250
LUCIEN GOLDMANN
republished), though written in a different style of course - and
in
any case more clearly - deal with the same problem. Horkheimer and
Adorno concentrated on those elements of liberal rationalism which
imperceptibly laid the ground for the abrupt shift to totalitarianism
in the most advanced industrial countries and for the compliance of
the middle class, particularly in Germany; and Marcuse also at–
tempted to show that this acceptance of oppression and exploitation
on the part of the middle class is inherent in idealist philosophy.
But far more than the other thinkers of the school, Marcuse em–
phasized the critical character of idealist philosophy, its demand for
rationality, for happiness, which despite reactionary distortions is
preserved from its heroic period, mainly from the Renaissance. These
promises and demands, he suggests, have been adopted by revolu–
tionary ideology, by materialism and by "critical philosophy" - a
term by which, given the prudent tone of the magazine, Marcuse
means Marxism.
In sum, a difference of accent within a unified school. At the
most, one can say that Marcuse ties that negative criticism which
will become more and more a characteristic of the Frankfurt School
to a demand for radical change, at the risk - which seems to
him
to be the price of continuing the true philosophic tradition - of
placing himself at least partially in the domain of utopian thought.
But suddenly, with Hitler's victory and the development of
Stalinism in Russia, passages appear which show a removal from
what - as a way of designating certain political and philosophical
strains in the radical tradition - has been conventionally called
dialectic thought. It was one of the central ideas of dialectical
thought, particularly that of Marx and Lukacs, that instead of coun–
terposing abstract moral or utopian ideas to reality, one should try
to understand their birth within the real world. Against those who
attributed to him a moral and normative position, Marx insisted
that
his
program expressed the vision of a genuine social force with–
in capitalist society, the proletariat. And even
if
(as seems more
and more to have been the case) Marx's specific analysis was
in–
correct, the notion that any valid idea must be the expression of a
group consciousness within society, which means
the partial or
total identity of the subject and the object of thought,
remained the
