Germany, a group of Marxists founded an institute devoted

to making the translation, the Institute of Social Research (later known as the Frankfurt

School). One of its founders, George Lukacs, stated its purpose as answering the

question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilization?” The Frankfurt School gained

profound influence in American universities after many of its leading lights fled to the

United States in the 1930s to escape National Socialism in Germany...."

However (which precipitated this pedantic little reply)....

JSPES [Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies], Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter 2002 )

pp. 409-444

Political Correctness and the Ideological Struggle: From Lenin and Mao to Marcuse and Foucault

Frank Ellis

ABSTRACT:

The first use of the term political correctness can be traced to the period between 1895-1921 when Lenin was trying to achieve two goals: first, to secure ascendancy over his revolutionary peers; and second, after 1917, to consolidate the party's control over the new Soviet state. This article explores the Leninist origins of political correctness and its evolution since 1917. The author analyses the exceptional importance of "correctness" in the Maoist variant and, subsequently, through Maoism, its influence on the New Left and the contemporary manifestation of political correctness which emerged as a public issue in the West at the end of the 1980s.

ACCESS:

by subscription http://www.jspes.org/online.html, Proquest, or Wilson Select (libraries).

by interlibrary loan OCLC 39109338 [222 libraries subscribing]

being all about libraries...

Um... I don't think this belongs here.

[Grames]

Here is a philosophical analysis of the causes of political correctness from Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels.

In the pre-Kantian era, ethical subjectivism was restricted to occasional skeptics; since Kant it has dominated the field of philosophy. The deepest roots of this modern shift are twofold: in epistemology, the romanticist advocacy of feeling as superior to reason; in ethics, the altruist advocacy of others as superior to self. The result is a view of morality in which the ruling standard is: the feelings of others.

Political correctness is inevitable, and acts as a indicator of the depth of philosophical rot in a culture. As long as PC is increasing, you know things must get worse before they can get better.

[Romantic_Realist]

Here is a fresh link to the Free Congress Foundation (the FCF) e-book:

http://www.freecongress.org/centers/cc/pcessay1-3.aspx

For another version of the same historical account, see Gerald Atkinson's article What is the Frankfurt School?:

http://www.newtotalitarians.com/FrankfurtSchool.html

According to the bibliographical footnotes in this Gerald Atkinson's article, there exists an even earlier historical account written in 1996 by Raymond Raehn (Critical Theory: A Special Research Report, 1 April 1996), which I suspect is similar to Raehn's Chapter II in the e-book.

I originally read this conspiracy theory a couple years ago, and have ever since been interested to know how much of the FCF e-book is true. Now I finally had enough time to research this question.

The basic claim of the e-book seems to be that the original first generation of the Frankfurt School and some related philosophers and scholars from the 1920s (including Georg Lukàcs, Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin) influenced by Hegelian Marxism (i.e. the Western Marxists as they later came to be called) were the planners of the New Left of the 1960s. The e-book moreover claims that the subversive ideas of the New Left, which had supposedly been deviously planned by these 1920s philosophers and scholars, even spread further in Western societies as supposedly intended from the very start, and then spawned many politically correct successor movements in the academia, education and mass media, now even totally dominating the political thinking of the elites.

According to my own very superficial research, the connection between the Western Marxists of the 1920s and the successor movements of the New Left since the 1960s seems to be much looser than claimed in the e-book. Especially, there may not be any causality, in the sense that the Western Marxists of the 1920s did not cause the youth rebellion of the 1960s. The New Left and other such student and youth movements had already reached a critical mass in the early 1960s (the sheer momentum of which may have lead into a large-scale youth rebellion without much need for planners) before they had had time to find out about the theories of Western Marxism, which mostly became available as new editions and translations of books and article collections no sooner than in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

To prove the claims made in the e-book, one would have to demonstrate how the Western Marxist ideas, which were in the 1940s and 1950s mostly available only in manuscripts, small-edition journals and, even in the best case, books published in German, French or Italian, found their way into the hands of Boomer youth cadres. Besides, even if the availability of Western Marxist texts in the early 1960s could be demonstrated, there remains the even larger plot hole of where did these Boomer youth cadres get the instant understanding needed to ponder the very difficult scholarly questions in these works. I suppose it would take many years or even as long as a decade of full-time study to get acquainted with the problematics tackled by Western Marxism, which was obviously beyond the understanding of most twenty-something radicals and definitely beyond the understanding of all teenagers of the 1960s. The numerous anti-war demonstrations, other street actions and the experimental lifestyle of the 1960s radicals left them even less time to reach the scholarly prerequisites needed for a proper study of Western Marxism than other generations.

By the way, this supposed link between the 1920s radicals and the 1960s radicals illustrates a general weakness in most historical accounts of political correctness. They are usually based on uncovering similar aspects of different movements from different eras, and then blindly assuming some kind of causality between them. Even the excellent article by Ellis mentioned above seems to be constructed in this manner. A better way to research the topic would be to try to disprove potential links between movements, for example, by demonstrating that a movement didn't have enough time and other resources to be influenced by another movement. In my opinion, disproving is a more sound method of research than to go looking for compatible evidence to support a hypothesis.

There was actually one influential book called The Authoritarian Personality co-authored by Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School which was available in English already in the early 1950s, but it is dubious whether this kind of mainstream empirical research can be called Western Marxism, even when motivated by goals compatible with a left-wing world view. And in 1955, there was, of course, the book Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse, which revised Freud's theories to suit Socialist dreams of the perfectibility of man and also included a presentation of some aspects (like alienation and reification) of the Western Marxist criticism of bourgeois society, which was seen as unnecessarily dominated by toil and technology. But this book is not nearly as deep philosophically as the hard-core texts of Western Marxism such as Lukàcs's and Adorno's dialectical methods to expose the reification in capitalism and the bourgeois culture.

So it seems that there were very few if any authentically Western Marxist texts widely available for the Boomer youth cadres to use as ready-made plans for their cultural rebellion in the early 1960s. Besides, most of the Western Marxists (Lukàcs, Adorno, Benjamin especially) come across in their biographies as stereotypical theoreticians, who were quite incompetent at planning ahead even in their personal choices, and therefore definitely unlikely to be able to plan an entire rebellion. I doubt that it's even possible to plan a rebellion by theoretical analysis only, without having advanced reality-based organizing skills to fuse into theories, which is a different talent altogether and which was either non-existent or atrophied in the Western Marxist ivory towers (see "Grand Hotel Abgrund").

So, in opposition to the view presented in the FCF e-book where the 1960s rebels were seen to be acting according to carefully crafted plans, I now personally believe that the 1960s rebellion arose spontaneously through chance meetings by socially active anti-authoritarian personalities of the Boomer generation at universities and cultural events. The type of discussion at such informal events can't obviously have been too philosophical, leading to a visionary and ethical rather than a theoretical outlook in the Boomer youth cadres. I also believe that the trendiness of this Boomer youth movement then attracted sellers of different types of rebellious paraphernalia, one merchandise of which was the reissue of books by obscure philosophers such as the Western Marxists of the 1920s for use as rebellious entertainment by the wannabe intellectuals of the New Left.

It is, of course, undisputable that politically correct scholars of our times often use theories based on Western Marxism alongside theories inspired more directly by the 1960s to support their political goals towards an anti-capitalist and anti-modernist society, but I believe that the role of these theories is either purely as tools, as paraphernalia or as intellectual games. I suspect that politically correct scholars rarely if ever use these theories as math-like objective formulas to find the right choice, as the politically correct answer is almost always known beforehand, and what remains for the scholars is just to formulate an eloquent rationalization for the politically correct answer.

If Western Marxism didn't exist at all, then its advocates could instead use some other rebellious way of thinking like, for example, the anti-bourgeois sentiments of the Surrealists or the Situationists for rationalizing the answers they have decided beforehand, as it probably doesn't really matter to them which theory they use as their tool, as long as it is rebellious enough to suit their identity. Subversion of traditional thinking patterns as an end in itself, in which politically correct scholars typically engage themselves for most of their time, would hardly change at all if they had never even heard about the Western Marxists of the 1920s. Revolutionary tradition is large enough to avoid their dependence on any particular branch of revolutionary theory.

If there is any link between the Western Marxists of the 1920s and the New Left of the 1960s, then it may be simply that they were two different generations and movements of the long line of cultural rebels entrenched for centuries in art circles and more recently in the humanities departments at universities. In every new revolutionary movement, there is, of course, bound to be some reuse of ideas from previous generations of rebels. This kind of distant link which is based on the occasional reuse of of old ideas in a new context alongside a variety of new ideas sounds more plausible to me than claiming à la the FCF e-book that some Boomer kids managed to find little-known philosophical and sociological texts and then built a political movement by implementing their ideas.

What I wrote above is, of course, just my own historical speculation, but I also have some interesting hard facts that I would like to discuss next.

One thing that puzzled me about the FCF e-book was why the e-book only mentioned some arbitrary Western Marxist philosophers and scholars but not some other very well-known Western Marxists. For example, Karl Korsch and Ernst Bloch are mysteriously ignored in the e-book altogether, and I wonder why, especially as many 1960s rebels were interested to read Ernst Bloch in particular (according to his Wikipedia entry: "Bloch's work became very influential in the course of the student protest movements in 1968 and in liberation theology.").

What I did was try to reverse-engineer the e-book into its original sources, and then find out the lineage of the textual components appearing in the e-book, in order to research whether the missing Western Marxists were ignored in the original sources, too, or whether they were dropped only from the e-book.

I took a look at the presumed bibliography of the FCF e-book (found in the chapter Further Readings on the Frankfurt School), browsed through most of the texts listed there, and noticed that the Chapter II of the e-book written by Raymond Raehn is amazingly similar to an earlier article by the LaRouche-related writer Michael Minnicino, which was also mentioned in the e-book bibliography as a recommendation. I suspected that Raymond Raehn may have built his chapter II more or less directly on Minnicino's article, as this level of textual similarity can hardly be a coincidence. Here is a link to Minnicino's article, so that you can compare yourselves:

Michael Minnicino: New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and Political Correctness

http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96..._frankfurt.html

Minnicino's article is a typical example of what you can expect from LaRouchian historiography, whose style I already knew from some other articles on the Internet. They usually contain lots of well-researched facts and intellectual charisma, which are then unfortunately tied together into more or less fallacious conspiracy theories.

The key to understanding LaRouchian historiography is apparently that they have a few favourite philosophers such as Plato, Leibniz and Schiller, whom they consider as geniuses and good guys, as well as many philosophers whom they hate passionately as bad guys such as Aristotle, the British empiricists, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Western Marxists. I haven't yet found out the official opinion of the LaRouchians towards Marx and Hegel. Maybe this is because in the 1960s Lyndon LaRouche used to lead some kind of Marxist sect, so he may still have enough respect for Marx and Hegel from his younger years not to list them as repulsive philosophers. Anyway, many LaRouchians seem to think that the question of which philosophy is most prevalent in society is one of the determining factors of the ultimate success and survival of that society. Minnicino's article is a stereotypical LaRouchian text in this respect, as it deals directly with his support for the metaphysics of the most attractive German idealism (especially their views on creativity) as well as with the competition between the good philosophers including Plato, Leibniz and Schiller against the bad philosophers including the Frankfurt School and some other Western Marxists, who had sinned against Minnicino's LaRouchian sensibilities by criticizing German idealism.

I wonder if Raymond Raehn of the Free Congress Foundation might have taken his basic plotline and historical facts from the Minnicino article, then finding out which books Minnicino had used as his sources (apparently these are not listed in the Fidelio article), reading these books himself, and finally leaving out of his version the most unbelievable causal claims of Minnicino's article like for example the claim about Western Marxism causing the dullness of mainstream mass media since the 1940s. It looks like Raehn's text might be a kind of disassembling, assessing and repackaging Minnicino's textual components with many independent additions to replace the content left out.

But then again, simply by noting that Raymond Raehn and the FCF in general may have based their plotline and many of their facts on Minnicino's article doesn't tell us enough about the entire historical lineage of textual components found in the FCF e-book. If Minnicino's article was indeed a model for Raehn, then where did Minnicino get these textual components, as he certainly can't have made them up himself? Therefore, we need to reverse-engineer Minnicino's article, too, in order to find out the sources on which Minnicino's article directly and maybe the FCF e-book indirectly are based.

If you take a look at the list of articles contained in the back issues of the Fidelio magazine at the Schiller Institute web site, you'll notice that there exists another article by Michael Minnicino and Webster Tarpley about the same topic called The Evil Philosophy Behind Political Correctness. Tarpley is a very famous conspiracy historian, so his mere co-operation with Minnicino suggests that we can indeed expect at least this second Fidelio article or maybe even both Fidelio articles, and thereby presumably, the FCF e-book, to be heavily implicated in the conspiracy genre.

Unfortunately, the Schiller Institute web site doesn't have the text of this second Fidelio article, but I managed to find it in another online magazine. I don't know much about the background of this other magazine, but it is irrelevant, as the text in itself proves to be very illuminating:

http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/polcorr.htm

This second Fidelio article presents the Frankfurt School as well as the Western Marxist Georg Lukàcs, who were both also discussed in the first Fidelio article, as intellectual heirs of the continental anti-metaphysical philosophical tradition by Nietzsche and Heidegger that the LaRouchians love to hate. Moreover, the article begins by commenting positively on Allan Bloom's very famous book The Closing of the American Mind, which had gained a huge following in the five years before the publication of Minnicino's first Fidelio article. I took a look inside Bloom's book, and there is considerable textual similarity between his account of philosophies popular in the 1960s and the account by Minnicino. They both emphasize that the 1960s rebels were mainly interested in continental philosophy like that of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Marcuse and Lukàcs.

Apparently, Minnicino had read Bloom's book, and made some independent further research about some of the philosophers that had been mentioned by Bloom. The LaRouchians are known for deep research, and I can imagine Minnicino piling up the best biographies of these philosophers (actually, Minnicino mentions "university bookstore" in the first Fidelio article), making notes on them, and writing a plotline based on them. Bloom probably didn't mean to imply that the continental tradition in general nor the Frankfurt School in particular were the direct cause of the general flavour of the 1960s rebellion, but Minnicino may have had his own reasons based on earlier LaRouchian historiography to hypothesize such a causality, even if it may not stand the test of common sense. Bloom also didn't have an incentive to attempt to compile a comprehensive list of intellectual influences of the 1960s rebellion, and his making an arbitrary short list of some known influences has probably carried on into every historical account inspired by Bloom, further distorting common knowledge about which forerunners were the main influences on the New Left.

This second Fidelio article basically deals with the larger philosophical context of the anti-metaphysical philosophical tradition started by Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School related details of which are then discussed more closely in the first Fidelio article, so the second article might even be seen as a kind of starting point for approaching the first article. So I hypothesized a textual lineage (presented here as the most logical but not necessarily chronologically accurate lineage of the shared textual components): 1) Bloom's book -> 2) the second Fidelio article -> 3) the first Fidelio article -> 4) Raymond Raehn's historical research Critical Theory: A Special Research Report in 1996 -> 5) the FCF e-book -> 6) Chapter Four in Pat Buchanan's book The Death of the West.

While trying to trace the lineage of textual components in the Fidelio articles, I bumped into an interesting connection between the first Fidelio article and an earlier LaRouchian publication. More specifically, the title of the first Fidelio article New Dark Age is almost identical to the title of an earlier LaRouchian book written by Carol White called The New Dark Ages Conspiracy, which was published in 1980. According to the Acknowledgements section of the book, "Lyndon LaRouche not only contributed the inspiration for this book, but provided outline which has proved an invaluable guide." So it seems that we can consider this book as a kind of semi-official LaRouchian view about the course of the 20th century. Because the title of the book was almost identical to the title of Minnicino's first Fidelio article, I expected to find an identical account of the role of Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Frankfurt School in the book.

I was wrong. Even though the book predictably outlines the course of the 20th century as a great conpiracy by the British elites (presumably of the hated empiricist tradition), the names of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Marcuse and Lukàcs nor the Frankfurt School aren't mentioned even once in the entire book! It seems that LaRouche was then completely preoccupied with opposing the Anglo-American elites and their empiricist philosophy, and didn't bother too much about getting repulsed by other lesser evils such as the philosophical traditions started by Nietzsche. As explained in Wikipedia:

"The New Dark Ages Conspiracy by Carol White, 1980 (ISBN 093348805X): alleges that a group of British intellectuals led by Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells attempted to control scientific progress in order to keep the world backward and more easily managed by Imperialism. In this conspiracy theory, Wells wished science to be controlled by some kind of priesthood and kept from the common man, while Russell wished to stifle it altogether by restricting it to a closed system of formal logic, that would prohibit the introduction of new ideas. This conspiracy also involved the promotion of the counterculture."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Lynd...h.22_conspiracy

Some significant change must have happened in the LaRouche movement between 1980 when The New Dark Ages Conspiracy book came out and 1992 when the first Fidelio article came out, getting the LaRouchians considerably more interested in opposing the anti-bourgeois, anti-metaphysical philosophical tradition started by Nietzsche and, on the other hand, opposing the repercussions of the 1960s counterculture more than ever before. The second Fidelio article gives us some hints about what may have caused this change by mentioning the publication of Bloom's book in 1987 and LaRouche's trial in 1988.

As many of us know, the publication of Bloom's book in 1987 coincided with the start of so-called Culture Wars in America between the politically correct loony left of the academia against the loose alliance of Conservatives and supporters of Enlightenment liberalism. As the LaRouchians are known to be very intellectually oriented, they must have been aware of the main texts and developments of Culture Wars, as hinted in both Fidelio articles, probably inspiring LaRouchian historians to thoroughly research the course of the philosophical traditions started by Nietzsche, which they may have overlooked before.

Another event which got the LaRouchians interested in the Frankfurt School in particular was the law suit against Lyndon LaRouche. The LaRouchians apparently suspected that their enemies were trying to use tricks from the Frankfurt School personality theory to make LaRouche look guilty. So both the general zeitgeist of the late 1980s as well as the pressing need caused by the trial may have been the specific reasons which spurred Minnicino to carry out independent research into the Frankfurt School and other Western Marxists, who had after all been already recognized by Bloom to have played some kind of role in the development of the loony left since the 1960s.

One more significant event in the 1980s was the publication of the famous book The Aquarian Conspiracy by Marilyn Ferguson in 1980, which predicted the rise of a New Age type of mass movement based on Boomers immersed in the mystical visions of the 1960s. The LaRouchians took action against Ferguson's book, and probably intensified their research into the roots of the 1960s counterculture very soon after her book came out, as they considered it a harmful influence on Americans. The availability of such good sources about the history of counterculture might explain how Minnicino was able to make a very surprising analogy between the 1960s rebellion and the little-known Asconan counterculture of the early 1900s in both of his Fidelio articles. Maybe it was this very analogy which made Minnicino see the generation of the Western Marxists and other such cultural rebels of the early 1900s as the architects of the 1960s rebellion, instead of considering the 1960s rebellion as a spontaneous, improvised movement by the anti-authoritarian segment of Boomers. Minnicino's source regarding the Asconan counterculture remains unclear to me, but it might be Martin Green's book Mountain of truth: the counterculture begins, Ascona, 1900-1920 on Otto Gross and other Asconan cultists:

Martin Green: The Asconan Idea in Politics

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/ascona.html

But why hypothesize any architects for the 1960s rebellion at all? I don't know. Maybe the possibility of a spontaneous birth of a mass movement would be quite antithetical to the LaRouchian view of history, which likes to believe that philosophical movements and their specific gurus shape history instead of spontaneous organization by the masses.

I have presented above some wild guesses about the timeline of how the LaRouchians may have proceeded in carrying out their historical research into the Nietzschean and Frankfurt School traditions of philosophy and into the 1960s counterculture. But I would also like to speculate on which section of the first Fidelio article was considered the most important, i.e. the core of Minnicino's argument.

Even though the book The New Dark Ages Conspiracy doesn't help us at all in answering this question, there exists an earlier book called Dope, Inc. published in 1978 about the alleged complicity of the British elites in the international drug trade. This book does contain one nearly identical textual component later found also in the first Fidelio article, and I suspect this very textual component is also supposed to be the core of Minnicino's plotline. On page 393 of Dope, Inc. (first edition) written by the U.S. Labor Party Investigating Team, i.e. the LaRouchians, we can find the following paragraphs:

"The social theory of rock was elaborated by British agent and musicologist Theodor Adorno, who came to the United States in 1939 to head the Princeton University Radio Research Project. (18) Adorno writes

'In an imaginary but psychologically emotion-laden domain, the listener who remembers a hit song will turn into the song's ideal subject, into the person for whom the song ideally speaks. At the same time, as one of many who identify with that fictitious subject, that musical I, he will feel his isolation ease as he himself feels integrated into the community of "fans." In whistling such a song he bows to a ritual of socialization, although beyond this unarticulated subjective stirring of the moment his isolation continues unchanged ....

The comparison with addiction is inescapable. Addicted conduct generally has a social component: it is one possible reaction to the atomization which, as sociologists have noticed, parallels the compression of the social network. Addiction to music on the part of a number of entertainment listeners would be a similar phenomenon.' (19)

The Hit Parade is organized precisely on the same principles used by Egypt's Isis priesthood and for the same purpose: the recruitment of youth to the dionysiac counterculture.

In a report prepared for the University of Michigan's Institute of Social Research, Paul Hirsch described the product of Adorno's Radio Research Project. (20) According to Hirsch, the establishment of postwar radio's Hit Parade 'transformed the mass medium into an agency of sub-cultural programming.'"

In the Notes section on pages 379-380, the book Dope, Inc. gives us some hints about how the LaRouchians may have first bumped into Adorno, and how they viewed Adorno when they were still preoccupied with opposing British empiricism:

"18) Theodor Adorno was a leading professor at the Frankfurt School of Social Research in Germany, founded by the British Fabian Society. A collaborator of twelve-tone formalist and British intelligence operative, Arnold Schonberg, Adorno was brought into the United States in 1939 to head up the Princeton Radio Research Project. The explicit aim of this project, as stated in Adorno's Introduction to the Sociology of Music, was to program a mass "musical" culture that would steadily degrade its consumers. Punk-rock is, in the most direct sense, the ultimate result of Adorno's work.

19) Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1976).

20) Paul Hirsch, "The Structure of the Popular Music Industry: The Filtering Process by Which Records are Preselected for Public Consumption." Institute for Social Research's Survey Research Center Monograph, 1969."

Otherwise, Adorno and the Frankfurt School are not mentioned at all in Dope, Inc., which is not surprising considering that mainly connections related to the British elites were explored in the book, and the Frankfurt School had very few if any such connections.

If we compare this short Adorno anecdote in Dope, Inc. to the section The Establishment Goes Bolshevik: "Entertainment" Replaces Art in the first Fidelio article, we'll notice that the plotline of the first Fidelio article can be imagined to be built around this earlier short anecdote. It explicitly mentions how the LaRouchians hypothesize a causality between the rebellious motive of Adorno ("to program a mass 'musical' culture that would steadily degrade its consumers"), his work during WWII in mass media research ("in 1939") and the supposed adoption of Adorno's rebellious vibes during the next decades by the impressionable Boomer youths through the mass media tricks coauthored by Adorno. Voilà! A sinister motive as well as the means and opportunity to implement it have been "demonstrated".

Apparently in the 1970s, the LaRouchians were researching anything and everything related to the British elites they hated. So let's make a guess. Maybe it was while they were browsing sources related to Britain's role in counterculture, mass psychology and musical addiction when they first bumped into Hirsch's report. They may have noticed via Hirsch's remarks that the Princeton Radio Research Project with Adorno was one of the earliest research projects into the effects of the mass media on audiences, and as Adorno's other works were obviously influential in the academia, the LaRouchians may have suspected that Adorno must be a British-connected scholar worth mentioning. Indeed, Adorno had spent a short time studying at Oxford, which must have had its share of Fabianists, and he had also started his stay in America by working in the Princeton Radio Research Project, whose approach can indeed be considered to be based on the British empiricism that the LaRouchians hated. If the LaRouchians had had more interest in Adorno and the Frankfurt School back then, they would have noticed very soon that Adorno and the Frankfurt School didn't like British empiricism at all, and also despised the political approach of Fabianists and other Social Democrats who were too tame to oppose the bourgeois society.

Let's continue with further guesses. When the Culture Wars and the LaRouche trial got the LaRouchians more interested in the Frankfurt School in the late 1980's, Minnicino may have rediscovered the Adorno anecdote from Dope, Inc., leading to some biographical research on Adorno and the Frankfurt School, which identified them as members of the anti-bourgeois, anti-metaphysical tradition started by Nietzsche rather than as empiricists. After gathering juicy bits of biographical information about a few anti-bourgeois philosophers and scholars mentioned by Bloom, whose involvement in the Nietzschean tradition was confirmed by the books that Minnicino had read while researching Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and tying these biographical facts together with a LaRouchian conspiracy plotline, one finally gets the final product of both Fidelio articles. Those philosophers and scholars mentioned by Bloom (such as C. Wright Mills) who didn't appear in the other books that Minnicino was browsing through, were probably just dropped from Minnicino's account as inconsequential. If we consider Bloom's book as a kind of attempted short list of the main culprits of the 1960s and its aftermath, then Minnicino's account is even a short list of a short list, explaining why so many other genuine intellectual influences on the 1960s rebellion were omitted from Minnicino's account.

I now hesitate a wild guess regarding the order in which this biographical research may have proceeded: 1) After reading Bloom's book, Minnicino may have found the Adorno anecdote in Dope, Inc. or in another unknown LaRouchian manuscript -> 2) he must have made further independent research, discovering the timeline and general idea of Western Marxism possibly in Martin Jay's book on the Frankfurt School called The Dialectical Imagination or maybe even in Martin Jay's book on Western Marxism called Marxism and Totality -> 3) he seems to have gathered many biographical details from Susan Buck-Morss's book The Origin of Negative Dialectics, which also emphasizes the link between Georg Lukàcs and the Frankfurt School -> 4) Minnicino also seems to have gathered some more juicy details about Georg Lukàcs and the Frankfurt School from other books and biographies such as Michael Löwy: Georg Lukàcs - From Romanticism to Bolshevism.

Susan Buck-Morss's book also includes on its page 34 a famous quote from Walter Benjamin, which might explain where Minnicino got his idea to consider the Frankfurt School as a planner of later political correctness, even though I personally think that Benjamin wasn't writing here about the same type of political correctness that later appeared in the American academia:

"... that the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense. That means that the tendency which is politically correct includes a literary tendency."

It's unlikely that my wild guess about the specific order in which the first Fidelio article was constructed could be right, but at least the order above would make sense based on the textual components selected for the first Fidelio article.

Or maybe the LaRouchians had made some further research on the Frankfurt School between Dope, Inc. and the first Fidelio article, which Minnicino may have relied on while writing his article. Whatever the exact lineage of how the LaRouchians had researched Adorno and the Frankfurt School, the LaRouchian answer to the apparent discrepancy between the very marginal following of Western Marxist ideas in the 1940s and 1950s and the huge scale of the 1960s mass rebellion seems to be the alienating dullness of the post-war mass media, which the LaRouchians presumed to be rigged by the Princeton Radio Research Project to brainwash the masses. To disprove this LaRouchian explanation, one would need to demonstrate the non-existence of Frankfurt School influence on how programs were selected by the American mass media in the 1940s and 1950s. I'd expect this kind of demonstration to be possible either by making a statistical analysis of playlists from these decades (thus disproving the existence of means to carry out subversion) or by finding very specific biographical data about Adorno between 1938 and 1941 to prove that he was not trying to achieve mass alienation while working on the Princeton Radio Research Project (thus disproving a motive to carry out subversion).

The first Fidelio article also lists 1) the involvement of many members of the Frankfurt School in war-time US government projects, 2) the popularity of the book Eros and Civilization after 1955, 3) the Frankfurt School's possible influence on some of their friends who were nationally popular scholars in other fields, as well as 4) Herbert Marcuse's guru status in the late 1960s among the New Left as other presumed dissemination channels of the Frankfurt School ideas, thus supposedly causing the 1960s rebellion with their combined effect. Surprisingly, the easiest one of these channels to refute may be the significance of Marcuse's guru status by noting that Marcuse wasn't widely known until his book One Dimensional Man in 1964, i.e. a few years after the start of the rebellion (circa 1960-1961 or even earlier), and he only achieved a prominent guru status when the rebellion was already peaking in 1966-1968. To refute the the potential dissemination of Western Marxist ideas through the bestsellers published by the friends of the Frankfurt School, one would need to demonstrate that these bestsellers do not contain any fundamentally Western Marxist components. To refute dissemination via Eros and Civilization, one would need to research how wide was its audience and how deeply did the Western Marxist components in it affect its readers. To refute the possibility of dissemination through those members of the Frankfurt School working in war-time US government projects, one would need to demonstrate that these were one-off projects without any lasting effect on how US government agencies perceived the national situation.

One could easily dismiss Minnicino's articles as typical LaRouchian conspiracy theories, and it seems intuitively possible to disprove his claims, but only by carrying out the refutations of every possible dissemination channel as outlined above would we reliably know if disproving Minnicino's claims is really as easy as it seems.

The Free Congress Foundation, on the other hand, is a traditionally conservative organization with occasional Christian overtones, so it's a bit puzzling why they seem to have used the LaRouchian account of the Western Marxists as one source for their e-book (the first Fidelio article is explicitly listed in the e-book section Further Readings on the Frankfurt School), as one would imagine there'd be an ideological mismatch between the LaRouchians and the FCF.

The reason why a supposed causality from the Western Marxists into the 1960s rebellion, when presented in the conspiratorial style of the LaRouchians, also suits the propaganda purposes of traditional conservative organizers, may be explained by the following revealing remark by Bill Lind, which he has made in another article similar to the e-book:

William S. Lind: What is Cultural Marxism

http://www.restoringamerica.org/cultural_marxism.htm

"But if the average American found out that Political Correctness is a form of Marxism, different from the Marxism of the Soviet Union but Marxism nonetheless, it would be in trouble. The next conservatism needs to reveal the man behind the curtain - old Karl Marx himself."

(This article can also be found under the title Unmasking Political Correctness)

So, even though the Free Congress Foundation retains in its e-book many facts identical to those in Minnicino's articles, and similarly hypothesizes a causality leading from the Western Marxists to the 1960s rebellion, the supposed motive of the Frankfurt School's conspiracy has been changed in the FCF account. As explained above, Minnicino's articles are based on the LaRouchian way of presenting history as a struggle between competing philosophical and intellectual movements, explaining why he wants to hypothesize such a causality, while the Free Congress Foundation seems to emphasize the same causality for the more calculating reason of wanting to stick the Marxist label to the 1960s rebellion in order to discredit it.

This might also explain why the Free Congress Foundation completely omits the Nietzsche and Heidegger part of Minnicino's second Fidelio article. It is ideologically more suitable for the Free Congress Foundation to present the 1960s rebellion as a successor of the original Marxist philosophy, which most conservative voters already hate after having endured the Communist threat during the Cold War. LaRouche, on the other hand, started as a Marxist, so it may be more convenient for the LaRouchians to downplay the influences of the original Marxism on the 1960s counterculture and present the Frankfurt School as successors of Nietzsche.

Both the LaRouchians and the FCF have a piece of truth regarding the intellectual influences on the Frankfurt School, as can be verified in George Friedman's book The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School where he presents both Nietzsche (like the LaRouchians did) and Marx (like the FCF did) among the basic influences on the Frankfurt School, but paints a view of the Frankfurt School as being mostly a child of its time, i.e. pessimists typical of the cultural avant-garde of the 1920s, whose world view may have been best illustrated by Spengler's apocalyptic dark thoughts about the state of the Western civilization.

Even without presenting a comprehensive list of their potential influences, Friedman manages to explain the Frankfurt School's bent on tireless criticism by the non-actionable pessimistic situation they were facing since the 1920s as well as the Bilderverbot type of thinking style they had inherited from some of their lesser influences such as Judaism, which discouraged them from outlining any utopia and left them only criticism as their main tool. I would like to add that despite the Vietnam War and the nuclear threat, the 1960s was a decade with lots of optimism due to a rising economy and hopes of an affluent utopia, thus raising the question of social justice in the forefront, i.e. how to share the surplus. This was an entirely different problematic than the state of the Western civilization, which anyway seemed to the cultural rebels in the 1960s as too strong rather than too weak as it had for Spengler. This zeitgeist comparison of mine seems to disprove any claim that the pessimists of the 1920s, who feared the Western civilization was descending into cultural and possibly political barbary, could have plausibly planned the world view of the 1960s when optimists were crusading fearlessly for social justice to share the endless surplus to come.

One of the Free Congress Foundation writers even confesses the inherent weakness of trying to prove that the Western Marxists of the 1920s could have caused a rebellion in such a distant era as the 1960s:

Gerald L. Atkinson: Who Placed American Men in a Psychic 'Iron Cage?' Part II - The Thread of 'Cultural Marxism'

http://www.newtotalitarians.com/PsychicIronCagePartII.html

"If such a core group could be found, then it would still depend on your personal "world view" as to its significance. If you believe in the "blind watchmaker," that is, cosmic and social events are random and guided only by the laws of nature, "evolutionary" in the sense of competing with other random events for survival in a stochastic world, you may choose to believe that such a core group was meaningless--it may have existed but so what? It may have been only one of an uncountable number of such groups in recorded history. And you may believe that any particular group's "window of opportunity" to influence future generations was passed by and did little to influence the course of America's history.

If you believe, instead, that nature has a design, that all events can be connected and man can make sense out of many of them if he only "connect all the dots." then you may believe that this small core group has great influence, even today, in American Culture. If this is your world view, you may (but not necessarily) even believe in a "conspiracy" and "conspirators" which and who aim to alter our culture on a vast scale. It is clear, however, that irrespective of one's world view, it is informative to at least know of such a core group, what it believed, what it set out to accomplish, and what methods it followed to take action on its beliefs."

It is also somewhat ironic that the Free Congress Foundation decided to hypothesize that the 1960s with its return of street-level political activism could have been caused by the Frankfurt School's theories which were, according to Friedman's book, especially marked in their belief that the time was ripe to discontinue the link between theory and revolutionary action and dedicate themselves to thinking about thinking, i.e. pure philosophical theory. Of the Frankfurt School core personnel, only Herbert Marcuse could be considered as a supporter of the action-oriented New Left flavour of the late 1960s, and even Marcuse appears to have been more of an interpreter of events rather than their planner.

This irony rises the question of whether Minnicino and the Free Congress Foundation might even have some sinister overtones when deciding to pin the 1960s rebellion and its repercussions on the Western Marxists. This possibility has been raised, for example, by Bill Berkowitz of the SPLC in his article Reframing the Enemy:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport...icle.jsp?aid=53

I can understand why Berkowitz is very suspicious about the real motives of the Free Congress Foundation. I myself wonder why the FCF omitted from their e-book most well-known non-Marxist influences on the Western Marxists of the 1920s, which the FCF must have been aware of in case they had themselves read through the books they have listed in the Further Readings on the Frankfurt School section.

Why aren't, for example, Nietzsche, Kant, Husserl and Schopenhauer mentioned as influences on the Frankfurt School? Why aren't Nietzsche, Fichte, Dilthey, Weber and Simmel mentioned as influences on Georg Lukàcs? Why isn't Croce mentioned as an influence on Antonio Gramsci?

Or similarly, why are the Western Marxists emphasized in the FCF e-book as the main influences on the New Left of the 1960s? Why aren't, for example, C. Wright Mills, Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon mentioned at all? It looks like the FCF has wanted to present the cultural criticism of the pre-1960s bourgeois society as a Western-Marxist-only endeavour despite the numerous scholars of all political orientations involved in such criticism.

And is there even any degree of connection between what these cultural critics have been doing in their ivory towers and how non-experts see society? In the words of Berkowitz:

"But can a theory like this, built on the words of long-dead intellectuals who have little discernible relevance to normal Americans' lives, really fly?"

That's exactly what I'm wondering, too.

Berkowitz seems to at least indirectly raise the possibility that as most of the demonized characters in the FCF-constructed plotline happen to be Jewish, there might be some hidden anti-semitist motives behind the plotline:

"Like Jews in general, the Frankfurt School makes a convenient antagonist — one that is basically seen as antithetical to all things American. The school, says social psychology professor Richard Lichtman of the Berkeley-based Wright Institute, is "a convenient target that very few people really know anything about."

"By grounding their critique in Marxism and using the Frankfurt School, [cultural conservatives] make it seem like it's quite foreign to anything American. It takes on a mysterious cast and translates as an incomprehensible, anti-American, foreign movement that is only interested in undermining the U.S.," he said. "The idea being transmitted is that we are being infected from the outside."

"Not everyone who uses the cultural Marxism construct sees Jews in general at the center of the plot."

The occasional flirtations of some FCF members with genuine anti-semitists make this a very relevant question. Even more so when we remember that some critics of the LaRouchians, the possible origin of the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory, have made the accusation that the LaRouchians are in their general approach really blaming Jews either by code language or indirectly whenever they are demonizing the British elites. Anyway, let's see if the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory could be considered anti-semitist. To be honest, this is not the type of question I personally like to discuss, as it can awaken undesirable passions, but it's hard to avoid in case one wants to explore all the possibilities why the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory was constructed in the first place, so I hope to put the matter into rest with this neutral analysis.

Available evidence would seem to suggest that Minnicino's both Fidelio articles and the FCF e-book were not constructed to arouse anti-semitism. The main evidence is that a genuine anti-semitist would certainly have included Ernst Bloch and maybe some other pre-WWII Jewish Marxists in the account. In the case of Minnicino, his pinning the Frankfurt School on the Nietzschean tradition is something that a genuine anti-semitist certainly wouldn't do, as for an anti-semitist, it would be more profitable and even easier to pin the Frankfurt School on Marx. Besides, the second Fidelio article explicitly aims to thoroughly discredit many intellectual influences of Nazism, which is something that an anti-semitist would hardly do.

In the case of the Free Congress Foundation, however, its pinning the Frankfurt School on Marx instead of Nietzsche doesn't similarly refute the accusation of anti-semitism. The FCF version of the conspiracy theory also doesn't demonize the Nazis in the same manner as the second Fidelio article did. So is the FCF version specifically constructed to allow an anti-semitist reading?

Apparently the answer is no, as the FCF have made an addition of their own to the plotline by including non-Jewish Antonio Gramsci alongside the Frankfurt School and Georg Lukàcs. A genuine anti-semist certainly wouldn't have done so, as this choice completely eradicates any possibility to present the 1960s rebellion as an all-Jewish plot, and why add one more character out of the blue anyway unless the goal is to attempt to present a reliable account? Besides, Allan Bloom seems to have already mentioned on page 225 of his book The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 the concept which the FCF likes to call cultural marxism: "In general, sophisticated Marxism became cultural criticism of life in the Western democracies." So the concept of cultural marxism may not be the FCF's own invention, as one might have easily imagined after reading Berkowitz's criticism of the concept.

The role of Gramsci in the FCF version of the plotline appears to originate in some books and articles on Culture Wars from the early 1990s, some of which are also listed in the Notes section for Chapter Four in Pat Buchanan's book The Death of the West. Buchanan especially lists Christopher Lasch's book The True and Only Heaven there, and it's very illuminating to find out that Lasch's account of how the Western Marxist philosophers, including Gramsci, influenced him in the late 1960s is extremely similar in its style, content and choice of philosophers to the FCF plotline. Therefore, I suspect that Lasch's book, which was well-known during the Culture Wars, may actually have been one of the most important sources for the FCF alongside Minnicino's first Fidelio article. In the following paragraph found on page 28 of Lasch's book, one can clearly see the similarity to the FCF plotline:

"By the late sixties, I thought of myself as a socialist, attended meetings of the Socialist Scholars Conference, and took part in several attempts to launch a journal of socialist opinion. Somewhat belatedly, I plowed through the works of Marx and Engels. I read Gramsci and Lukàcs, the founders of "Western Marxism." I immersed myself in the work of the Frankfurt school - Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse. Their synthesis of Marx and Freud - to whom I had been introduced in the first place by Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, who wanted to put psychoanalysis at the service of social theory - struck me as enormously fruitful, providing Marxism for the first time with a serious theory of culture. The tradition of English Marxism, as articulated by Raymond Williams and E P Thompson, appealed to me for the same reason. It repudiated economic determinism and the mechanistic distinction between economic "base" and cultural "superstructure." It showed that class consciousness is the product of historical experience, not a simple reflection of economic interest."

http://www.amazon.com/True-Only-Heaven-Pro...53-2816707-3367

The similarity of Christopher Lasch's account of his main intellectual influences in the late 1960s to the FCF e-book, gives the FCF a credible bona fide for their choice of characters. On the other hand, when we remember that the LaRouchian version of the conspiracy theory may have had its modest origin as a minor anecdote in the book Dope, Inc. in an anti-British context long before political correctness and the Frankfurt School's alleged conspiracy were discussed at all, this lineage of how the plotline was constructed seems to give LaRouchians a bona fide explanation for their choice of characters as well. Combined with Minnicino's explicit demonization of Nazism and the FCF's addition of Gramsci, we seem to have totally refuted the criticism of Berkowitz regarding possible anti-semitist and other sinister overtones, even though it must be said that the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory regrettably seems to have later become a favourite of many genuine anti-semitists.

Finally, it should be noted that Perry Anderson's book called Considerations on Western Marxism was apparently the original text on Western Marxism which put the concept into its current chronological form, i.e. provides a somewhat similar historical account to that presented above leading from the 1920s cultural rebellion of scholars to the 1960s cultural rebellion by the Boomer masses. The FCF's view on Western Marxism and its timeline is actually similar enough to Anderson's interpretation that I suspect the FCF may have used either his book directly or some of its elaborations as one of their sources.

So we seem to have both supporters and adversaries of Western Marxism trying to pin the 1960s rebellion on this tradition. What we are still lacking is a thorough analysis about whether the 1960s rebellion was noticeably affected in its incubation phase by any type of earlier philosophical theory at all or whether it was just improvised from its very start. Ayn Rand was, of course, a critic of many aspects of the New Left, so I'd be interested to find out if she had some ideas regarding the philosophical background of the New Left of the early 1960s.

To conclude, let's recall what we have done in this analysis. I hope that I was able to take a relatively objective look at the hard evidence regarding the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory, its notable plot holes as well as the notable weaknesses in one of its leading criticisms. I predict the question of deference to revolutionary tradition versus spontaneity by Boomers in the development of the 1960s rebellion to be the key to proving or disproving this conspiracy theory.

Edited April 3, 2009 by Romantic_Realist

[Grames]

I have long had an abstract curiousity as whether or not OO.net forum posts had length limitation. The question has now been answered definitively in the negative.

Emotionalism and altruism in combination were transmitted through American establishment pragmatists. Additional means, such as the exotic conspiracy you have cast doubt upon, are not required.

[Romantic_Realist]

I had too much time on my hands last weekend, as well as access to the full texts of a couple of books on which the conspiracy theory was based. So I used the search function to find the corresponding specific original source passages for a great number of claims made in Minnicino's Fidelio articles.

It is, in my opinion, very useful to know these specific original source passages, so that one can easily verify whether Minnicino has used his source books accurately. Of course, I can't know definitely whether I really found the same original source passages that he was using in every case, so this is just pure speculation, but should be sufficient to verify in general how accurate his claims are.

Because of fair use limitations, I unfortunately can't cite here the entire texts of these original source passages. But for those carrying out serious research on this topic, it's probably not too much trouble to buy or borrow these books, and find the complete original source passages in them based on the markers I give here.

Markers for the start and end of every textual component in Minnicino's Fidelio articles are given here in bold font, the corresponding original source passages in Minnicino's presumed source books are given in italics, and my own comments are in normal font.

In the heady ... only months.

Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism gives a thorough account of the effects that these disappointments described by Minnicino here had on Marxist theory.

http://www.amazon.com/Considerations-Weste...532-9756940-808

Martin Jay's book The Dialectical Imagination is a history of the Frankfurt School, starting in the aftermath of the failed Socialist revolutions in Central Europe.

http://www.amazon.com/Dialectical-Imaginat...0/dp/0520204239

Martin Jay also has another book called Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas exploring the concept of totality in Western Marxism, thus bridging the gap between his Frankfurt School book and Anderson's book on Western Marxism.

http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Totality-Adv...s/dp/0520057422

Susan Buck-Morss's book The Origin of Negative Dialectics describes the intellectual influences of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, as well as the different phases of their philosophical approach. Adorno and Benjamin happened to start their scholarly careers in the 1920s, which was also the starting point for Anderson's and Jay's books, so Buck-Morss's account includes lots of background details helpful to those readers mainly interested in the other books.

Most biographical information on Georg Lukàcs in Minnicino's article seems to be based on Michael Löwy's Ph.D. thesis which has been translated into English as Georg Lukàcs - From Romanticism to Bolshevism.

http://www.amazon.com/Georg-Lukàcs-Romant...y/dp/0860910032

Passages similar to Minnicino's interpretation of the failed Socialist revolutions after WWI can be found on the following pages.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 3.

One of the most far-reaching ... intellectuals of Germany.

Buck-Morss, p. 29.

Writing in the potential-charged ... been broken.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 43.

By the 1930's, ... revolutionary working class.

The Communist International ... was headed by

Unknown source. Probably an erroneous claim, as there seems to be no proof that Lukàcs had ever been involved in any explicit project to discover the reasons for the non-occurrence or failure of Socialist revolutions in Central and Western Europe. Besides, when this situation became evident by the mid-1920s, Lukàcs was already considered quite unreliable by Moscow for both his political and scholarly views, and therefore unlikely to be given a position of responsibility.

See Lukàcs's own interpretation of these developments in the early 1920s in Löwy, p. 193.

Using the pretext ... epoch in my thought.

Georg Lukàcs, ... leading bankers.

Source: Löwy, p. 71.

To take but one example, ... father of Gyorgy.

The start of Minnicino's account of Lukàcs's early career also has a few textual similarities to Arpad Kadarkay's book Georg Lukàcs: Life, Thought, and Politics, see for example page 3.

http://www.amazon.com/George-Kukacz-Life-T...s/dp/B0012G3Z62

Trained in Germany ... literary theorist

Lukàcs's intellectual influences during his early career have been explained in Löwy's book.

Löwy p. 43.

Probably the most important ... in Berlin.

Löwy p. 94.

It was also Bloch ... uncommon ideas.

Löwy p. 98.

In 1909 Lukàcs ... run by Simmel.

Löwy p. 122.

Lukàcs explains ... in Fichte

Lukàcs became a Communist during World War I, writing as he joined the party, "Who will save us from Western civilization?"

This citation by Lukàcs was really made in an entirely different context when he was writing a preface to a new edition of his book The Theory of the Novel nearly four decades after its original publication. Lukàcs is trying here to describe his feelings during WWI regarding what might happen if the Western alliance of the US, Britain and France defeats the Central Powers and, thereby, exports its individualist-capitalist (i.e. "Western") world view to Central Europe.

Löwy, p. 112.

The 1962 preface ... save us from western civilization?"

See also Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 98.

He seems to have been captivated ... how he did not know

Lukàcs was well-suited to the Comintern task

Unknown source. This is a dubious claim, as Lukàcs seems to have been a mainly ethical and mystical fanatic, and thus not at all suitable for the clear-headed analytical and organizing roles as needed by Comintern.

For Lukàcs's real role in Comintern, see Löwy, p. 155.

Lukàcs also ... Southeast Europe.

he had been one ... Budapest in 1919;

For an account of Lukàcs's role in Bela-Kun's government, see Löwy p. 150-154.

Especially Löwy p. 150.

During the 133 ... for Education and Culture.

Regarding Lukàcs's intellectual influences during Bela-Kun's government, see Löwy p. 132.

The reference to Crime and Punishment ... in 1919.

in fact, modern historians ... in the schools,

Löwy, p. 150-151.

On the other hand, ... is the goal.

Victor Zitta's account of Lukàcs's involvement in Bela-Kun's government which Minnicino and many other anti-Lukàcs writers indirectly refer to, gives a misleading view of Lukàcs's cultural policy.

Löwy, p. 151.

`Whatever its origin, anything with real literary value will find the support of the People's Commissar; naturally enough, he will above all support art which grows on proletarian soil, to the extent that it really is art.'

'The programme of the People's Commissariat for Education is to put the fate of literature back into the hands of writers.'

`The Commissariat does not want an official art, and nor does it seek party dictatorship in the arts.'

It is important ... Lukàcs's `cultural terrorism' (e.g., Eugen Szatmari, Das Rote Ungarn, Der Bolsehevismus in Budapest, Leipzig, 1920; Victor Zitta, George Lukàcs' Marxism, The Hague, 1964).

easy access to contraception

Unknown source.

and the loosening of divorce laws

Unknown source.

all of which ... Catholic population.

Indirectly implied by Löwy, p. 151.

The bourgeois fury ... one Victor Zitta.

Fleeing to the Soviet Union after the counter-revolution,

Lukàcs fled originally to Austria and moved to the Soviet Union only later.

Löwy, p. 154.

After the defeat ... to Austria

Lukàcs was secreted into Germany in 1922... and intellectuals.

The Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche event was really held in 1923 according to a later edition of The Dialectical Imagination as well as Wiggershaus's history on the Frankfurt School, and although Lukàcs and Karl Korsch both held a presentation there, they were not in charge of the event. This telling indicator regarding the year of the event reveals us that Minnicino is probably using here either the biography The Young Lukàcs and the Origins of Western Marxism by Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, Martin Jay's Marxism and Totality or Jay's Dialectical Imagination as his source, as they all dated the event to 1922 instead of 1923.

See especially Arato & Breines, p. 175-176.

While Lukacs and Korsch ... We can venture the thought that at this brief gathering, Lukacs and Korsch discussed some of the differences in "matters of method and substance" to which Korsch would refer less than than a year later.

It's possible that Minnicino's account of this event and even his entire view of the link between Lukàcs and the Frankfurt School are based on the following footnote in Arato & Breines, p. 245.

For information regarding the "Summer Academy" at which Korsch and Lukacs met, the authors thank Mrs. Hedda Korsch. In 1922, Lukacs, along with a number of comrades from the Communist Party of Hungary, were sent to Berlin, where they remained for the year. The occasion was the decision by the Executive of the Communist International to resolve the factional battle in the Hungarian party by temporarily disbanding the party as a whole and removing the anti-Kun faction from Vienna. Contact between Lukacs and Korsch, then, took place at the time both men were at work on their respective books, History and Class Consciousness and Marxism and Philosophy.

This passage from Arato & Breines might also explain why Minnicino wrote about Lukàcs as a Comintern operative, which even had a bit of truth in this particular case.

http://www.amazon.com/Young-Lukacs-Origins...m/dp/0861040961

See also Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 196.

In May, 1922, ... the Frankfurt School.

And compare the next passage in different editions of Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 5.

With the hope ... and others.

This meeting founded the Institute for Social Research.

The Institute for Social Research had not yet been founded during the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche event, even though this event may have inspired its founding later in the same year.

Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 196.

but it also provided ... as the Frankfurt School

Over the next decade ... the capitalist West.

Unknown source. Anyway, a dubious claim, as it seems that the Institute for Social Research was never dependent on the Soviet Union nor had any notable connection to Comintern or its goals. Instead, the Institute for Social Research seems to have been interested in objective research to serve a possible Socialist revolution instead of inventing psychological tricks for politics, even though one can ask to what extent objectivity was possible for a Marxism-inspired scholar at the time.

Lukacs identified that any political movement capable of bringing Bolshevism to the West would have to be, in his words, "demonic"

See Löwy, p. 117-118, footnotes.

Lukàcs deals with this ... spiritual necessity'. (Lukàcs, 'Stavrogins Beichte', Die Rote Fahne, 16 July 1922.)

Despite not yet a clean-cut Socialist, Lukàcs was apparently pondering the possibility of Socialism defeating Capitalism as early as in his essay `Esztetikai Kultura', Renaissance, Budapest, 1910.

For the real meaning of the word "demonic" as it was used by Lukàcs, see his famous book The Theory of the Novel, p. 88.

The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God. The novel hero's psychology is demonic; the objectivity of the novel is the mature man's knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that reality would disintegrate into nothingness or inessentiality.

http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Novel-Georg-L...s/dp/0850362369

it would have to "possess the religious power which is capable of filling the entire soul; a power that characterized primitive Christianity." However, Lukacs suggested, such a "messianic" political movement

The words in citation marks (or rather their equivalents in Hungarian and German) were indeed originally used in Lukàcs's writings, even though Minnicino is using/misusing them here to present his own account of the events. The first quote here is apparently originally from Lukàcs's ponderings about what kind of movement could defeat the entrenched Capitalist system in his essay `Esztetikai Kultura', Renaissance, Budapest, 1910.

For the real meaning of the word "messianic" as it was understood by Lukàcs, see Löwy, p. 93.

It was at this time ... ethico-messianic utopianism.

could only succeed ... in his words, "demonic"

Unknown source. This is a bit misleading claim when put this way, as it's not clear whether Lukàcs considered the beliefs of the individual as central to deciding the success of a political movement.

"not a personal destiny, but the destiny of the community"

It's unclear to me why Minnicino seems to want to use citations from Lukàcs's celebrated book The Theory of the Novel from his pre-Marxist period in this context.

The Theory of the Novel, p. 66.

It is traditionally thought that one of the essential characteristics of the epic is the fact that its theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of a community.

in a world "that has been abandoned by God."

The Theory of the Novel, p. 88.

The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God. The novel hero's psychology is demonic; the objectivity of the novel is the mature man's knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that reality would disintegrate into nothingness or inessentiality.

The Theory of the Novel, p. 92.

Irony, with intuitive double vision, can see where God is to be found in a world abandoned by God; irony sees the lost, utopian home of the idea that has become an ideal, and yet at the same time it understands that the ideal is subjectively and psychologically conditioned, because that is its only possible existence.

Bolshevism worked in Russia ... Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 98.

He seems to have been captivated ... basis of culture

For the special character of Russian mentality, see Löwy p. 38-39, p. 53, p. 67-69, p. 80, p. 111-114.

Chapter 6 of Arato & Breines deals specifically with Lukàcs's interest in the Russian mentality.

The model for ... to a holy man

Source: Löwy p. 114-115.

In Alyosha Karamazov ... world of individualism.

and thus ceased to be "unique, pure, and therefore abstract."

I'm not sure if this phrase of Lukàcs is really relevant in this context.

The Theory of the Novel, p. 152.

This world is the sphere of pure soul-reality in which man exists as man, neither as a social being nor as an isolated, unique, pure and therefore abstract interiority.

For another instance of this phrase, see Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 98.

His chastisement of Tolstoy ... abstract interiority

This abandonment of the soul's uniqueness also solves the problem of

Unknown source. A misleading passage when written in this manner, as it sounds like Lukàcs, whose thinking was really ethical rather than calculating, could have pondered the abandonment of the soul's uniqueness from the cold-blooded point of view of whether it might encourage revolutionaries to start an armed insurgency despite casualties. Instead, what really happened was that Lukàcs saw individual life as an ethical obstacle to violence, and was pondering if there can exist more pressing ethical reasons for which this obstacle should be waived. However, most of Lukàcs's writings regarding the uniqueness of an individual are related to what is authentic life and an authentic community rather than questions of violence.

"the diabolic forces lurking in all violence" which must be unleashed in order to create a revolution.

This is a misleading way to use the phrase, as it's probably not originally from Lukàcs but his teacher Weber.

Löwy, p. 39.

Weber, `Politics as a Vocation', in From Max Weber, p. 122: `The proponent of an ethic of absolute ends cannot stand up under the ethical irrationality of the world. He is a cosmic-ethical "rationalist". Those of you who know Dostoevsky will remember the scene of the Grand Inquisitor, where the problem is poignantly unfolded. If one makes any concessions at all to the principle that the end justifies the means, it is not possible to bring an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility under one roof or to decree ethically which end should justify which means.' See also pp. 125-6: `Whoever wants to engage in politics at all, and especially in politics as a vocation, has to realize these ethical paradoxes.... I repeat, he lets himself in for the diabolic forces lurking in all violence. The great virtuosi of a cosmic love of humanity and goodness, whether stemming from Nazareth or Assisi or from Indian royal castles, have not operated with the political means of violence.... The figures of Platon, Karatayev and the saints of Dostoevsky still remain their most adequate reconstructions.'

In this context, Lukàcs cited the Grand Inquisitor section of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov,

For Lukàcs's use of the Grand Inquisitor theme, see Löwy, p. 132.

The reference to ... in 1919.

noting that the Inquisitor ... is justified;

Unknown source. A misleading claim again, as it sounds like Lukàcs wanted people to become ruthless to carry out a revolution, and saw alienation from religion as a possible way to achieve this. But Lukàcs seems to have been an ethical rather than a calculating person, making such an attitude unlikely.

such an act can be "neither crime nor madness

I'm again not sure if this phrase of Lukàcs is really relevant in this context.

The Theory of the Novel, p. 61.

In this sense, the epic and the tragedy know neither crime nor madness. What the customary concepts of everyday life call crime is, for them, either not there at all, or it is nothing other than the" point, symbolically fixed and sensually perceptible from afar, at which the soul's relationship to its destiny, the vehicle of its metaphysical homesickness, becomes visible.

For crime and madness are objectifications of transcendental homelessness

This phrase can be found in The Theory of the Novel, p. 41.

For crime and madness are objectifications of transcendental homelessness - the homelessness of an action in the human order of social relations, the homelessness of the soul in the ideal order of a supra-personal system of values.

According to an eyewitness ... and if you dare

Unknown source. This is a dubious passage, as it indeed captures Lukàcs's ethical revolutionary righteousness at the time, but I don't know if Lukàcs's use of Dostoyevski's phrase was really directly related to his possible involvement in drawing up hit lists.

Löwy, p. 135.

This passage ... to Christ: `And we who, for their happiness, have taken their sins upon ourselves, we shall stand before you and say, "Judge us if you can and if you dare."' (The Brothers Karamazov, p. 305.)

For Lukàcs's ethical dilemma, see also Löwy, p. 134.

Lukàcs's first article ... Hebbel's Judith: "Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me - who am I to be able to escape it?"

And also Löwy, 132-133.

Dostoevsky, pp. 276-7: 'And, when you come to think of it, what does the life of a sickly, wicked old hag amount to when weighed in the scales of the general good of mankind? It amounts to no more than the life of a louse or a black beetle, if that, for the old hag is really harmful. For one thing, she is ruining the life of another human being.' (pp. 84-9) It is quite possible ... lives of other people."

What differentiated ... Lukàcs abjured.

Once again, see Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 98

He seems to have been captivated ... basis of culture

For the special character of Russian mentality, see again Löwy p. 38-39, p. 53, p. 67-69, p. 80, p. 111-114, as well as Arato & Breines, Chapter 6.

At its core, ... problems facing society,

The LaRouchians see creativity as central to the ultimate success and survival of society, and apparently see Lukàcs's anti-individualistic thoughts as antithetical to this necessity. See also Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, chapter "The Discourse of Totality Before" and its remarks on Schiller to find one possible source where Minnicino may have gotten his idea to compare the Western Marxists and Schiller.

then that society ... for socialist revolution.

This is a misleading claim, as it's hard to find any proof that Lukàcs saw a manipulated increase in hopelessness and alienation as a successful way to start a revolution, even though he may have thought that such sentiments might automatically lead to a revolution. To find out what Lukàcs really considered necessary for the entrenched Capitalist system to fall when he first started to ponder this question, see again his essay `Esztetikai Kultura', Renaissance, Budapest, 1910.

More information about Lukàcs's thoughts in the 1910s regarding the possibilities of societal change can be found in Arato & Breines. For their comments on Lukàcs's `Esztetikai Kultura' essay, see especially p. 29-30.

One of the few places ... alienated egos.

See also Arato & Breines, p. 13.

As we look more closely at Lukàcs's early work, trying to reconstruct it from within, we need the reminder that a fully unified treatment of his development prior to 1919, when his first explicitly Marxist writings appeared, is nearly impossible.

A more specific explanation of Lukàcs's scholarly style and influences in the early 1910s can be found in Arato & Breines, p. 13-14.

In his earliest works (taking 1910 as a rough demarcation point) there are three fundamental approaches. First, in the History of the Development of Modern Drama (hereafter: Dramahistory), which was written and rewritten between 1906 and 1909, and the essay, "Aesthetic Culture" (1910), there is an historical-critical sociology of culture and cultural alienation. Within his sociology of culture, Lukàcs makes use of Marx seen through Simmel's eyes, but he also corrects Simmel by way of Marx. Second, in The Soul and the Forms (1907-10) and the essay-dialogue, "On the Poverty of Spirit" (1911), there is a series of critical-individual confrontations with the historical results of cultural alienation, results Lukàcs generally but not always interprets metaphysically. And, third, in the "Notes to the Theory of the History of Literature" (1910), there is a search for a comprehensive many-sided method appropriate to the study of literature as Absolute Spirit.

And one more passage from Arato & Breines, p. 14.

These three dimensions are interrelated ... Life and Soul.

The task of the Frankfurt School ... in Lukàcs' German

An uncredible claim using an obscure phrase in German regarding the task of the Frankfurt School's criticism. As discussed in "Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique" by Jurgen Habermas, the phrase "Aufhebung der Kultur" seems to be related to what type of culture Walter Benjamin considered as worthy. According to this same article by Habermas, Herbert Marcuse seems to have commented on a similar idea in the 1930s.

I would like to start from a statement Benjamin once turned against the procedure of cultural history: "It [cultural history] increases the burden of treasures that is piled on the back of humanity. But it does not bestow upon us the power to shake it off, so as to put it at our disposal." (F, p. 36) Benjamin sees the task of criticism precisely in this. He deals with the documents of culture (which are at the same time those of barbarism) not from the historicist viewpoint of stored-up cultural goods but from the critical viewpoint (as he so obstinately expresses it) of the decline of culture into "goods that can become an object of possession for humanity." (F. p. 35) Benjamin says nothing, of course, about the "overcoming of culture" [Aufhebung der Kultur].

Herbert Marcuse speaks of the overcoming of culture in a 1937 essay, "The Affirmative Character of Culture." As regards classical bourgeois art, he criticizes the two-sidedness of a world of beautiful illusion that has been established autonomously, beyond the struggle of bourgeois competition and social labor. ... Marcuse makes good the claim of ideology critique to take at its word the truth that is articulated in bourgeois ideals but has been reserved to the sphere of the beautiful illusion - that is, to overcome art as a sphere split off from reality.

and, second, to determine ... "new barbarism."

A "new, positive notion of barbarism" was an idea which Walter Benjamin once explored in his essay "Experience and Poverty" (1933).

See also the article "Two Worlds of Fortune: Culture and Dying in the Global Zone".

http://militantesthetix.co.uk/adorno/globalica.htm

In all these examples, Benjamin’s positive concept of barbarism has less to do with an effortless prosthetic use of technologies to modify bodies, flowing in the direction of capital’s own unfolding, and more to do with a scornful appropriation for strategic purposes of representation, which feed into both nightmarish and utopian visions of technological potential. 'Impoverished experience' is overpowered only if the fact of poverty is made into the underpinning of a political strategy of a ‘new barbarism’ that corresponds faithfully to the new realities of the constellation of Masse and Technik, in all their potential combinations. In his day, Benjamin was buoyed up by a mass media worker, John Heartfield, who developed a critical method of working with refuse, especially technological detritus, and who turned the barbarism of capitalism back against itself.

To this task, ... of Astarte

Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 196.

In May, 1922, ... as the Frankfurt School.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 5.

The first of these ... took its place.

The variegated ... the sponsorship

Unknown source.

although the Institute for Social Research ... in Beverly Hills

Remember that the LaRouchians like to see most political movements and organizations as part of a joint conspiracy by the devious elites.

Similarly, the Institute's ... the Soviet Union

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 17.

Like Wittfogel's and Borkenau's, ... coming to Frankfurt.

and there is evidence ... into the 1960's

Unknown source.

the Institute saw ... foreign policy.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 18-19.

Pollock was invited ... post-Lenin Russia.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 19.

Heated sub rosa ... Stalin’s Russia.

Stalin, who was horrified ... his predecessors,

Indirectly commented in Löwy, p. 193.

In the 1967 preface ... my thought

cut the Institute off in the late 1920's,

Unknown source. However, it seems that the Institute for Social Research was never dependent on the Soviet Union.

forcing Lukàcs into "self-criticism,"

See Löwy, p. 169-170.

In 1933 Lukàcs ... idealist tendency.

and briefly jailing ... World War II.

I'm not sure whether this was really the reason why Lukàcs was jailed.

Löwy, p. 203.

More generally ... Moscow in 1941.

Lukàcs survived to ... regime in Hungary.

Löwy, p. 206.

As of 1956, Lukàcs ... at the time.

Of the other top ... in West Germany.

Unknown source.

After completing studies at the University of Frankfurt,

This may be inaccurate, as Benjamin left his unsuccessful Habilitationsschrift to Cornelius only in 1925.

Buck-Morss, p. 21.

Benjamin submitted the Trauerspiel ... not accepted.

Walter Benjamin planned ... friend Gershom Scholem

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 21.

She met him in 1924, ... in Palestine

who later became ... leading gnostic

Unknown source.

but was prevented ... of Capri

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 21.

She met him ... Capri and Positano.

a cult center ... training base;

Unknown source.

the heretofore apolitical ... radical communism

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 209.

Benjamin wrote Scholem ... ever met

Lacis later ... further indoctrination,

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 209.

He visited Moscow ... 1926-1927

where he met playwright Bertolt Brecht,

Benjamin really met Brecht in Berlin, not in Moscow.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 209.

and then lived and wrote ... him to Brecht.

See also Walter Benjamin Moscow Diary.

According to Lacis's autobiography, Benjamin met Brecht in Berlin before his Moscow

http://www.scribd.com/doc/13139283/Walter-...in-Moscow-Diary

with whom he would begin a long collaboration;

See Buck-Morss, p. 34.

Benjamin was caught ... became increasingly apparent.

A more significant event in this context can be found in Buck-Morss, p. 129.

as the article appeared ... of that year.

soon thereafter, ... poet Baudelaire,

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 87.

Benjamin's experience ... reproduction of music.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 126.

Like the precursor ... (whose works he translated)

Benjamin began ... with hallucinogens.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 126.

Like the precursor ... liberation problematic.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 126-127.

Nonetheless, "hashish, ... new one."

In 1927, he ... Otto Klemperer.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 20.

Beginning in 1927 ... Lotte Lenya.

From 1928 to 1932, ... drug overdose.

See Buck-Morss, Chapters 9-11.

Benjamin's work remained ... 1980's copyright dates.

Unknown source. Anyway, this passage which dates the revival of Walter Benjamin's works to 1968-1969 seems to indirectly admit that Benjamin can't have influenced the beginnings of the student rebellion in the early 1960s.

Adorno was younger than Benjamin

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 6.

Adorno, eleven years younger than Benjamin

and as aggressive as the older man was passive.

Unknown source.

Born Teodoro ... Adelina Patti.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 1.

He was born ... world with music.

It was generally ... Paul Hindemith's teacher.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 3.

He was eighteen ... Bernhard Sekles.

Another source: Buck-Morss, p. 11.

Adorno's teacher ... geniuses of Vienna

However, in 1918 ... Siegfried Kracauer.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 2.

In 1918-1919, ... reading Kant.

Kracauer was part ... Franz Rosenzweig,

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 7.

Adorno in an affirmative ... circle in Frankfurt.

Another possible source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 21.

the group of ... Ernst Simon.

and two students, Leo Lowenthal and Erich Fromm.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 21.

It was as a member ... join the Institut.

Adorno engaged Kracauer ... of Kant;

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 2.

His Kant tutor ... Pure Reason

Kracauer also ... writings of Lukàcs

Unknown source. Even the credibility of this detail remains totally unclear to me.

and to Walter Benjamin ... Nobel clique.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 5-6.

Adorno met Benjamin ... am Opernplatz.

In 1924, Adorno ... Arnold Schönberg,

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 11.

In 1924 he was ... the chance.

Another possible source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 28.

Frankfurt, however, ... January, 1925.

and became connected ... Karl Kraus.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 28.

The Vienna to which ... Schönberg circle.

Here, he ... Hans Eisler,

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 16.

Adorno went with ... Hanns Eisler

but also came into contact ... "bourgeois family."

Unknown source. Possibly a book on Ascona such as Martin Green: The Mountain of truth: the counterculture begins, Ascona, 1900-1920.

By 1928, Adorno ... to do some work.

There are two minor errors here as Benjamin never became a member of the Institute for Social Research despite writing for its journal, and Adorno joined the Institute properly only in America in 1938 after having completed his studies in Frankfurt and Oxford and having also worked for a few years at the University of Frankfurt.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 21.

In 1928 Adorno ... the first magnitude.

As subject, ... at the time.

Buck-Morss, p. 21.

It was a Hegelianized, ... was decisive.

Another possible source: Buck-Morss, p. 27.

There can be no doubt ... sphere of music.

Official Soviet discussions ... banal, at best.

Unknown source, even though "socialist realism" is discussed in Jay's book.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 173.

Lenin's demand ... Stalinist socialist realism

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 184.

Socialist realism in music ... neoclassical objectivism.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 196.

The result was ... socialist realism.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 296.

Finally, by skillfully ... socialist realism

In essence, ... Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 93.

Benjamin (who had been ... nonempirical absolutes.

At the beginning ... legacy of Socrates.

The genius of Leibnitz is a constant theme of the LaRouchians.

As an alternative, ... the physical world.

Some details in this Minnicino's passage apparently come from some unidentified source, even though its basic idea can be found in Susan Buck-Morss's account.

Buck-Morss, p. 88.

In Benjamin's thought ... vis-a-vis content.

Buck-Morss, p. 89.

The source ... class oppression.

Buck-Morss, p. 89.

With Benjamin ... language of names.

Buck-Morss, p. 89.

Just as his thought ... to reconstruct.

Buck-Morss, p. 90.

Where Benjamin had ... utopia depended.

Thus, Benjamin ... hopelessly elusive.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 78.

Describing phenomena ... in his writings.

In fact, speech, ... truthful he becomes;

Unknown source.

or, in one of Benjamin's ... death of intention

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 77.

Truth never enters ... "doctrine of intentionality"

This philosophical sleight-of-hand ... good and evil

The LaRouchian complaint against the Frankfurt School once again proves to be its part in the anti-metaphysical philosophical tradition started by Nietzsche. Compare this passage to the general anti-Nietzschean attitude in Michael Minnicino "The Evil Philosophy Behind Political Correctness".

http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/polcorr.htm

Benjamin is able, ... of the bourgeoisie.

Original text: Walter Benjamin: Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.

Characteristic of this ... all moralizing dilettantism.

http://www.autoroute.plus.com/generation/c/fcsurrealism.htm

Thus, we are ... (Adorno's thesis);

Source: Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 255

The classical example of musical totalization for Adorno was always Beethoven, ... Beethoven thus began the process of negating totality in music that would culminate in Schoenberg's atonal revolution.

similarly, Schiller ... reason (Marcuse's thesis).

Schiller is mentioned in Herbert Marcuse's book Eros and Civilization on p. 177, p. 180, p. 182, p. 185-188. p. 190, p. 192-193.

http://www.amazon.com/Eros-Civilization-Pa...e/dp/0415186633

See also in this context Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 179.

In short, ... this negative moment.

Thus, for the Frankfort School ... God the Creator;

This seems to be the main objection that the LaRouchians have against the Frankfurt School, as the LaRouchians apparently consider only philosophies supporting individual creativity as worthwhile.

"religious illumination," ... introductory lesson

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 124-126, especially p. 125.

Two years later, ... anthropological inspiration.

For the Walter Benjamin quote, see Buck-Morss, p. 126.

Nonetheless, "hashish ... profane illumination

At the same time, ... without socialism.

This experimental idea of Walter Benjamin can be found in his essay "Experience and Poverty" (1933). See also Two Worlds of Fortune: Culture and Dying in the Global Zone.

Artists should not ... makes them barbaric.

http://militantesthetix.co.uk/adorno/globalica.htm

"Do not build ... said Benjamin

This was really Brecht's idea which Benjamin cites, published in Walter Benjamin: Reflections, p. 219.

A Brechtian maxim: do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones.

http://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Essays-A...s/dp/080520802X

The proper direction ... familiar world

For the Walter Benjamin citation, see Buck-Morss, p. 127.

Under the gaze ... new one

In music, ... is sick, and

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 50.

As Schonberg had noted ... progressing disintegration.

"the sickness, ... the cure"

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 36.

Yet it must be admitted ... they leading?

"The extraordinarily violent ... as 'destruction.'"

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 38.

As with his program ... as 'destruction.'

The purpose of modern ... political revolt.

Once again the LaRouchian complaint about the Frankfurt School's relationship to the question of creativity.

To organize pessimism ... for images."

Original text: Walter Benjamin: Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.

Here due weight must be given to the insight that in the Traite du style, Aragon’s last book, required in distinction between metaphor and image, a happy insight into questions of style that needs extending. Extension: nowhere do these two—metaphor and image—collide so drastically and so irreconcilably as in politics. For to organize pessimism means nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover in political action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images. This image sphere, however, can no longer be measured out by contemplation. If it is the double task of the revolutionary intelligentsia to overthrow the intellectual predominance of the bourgeoisie and to make contact with the proletarian masses, the intelligentsia has failed almost entirely in the second part of this task because it can no longer be performed contemplatively.

http://www.autoroute.plus.com/generation/c/fcsurrealism.htm

Thus, Benjamin collaborated with Brecht to work these theories into practical form,

Benjamin and Brecht kept in touch and occasionally met, but it would be an exaggeration to say that they had common goals and closely collaborated. See Buck-Morss, p. 32-33, p. 150-151, p. 213, p. 230.

and their joint effort ... aimlessly angry.

For Verfremdungseffekt, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 186.

It thus served ... modern era.

See also Buck-Morss, p. 143.

But Benjamin, in line ... on the other.

The Adorno-Benjamin analysis ... our universities.

I guess Benjamin wasn't writing about the same type of political correctness that later appeared in the American academia.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 34.

Benjamin was caught ... literary tendency

The Poststructuralism of ... over-reliance on words.

Unknown source.

If these campus antics appear "retarded" (in the words of Adorno),

Original text: Adorno: On the Fetish-Character in Music

The counterpart to the fetishism of music is a regression of listening. Not only do listeners lose, along with freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, but listeners come to stubbornly reject the notion that any such perception is possible. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear. They are childish. However, their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded. Whenever they have a chance, they display the pinched hatred of those who really sense the other but exclude it in order to live in peace, and who therefore would like best to root out the nagging possibility.

http://musiccog.ohio-state.edu/Music839B/A...hes/Adorno.html

The Frankfurt School's most important ... reproduction of art."

Benjamin had a short period when he considered that the mass media might have a positive shock effect on the otherwise passive public, but this horrified Adorno who despised most effects of the mass media.

Buck-Morss, p. 147-148.

But whereas he saw ... a new use value

However, the new technologies ... this process, "demythologizing."

Unknown source, and I'm not sure whether Adorno used the term "demythologize" in this meaning. However, for one instance of Adorno using the word "demythologize", see Buck-Morss, p. 58.

Adorno also used ... critical understanding.

This new passivity, ... forcibly retarded.

For Adorno's original text, see Theodor Adorno and the Regression of Listening - Notes by David Huron.

Adorno's On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening is an influential 30-page essay originally published in 1938.

http://musiccog.ohio-state.edu/Music839B/A...hes/Adorno.html

As Benjamin puts it ... their exposed resurrection."

For the original text, see Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/...ge/benjamin.htm

The great possibilities ... in 1934.

Unknown source. Appears somewhat dubious, as the Frankfurt School wasn't as financially well-off as they would have wished during their American period.

In 1937, the Rockefeller ... Project's music section.

Unknown source, even though the Princeton Radio Project is discussed in Jay's The Dialectical Imagination as well as in Buck-Morss's Chapter 11.

Despite the official gloss, ... "brainwashing."

This is probably just LaRouchian conspiracy speculation without a source. Compare to Dope, Inc., p. 373.

In 1939, one of the numbers ... their findings.

Published in "Radio Research and Applied Psychology". Journal of Applied Psychology. Vol. XXIII, No. 1. February, 1939.

Their conclusion was ... become acceptable.

Unknown source.

"Not only are ... are interchangeable."

Original text: Adorno & Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979), p. 125.

The crowning achievement ... by war preparations.

Unknown source.

Adorno understood this ... in one work

Original text: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, published in Adorno & Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972), p. 124.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/...re-industry.htm

The efforts of the Radio ... 50% no opinion.

Unknown source.

These psychoanalytic survey techniques became standard, not only for the Frankfurt School, but also throughout American social science departments, particularly after the I.S.R. arrived in the United States. The methodology was the basis of the research piece for which the Frankfurt School is most well known, the "authoritarian personality" project.

This is misleadingly put as it makes it sound like the I.S.R.'s arriving in the United States had anything to do with the psychoanalytic survey techniques simultaneously becoming standard throughout American social science departments.

In 1942, I.S.R. ... American population.

Possible source: Buck-Morss, p. 178.

In 1944 Horkheimer ... of Scientific Research.

"Our aim," ... arrived at.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 227.

Education for tolerance, ... make an appearance.

Ultimately, five volumes ... social psychologists.

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 178.

Adorno became codirector ... Study Group.

In the 1930's ... "ambivalent."

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 131.

Although, as mentioned ... ambivalent.

The heart of Adorno's ... postwar audience.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 227

For example, the opposite ... goings-on.

Nine personality traits ... and the F Scale (fascism).

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 243

Source: The new measuring device ... "goings-on."

Using Rensis Lickerts's methodology of weighting results,

Unknown source.

the authors were ... the authoritarian personality.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 239

The basic objective ... the authoritarian personality

Source: Buck-Morss, p. 179

But that validity ... anthropological type.

The legerdemain here,... not a scientific, decision.

Unknown source.

Horkheimer and Adorno firmly ... Frankfurt School despised."

Unknown source. I wonder if this can be true, as Horkheimer and Adorno even both had a period when they were interested in religion.

In their theoretical writings ... root of evil

Original text: Adorno & Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 145.

But by virtue of the same moments by which it lifted the spell of nature religion, Christianity is producing ideology once again, in a spiritualized form. To the same degree as the absolute is brought closer to the finite, the finite is made absolute. Christ, the incarnated spirit, is the deified sorcerer. The human self-reflection in the absolute, the humanization of God through Christ, is the proton pseudos [first substitution]. The progress beyond Judaism is paid for with the assertion that the mortal Jesus was God. The harm is done precisely by the reflective moment of Christianity, the spiritualization of magic. A spiritual essence is attributed to something which mind identifies as natural. Mind consists precisely in demonstrating the contradiction inherent in such pretensions of the finite.

At the same time ... is Russia".

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 228.

Thus, in 1946, ... is Russia."

This self-serving attempt ... B'nai B'rith, among others.

This passage is mainly related to the general interests of the LaRouchians, and not related to the Frankfurt School.

Using standard ... against them.

This apparently refers to the law suit against Lyndon LaRouche, the connection of which to the Frankfurt School personality theories hasn't been reliably proved.

When Lyndon LaRouche and six of his colleagues faced trial on trumped-up charges in 1988, LaRouche identified that the prosecution would rely on the Frankfurt School's authoritarian personality fraud, to claim that the defendants' intentions were inherently criminal. During the trial, LaRouche's defense attorney attempted to demonstrate the Frankfurt School roots of the prosecution's conspiracy theory

http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/polcorr.htm

Despite its unprovable ... remains so today.

Unknown source. I doubt the Frankfurt School had much to do with the popularity of empirical questionnaire methods in the social sciences.

In fact, the adoption ... content is zero.

This passage explores the history of public-opinion surveys and their somewhat remote relation to Paul Lazarsfeld's projects, but not really demonstrating any kind of link to the scholarly interests of the Frankfurt School during the same period.

Part of the influence ... R&A Branch veterans.

Unknown source. However, for those Frankfurt School members who were working for the US government during WWII, any credible proof of their possible lasting influence on the US government is lacking here. In particular, their influence on choosing the future enemies of the USA is lacking.

At the same time ... the German university system.

Indirectly commented in Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 282.

With the encouragement ... impossible to reject.

In fact, McCloy ... U.S. citizenship.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 283.

Like many other refugees ... his origin

In Germany, Horkheimer began the spadework for the full-blown revival of the Frankfurt School in that nation in the late 1950's,

See the Epilogue chapter in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination.

including the training ... knowledge and human activity.

Unknown source.

This statement not only ... objects repel

This passage once again restates the standard Larouchian theme about how important creativity is, how Plato and Leibniz were among the geniuses of philosophy and how anti-metaphysical philosophy questions this important basis of Western society.

The key to the ... psychologically primary.

Unknown source. Lukàcs was indeed interested in the questions of community and the alienation of the individual, but as evidenced by his emphasis on class-consciousness in the 1920s and his disdain for psychology as such, he can hardly be said to have considered "individual feeling states psychologically primary".

When the I.S.R. leaders ... [cultural pessimism].

The sentiment of "Kulturpessimismus" was hardly invented by neither Lukàcs nor the Frankfurt School, as this type of thinking may have been common in the intellectual circles of the 1910s and 1920s.

You can find more info about the history of Kulturpessimismus in Martin Schmidt's thesis "Der Begriff Kulturpessimismus":

http://www.cultiv.net/cultiv/index.php?id=...e&docid=122

Schmidt cites Kurt Wahlmuller's old study which explores the sentiments typical of Kulturpessimismus in German poetry between 1912-1939 (however, the word "Kulturpessimismus" itself wasn't used until at the end of this period). It should be noted from this study that Kulturpessimismus was occurring even before Lukàcs had released his famous books The Theory of the Novel (written in 1914, published in 1916) and History and Class Consciousness (published in 1923, some chapters written a couple of years earlier).

Kurt Wahlmuller: Der Kulturpessimismus in der deutschen Dichtung von 1912 bis 1932. Wien, Universitat Wien, Dissertation, 1939.

Moreover, Lukàcs can't have used the word "Kulturpessimismus" himself in his major works, which had been written before the mid-1920s, as the first occurrence of the word which Schmidt was able to find was in 1929: "Dostojewski und der Kulturpessimismus der Gegenwart", Bruhn (1929).

However, although the Frankfurt School ... completely from the Frankfurt School

This passage seems to be a stereotypical LaRouchian plotline.

Lucien Goldmann, ... and aspirations."

Goldmann seems to have made this comment in his 1969 analysis of Herbert Marcuse.

Goldmann, L (1969). "La Pensée de Herbert Marcuse". La Nef 36 (Jan-March).

To estimate the real influence of Herbert Marcuse on the 1960s cultural rebels, see James Panton: "Intellectual Influences on the New Left in America: C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse".

http://reconstruction.eserver.org/081/panton.shtml

The long hair and ... already-available materials.

Unknown source.

The founding document ... "revolutionary messianism" of the 1920's into the 1960's,

The words "revolutionary messianism" are indeed used by Georg Lukàcs in his 1967 preface for the new edition of his book History and Class Consciousness.

It is at this point that the objective internal contradictions in my political and philosophical views come into the open. On the international scene I was able to indulge all my intellectual passion for revolutionary messianism unhindered. ... utopianism of my revolutionary messianism.

http://www.amazon.com/History-Class-Consci...s/dp/0262620200

was Marcuse's Eros and Civilization ... of "dimensionality."

Actually, the word "dimensionality" cannot be found yet in the book Eros and Civilization, which was published almost a decade before One-Dimensional Man.

In one of the most bizarre ... a creative play instinct.

As already mentioned above, Schiller is mentioned in Herbert Marcuse's book Eros and Civilization on p. 177, p. 180, p. 182, p. 185-188. p. 190, p. 192-193. Note that Marcuse uses the words "play impulse" in this book rather than the words "play instinct".

For Marcuse, on the other hand, ... "technological rationality."

For the first use of the phrase "technological rationality" in Marcuse's major books, see Eros and Civilization, p. 85-86.

But does not the civilized inhibition of aggressive impulses in work offset the weakening of Eros? Aggressive as well as libidinal impulses are supposed to be satisfied in work "by way of sublimation," and the culturally beneficial "sadistic character" of work has often been emphasized. The development of technics and technological rationality absorbs to a great extent the "modified" destructive instincts

As Marcuse would say ... technical progress.

For Marcuse's original use of the phrase "technical progress", see One-Dimensional Man, p. 3.

A comfortable, smooth ... promising development.

http://www.amazon.com/One-Dimensional-Man-...l/dp/0807014176

This erotic liberation ... with true creativity.

Apparently, Marcuse uses in Eros and Civilization only the words "play impulse", while the exact words "play instinct" have been used, for example, by another radical Raoul Vaneigem in his "The Revolution of Everyday Life".

It was in fact from art that play broke free. The eruption was called Dada. "The dadaist events awoke the primitive-irrational play instinct which had been held down an the audience", said Hugo Ball.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6147926/Raoul-Va...f-Everyday-Life

Marcuse's contrary theory ... extent, Carl Jung.

Unknown source.

Every aspect ... idea of reason."

For the original use of the phrase "idea of reason", see One-Dimensional Man, p. 128.

The totalitarian universe ... reason in one.

Or: "Auschwitz continues ... electronics plants

Original text: One-Dimensional Man, p. 252.

Auschwitz continues ... nonsense into sense.

This erotic liberation ... of the "Great Refusal,"

For Marcuse's explanation of the phrase "Great Refusal", see One-Dimensional Man, p. 63-64.

In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal - the protest against that which is.

a total rejection ... "ritual-authoritarian language."

For the original use of this phrase, see One-Dimensional Man, p. 102.

The ritual-authoritarian language ... non-capitalist countries.

Eros and Civilization was reissued ... political fight."

Unknown source.

As part of the Great Refusal, ... "aesthetic ethos,"

For the original use of this phrase, see An Essay on Liberation, p. 24.

Emergence of a new Reality Principle: under which a new sensibility and a desublimated scientific intelligence would combine in the creation of an aesthetic ethos.

Another instance from the same book: An Essay on Liberation, p. 26.

Does this idea ... and the political?

And an instance explaining its connection to Socialism: An Essay on Liberation, p. 48.

They would reside in modes of work and pleasure, of thought and behavior, in a technology and in a natural environment which express the aesthetic ethos of socialism.

http://www.amazon.com/Essay-Liberation-Her...e/dp/0807005959

turning life into ... under Marcuse's influence

Marcuse apparently used the word "life-style" for the first time in his major books in Counterrevolution and Revolt in 1972, p. 84.

This whole "life style" of bourgeois muterialism was permeated with an instrumentalist rationality which militated against libertarian tendencies, debased sex, discriminated against women, and imposed repression for the sake of God and business.

http://www.amazon.com/Counterrevolution-Re...e/dp/0807015334

See also Counterrevolution and Revolt, p. 48.

But the bourgeois individual is not overcome by simply refusing social performance, by dropping out and living one's own style of life.

However, different "styles" of protagonists, art and language are discussed already in One-Dimensional Man, p. 62, p. 66, p. 67, p. 81, p. 90, p. 93, p. 98, p. 104, p. 136, p. 178, p. 182, p. 200.

With Marcuse representing ... a political fight."

Unknown source.

In 1969, he noted ... and defined."

Original text: An Essay on Liberation, p. 35.

Here is a systematic ... the established one.

Marcuse was aided ... determined by their "natures."

Unknown source.

The importance of the individual ... women into feminism.

This is probably a false accusation, as Marcuse when interviewed by Playboy in 1970, explicity rejected the idea of separate black studies. Marcuse appears to have believed in the Socialist dream about the perfectibility of man, so it wouldn't have made much sense for him to lose a lot of time pondering how scholarly activities should be organized in an imperfect society.

"What do you think about black studies?" ... "I don’t believe in black studies or white studies," Marcuse replied. "There is a certain amount of material that every intelligent person should learn.

http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/newsevents/...9PlayboyInt.htm

Discussion of women's ... other Freudian extremists.

Unknown source.

This popularization of ... popular, in the beginning.

This is basically Minnicino's own concluding section.

Appendix: Nazi-Communist Hippies of the 1920’s

Source unknown. May be based on a book such as Martin Green: Mountain of truth: the counterculture begins, Ascona, 1900-1920.

Appendix: The New Age Paradigm Shift

Sources mostly unknown.

The Frankfurt School's original 1930's ... was originally "matriarchal."

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 95.

In the next issue ... bourgeois men

Another possible source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 94.

Before the decline ... indebted to them.

However, the core group of the Frankfurt School wasn't enthusiastic about Erich Fromm's interest in Bachofen's non-Freudian ideas, as explained in Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 101.

Only Walter Benjamin, ... patriarchal thinking.

This primoridial period ... made by the individual

Unknown source. Anyway, this passage details Erich Fromm's comments in 1970 regarding how society had developed compared to the wishes of the advocates of matriarchism.

Appendix: The Theory of the Authoritarian Personality

Unknown source. Mainly refers to the law suit against Lyndon LaRouche in which the LaRouchians suspected their enemies were trying to use tricks from the Frankfurt School personality theory to make LaRouche look guilty. This event may have inspired the LaRouchians to research the history of the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism.

Edited April 9, 2009 by Romantic_Realist

[Romantic_Realist]

---

Here are my notes to Minnicino's second Fidelio article The Evil Philosophy Behind Political Correctness: Why Lyndon LaRouche Is The Only Antidote (printed in The American Almanac, February, 1993). Some of these have been copied directly from my notes to Minnicino's first Fidelio article for the sake of completeness and simplicity.

The Frankfurt School was founded ... his various elaborators.

Even though Susan Buck-Morss outlines in her book many kinds of influences that Georg Lukàcs had on the Frankfurt School, it's definitely erroneous to say that he founded it. One could say that Lukàcs started Western Marxism, but that may be oversimplification, too.

As to the claim about Lukàcs's work being based on Nietzsche, this is an exaggeration, even though Nietzsche was certainly an important influence on him during one of his pre-Marxist scholarly periods.

See Löwy, p. 26.

According to Lukàcs ... of his aesthetics

Around the time ... toward Bolshevism,

Löwy, p. 123-124.

Still, in 1917 ... aspects of life

and became commissar ... in 1919.

Löwy, p. 150.

During the 133 days ... Education and Culture.

After the 100-day ... to Moscow

Lukàcs fled originally to Austria after the 133-day revolution was defeated, and moved to the Soviet Union only later.

Löwy, p. 154.

After the defeat ... emigrate to Austria.'

and became ... the Comintern.

Löwy, p. 155.

Lukàcs also exerted ... Southeast Europe.

There, his task ... across Europe?

This is inaccurate. Certainly while living in the Soviet Union, Lukàcs wanted to implicitly explore the possibility of a world revolution on some level in most of his studies, but his theorizing was then mostly limited to the realm of culture, as he was forced to abandon his earlier overtly political speculations.

To this end ... known as the Frankfurt School.

This alleged conspiracy is false, as Lukàcs only made a presentation during the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche event in 1923, and was not responsible for organizing this event nor for the subsequent founding of the Institute for Social Research, which was inspired by this event.

Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 196.

In May, 1922, ... the Frankfurt School.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 5.

The first of these ... took its place.

The ISR determined in the "communal soul."

The Frankfurt School wasn't very enthusiastic about admiring the events in the Soviet Union neither before nor after the Bolshevik revolution.

On the other hand the Russian world view had been an inspiration for Lukàcs even before he became a Marxist.

Löwy, p. 38-39, and also p. 53, p. 67-69, p. 80, p. 111-114; Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 98, as well as Arato & Breines, Chapter 6.

The Bolsheviks succeeded ... from the Party.

Unknown source. Possibly Minnicino tries to paraphrase in his own words the idea of Lukàcs's `Esztetikai Kultura' essay and Lukàcs's admiration of Russia in the context of the later Bolshevik revolution, but I don't know whether Lukàcs still interpreted the Bolshevik revolution from this kind of point of view.

The ISR investigators ... the individual soul.

For Lukàcs's way to use of the word "unique", see The Theory of the Novel, p. 152.

This world is the sphere of pure soul-reality in which man exists as man, neither as a social being nor as an isolated, unique, pure and therefore abstract interiority.

Worse than that, from the ISR's standpoint ... successful Bolshevik revolution.

Most of this passage consists of typical LaRouchean views on individual creativity.

For the concept of "mediation", see Buck-Morss, p. 45-46.

In the case ... all geistige phenomena.

See also Buck-Morss, p. 161.

Rather than affirming ... [strassenpublikum]

On the question of mediation in performing music, see Buck-Morss, p. 44.

In order to ... the composition.

Thus, in 1914, ... Western civilization?"

This is a misunderstanding as Lukàcs only wrote this question almost four decades later for his new preface to the 1962 edition of The Theory of the Novel.

See Löwy, p. 112.

The 1962 preface ... from western civilization?"

"The ISR's particular ... theory of criticism,

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 292.

In 1938 Benjamin ... as self-criticism

while at the same ... life under capitalism

See Walter Benjamin, "Experience and Poverty" (1933), and also the article "Two Worlds of Fortune: Culture and Dying in the Global Zone".

Artists should not ignore ... what makes them barbaric.

http://militantesthetix.co.uk/adorno/globalica.htm

and the false myths of monotheism.

Unknown source.

What was needed ... a personal destiny,

The sentiments of "Aufhebung der Kultur" and "Kulturpessimismus" were hardly invented by Lukàcs, as this type of thinking may have been common in the intellectual circles of the 1910s and 1920s.

You can again find more info about the history of Kulturpessimismus in Martin Schmidt's thesis "Der Begriff Kulturpessimismus":

http://www.cultiv.net/cultiv/index.php?id=...e&docid=122

The phrase "Aufhebung der Kultur" has been notably discussed by Jurgen Habermas in "Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique" regarding what type of culture Walter Benjamin considered as worthy. According to this same article, Herbert Marcuse seems to have commented on a similar idea in the 1930s. The words "Aufhebung der Kultur" apparently don't mean here the total abolition of culture but rather overcoming in the sense of hoping to step on a new level with the most worthy elements from the old level.

He deals with the documents of culture (which are at the same time those of barbarism) not from the historicist viewpoint of stored-up cultural goods but from the critical viewpoint (as he so obstinately expresses it) of the decline of culture into "goods that can become an object of possession for humanity." (F. p. 35) Benjamin says nothing, of course, about the "overcoming of culture" [Aufhebung der Kultur].

Herbert Marcuse speaks of the overcoming of culture in a 1937 essay, "The Affirmative Character of Culture." ... Marcuse makes good the claim of ideology critique to take at its word the truth that is articulated in bourgeois ideals but has been reserved to the sphere of the beautiful illusion-that is, to overcome art as a sphere split off from reality.

but only "a destiny of the community in a world that has been abandoned by God."

For Lukàcs's use of the phrase "a destiny of the community", see The Theory of the Novel, p. 66.

It is traditionally thought that one of the essential characteristics of the epic is the fact that its theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of a community.

For Lukàcs's use of the phrase "abandoned by God", see The Theory of the Novel, p. 88.

The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God. The novel hero's psychology is demonic; the objectivity of the novel is the mature man's knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that reality would disintegrate into nothingness or inessentiality.

For Lukàcs's another use of this phrase, see The Theory of the Novel, p. 92.

Irony, with intuitive double vision, can see where God is to be found in a world abandoned by God; irony sees the lost, utopian home of the idea that has become an ideal, and yet at the same time it understands that the ideal is subjectively and psychologically conditioned, because that is its only possible existence.

The political task ... and hopelessness

This is misleading, as the Frankfurt School wanted the masses to be shocked into realizing how bad capitalism was, but this might also be implemented through giving them glimpses of a better society to come. Walter Benjamin temporarily got under the influence of Bertolt Brecht, and considered alienation as a potential route to awakening the masses, but was soon pressurized by Adorno into changing his mind.

See Walter Benjamin, "Experience and Poverty" (1933), and also the article "Two Worlds of Fortune: Culture and Dying in the Global Zone".

http://militantesthetix.co.uk/adorno/globalica.htm

while simultaneously ... uncontrollable revolt.

This is a completely uncredible statement as the Frankfurt School definitely wanted the masses to break out of reification rather than get even duller.

In the 45 years ... and music.

Unknown source.

Walter Benjamin, who ... Socrates and Plato.

Buck-Morss, p. 88.

In Benjamin's thought ... that understanding.

Benjamin admits ... that understanding.

Unknown source.

At the beginning ... which envisions it.

This passage restates the standard Larouchian theme about how important creativity is and how Plato and Leibniz are among the good guys of philosophy.

All this is ... not the mind.

Buck-Morss, p. 22.

What was remarkable ... into profane illumination.

Way back ... capitalist society.

Buck-Morss, p. 88-89.

In Benjamin's thought ... vis-a-vis content.

Buck-Morss, p. 89.

The source of ... class oppression.

Buck-Morss, p. 89.

With Benjamin ... language of names.

Buck-Morss, p. 89.

Just as his thought ... to reconstruct.

Buck-Morss, p. 90.

Where Benjamin ... utopia depended.

But creativity ... Nietzsche and Heidegger.

For Walter Benjamin, see Buck-Morss, p. 56.

Whereas Lukàcs had ... of "first nature."

For Adorno, see Buck-Morss, p. 25.

Adorno insisted ... or ontological sense.

The creative act ... no natural law.

For Adorno, this idea can be found indirectly in Buck-Morss, p. 25.

In 1925 Adorno ... articulation and expression.

The best art ... of "capitalist art."

Walter Benjamin: Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.

Characteristic of this whole left-wing bourgeois position is its irremediable coupling of idealistic morality with political practice. Only in contrast to the helpless compromises of “sentiment” are certain central features of Surrealism, indeed of the Surrealist tradition, to be understood. Little has happened so far to promote this understanding. The seduction was too great to regard the Satanism of a Rimbaud and a Lautreamont as a pendant to art for art’s sake in an inventory of snobbery. If, however, one resolves to open up this romantic dummy, one finds something usable inside. One finds the cult of evil as a political device, however romantic, to disinfect and isolate against all moralizing dilettantism.

http://www.autoroute.plus.com/generation/c/fcsurrealism.htm

Theodor Adorno, a musician ... miserable existence.

Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 255.

The classical example ... Schoenberg's atonal revolution.

The purpose of ... from politics."

Walter Benjamin: Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.

Here due weight ... performed contemplatively.

http://www.autoroute.plus.com/generation/c/fcsurrealism.htm

The Frankfurt School was not satisfied ... into practice.

This is an uncredible statement, as the Frankfurt School core group and Adorno especially considered that the time was ripe to discontinue the link between theory and revolutionary action and dedicate themselves to thinking about thinking, i.e. pure philosophical theory.

The entire institute ... coming to power.

See Jay, chapter 7 and Buck-Morss, chapter 11.

Sponsored by such institutions ... or reason itself.

A stereotypical LaRouchian plotline of a joint conspiracy by the elites.

The Frankfurt School's Critical Theory ... entertainment industry,

This is an extremely uncredible statement, as the Frankfurt School despised mass culture, except for a short period when Walter Benjamin considered its potential as a tool to break out of the apathetic status quo, thus shocking Adorno.

Buck-Morss, p. 147-148.

Benjamin situated ... was not surprising.

a phrase which the School coined;

Buck-Morss, p. 109.

Adorno's jazz critique ... "culture industry" in the 1940s.

It is the theoretical ... politics in America.

The legacy of Adorno's involvement in the Princeton Radio Project seems to be the unplausible core link in both of Minnicino's articles which is supposed to prove how the Frankfurt School has managed to disseminate the alleged seeds of political correctness to the American mass media and politics.

Adorno did indeed work in the Princeton Radio Project, but the co-operation proved to be less than successful, so it appears unlikely that the results of Adorno's work in the project could have had any kind of major effect on the American mass media at the time.

Buck-Morss, p. 166.

In short, Adorno ... to join Horkheimer,

Buck-Morss, p. 175.

When Adorno first ... sociological analysis.

As to opinion polling, the Frankfurt School's main connection to it seems to be the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group, which co-operated with them to carry out The Authoritarian Personality project.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 239.

Thus, with the grant ... following year.

the "culture of barbarism" sought by Lukàcs

Lukàcs, `Esztetikai Kultura', Renaissance, Budapest, 1910.

Also mentioned in Arato, p. 29-30.

One of the few places in this period in which Lukàcs links together these two dimensions of his thinking is in the 1910 essay, "Aesthetic Culture," which can be viewed as an addendum to the Dramahistory. In the 1910 essay, as we have noted, Lukàcs condemns "aesthetic culture" as an alienating pursuit of interiority. As an alternative in this connection he makes a striking assertion: "the only hope could have been in the proletariat, in socialism; the hope that the barbarians come and with rough hands tear apart all overrefinement; the hope that the revolutionary spirit which unmasked every ideology and saw everywhere the real moving forces could have seen and felt clearly here, too, sweeping away everything peripheral, returning to the essential.

and the "forced retardation" of Adorno,

Adorno: On the Fetish-Character in Music.

The counterpart to the fetishism of music is a regression of listening. Not only do listeners lose, along with freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, but listeners come to stubbornly reject the notion that any such perception is possible. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear. They are childish. However, their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded. Whenever they have a chance, they display the pinched hatred of those who really sense the other but exclude it in order to live in peace, and who therefore would like best to root out the nagging possibility.

http://musiccog.ohio-state.edu/Music839B/A...hes/Adorno.html

---

Minnicino also wrote a humoristic piece in 1994 indirectly related to the Frankfurt School and Georg Lukàcs, including a couple of references to Lukàcs not found in his previous two Fidelio articles.

Michael Minnicino: Freud and the Frankfurt School

http://schillerinstitute.net/conf-iclc/199..._minnicino.html

Lukàcs said that you had to make people completely pessimistic; you had to make them believe that they lived in "a world abandoned by God," as he put it.

For the phrase "abandoned by God", see The Theory of the Novel, p. 88.

The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God. The novel hero's psychology is demonic; the objectivity of the novel is the mature man's knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that reality would disintegrate into nothingness or inessentiality.

And also see, The Theory of the Novel, p. 92.

Irony, with intuitive double vision, can see where God is to be found in a world abandoned by God; irony sees the lost, utopian home of the idea that has become an ideal, and yet at the same time it understands that the ideal is subjectively and psychologically conditioned, because that is its only possible existence.

http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Novel-Georg-L...955-1866944-209

At the same time, the new social movement that you were trying to create had to have certain key similarities to a religion — but, of course, without a concept of a Supreme Being.

Lukàcs, `Esztetikai Kultura', Renaissance, Budapest, 1910.

In fact, Lukàcs seriously investigated the Baal Shem cult, a Jewish cabbalistic sect,

Löwy, p. 94.

Thus, in his 1911 ... Baal-Shem.

as well as several medieval Christian heresies,

Löwy, p. 94.

During the same ... and Böhme.

in order to find what he called the "messianic" ideas which could be incorporated into Bolshevik organizing.

Lukàcs, `Esztetikai Kultura', Renaissance, Budapest, 1910.

---

Here are finally my notes for Raymond Raehn's Chapter 2 in the Free Congress Foundation e-book.

http://www.freecongress.org/centers/cc/pcessay1-3.aspx

Fair use limitations were otherwise a big problem for preparing these notes and necessitated my use of abbreviated markers instead of complete excerpts from the presumed source books and Fidelio articles. But as the FCF states that "We encourage other organizations to make the text of the book available on their own websites", I probably don't need to abbreviate the FCF's textual passages here, as I'll be just doing what they suggested on the next page:

See: http://www.freecongress.org/centers/cc/index.aspx

You may find here some overlap with my earlier notes on Minnicino's Fidelio articles, as I just straighforwardly copied their most suitable passages here. However, most notes here are completely new.

I also try to point out here all Raehn's passages which I suspect are not entirely reliable, as the difference between the well-researched hard facts and wild speculations is not as clear-cut in the FCF e-book as in the stereotypical LaRouchian style of the Fidelio articles.

First, I'll give some selected notes on William S. Lind's Chapter 1.

The effort to translate Marxism from economics into culture did not begin with the student rebellion of the 1960s.

Compare this key passage of the FCF e-book to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987), p. 225.

In general, sophisticated Marxism became cultural criticism of life in the Western democracies.

And likewise see the next passage found on page 220 of Bloom's book, which is probably the source where both Minnicino and the FCF got their idea to start looking for the architects of the 1960s rebellion from the direction of the cultural intellectuals of the 1920s and their later careers in the period 1930-1968.

Vulgar Marxism is, of course, Marxism. Nonvulgar Marxism is Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Neidegger, as well as the host of later Leftists who drank at their trough - such as Lukacs, Kojeve, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre - and hoped to enroll them in the class struggle. To do this, they had to jettison that embarrassing economic determinism.

After all, many student rebels of the 1960s were undeniably reading books of the continental intellectuals, so this naturally raises the question of whether these books had a causal effect on what these rebels were doing. Or maybe even the very reason why the rebels started doing their strange and radical antics in the first place had a causal relation to these earlier books. Or maybe not. This is a question which any historian of the 1960s would automatically ask, so it's not surprising that Bloom, Minnicino and the FCF all took up this question.

The Free Congress Foundation apparently wants to prove with their e-book that the cultural revolution of the 1960s and its politically correct successor movements were based on the Western Marxist theories of the 1920s, and thus ultimately on Marxism.

However, the phenomenon of cultural radicalism hostile to a modernist-capitalist bourgeois society dates back much further in history, as also explained in Bloom's book on pages 223-224. In standard texts on Romanticism, the origins of this kind of anti-modernism by cultural radicals have been found as early as in the early 19th century or even in the 18th century. So anti-modern cultural rebellion is a much older phenomenon than its 1960s incarnation, and even considerably older than the original Marxism of the mid-1800s.

A good introduction to these origins can be found in Michael Löwy's book Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, p. 43-56.

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Against-...s/dp/0822327945

However, if one wants to search for the roots of Marxism-inspired cultural radicalism in the specific context of imperialist repression of the Third World, which was perhaps the main theme of the 1960s in its Third Worldism, such discussion can't really be found in the Western Marxist tradition of the early 1900s. On the other hand, such discussion can be found even earlier in the Marxist tradition, for example, in some writings of Rosa Luxemburg towards the end of the 1800s.

Michael Löwy, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, p. 102.

From this standpoint, the European colonization of Third World peoples struck Luxemburg as a fundamentally inhuman and socially destructive enterprise.

Michael Löwy, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, p. 103.

Above and beyond any specific examples, Luxemburg denounced the entire colonial system - whether Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, or German, in Africa or in Asia. She adopted the viewpoint of the victims of capitalist modernization: "For primitive peoples, in the colonial countries where primitive Communism once reigned, capitalism constitutes an unspeakable misfortune full of the most frightful suffering." According to her, the struggle of the indigenous populations against the imperial metropolis admirably manifests the tenacious resistance of the old communist traditions against the quest for profits and against capitalist Europeanization. Reading between the lines, one can discern here the idea of an alliance between the anticolonial struggle of these peoples and the anticapitalist struggle of the modern proletariat as a revolutionary convergence between the old and the new communism.

It goes back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci's views on history and relativism are, however, not entirely his own invention, but are more or less related to the larger philosophical movements of the early 1900s.

Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 153.

Gramsci's holism informed his image of Marxism both as a theory and as an historical force. As the materialist inheritor of what he called the "immanentist" tradition in bourgeois philosophy, Marxism for Gramsci fought any attempt at positing a realm of transcendence outside of history and, by extension, outside of its own theoretical ken.

Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 154.

This Sorelian emphasis on the global quality of Marxism as a kind of secular religion with irrational as well as rational appeal never left Gramsci, even as he distanced himself from the Council Communist inclinations of his earlier years. ... Many years later, in 1947, Croce would in fact recognize in Gramsci "one of our own".

Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 154.

Bergson's subjectivist voluntarism ... he applauded.

Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 154.

In a meeting ... after the war.

Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 155.

In the years ... cultural totality

Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 157.

History, in other words, is not merely a unified whole, but also one in which survival implies normative validation. This very idealist assumption, most cogently expressed in Schiller's remark that "world history is the world court,"

In 1923, in Germany, a group of Marxists founded an institute devoted to making the translation, the Institute of Social Research (later known as the Frankfurt School).

This probably refers to the founding of the Institute of Social Research in 1923 rather than the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche event held earlier that year.

See especially Arato & Breines, p. 175-176.

While Lukacs and Korsch ... a year later.

See also the following footnote in Arato & Breines, p. 245.

For information regarding ... Marxism and Philosophy.

Another source may be: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 5.

The first of these ... took its place.

The event was also described in this style by Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 196.

In May, 1922, ... the Frankfurt School.

One of its founders, George Lukacs,

An inaccurate statement. Is this referring to Lukacs's relatively ineffectual participation in the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche event or to the influence which Lukacs's works had on the intellectual development of Adorno, Benjamin and Horkheimer?

Regarding Lukacs's influence on the German intellectual circles where Adorno, Benjamin and Horkheimer moved in their formative period, see Buck-Morss, p. 20.

Concerned with the ... 'Western Marxism'.

Regarding Lukacs's influence on Adorno and Horkheimer in the late 1920s, see Buck-Morss, p. 21.

Lukacs had been ... and social philosophy.

Regarding Lukacs's influence on Walter Benjamin, see Buck-Morss, p. 21.

[in 1924 after having met Asja Lacis] Benjamin began to concern himself with Marx (and with Lukacs's Hegelianized interpretation of Marx)

Regarding Lukacs's influence on Adorno in his critical study of Kierkegaard between 1929-1933, see Buck-Morss, p. 27.

There can be ... and "fetishism."

Regarding how Lukacs's pre-Marxist book The Theory of the Novel influenced Adorno already in 1921, see Buck-Morss, p. 44.

In 1921 Adorno ... artistic creation

Regarding how widely Lukacs's main work History and Class Consciousness generally affected the intellectuals of the 1920s, see Buck-Morss, p. 208.

Hans Mayer ... problems of culture.'

Regarding the commonalities between Lukacs's and the Frankfurt School's views on art, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 175.

Moreover, the Frankfurt School ... common tradition.

stated its purpose as answering the question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilization?”

This citation by Lukacs was really made in an entirely different context. Lukacs is trying to describe in it his feelings during WWI regarding what might happen if the Western alliance of the US, Britain and France defeats the Central Powers and, thereby, exports its indivualist-capitalist (i.e. "Western") world view to Central Europe.

Source: Löwy, p. 112.

The 1962 preface ... save us from western civilization?"

The Frankfurt School gained profound influence in American universities

This is a misleading statement since the core members of the Frankfurt School didn't gain much influence in America during their stay in the 1940s, nor did they get their most fundamental ideas known at the time, which was partly due to most of their earlier texts being available only in German.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 40.

By resisting the entreaties ... theory and research.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 172.

The end of the Zeitschrift ... adopted language.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 217.

In many ways, ... frequently acknowledged.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 289.

Rather, it was ... was thus secure.

To track the lineage of textual components in the FCF's e-book is more complicated than in tracking those of Minnicino's Fidelio articles, as there were many potential new source books on the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism released in the interim years between the Fidelio articles and the e-book. The most notable of these is Rolf Wiggershaus's extensive history of the Frankfurt School called The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, 1994 (the original German edition was Die Frankfurter Schule. Geschichte. Theoretische Entwicklung. Politische Bedeutung, which was published in 1986).

http://www.amazon.com/Frankfurt-School-Pol...110-7493063-887

Wiggershaus also tries to outline the influence that the Frankfurt School had in the United States by listing the books published in English by former Frankfurt School members in the 1940s, even though their views are almost all very non-orthodox compared to the core group of the Frankfurt School, see p. 264.

The effort to attract ... Monopoly Capitalism

after many of its leading lights fled to the United States in the 1930s to escape National Socialism in Germany.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 39.

Thus when Horkheimer ... Murray Butler.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 39.

Marcuse came in July ... Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 188.

Adorno made his first ... February, 1938.

The Frankfurt School blended Marx with Freud,

Buck-Morss, p. 18.

Was Adorno first ... of 1916-1917.

Buck-Morss, p. 21.

It was a Hegelianized ... social psychology.

Buck-Morss, p. 97.

Adorno's writings ... a contradictory reality.

Buck-Morss, p. 135.

But philosophical interpretation ... psychology specifically.

Buck-Morss, p. 152.

Horkheimer, influenced ... rationalization of society.

Buck-Morss, p. 178.

The latter ... religion or politics.

Buck-Morss, p. 179.

Adorno had not written ... Freudian theory.

Buck-Morss, p. 186.

Adorno's originality ... of modern man.

Buck-Morss, p. 204.

Adorno wrote ... Adorno in Freud.

Buck-Morss, p. 206.

In regard to ... theory of sexuality.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 84-85.

In the meantime ... the next chapter.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 86.

In the 1970's ... the Atlantic.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 87.

In contrast, ... the mid-twenties.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 87.

As early as 1927 ... in the past.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 88.

It was thus ... reconcile Freud and Marx.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 93.

To give substance ... "polymorphous perversity."

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 106.

In 1956 the Institut ... Beiträge zur Soziologie

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 108.

It was not, however, ... Freud seriously.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 111.

As was to be expected, ... former colleagues.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 197.

The Freud ... Analysis of the Ego.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 275.

The only element ... in the Zeitschrift.

Wiggershaus, p. 186.

Instead, Freud's ... fruitful ideas.

Wiggershaus, p. 338.

Adorno and Horkheimer used ... are produced

On the differences regarding the correct way to interpret Freud which developed between the core group of the Frankfurt School and Erich Fromm, and affected his leaving the Institute very early, see Wiggershaus, p. 266-270, section "Break with Erich Fromm".

and later influences (some Fascist as well as Marxist) added linguistics to create “Critical Theory” and “deconstruction.”

This reference to Fascism in connection with the Frankfurt School might be based on a similar interpretation in Michael Minnicino's article "The Evil Philosophy Behind Political Correctness":

All the lunacies being taught on campus are postmodernism. The postmodernists spend much of their time polemicizing with each other over who, exactly, has possession of the true grail of postmodernism; thus, there are structuralists, poststructuralists, feminist deconstructionists, Third World lesbian feminist deconstructionists, and so on. However, all postmodernist thought has its proximate origins, as Bloom implies, in the three sources of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernists will not deny this; most celebrate it.

Today, we have evidence that postmodernism is reverting, lawfully, to its raw Nazi-Communist form.

http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/polcorr.htm

These in turn greatly influenced education theory, and through institutions of higher education gave birth to what we now call “Political Correctness.” The lineage is clear, and it is traceable right back to Karl Marx.

See, for example, the following book review on Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, which gives one remote link between Adorno, the Frankfurt School and mainstream American education.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3E1UU61CS9W33

Read pg. 32 where Bloom claims there is no lasting truths for all time and all places. Compare Bloom's statement with Engel's claim in Ludwig Feuerbach, "nothing is final, absolute, or sacred." In Bloom's affective domain book he blatently acknowledges Adorno and another Frankfurt School Marxist as forming his "world view". The progressive restructuring educational movement has destroyed what was great in America.

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Here are my notes on Raymond V. Raehn's Chapter 2 called The Historical Roots of “Political Correctness”.

America is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values that we have come to know as “Political Correctness.”

Any proof that America is indeed dominated by political correctness is lacking here, even though common sense tells us that it's not just a myth.

Political Correctness seeks to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior on all Americans and is therefore totalitarian in nature.

Marcuse's article "Repressive Tolerance" in the 1960s can be said to provide the strongest link between the Frankfurt School and political correctness, even though it's hard to say whether Marcuse was just interpreting in it what was already established in the radical circles. For views reminiscent of political correctness held by some Frankfurt School members, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 96-97.

Fromm's discussion ... toleration of movements from the Left

Apparently, Marcuse's negative views on tolerance for its own sake were preceded by the similar views of Erich Fromm on bourgeois tolerance, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 227.

the critique of tolerance ... by Adorno and Marcuse

Its roots lie in a version of Marxism

Demonstrating a lineage leading from Marxism to political correctness is lacking here, and would need to be explicitly proved to be believed.

which seeks a radical inversion of the traditional culture in order to create a social revolution.

Indirectly in Buck-Morss, p. 36.

Yet it must ... whom were they leading?

Social revolution has a long history, conceivably going as far back as Plato’s Republic. But it was the French Revolution of 1789 that inspired Karl Marx to develop his theories in the nineteenth century.

Unknown source.

In the twentieth century ... as Marx did.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 116

Critical Theory was developed partly in response to the failure of traditional Marxism to explain the reluctance of the proletariat to fulfill its historical role.

See also Perry Anderson's book Considerations on Western Marxism for a comprehensive account.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs contributed the most to this new cultural Marxism.

This passage might be based on Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, p. 28.

I read Gramsci and Lukács, the founders of "Western Marxism." I immersed myself in the work of the Frankfurt school-Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse.

Other potential sources for this passage include Douglas Kellner: Western Marxism, Douglas Kellner: Critical Theory and Martin Jay: Marxism and Totality, chapter 'The Topography of Western Marxism'.

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/...arxismfinal.pdf

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/...ticaltheory.pdf

Antonio Gramsci worked for ... education and culture.

Unknown source.

Gramsci envisioned a long march through the society’s institutions,

This is a misleading statement as the concept of "a long march through the institutions" was apparently premiered in a speech by Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s. This misattribution may originate from Russ Limbaugh's bestseller "See, I Told You So" where the same mistake appeared in an identical form.

In the early 1900s, an obscure Italian communist by the name of Antonio Gramsci theorized that it would take a "long march through the institutions" before socialism and relativism would be victorious. Up until then, most of the radical left still believed that they would take power only when they convinced enough people in the working class to take up arms in their cause. But Gramsci theorized that by capturing these key institutions and using their power, cultural values would be changed, traditional morals would be broken down, and the stage would be set for the political and economic power of the West to fall.

including the government ... revolutionary appeals.

Unknown source.

Georg Lukacs was the son of a wealthy Hungarian banker.

Source: Löwy, p. 71.

To take but ... father of Gyorgy.

Lukacs began his political life as an agent of the Communist International.

Source: Löwy, p. 155.

Lukacs also exerted ... Southeast Europe.

His book History and Class Consciousness gained him recognition as the leading Marxist theorist since Karl Marx.

Source: Löwy, p. 168.

We need hardly ... Marxist philosophy.

Lukacs believed that for a new Marxist culture to emerge, the existing culture must be destroyed. He said, “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch,”

Source: Löwy, p. 92-93.

These same feelings ... of the epoch.'

and, “Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.”

Source: Löwy, p. 130.

Lukacs had no hesitation ... by the revolutionaries.

When he became ... as “Cultural Terrorism.”

Source: Löwy, p. 151.

It is important ... `cultural terrorism' (e.g., Eugen Szatmari, Das Rote Ungarn, Der Bolsehevismus in Budapest, Leipzig, 2920; Victor Zitta, George Lukacs' Marxism, The Hague, 1964).

As part of this terrorism ... mores of the time.

Source: Löwy, p. 151

Portraying Lukacs ... is the goal.

Lukacs’s campaign of “Cultural Terrorism” was a precursor to what Political Correctness would later bring to American schools.

Demonstrating a causality leading from the short-time educational experiment during Lukacs's involvement in Bela-Kun's government to later mainstream American education is lacking here, and doesn't sound at all plausible, even though it seems that this 1919 educational experiment in Budapest may have been discussed as an example in some Marxist texts on education in the former Eastern bloc.

In 1923, Lukacs and other Marxist intellectuals associated with the Communist Party of Germany founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany.

This is a misleading statement, as the Institute of Social Research was not founded during the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche event, even though this event inspired its later founding.

See Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 196.

'but it also provided an important stimulus to the creation of the Institute of Social Research, the institutional matrix of what later became known as the Frankfurt School.'

The Institute, which became known as the Frankfurt School, was modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.

Source: Wiggershaus, p. 16.

The elder Weil ... Marx-Engels Institute.

Another source: Wiggershaus, p. 24.

'Weil's heartfelt wish', ... with libraries and archives

In 1933, when Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled. Most came to the United States.

For Horkheimer, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 39.

Thus when Horkheimer ... Murray Butler.

For several members of the Institute, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 39.

Marcuse came in July ... Institute of Psychoanalysis.

For Adorno, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 188.

Adorno made his ... in February, 1938.

For a comprehensive account, see Wiggershaus, Chapters 2-4.

The members of the Frankfurt School conducted numerous studies on the beliefs, attitudes and values they believed lay behind the rise of National Socialism in Germany.

See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 26.

concluding his remarks ... ensuing years.

Regarding the very limited scope of these empirical studies, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 130-131.

"Moreover," Horkheimer ... statistically conclusive.

Another instance of the same problem is mentioned in Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 131.

Other studies ... generalize the material.

See the section "Other empirical research projects at the Institute during the 1930s" in Wiggershaus's book, Chapter 3, p. 165-176.

The Frankfurt School’s studies combined Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis

See the details above regarding references to Freud in Buck-Morss's and Jay's books.

Here is the list of the page numbers: Buck-Morss, p. 18, p. 21, p. 97, p. 135, p. 152, p. 178, p. 179, p. 186, p. 204, p. 206; Jay, Dialectical Imagination, p. 84-85, p. 86, p. 87, p. 88, p. 93, p. 106, p. 108, p. 111, p. 197, p. 275.

to criticize the bases of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism.

I'm not sure whether the Frankfurt School viewed Critical Theory in this manner, but one instance of such complete rejection of the Western philosophical and cultural tradition is mentioned in Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 266.

In an aphorism devoted to the philosophy of history, Horkheimer and Adorno explicitly rejected the optimistic premises of Christianity, Hegelian idealism, and historical materialism.

These criticisms, known collectively as Critical Theory, were reflected in such works of the Frankfurt School as Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and The Dogma of Christ, Wilhelm’s Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality.

This is very misleading as Critical Theory isn't directly related to Wilhelm Reich's work, and moreover, Erich Fromm had already left his Frankfurt School related work behind him when he wrote his famous psychological books à la Reich like Escape from Freedom and The Dogma of Christ. Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, on the other hand, was a co-operation where most co-authors were using research methods more or less incompatible with Critical Theory.

On the connection between Fromm and Reich, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 93.

Here, it should be noted ... political freedom.

On Marcuse's agreements and disagreements with Reich, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 107.

Here Marcuse ... its inadequacies.

The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950, substantially influenced American psychologists and social scientists.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 250.

Other difficulties ... the Berkeley study, provided.

For a more comprehensive account of the background to The Authoritarian Personality, see Wiggershaus, Chapter 5.

The book was premised on one basic idea, that the presence in a society of Christianity, capitalism, and the patriarchal-authoritarian family created a character prone to racial prejudice and German fascism.

Very indirectly referred to in Wiggershaus, p. 373.

From the beginning ... their rationalization.

It should be noted that as a co-operational project, the book The Authoritarian Personality had significant differences to Critical Theory, e.g. in how to view anti-semitism, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 253.

As noted ... in Dialectic of the Enlightenment.

The Authoritarian Personality became a handbook for a national campaign against any kind of prejudice or discrimination on the theory that if these evils were not eradicated, another Holocaust might occur on the American continent.

I don't know which national campaign is meant here unless this passage refers to Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3E1UU61CS9W33

Horkheimer seems to have had an idea about some kind of campaign, but I'm not aware of whether this kind of campaign has ever been implemented, even less whether it might have had any lasting effect on the American youth.

Wiggershaus, p. 227.

Education for tolerance ... an appearance.

This campaign, in turn, provided a basis for Political Correctness.

Demonstrating a causality leading from any such educational campaign to political correctness is lacking here, and would need to be proved.

Critical Theory incorporated sub-theories which were intended to chip away at specific elements of the existing culture, including “matriarchal theory,”

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 95.

In the next issue ... bourgeois men

“androgyny theory,”

Indirectly, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 95.

Fromm also praised ... socially determined.

“personality theory,”

See Fromm's views of masochism-sadism as a unified character syndrome in Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 128.

Fromm agreed ... and so on.

See also Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 128.

Instead, be attempted ... symbiotic relatedness.

Marcuse was initially dedicated to philosophy, and only later took up psychology, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 129.

Marcuse, who was ... of rehearsing.

The personality theory in The Authoritarian Personality was built on the Frankfurt School's own earlier research called Studien uber Autorität und Familie, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 226-227.

Much of the material ... Marxist or radical.

“authority theory,”

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 116.

Well before the forced emigration, it had turned its attention to problems of authority.

As in most other eccentric fields of research, Fromm was the Frankfurt School's principal researcher in authority theory, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 99.

His discussion of sado-masochism ... erotic elements.

See also Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 129.

In rational ... libertarian anarchist.

Marcuse was also involved in the Frankfurt School's research on authority at a surprisingly early stage, considering his mainly philosophical interests, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 129.

In his "Intellectual Historical Section," ... outer selves.

“family theory,”

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 92.

Childhood experiences ... formative years

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 93-94.

Having established ... relative stability.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 106.

In the contribution ...not yet questioned.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 113.

The family in crisis ... blind submission.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 125-126.

With this as a background ... interpersonal relations.

“sexuality theory,”

For Fromm's similarities to Reich, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 92.

He also agreed with Reich ... sufficient in itself.

For the connection of sexuality to character types in Fromm's research and its very different character to Marcuse's later approach in this field of research, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 93.

Building on the ideas ... "polymorphous perversity."

For Fromm's initial popularity and later disagreements with the core group of the Frankfurt School, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 129.

Fromm's contribution ... with little qualification.

“racial theory,”

This is inaccurate as the Frankfurt school mainly wrote about racism in the context of anti-semitism, and even then they often saw this as a symptom of the general decline of reason.

See, for example, Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 62.

Neumann, for example, ... until the war.

“legal theory,”

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 133.

The Institut's First Studies of Authority ... various countries.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 145.

Coming to political theory ... inner circle.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 146.

Fascist legal theory ... or corporation

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 149.

In New York Kirchheimer ... in 1939

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 149.

The basic premise ... criminal offenses.

and “literary theory.”

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 58.

Horkheimer and his comments on de Sade are one of the most famous topics in the Frankfurt School's somewhat minor efforts in literary analysis.

See Jay, p. 58.

In contrast to ... higher morality.

However, Leo Löwenthal was originally the Frankfurt School's principal writer on literary analysis, even though without a lasting influence, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 136.

Lowenthal, however, ... to offer.

Put into practice, these theories were to be used to overthrow the prevailing social order and usher in social revolution.

Indirectly, see Buck-Morss, p. 36.

Yet it must be admitted ... whom were they leading?

To achieve this, the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School recognized that traditional beliefs and the existing social structure would have to be destroyed and then replaced.

Indirectly, see Wiggershaus, p. 227.

Education for tolerance ... make an appearance.

The patriarchal social structure would be replaced with matriarchy;

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 95

In the next issue ... bourgeois men

the belief that men and women are different and properly have different roles would be replaced with androgyny;

Indirectly, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 95

Fromm also praised ... socially determined.

and the belief that heterosexuality is normal would be replaced with the belief that homosexuality is equally “normal.”

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 129

And Marcuse, ... little qualification.

As a grand scheme ... in their movement.

Unknown source regarding Trotsky's idea of using the blacks as the vanguard of a Marxist revolution in America.

The student revolutionaries were also strongly influenced by the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt School.

Demonstrating that Marcuse had any kind of notable influence on the early phases of the student revolution is lacking, even though common sense tells us that some later phases of the revolution were certainly more or less influenced by Marcuse. But one also has to ask whether the student rebels were influenced more by Marcuse than Marcuse was himself influenced by these student rebels, i.e. which way did the causality go?

Marcuse preached the “Great Refusal,” a rejection of all basic Western concepts, sexual liberation and the merits of feminist and black revolution.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 111

Marcuse accepted ... in the present world.

His primary thesis was that university students, ghetto blacks, the alienated, the asocial, and the Third World could take the place of the proletariat in the Communist revolution.

Original text: Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man, p. 256-257

However, underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. Their opposition hits the system from without and is therefore not deflected by the system; it is an elementary force which violates the rules of the game and, in doing so, reveals it as a rigged game. When they get together and go out into the streets, without arms, without protection, in order to ask for the most primitive civil rights, they know they face dogs, stones, and bombs, jail, concentration camps, even death. Their force is behind every political demonstration for the victims of law and order. The fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact which marks the beginning of the end of a period.

For Marcuse's views on the role of the Third World in overcoming Capitalism, which may also have been taken up by some of the 1960s rebels, see Wiggershaus, p. 614.

Picking up ... in these countries

Marcuse seems to have pondered about revolutionary strategy in the 1960s similarly to Oskar Negt regarding the cultural rebels' solidarity with revolutionary movements in the Third World as a possible prelude to importing their revolutions to the West, see Wiggershaus, p. 617.

Marcuse and Negt ... industrial societies.

On Marcuse's disagreements with the student rebels of the 1960s, see

Wiggershaus, p. 622.

But Marcuse, ... liberation struggle.

On Marcuse's support to the student rebels of the 1960s, see Wiggershaus, p. 622.

To have one ... a concrete utopia.

An excerpt from Marcuse's speech for the German student organization SDS in 1967 is given in Wiggershaus, p. 623.

I observe a tendency towards these new demands at both poles of existing society, namely in the most highly developed part and also in those parts of the Third World engaged in the struggle for liberation ... It is not necessary, for example, to impose a demand for peace on the Vietnamese involved in the struggle for liberation, since they have it already ... And, on the other hand, in highly developed society, there are those groups - minority groups - which can afford the new demands, or which, even if they can't afford them, simply have them anyway since they would otherwise physically suffocate. Here we come back to the beatnik and hippie movement. What we have here is certainly an interesting phenomenon - a refusal to share in the blessings of the 'affluent society'. This is also one of the qualitative changes in demands that are taking place.

In his book An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse proclaimed his goals of a radical transvaluation of values;

Original use of this word "transvaluation": An Essay on Liberation, p. 22.

It has been the great ... rebellion in France.

Another instance of the phrase "radical transvaluation": An Essay on Liberation, p. 54-55.

No matter how rational ... "from without."

Raehn seems to have picked up very many quotes for his account from this post-1968 book of Marcuse, which may be closest to what the FCF are thinking when they consider Marcuse as a notable influence on the student rebels of the 1960s and their later revolutionary careers continued in the acedemia.

http://www.amazon.com/Essay-Liberation-Her...e/dp/0807005959

the relaxation of taboos;

An Essay on Liberation, p. 8.

The reaction to obscenity ... a taboo.

An Essay on Liberation, p. 9.

And indeed, the exposure ... considerably relaxed.

An Essay on Liberation, p. 29.

the power of the imagination ... perversion and subversion.

cultural subversion;

Original use of the phrase "cultural subversion": An Essay on Liberation, p. 9-10.

This union provokes ... morality in the human being.

Another instance of the word "subversion": An Essay on Liberation, p. 17

We would have to conclude ... majority of the people.

Marcuse even compared "subversion" to "imagination", see An Essay on Liberation, p. 29.

The order and organization ... perversion and subversion.

Critical Theory;

This quote may have been significant in convincing the FCF that Critical Theory was adapted to be used for advancing the goals of the 1960s rebels.

Possible source: An Essay on Liberation, p. 23.

The new sensibility has become a political factor. This event, which may well indicate a turning point in the evolution of contemporary societies, demands that critical theory incorporate the new dimension into its concepts, project its implications for the possible construction of a free society.

and a linguistic rebellion that would amount to a methodical reversal of meaning.

An Essay on Liberation, p. 35-36.

It is a familiar ... redefine them.

An Essay on Liberation, p. 35.

The familiar "obscenities" ... interest in mind.

An Essay on Liberation, p. 73-74.

Political linguistics ... and defamation.

As for racial conflict, Marcuse wrote that white men are guilty and that blacks are the most natural force of rebellion.

Source for the part of "white men", see An Essay on Liberation, p. 57.

While it is true that the white man is guilty ... external colonization.

Marcuse may be the most important member of the Frankfurt School in terms of the origins of Political Correctness, because he was the critical link to the counterculture of the 1960s.

Any proof of causality leading from the Frankfurt School or Marcuse to the counterculture of the 1960s is lacking here, and remains to be proved.

His objective was clear: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including morality of existing society…”

Both Raehn's text and Chapter Four of Pat Buchanan's book The Death of the West, which cites Raehn, include this passage from Marcuse's almost unknown text called The Carnivorous Society.

His means was liberating the powerful, primeval force of sex from its civilized restraints, a message preached in his book, Eros and Civilization, published in 1955.

This interpretation might be based on an earlier similar interpretation of Michael Minnicino in his article "The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and Political Correctness" regarding the alleged central role of Marcuse's book Eros and Civilization in the 1960s rebellion.

The founding document of the 1960's counterculture, and that which brought the Frankfurt School's "revolutionary messianism" of the 1920's into the 1960's, was Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, originally published in 1955

http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96..._frankfurt.html

See also Eros and Civilization, p. 85-86.

But does not the civilized ... destructive instincts

Marcuse became one of the main gurus of the 1960s adolescent sexual rebellion;

See Chapter 8 ("Critical Theory in a Period of Upheaval") in Wiggershaus's book, p. 597-655, especially the following passages:

Wiggershaus, p. 614.

In the same year ... student opposition.

Wiggershaus, p. 622.

As we have mentioned ... mentor of the New Left.

Wiggershaus, p. 630.

Habermas held ... new protest methods

Wiggershaus, p. 631.

The breakthrough constituted ... somatic impulse.

he himself coined the expression, “make love, not war.”

This is a misunderstanding of how this phrase was related to Marcuse, possibly based on Minnicino's apparently correct account in his first Fidelio article of how the 1966 edition of Eros and Civilization included this slogan, but Marcuse didn't invent it.

With that role, the chain of Marxist influence via the Frankfurt School was completed: from Lukacs’ service as Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Hungarian government in 1919 to American students burning the flag and taking over college administration buildings in the 1960s. Today, many of these same colleges are bastions of Political Correctness, and the former student radicals have become the faculties.

Any proof of causality leading from Lukacs in 1919 to the rebelling American students in the 1960s and further to political correctness in the academia is lacking here, and remains to be proved.

One of the most important contributors to Political Correctness was Betty Friedan.

Any proof of causality leading from Betty Friedan and her books to political correctness is lacking here, even though Friedan must have been a significant influence on the feminism taking shape in the 1960s. However, some type of sexual liberation would certainly have occurred even without the books of Friedan and other theorists, as sexual liberation seems to have begun in the student dormitories by itself because of their overly strict rules on dating.

Through her book The Feminine Mystique, Friedan tied Feminism to Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualization. Maslow was a social psychologist who in his early years did research on female dominance and sexuality.

Friedan discusses Maslow in The Feminine Mystique, p. 316-328.

http://www.amazon.com/Feminine-Mystique-Be...n/dp/0393322572

See especially The Feminine Mystique, p. 321.

In this context, Professor Maslow later set about to study people, dead and alive, who showed no evidence of neurosis, psychosis, or psychopathic personality; people who, in his view, showed positive evidence of self-realization , or "self-actualization," which he defined as "the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities. Such people seem to be fulfilling themselves and to be doing the best that they are capable of doing."

And also see The Feminine Mystique, p. 322.

As a matter of fact, his findings implied that self-actualization, or the full realization of human potential, was hardly possible at all for women in our society.

Maslow was a friend of Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University and had met Erich Fromm in 1936. He was strongly impressed by Fromm’s Frankfurt School ideology. He wrote an article, “The Authoritarian Character Structure,” published in 1944, that reflected the personality theory of Critical Theory. Maslow was also impressed with the work of Wilhelm Reich, who was another Frankfurt School originator of personality theory.

Unknown source. However, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 240.

Anti-Semite and Jew ... construction of the syndrome.

The significance of the historical roots of Political Correctness cannot be fully appreciated unless Betty Friedan’s revolution in sex roles is viewed for what it really was – a manifestation of the social revolutionary process begun by Karl Marx. Friedan’s reliance on Abraham Maslow’s reflection of Frankfurt School ideology is only one indicator. Other indicators include the correspondence of Friedan’s revolution in sex roles with Georg Lukacs’ annihilation of old values and the creation of new ones, and with Herbert Marcuse’s transvaluation of values.

Demonstrating conclusively the existence of a causal link between any combination of 1) Lukacs's ideas in the 1910s, 2) Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique, 3) Marcuse's book An Essay on Liberation as well as 4) the birth and dissemination of political correctness is lacking here.

But the idea of transforming a patriarchy into a matriarchy – which is what a sex-role inversion is designed to do – can be connected directly to Friedrich Engels book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. First published in 1884, this book popularized the now-accepted feminist belief that deep-rooted discrimination against the oppressed female sex was a function of patriarchy.

Demonstrating a causality leading from Engels's 1884 book to the now-accepted feminist beliefs about patriarchy and its oppression is also lacking here.

See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 94.

Before the decline in interest ... heavily indebted to them.

The belief that matriarchy was the solution to patriarchy flows from Marx’s comments in The German Ideology, published in 1845.

Unknown source.

In this work Marx advanced the idea that wives and children were the first property of the patriarchal male. The Frankfurt School’s matriarchal theory and its near-relation, androgyny theory, both originated from these sources.

Unknown source.

When addressing the general public, advocates of Political Correctness – or cultural Marxism, to give it its true name – present their beliefs attractively. It’s all just a matter of being “sensitive” to other people, they say. They use words such as “tolerance” and “diversity,” asking, “Why can’t we all just get along?” The reality is different. Political Correctness is not at all about “being nice,” unless one thinks gulags are nice places. Political Correctness is Marxism,

Demonstrating a real causality leading from Marxist philosophy to political correctness, or a real causality leading from political correctness to gulags is lacking here.

with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order, and, ultimately, a totalitarian state. If anything, the cultural Marxism created by the Frankfurt School is more horrifying than the old, economic Marxism that ruined Russia.

Indirectly, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 97.

"Liberating tolerance," Marcuse wrote in 1965, "would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left."

At least the economic Marxists did not exalt sexual perversion and attempt to create a matriarchy, as the Frankfurt School and its descendants have done.

This may not apply to the core members of the Frankfurt School, even though some members seem to have taken an interest in matriarchy.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 101.

By the late thirties, ... by the others.

This short essay has sought to show one critical linkage, that between classical Marxism and the ingredients of the “cultural revolution” that broke out in America in the 1960s.

Demonstrating a real causality leading from classical Marxism to the 1960s cultural revolution is lacking here.

The appendices to this paper offer a “wiring diagram” which may make the trail easier to follow, along with a more detailed look at some of the main actors.

The rest of Raehn's article indeed proves that there has been a lineage of cultural radicalism based on Marxist philosophy ever since the 1920s. However, even the undisputed existence of this lineage doesn't tell us anything about the factors really responsible for the current societal decline nor about how this decline has managed to spread further in society. There are, of course, undisputed links between some aspects of this decline and some persons related to the lineage of cultural radicalism, but this doesn't mean that this link has ever been a significant driver in the continued societal decline.

Of course, the action does not stop in the ‘60s; the workings of the Frankfurt School are yet very much with us, especially in the field of education.

I wonder if Raehn might be referring here to the Critical Pedagogy of Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren and Henry Giroux or to some other Marxism-based education theory, or maybe to the New American Child program that he mentions later.

Georg Lukacs • He began his political life as a Kremlin agent of the Communist International.

This is an inaccurate statement, see Löwy, p. 155.

Lukacs also exerted ... Southeast Europe.

• His History and Class-Consciousness ... since Karl Marx.

Source: Löwy, p. 168.

We need hardly ... of Marxist philosophy.

• In 1919 he became ... in Hungary.

Source: Löwy, p. 150-154, see especially Löwy, p. 150.

During the 133 ... for Education and Culture.

• He instigated what become known as “Cultural Terrorism.”

Source: Löwy, p. 151.

It is important ... Lukacs's `cultural terrorism' (e.g., Eugen Szatmari, Das Rote Ungarn, Der Bolsehevismus in Budapest, Leipzig, 2920; Victor Zitta, George Lukacs' Marxism, The Hague, 1964).

• Cultural Terrorism was a precursor of what was to happen in American schools.

This is an uncredible claim if the word 'precursor' is used here to mean that the decision makers of American education might have known or even been influenced enough by this obscure educational experiment to use it as a model for American schools.

• He launched ... to Hungarian women.

Source: Löwy, p. 151, footnotes, citing Victor Zitta's biased account.

Portraying Lukacs ... culture is the goal.

• In rejecting the idea that Bolshevism spelled the destruction of civilization and culture, Lukacs stated: “Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.”

Source: Löwy, p. 130

Lukacs had no hesitation ... by the revolutionaries.

• Lukacs’ state of mind was expressed in his own words: o “All the social forces I had hated since my youth, and which I aimed in spirit to annihilate, now came together to unleash the First Global War.”

Source: Löwy, p. 111.

In Gelebtes Denken ... aesthetics to ethics

o “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch.”

Source: Löwy, p. 92-93.

These same feelings ... of the epoch

o “The question is: Who will free us from the yoke of Western Civilization?”

Source: Löwy, p. 112.

In the 1969 preface to his writings on Hungary, Lukacs returns to this idea, expressing it in even more violent terms: `The question is: who will free us from the yoke of western civilization?' (Lukacs, `Eloszo', Pp. 13-14)

o “Any political movement capable of bringing Bolshevism to the West would have to be ‘Demonic’.”

o “The abandonment of the soul’s uniqueness solves the problem of ‘unleashing’ the diabolic forces lurking in all the violence which is needed to create revolution.”

Raehn seems to have taken these two passages verbatim from Minnicino's first Fidelio article, which proves more or less conclusively that Raehn has used at least Minnicino's first Fidelio article as one starting point for his historical research.

For the latter of these sentences from Minnicino, the corresponding original passage in Löwy's book can be found on page 39 where Löwy cites Weber.

Whoever wants to engage in politics at all, and especially in politics as a vocation, has to realize these ethical paradoxes.... I repeat, he lets himself in for the diabolic forces lurking in all violence. The great virtuosi of a cosmic love of humanity and goodness, whether stemming from Nazareth or Assisi or from Indian royal castles, have not operated with the political means of violence.

• Lukacs’ state of mind was typical of those who represented the forces of Revolutionary Marxism.

Unknown source. I wonder if Raehn's mysterious group of "those who represented the forces of Revolutionary Marxism" was supposed to mean the Western Marxists or the more orthodox Marxists.

• At a secret meeting in Germany in 1923, Lukacs proposed the concept of inducing “Cultural Pessimism” in order to increase the state of hopelessness and alienation in the people of the West as a necessary prerequisite for revolution.

This passage refers clearly to the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche event in 1923, but it's unclear to me whether Lukacs held his presentation there on Kulturpessimismus or on some other similar topic and whether he really wanted to increase the alienation of the masses.

• This meeting led to the founding of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University in Germany in 1923 – an organization of Marxist and Communist-oriented psychologists, sociologists and other intellectuals that came to be known as the Frankfurt School,

This is a misleading statement as the Frankfurt School was not founded directly by the events of the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche.

See Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 196.

but it also provided an important stimulus to the creation of the Institute of Social Research, the institutional matrix of what later became known as the Frankfurt School.

which devoted itself to implementing Georg Lukacs’s program.

The Frankfurt School was not implementing Georg Lukacs’s program, but a program of their very own.

See Buck-Morss, p. 64.

Adorno considered ... "logic of disintegration."

Antonio Gramsci • He was an Italian Marxist ... in English to Americans.

Unknown source.

• His advice to the intellectuals was to begin a long march

This is a misleading statement as the concept of "a long march through the institutions" was apparently premiered in a speech by Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s. As mentioned above, this mislabeling may originate from Russ Limbaugh's bestseller "See, I Told You So" where the same mistake appeared in an identical form.

through the educational ... the education cartel.

Unknown source.

• The essential nature of Antonio Gramsci’s revolutionary strategy is reflected in Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions in the past. It will originate with the individual and the culture, and it will change the political structure as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. This is revolution of the New Generation.”

This interpretation is probably misleading. See an illuminating article by Chris Harman called "Gramsci versus Eurocommunism", which seems to prove that Gramsci considered the role of hegemony only as a supporting tool for the violent class struggle of the prolatariat.

http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=239

To put it another way: most of the time revolutionaries are involved in ideological struggle, using the tactics of the united front in partial struggles to win leadership from the reformists. Nonetheless, there are periodic moments of violent confrontation, when one side or other tries to break through the other’s trenches by frontal assault. Armed insurrection remained for Gramsci, as he made clear in his prison conversations, ‘the decisive moment of struggle.’

Wilhelm Reich

Raehn includes Wilhelm Reich here as a character close to the Frankfurt School, but in fact, Reich seems to have been a significant influence on Erich Fromm only, even if there is indeed some information about him in Martin Jay's book The Dialectical Imagination.

• In his 1933 book entitled The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he explained that the Frankfurt School departed from the Marxist sociology that set “Bourgeois” against “Proletariat.” Instead, the battle would be between “reactionary” and “revolutionary” characters.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 95.

In psychoanalytic circles ... "natural society."

• He also wrote a book ... are produced.”

Unknown source.

• Wilhelm Reich’s theory, when coupled with Georg Lukacs’ sex education in Hungary, can be seen as the source for the American education cartel’s insistence on sex education from kindergarten onwards and its complete negation of the paternal family, external authority, and the traditional character structure.

This is not a credible claim, as the causality leading from Wilhelm Reich's book and Georg Lukacs's short educational experiment in Bela-Kun's government to modern American education has not been demonstrated at all, and even seems extremely unplausible.

• Reich’s theory ... most college bookstores.

Unknown source.

Erich Fromm • Like Wilhelm Reich, Fromm was a social psychologist of the Frankfurt School who came to America in the 1930s.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 39.

Fromm had been ... Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis.

• His book Escape from Freedom, published in 1941,

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 98.

Two years later ... was published.

is an ideological companion to Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Indirectly, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 93.

Here, it should ... at the same time.

• Fromm asserted ... greater dignity.

Unknown source.

• Fromm made the real meaning of this “Positive Freedom” clear in another of his many books – The Dogma of Christ

Indirectly, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 91.

Even more indicative ... the same problem.

wherein he describes ... with revolutionary characters.

Indirectly, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 318.

For Fromm's own ... Culture (New York, 1966).

Herbert Marcuse • Like Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, Marcuse was an intellectual of the Frankfurt School who came to America in the 1930s.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 39.

Marcuse came in July ... soon after.

• He has often been described as a Marxist philosopher, but he was in fact a full-blooded social revolutionary who contemplated the disintegration of American society just as Karl Marx and Georg Lukacs contemplated the disintegration of German society: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society…there is one thing we can say with complete assurance: the traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution has ended. These ideas are old-fashioned…What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.”

Both Raehn and Pat Buchanan's later book The Death of the West include this quote from a rare Marcuse text called The Carnivorous Society.

• Marcuse published Eros and Civilization in 1955,

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 107

When, after ... Freud and Marx.

See also the origins of Eros and Civilization in Marcuse's earlier Zeitschrift articles.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 256.

Even Marcuse's later ... under consideration.

which became the founding document of the 1960s counterculture and brought the Frankfurt School into the colleges and universities of America.

Any proof that Marcuse's book was the founding document of the developments of the 1960s is lacking here, even though it must be noted that the possible source, i.e. Minnicino's first Fidelio article explicitly stated so without giving any proof either.

• He asserted that the only way to escape the one-dimensionality of modern industrial society

See Marcuse's book One-Dimensional Man.

was to liberate the erotic side of man, the sensuous instinct,

See Marcuse: Eros and Civilization, p. 192.

He was fully aware that, in its first free manifestations, the play impulse " will be hardly recognized," for the sensuous impulse will incessantly interpose with its "wild desire."

in rebellion against “technological rationality.”

Criticism against technological rationality wasn't only Marcuse's own theme but that of the Frankfurt School core group in general.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 156.

In "Authoritarian State" ... in Dialectic of the Enlightenment.

• This erotic liberation was to take the form of the “Great Refusal,”

See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 111.

Marcuse accepted ... the present world.

His primary thesis was that university students, ghetto blacks, the alienated, the asocial, and the Third World could take the place of the proletariat in the Communist revolution.

Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man, p. 256-257, the passage given above.

See also Wiggershaus's passages above regarding the connection between Marcuse and the 1960s rebels, p. 614, p. 617, p. 622, p. 623.

a total rejection of the capitalist monster and its entire works, including technological reason and ritual-authoritarian language.

For the original use of "technological reason", see One-Dimensional Man, p. 87.

This is technological reasoning, which tends "to identify things and their functions."

For the original use of "ritual-authoritarian language", see One-Dimensional Man, p. 102.

The ritual-authoritarian language spreads over the contemporary world, through democratic and non-democratic, capitalist and non-capitalist countries.

• He provided the needed intellectual justifications for adolescent sexual rebellion and the slogan “Make Love, Not War.”

An erroneous claim as explained above. See Michael Minnicino: The New Dark Age - The Frankfurt School and Political Correctness:

With Marcuse representing ... a political fight

• His theory included the belief that the Women’s Liberation Movement was to be the most important component of the opposition, and potentially the most radical.

See Marcuse, Kellner (ed.): Towards a Critical Theory of Society, p. 182.

In this context too, the Women's Liberation Movement is of the utmost importance - precisely to the degree to which it becomes a political movement.

See also Towards a Critical Theory of Society, p. 198.

This is the historical and psychological depth dimension of the Women's Liberation Movement. It does not yet seem conscious of its truly subversive radical potential, which could propel a decisive transformation of the entire material and intellectual culture, could reduce repression, and provide the psychological, instinctual foundation for a less aggressive Reality Principle.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415137810

• His revolutionary efforts would blossom into a full-scale war by revolutionary Marxism against the European white male in the schools and colleges.

Any proof of a real causality leading from Marcuse's revolutionary efforts to feminists' negative sentiments about white males is lacking, and would need to be proved.

Theodor Adorno • He was another Marxist revolutionary and a member of the Frankfurt School who came to America in the 1930s.

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 188

Source: Adorno made ... February, 1938.

• Along with others, Adorno authored The Authoritarian Personality, which was published in 1950.

A slightly misleading passage as the co-operational character of the project and its publications is not mentioned properly.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 234.

What also must ... collaborative effort.

See also Wiggershaus, p. 411.

The Authoritarian Personality was ... research programme.

• Adorno’s book was inspired by the same kind of theoretical assertions revealed in the works of Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse based on analytical studies of German society that were begun in 1923.

See again the passages on the empirical research of the Frankfurt School, Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 26, p. 130-131

and Wiggershaus, Chapter 3, p. 165-176.

See especially Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 172.

In the forties ... forms of authoritarianism.

Regarding the empirical research for The Authoritarian Personality specifically, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 226-227.

Much of the material ... Marxist or radical.

• The basic theme was the same. There was such a thing as an authoritarian character that was the opposite of the desired revolutionary character.

A possible source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 318.

For Fromm's own attitude ... Culture (New York, 1966).

This authoritarian character was a product of capitalism, Christianity, conservatism, the patriarchal family and sexual repression. In Germany, this combination induced prejudice, anti-Semitism and fascism according to Frankfurt School theory.

A possible source: Wiggershaus, p. 373.

From the beginning, Adorno ... their rationalization.

• It so happened that most Americans were products of capitalism, Christianity, conservatism, the patriarchal family, and sexual repression in their youth. So Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School had a golden opportunity to execute Georg Lukacs’ and Antonio Gramsci’s program for creating social revolution in America instead of Germany.

This interpretation is misleading independent of whether The Authoritarian Personality had any notable effect on American education or not, as the way The Authoritarian Personality discusses the traditional world view is quite different from that of either the Frankfurt School with its emphasis on the general decline of reason as the main problem or the Marxist tradition of Lukacs and Gramsci with their emphasis on the primacy of class.

Indirectly, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 253.

Most obviously ... Dialectic of the Enlightenment.

• They would posit the existence of authoritarian personalities among Americans with tendencies toward prejudice, and then exploit this to force the “scientifically planned re-education” of Americans with the excuse that it was being done in order to eradicate prejudice.

Source: Wiggershaus, p. 227.

Education for tolerance ... make an appearance.

• This scientifically-planned re-education ... education cartel thereafter.

Unknown source.

[Wotan]

Romantic Realist -- I think you need to substantiate your arguments better and provide more sources.

[themadkat]

Romantic Realist -- I think you need to substantiate your arguments better and provide more sources.

YOU HUSH. DON'T GIVE HIM IDEAS.

[musenji]

I used to hold tl;dr in disdain as laziness...

[Romantic_Realist]

I just re-read my earlier posts, and as I can no longer edit them because of the time limit, here are a few errata worth mentioning.

The necessary corrections are given below as they are supposed to look, with all the changes from the original posts underlined.

---

At the top of post #7, I forgot to give what's most important, i.e. the name and URL of Minnicino's first Fidelio article which I was reviewing in my post:

Michael Minnicino — New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and Political Correctness

http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96..._frankfurt.html

---

The task of the Frankfurt School ... in Lukàcs' German

An uncredible claim using an obscure phrase in German regarding the task of the Frankfurt School's criticism. As discussed in "Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique" by Jurgen Habermas, the phrase "Aufhebung der Kultur" seems to be related to what type of culture Walter Benjamin considered as worthy. According to this same article by Habermas, Herbert Marcuse seems to have commented on a similar idea in the 1930s.

English translation from Peter Osborne: Walter Benjamin, p. 108-109.

http://www.amazon.com/Walter-Benjamin-Crit...l/dp/0415325331

Osborne, p. 108.

I would like to start from a statement Benjamin once turned against the procedure of cultural history: "It [cultural history] increases the burden of treasures that is piled on the back of humanity. But it does not bestow upon us the power to shake it off, so as to put it at our disposal." (F, p. 36) Benjamin sees the task of criticism precisely in this. He deals with the documents of culture (which are at the same time those of barbarism) not from the historicist viewpoint of stored-up cultural goods but from the critical viewpoint (as he so obstinately expresses it) of the decline of culture into "goods that can become an object of possession for humanity." (F. p. 35) Benjamin says nothing, of course, about the "overcoming of culture" [Aufhebung der Kultur].

Osborne, p. 109.

Herbert Marcuse speaks of the overcoming of culture in a 1937 essay, "The Affirmative Character of Culture." As regards classical bourgeois art, he criticizes the two-sidedness of a world of beautiful illusion that has been established autonomously, beyond the struggle of bourgeois competition and social labor. ... Marcuse makes good the claim of ideology critique to take at its word the truth that is articulated in bourgeois ideals but has been reserved to the sphere of the beautiful illusion - that is, to overcome art as a sphere split off from reality.

---

The Frankfurt School's most important ... reproduction of art."

Benjamin had a short period when he considered that the mass media might have a positive shock effect on the otherwise passive public, but this horrified Adorno who despised most effects of the mass media.

Buck-Morss, p. 147-148.

But whereas he saw ... response was not surprising.

---

The importance of the individual ... women into feminism.

This is probably a false accusation, as Marcuse when interviewed in April 1969, explicity rejected the idea of separate black studies. Marcuse appears to have believed in the Socialist dream about the perfectibility of man, so it wouldn't have made much sense for him to lose a lot of time pondering how scholarly activities should be organized in an imperfect society.

"What do you think about black studies?" ... "I don’t believe in black studies or white studies," Marcuse replied. "There is a certain amount of material that every intelligent person should learn.

http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/newsevents/...9PlayboyInt.htm

---

[Here start the errata for my post #8]

The ISR determined ... in the "communal soul."

The Frankfurt School wasn't very enthusiastic about admiring the events in the Soviet Union neither before nor after the Bolshevik revolution.

...

---

It is the basis ... politics in America.

The legacy of Adorno's involvement in the Princeton Radio Project seems to be the unplausible core link in both of Minnicino's articles which is supposed to prove how the Frankfurt School has managed to disseminate the alleged seeds of political correctness to the American mass media and politics.

...

---

in order to find what he called the "messianic" ideas which could be incorporated into Bolshevik organizing.

Löwy, p. 129.

On the other hand, Lukacs clearly read into the Soviet revolution his own messianic hope that the new world would dawn in Russia.

Löwy, p. 131.

Through the mediation of this abstract ethical will, Lukacs discovers in the proletariat `the bearer of the social redemption of humanity' and even `the messiah-class of world history'. Driven by such messianic excitement, he also (like Engels) sees the proletariat as the legatee of German classical philosophy -`of the ethical idealism of Kant and Fichte which, suppressing all earthly links, was supposed to tear the old world, metaphysically, from its hinges'.

---

[Here is the correction to the most misleading typing error in my posts.]

and “literary theory.”

Horkheimer and his comments on de Sade are one of the most famous topics in the Frankfurt School's somewhat minor efforts in literary analysis.

See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 58.

In contrast to ... higher morality.

However, Leo Löwenthal was originally the Frankfurt School's principal writer on literary analysis, even though without a lasting influence, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 136.

Lowenthal, however, ... to offer.

---

The patriarchal social structure would be replaced with matriarchy;

This might be indirectly implied by some of Fromm's speculations, especially when studying Bachofen, but was hardly among the main interests of the core group of the Frankfurt School.

See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 95

In the next issue ... bourgeois men

---

Marcuse seems to have pondered about revolutionary strategy in the 1960s similarly to Oskar Negt regarding the cultural rebels' solidarity with revolutionary movements in the Third World as a way to awaken the revolutionary consciousness in the West, see Wiggershaus, p. 617.

Marcuse and Negt ... industrial societies.

http://www.amazon.com/Frankfurt-School-Pol...110-7493063-887

On Marcuse's support to the student rebels of the 1960s, see Wiggershaus, p. 622.

To have one ... hanging in the air.

...

---

In his book An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse proclaimed his goals of a radical transvaluation of values;

Original use of the phrase "transvaluation of values": An Essay on Liberation, p. 22.

It has been the great ... rebellion in France.

Another instance of the phrase "radical transvaluation of values" can be found in An Essay on Liberation, p. 54-55.

No matter how rational ... "from without."

Raehn seems to have picked up very many quotes for his account from this post-1968 book of Marcuse, which may be the most illuminating example of what the FCF means when emphasizing Marcuse as a notable influence on the student rebels of the 1960s and also as a conspiratorial manual on their later revolutionary careers continued in the acedemia.

http://www.amazon.com/Essay-Liberation-Her...e/dp/0807005959

---

...

Marcuse even noted that sometimes the upholders of "taboos of social morality" had seen "imagination" as "subversion", see An Essay on Liberation, p. 29.

The order and organization ... perversion and subversion.

---

As for racial conflict, Marcuse wrote that white men are guilty and that blacks are the most natural force of rebellion.

Source for the phrase "white men are guilty": An Essay on Liberation, p. 57.

While it is true that the white man is guilty ... external colonization.

Source for the phrase "most natural force of rebellion": An Essay on Liberation, p. 58.

The fact is that, at present in the United States the black population appears as the most natural force of rebellion.

---

But the idea of transforming a patriarchy into a matriarchy – which is what a sex-role inversion is designed to do – can be connected directly to Friedrich Engels book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. First published in 1884, this book popularized the now-accepted feminist belief that deep-rooted discrimination against the oppressed female sex was a function of patriarchy.

Demonstrating a causality leading from Engels's 1884 book to the "now-accepted feminist beliefs" about patriarchy and its oppression is also lacking here. Raehn's interest in mentioning Engels's book in this context may be a reflection of Martin Jay's short historical account of theorists of matriarchy, which explicitly mentions this book of Engels.

See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 94.

Before the decline in interest ... heavily indebted to them.

---

• In his 1933 book entitled The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he explained that the Frankfurt School departed from the Marxist sociology that set “Bourgeois” against “Proletariat.” Instead, the battle would be between “reactionary” and “revolutionary” characters.

Raehn may have gotten the idea to discuss Wilhelm Reich and this particular 1933 book from Martin Jay's account which mentions this book in another connection, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 95.

In psychoanalytic circles ... "natural society."

---

• Fromm made the real meaning of this “Positive Freedom” clear in another of his many books – The Dogma of Christ

The reason why Raehn mentions here Erich Fromm's book The Dogma of Christ is probably Martin Jay's account which mentions this book in another connection, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 91.

Even more indicative ... the same problem.

---

• This erotic liberation was to take the form of the “Great Refusal,”

Unknown source. Was Marcuse's erotic liberation really directly connected to his "Great Refusal"?

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• Along with others, Adorno authored The Authoritarian Personality, which was published in 1950.

A slightly misleading passage as the character of this project and its publications as a collaboration of Adorno with outside researchers, who were totally incompatible with Critical Theory, is not mentioned properly.

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 234.

What also must ... collaborative effort.

See also Wiggershaus, p. 411.

The Authoritarian Personality was ... research programme.

---

• Adorno’s book was inspired by the same kind of theoretical assertions revealed in the works of Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse based on analytical studies of German society that were begun in 1923.

Raehn is probably referring here with his phrases "theoretical assertions" and "analytical studies" (as opposed to empirical studies) to Erich Fromm's personality theory, which was somewhat related to Wilhelm Reich's similar work at the time but at this point more or less unrelated to Herbert Marcuse who was still preoccupied with his philosophical analyses.

---

As you can see from the number of errata, once again the percentage of errors per text tended to remain surprisingly constant. In my posts above, I was able to replace many of Minnicino's and Raehn's inaccuracies and mistakes with those of my own.

Reading through the source books listed above is probably the most reliable way to learn what the Frankfurt School was really about and to learn the somewhat remote connections they had on the 1960s rebels and maybe even looser connections to the political correctness in the academia. I also suggest Ayn Rand's writings on the New Left to understand their ideas, so that it's easier to compare their similarities and differences to those of the Western Marxists.

What's most important to remember from this exercise is, in my opinion, that a causal link leading from Marxism to societal decline and its politically correct symptoms hasn't yet been proved at all. Proving causality is not the same thing as noting occasional and superficial co-occurrence, as this may or may not have anything to do with which underlying forces are driving the system into a certain direction.

Edited April 10, 2009 by Romantic_Realist

[Wotan]

YOU HUSH. DON'T GIVE HIM IDEAS.

Mad Kat -- Too too (too too) late!

[Romantic_Realist]

> Posted by lidryn:

> Lind, William S. The Origins of Political Correctness: An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind.

> n.d. retrieved 29 May, 2007

> http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html.

This particular version of the FCF's historical account of Western Marxism, which goes under the name The Origins of Political Correctness: An Accuracy in Academia Address, is, in my opinion, much superior to the versions I listed in my own posts.

In this version Bill Lind has finally been careful enough to exclude the most uncredible claims regarding the pre-1960s dissemination channels of Critical Theory (such as the dullness of the mass media, the I.S.R. infiltration in US government projects and the effects of The Authoritarian Personality book on the American youth) found in Minnicino's Fidelio articles and in the FCF's own earlier efforts.

The plotline in this version is much more fluent, and its facts are mostly correct and truer to the source books, even though there are still some factual errors as well as occasional unplausible causalities between Western Marxism and political correctness hypothesized out of the blue every now and then.

As this version indeed consists of very fluent text, rather than facts lifted one after another straight from the source books, it doesn't make sense for me to try listing the original passages from the source books for Lind's text sentence by sentence, which was still somewhat possible for the FCF e-book.

The following passage seems to be the key link of how Bill Lind tries to implicate Critical Theory in the 1960s cultural rebellion.

"But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, "Hell no we won’t go," they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it."

But this passage also seems to admit that the student movement already existed by its own initiative before it started to look for suitable scholarly theories such as Critical Theory, and also seems to admit that these scholarly theories were mostly the post-facto rationalization of what the students had done rather than the blueprints for their actions. In my opinion, this difference is crucial, and refutes the claim that the Frankfurt School caused the 1960s cultural rebellion. It seems to me that not much would have changed in the 1960s if the cultural rebels had used some other philosophical theory as rationalization for what they felt like doing - if they even used Critical Theory in the first place as their main theory of the 1960s, which is not at all proved yet.

I asked above whether Ayn Rand had any ideas regarding the philosophical background of the New Left of the early 1960s. And indeed, I found her text The Cashing-In: The Student 'Rebellion', which actually seems to be one of the best sources for answering the question about the philosophical background of the early student movement.

This text appeared in Ayn Rand's famous collection The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, which also has several other illuminating texts on the topic of the New Left and their world view.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Left-Anti-Indust...664-1857595-284

These texts have, of course, been republished with additional new texts by Peter Schwartz in a new book called Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, which is highly recommended.

Here are a few excerpts from the text The Cashing-In: The Student 'Rebellion' where Ayn Rand cites some contemporary 1960s commentators regarding their first-hand observations about the intellectual influences of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

"The core in this case, however, is not the disciplined Communist party, but a heterogeneous group of radical sects." Professor Petersen lists the various socialist, Trotskyist, communist, and other groups involved.

Some of these activists "who liken their movement to a 'revolution', want to be called radicals. Most of them however, prefer to be called 'organizers.'"

"Theirs is a sort of political existentialism", says Paul Jacobs ...

The central theme and basic ideology of all the activists is: anti-ideology.

"Their taste in reading runs more to Sartre than to Marx."

"'These students don't read Marx', said one Berkeley Free Speech Movement leader. 'They read Camus.'"

For a more sophisticated audience, the socialist magazine The New Leader (Dec. 21, 1964) offers a Marxist-Freudian appraisal, ascribing the rebellion primarily to "alienation" (quoting Savio: "Somehow people are being separated off from something") and to "generational revolt" ("Spontaneously the natural idiom of the student political protest was that of sexual protest against the forbidding university administrator who ruled in loco parentis").

Finally, I would like to thank Grames for citing Peikoff's views about the epistemological (Romanticist feeling above reason) and ethical (others before self) underpinnings of the societal rot which also enabled the 1960s cultural rebellion. These views were very helpful to me for understanding how the spirit of the so-called cultural rebellion may really have been partly transmitted to the Boomer kids through the mainstream education, thus not being very rebellious at all.

Ayn Rand seems to agree with this interpretation in her text The Cashing-In: The Student 'Rebellion.' where her exact words to describe the 1960s student rebels are "epistemological agnosticism, avowed irrationalism, ethical subjectivism". She also gives there a proper bashing of the emptiness of existentialism, which builds on the tradition of Kant's dichotomy. In fact, she doesn't consider the student rebels as genuine rebels at all, but rather as conformists acting out an unfortunate philosophical tradition.

Edited April 14, 2009 by Romantic_Realist

[Romantic_Realist]

Only now did I realize that Leonard Peikoff has written about this topic already in his 1982 book The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America.

http://www.amazon.com/Ominous-Parallels-En...832-1479047-907

(The page numbers given below are taken from a later edition of this book called The Ominous Parallels: A Brilliant Study of America Today.)

http://www.amazon.com/Ominous-Parallels-Br...r/dp/0452011175

In fact, Peikoff writes on pages 278-279 of this book about the Frankfurt Institute (sic) and its influence on the rebellious American intellectuals circa 1970, as well as mentions Herbert Marcuse by name, so I wouldn't be surprised if Allan Bloom, Michael Minnicino or the Free Congress Foundation had taken inspiration from Peikoff's book while writing their own versions.

More specifically, Peikoff takes a look on pages 198-201 at the Weimar cult mentality, which is in my opinion remotely reminiscent of the New Age mentality of the 1960s, as well as a look at Freud's influence on the then prevalent irrationalism.

For the general intellectual atmosphere in Weimar Germany, see p. 198.

Weimar Germany was awash with mystic and occult crazes of every kind, including medieval revivals, Orientalist sects, anthroposophy, theosophy, etc. It was also awash with the social concomitants of such crazes.

The Frankfurt School is mentioned for the first time in the book on p. 201.

The erudite theoreticians and social commentators of the Frankfurt Institute were formulating a new "Western" Marxism melding the socialism of Marx with the idealism of Hegel and the sex theories of Freud.

The Frankfurt School is also mentioned in passing on page 205 while listing the various anti-reason movements of the 1920s.

Man's science, they say, requires the dismissal of values (Max Weber), his feelings require the dismissal of science (Heidegger), his society requires the dismissal of the individual (the Frankfurt Institute), his individuality requires liberation from logic (the Bauhaus) ...

And finally the link-up of these anti-reason movements of the 1920s to the left-wing American intellectuals of the 1960s can be found on pages 278-279 with apparent similarities to Allan Bloom's later book The Closing of the American Mind.

If concepts lead to paralysis, there is another source of knowledge: passion. If the mind of the West has failed, there is a superior guide: the religions of the East. The quiet voices of the more civilized skeptics had prepared the way. They began to be drowned out by their natural successors.

The successors included the Existentialists, the Zen Buddhists, and a number of figures inspired by Weimar Germany's Frankfurt Institute, who sought to fuse Hegel, Marx, and Freud. Typically, the fusers affirmed a nonmaterial dimension, denounced Aristotelian logic, and upheld the cognitive powers of an emotion-oriented faculty, such as "phantasy." Time magazine summarized the trend among American intellectuals eloquently, in a 1972 essay titled 'The New Cult of Madness: Thinking as a Bad Habit.' "'Reason' and 'logic,'" the essayist reported, "have, in fact, become dirty words - death words. They have been replaced by the life words `feeling' and 'impulse.'"

The name of Herbert Marcuse, as well as Peikoff's theory about the cause of the 1960s rebellion can also be found on page 279.

It was a recapitulation in the New World of the history of nineteenth-century European philosophy. The standard textbook progression was reenacted, in mini-terms. "From Kant to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche" became "from Dewey to Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse."

The men and women growing up in the 1920s and '30s, the first large-scale group of Americans to be reared in Progressive schools, had been rendered incapable of offering their future children any intellectual guidance. As it happened, their children, growing up in the postwar years, were the first generation to be exposed to the new irrationalist trend. These children became the rebels of the sixties.

In view of this very illuminating historical account by Leonard Peikoff, it seems likely that there indeed existed some type of link between the anti-reason movements of Weimar Germany and the American cultural rebellion of the late 1960s. However, what is still lacking in all these historical accounts we have seen above is an explanation of what were the original intellectual influences of the Civil Rights movement, the Anti-War movement and the campus rebellions of the early 1960s (sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, left-wing gay activism, early feminism, environmentalism spurred by Rachel Carson's book The Silent Spring, anti-nuke events, anti-war demonstrations, beatniks, protests against the strict dating rules at university dormitories, The Port Huron Statement, the founding of the SDS, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, teach-ins), which can't be explained by the then quite unknown Western Marxism. One would assume that the New Left had already found its specific form and had chosen many or even most of its political themes by the mid-1960s before the re-issued books written by the cultural rebels of Weimar Germany began to interest the New Left in the late 1960s.

Peikoff's account seems to differ from the historical accounts of Bloom, Minnicino and the FCF in that it traces the spirit of the 1960s rebellion to a larger ideological shift on the rational-irrational axis instead of to any single ideological school. I find Peikoff's approach a much more credible explanation than Allan Bloom's possible overemphasis on the Nietzschean philosophical tradition and the FCF's overemphasis on the Frankfurt School in particular.

However, it is possible to prove that some left-wing intellectuals of the 1960s have indeed used the Western Marxism of the 1920s to formulate their political positions such as their support for radical multiculturalism, even though it must be said that these uses have often been contrary to the original purpose of Western Marxism. I found the following exemplary texts:

- Stuart Hall: Gramsci's relevance for the study of race and ethnicity

- Cornel West: The Cornel West Reader, especially the chapter The Making of an American Radical Democrat of African descent

- Cornel West: On Georg Lukács in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America

- Edward Said: Traveling Theory Revisited

“Fanon seems to have read Lukacs’ book and taken from its reification chapter an understanding of how even in the most confusing and heterogenous of situations, a vigorous analysis of one central problematic could be relied on to yield the most extensive understanding of the whole.”

See David Black: Frantz Fanon and Marxist-Humanism.

http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h32002_DB_Fanon.htm

- Douglas Kellner: Marcuse's Challenge to Education

- Ilan Gur-Ze’ev: Adorno, Horkheimer, Critical Theory and the Possibility of a Non-Repressive Critical Pedagogy

- Henry A. Giroux: Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning, especially Chapter 15: Antonio Gramsci

- Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics

---

---

Finally, a few additions and errata to the source passages given in my previous posts. Hopefully there aren't too many duplicates, as I don't have time to re-read them now.

---

ADDITION

Here is a key passage taken from the chapter Further Readings on the Frankfurt School of the FCF e-book which states explicitly that they don't want to consider political correctness as a simple consequence of the 1960s cultural rebellion as a spontaneous youth movement.

The Frankfurt School, or the Institute for Social Research as it was formally known, was established at Frankfurt University in Germany in 1923. This fact alone is important, because it tells us that Political Correctness is not merely a leftover of the American student rebellion of the 1960s.

http://www.freecongress.org/centers/cc/pcessay6.aspx

---

ADDITION

Conspiracy theories regarding the role of the Frankfurt School in the development of the New Left in the 1960s are much older than all the books I have mentioned above, and go back to the early 1970s.

Rolf Wiggershaus lists some of these early conspiracy theories about the Frankfurt School in his book The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, p. 657.

Since the publication in 1970 of his book The Poverty of Critical Theory, [Gunter] Rohrmoser has promulgated, in constantly varying forms, the view that Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer were the terrorists’ intellectual foster-parents, who were using cultural revolution to destroy the traditions of the Christian West.

Academics such as Ernst Topitsch and Kurt Sontheimer, who saw themselves as educators and liberal democrats, followed in Rohrmoser’s footsteps. In 1972 Topitsch, a critical rationalist who was Professor of Philosophy in Graz, had stated that behind the slogans of “rational discussion” and “dialogue free of domination” there was being established at the universities “a distinct terrorism of political convictions such as never existed before, even under Nazi tyranny.”

---

ADDITION

Lukacs was well-suited to the Comintern task: he had been one of the Commissars of Culture during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet in Budapest in 1919.

Minnicino may have based this passage directly on Buck-Morss, p. 28.

Fresh from his experience as Deputy Commissar for Education in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács's intent was to convince intellectuals to become revolutionaries.

---

Lukàcs became a Communist during World War I, writing as he joined the party, "Who will save us from Western civilization?"

This citation by Lukàcs was really made in an entirely different context when he was writing a preface to a new edition of his book The Theory of the Novel nearly five decades after its original publication. Lukàcs is trying here to describe his feelings during WWI regarding what might happen if the Western alliance of the US, Britain and France defeats the Central Powers and, thereby, exports its individualist-capitalist (i.e. "Western") world view to Central Europe.

Löwy, p. 112.

The 1962 preface ... save us from western civilization?"

See also Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 98.

He seems to have been captivated ... how he did not know

---

And one more passage from Arato & Breines, p. 14.

These three dimensions are interrelated ... Life and Soul.

---

...

See also Walter Benjamin Moscow Diary.

According to Lacis's autobiography, Benjamin met Brecht in Berlin before his Moscow

http://www.amazon.com/Moscow-Diary-Walter-...n/dp/0674587448

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Using standard ... against them.

This apparently refers to the law suit against Lyndon LaRouche, the connection of which to the Frankfurt School personality theories hasn't been reliably proved.

When Lyndon LaRouche and six of his colleagues faced trial on trumped-up charges in 1988, LaRouche identified that the prosecution would rely on the Frankfurt School's authoritarian personality fraud, to claim that the defendants' intentions were inherently criminal. During the trial, LaRouche's defense attorney attempted to demonstrate the Frankfurt School roots of the prosecution's conspiracy theory

http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/polcorr.htm

---

This erotic liberation ... with true creativity.

Apparently, Marcuse uses in Eros and Civilization only the words "play impulse", while the exact words "play instinct" have been used, for example, by another radical Raoul Vaneigem in his "The Revolution of Everyday Life", p. 257.

It was in fact from art that play broke free. The eruption was called Dada. "The dadaist events awoke the primitive-irrational play instinct which had been held down an the audience", said Hugo Ball.

http://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Everyday-...m/dp/0946061017

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Every aspect ... idea of reason

For the original use of the phrase "idea of reason", see One-Dimensional Man, p. 128.

The totalitarian universe ... reason in one.

---

a total rejection ... "ritual-authoritarian language."

For the original use of the phrase "ritual-authoritarian language", see One-Dimensional Man, p. 102.

The ritual-authoritarian language ... non-capitalist countries.

---

As part of the Great Refusal, ... "aesthetic ethos,"

For the original use of the phrase "aesthetic ethos", see An Essay on Liberation, p. 24.

Emergence of a new Reality Principle: under which a new sensibility and a desublimated scientific intelligence would combine in the creation of an aesthetic ethos.

...

---

Thus, in 1914, ... Western civilization?"

This is a misunderstanding as Lukàcs only wrote this question almost five decades later for his new preface to the 1962 edition of The Theory of the Novel.

See Löwy, p. 112.

The 1962 preface ... from western civilization?"

---

The best art ... of "capitalist art."

Walter Benjamin: Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.

Characteristic of this whole left-wing bourgeois position is its irremediable coupling of idealistic morality with political practice. Only in contrast to the helpless compromises of “sentiment” are certain central features of Surrealism, indeed of the Surrealist tradition, to be understood. Little has happened so far to promote this understanding. The seduction was too great to regard the Satanism of a Rimbaud and a Lautreamont as a pendant to art for art’s sake in an inventory of snobbery. If, however, one resolves to open up this romantic dummy, one finds something usable inside. One finds the cult of evil as a political device, however romantic, to disinfect and isolate against all moralizing dilettantism.

http://www.autoroute.plus.com/generation/c/fcsurrealism.htm

---

and the "forced retardation" of Adorno,

Adorno: On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.

The counterpart to the fetishism of music is a regression of listening. Not only do listeners lose, along with freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, but listeners come to stubbornly reject the notion that any such perception is possible. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear. They are childish. However, their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded. Whenever they have a chance, they display the pinched hatred of those who really sense the other but exclude it in order to live in peace, and who therefore would like best to root out the nagging possibility.

http://musiccog.ohio-state.edu/Music839B/A...hes/Adorno.html

---

Political Correctness seeks to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior on all Americans and is therefore totalitarian in nature.

Marcuse's article "Repressive Tolerance" in the 1960s can be said to provide the strongest link between the Frankfurt School and political correctness, even though it's hard to say whether Marcuse was just interpreting in it what was already established in the radical circles. For views reminiscent of political correctness held by some Frankfurt School members, including Erich Fromm's views on bourgeois toleration, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 96-97.

Fromm's discussion ... toleration of movements from the Left

Apparently, Marcuse's negative views on tolerance for its own sake were preceded by the similar views of Erich Fromm, see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 227.

the critique of tolerance ... by Adorno and Marcuse

---

Marcuse preached the “Great Refusal,” a rejection of all basic Western concepts

Source: Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 111

Marcuse accepted ... in the present world.

---

Critical Theory;

Possible source: An Essay on Liberation, p. 23.

The new sensibility has become a political factor. This event, which may well indicate a turning point in the evolution of contemporary societies, demands that critical theory incorporate the new dimension into its concepts, project its implications for the possible construction of a free society.

This quote may have been significant in convincing the FCF that Critical Theory was adapted to be used for advancing the goals of the 1960s rebels.

---

• Lukacs’ state of mind was expressed in his own words: o “All the social forces I had hated since my youth, and which I aimed in spirit to annihilate, now came together to unleash the First Global War.”

Source: Löwy, p. 111.

In Gelebtes Denken ... aesthetics to ethics

---

• His revolutionary efforts would blossom into a full-scale war by revolutionary Marxism against the European white male in the schools and colleges.

Any proof of a real causality leading from Marcuse's revolutionary efforts to increased negative sentiments about European white males is lacking, and would need to be proved.

Edited April 23, 2009 by Romantic_Realist