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LUCIEN GOLDMANN
formulate their not inconsiderable differences schematically as the
opposition between optimistic utopianism and a critical pessimism,
if it is understood that Bloch's utopia implies a critique of the
existing as well, and that the realistic criticism of the Frankfurt
School involves (and, in Marcuse, always will) the idea of a future
society free from oppression and radically different from the present
order.
Both positions, however, were opposed to that so-called "dialec–
tical" thought which history had already proven wrong. Only a few
partisans of what is now called "institutional marxism" defended
that lying and oppressive ideology. There can be no question in that
period of the intellectual superiority of the Frankfurt School over
the dogmatic mouthings of the orthodox Marxists. The few critical
Marxists shut themselves off in historical or aesthetic analyses, or,
like Erich Fromm, moved toward "revisionist" psychoanalysis; and
the situation was to remain unchanged until the work of several
Italian thinkers and the early studies of the self-taught Serge Mallet,
among others.
But back to Marcuse, whose
Reason and Revolution, Hegel
and the Rise of Social Theory
was published in 1941. For a long
time,
Reason and Revolution
was considered the representative work
of progressive Hegelianism, a sort of counterpoint to the conservative
Hegelianism represented by Kojeve's
Introduction to the Study of
Hegel,
and by Eric Weil; and I confess that I myself read it then
that way. But on reading it today, one can see that it is not truly
"dialectical": it uses Hegel and an Hegelian language to return to
a Kantian and Fichtean position, brought up to date and radicalized,
and in some respects close to Sartre. For, though
Reason and
R evolution
may be radical and critical, nowhere does it contain the
idea of the identity of subject and object, of reason and reality,
fundamental to the belief that the only valid and realizable goals
are those discoverable within the real tendencies of the social process.
When Hegelian terms appear, they are used to signify a moral,
Kantian desire to incarnate the subject in the object and to create
a society responsive to the rational aspirations of the individual, or
at least to a reason which is at the same time individual and
universal.
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