Interdisciplinary materialism and the task of critical institutionalism

Abstract

My first encounter with Horkheimer's seminal 1931 speech “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research” dates back to 1981 when I was struggling as a young student to read the final chapters of Jürgen Habermas's just published Theory of Communicative Action. Habermas made a strong case for Horkheimer's program of interdisciplinary materialism in his book. He reconstructed Horkheimer's original program and presented an ambitious update (see Habermas, 1987, pp. 374–403). This encouraged me to read Horkheimer's famous speech of January 1931 and became the inspirational starting point for my ongoing interest in the history of the Frankfurt School.

The primary reason for the appeal of the classical Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School until today is that while it remains within a Marxist framework, it contrasted the economism of Marxist orthodoxy. It restored an autonomous logic to the domains that orthodox Marxism qualified as “superstructure.” This perspective yields inspiring findings in cultural theory and social psychology to this day. Yet in the early period of the Frankfurt School, the inner circle around Horkheimer did not achieve comparable results; at no point did this circle elaborate a theory of the political or of political institutions. This shortcoming dates back to the very beginnings of the Frankfurt School, to Horkheimer's programmatic inaugural speech as the new director of Institut für Sozialforschung (IfS) of 1931 in particular.

When Horkheimer enumerated the subdisciplines of interdisciplinary materialism in his speech, the absence of political science was striking. He defined social philosophy as the philosophical interpretation of human beings as members of a community; social philosophy must therefore primarily concern itself with the social existence of human beings. Horkheimer named “the state” and the “law” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 25) first in the list of social phenomena, even above economy and religion. He dug deeper in his discussion of social philosophy with an examination of Hegel's theory of objective spirit by criticizing Hegel's idea that the state could serve as a solution to integrate the conflicts of capitalist society (see Horkheimer, 1931, pp. 26–28). He included “the state” and “political association” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 31) as part of the investigation of the ways in which people live together.

In his following deliberations about the “ongoing dialectical permeation and evolution of philosophical theory and empirical-scientific praxis” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 29), however, Horkheimer quickly lost sight of political associations and the state. In his list of the scientific disciplines that are supposed to participate in socio-philosophical research, Staatswissenschaft and Wissenschaft von der Politik—as the discipline newly emerging at some universities in the German Reich was called at the time—are simply absent. Next to philosophers, sociologists, historians, and psychologists only “political economists” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 32) are briefly mentioned. Neither the state apparatus, nor political associations like parties or interest groups, parliaments, elections, or political debates are mentioned even once. The “law” as a research topic gets minimized among “specific areas of culture” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 33) in the final paragraphs of his speech, echoing the traditional Marxist view of law and politics as elements of the “superstructure.” This kind of absence of studies about the state and political associations also stands out in Horkheimer's lists of the research topics he considered most pressing in the preface of the first issue of Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (see Horkheimer, 1932) and in the preface of Studien über Autorität und Familie (Studies on Authority and Family, see Horkheimer, 1936, pp. 329–330). This absence is also echoed in Walter Benjamin's favorable portrait of the IfS, written for an audience of German-speaking exiles (see Benjamin, 1938, p. 519).

In my view, there is a systematic reason for this thematic gap, besides motives stemming from the personal disgust with current politics characteristic of the inner circle of the Institute. With the dominant focus of social philosophy on capitalist “society” as the fundamental analytic category, it seemed only natural for him to transform potential topics of political science into questions of sociology and social psychology. According to the assumption behind this approach, society is held together less by political institutions and more by the glue of culture and psychological dispositions.

This perspective continued in Horkheimer's two famous programmatic essays published in 1937. In “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie” (Traditional and Critical Theory) and in “Philosophie und kritische Theorie” (Philosophy and Critical Theory), he outlined the Institute's interdisciplinary work on a comprehensive theory of the “historical course of society as a whole” (Horkheimer, 1937b, p. 247). Dismissing works by “students of political science” (Horkheimer, 1937a, p. 222)—characterized as an academic discipline with a limited intellectual horizon—he went as far as to postulate a direct “dependence of politics on the economy” (Horkheimer, 1937b, p. 271).

At the time when Horkheimer gave his speech, it was Hermann Heller who became a colleague at the University of Frankfurt in the following year, who acknowledged the “relative autonomy” of political institutions. He propagated political science as an academic discipline that is focused on the “description, explanation and criticism of political phenomena” (Heller, 1934, p. 227). Since the late 1930s, three members of the “periphery” (Honneth, 1987, p. 350) of the Frankfurt School in exile—Franz L. Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Arkadij Gurland—followed Heller's impulse, alas with no success at the IfS.

But there is more to Horkheimer's inaugural speech than its deficits about politics. His diagnosis that the vision of an “individualistic society” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 28) has replaced the old Hegelian metaphysics of the objective spirit provides the starting point for an alternative way to renovate Critical Theory. Horkheimer's statement that the disappointment of the belief in the pre-stabilized harmony of individual interests will take “revenge” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 28) has particular relevance for politics in our times.

The most radical version of Horkheimer's statement today is presented by Rational Choice. Rational choice, of all things! From the perspective of classical Critical Theory, Rational Choice is the incarnation of fetishized reification and instrumental rationality. In my view, such clear-cut opposition between Critical Theory and Rational Choice is outdated and deserves to be revised.¹ Mancur Olson's insight about the collective irrationality of individual rational behavior (Olson, 1965), Amartya Sen's description of the “rational fool” (Sen, 1977), and Jon Elster's reflections on the rational boundaries of rational decision-making (Elster, 2002)—to mention just a few landmark contributions in this tradition of immanent critique—make it possible to turn Rational Choice into a valuable instrument of Critical Theory.

Like Critical Theory, Rational Choice has a materialistic approach, because it assumes egoistic, mostly materialistic actor preferences. In addition, the methodological individualism of Rational Choice permits to reconstruct the collective irrationalities and social disasters to which the unrestricted aggregation of individual rational calculations leads. The selective use of Rational Choice for Critical Theory provides a way to transfer the insight of Horkheimer's criticism of the naïve optimism in Hegel's creation of the state out of “the medley of arbitrariness” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 27) in capitalist society into the framework of his Dialectic of Enlightenment and his Critique of Instrumental Reason about the pathologies of instrumental rationality.

The best-known constellation in Rational Choice theory for the production of collective irrationalities is the Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) game. PD constellations have been diagnosed in many areas in the field of political science (from trade unions’ organizing problems to international disarmament and global climate policy). The PD game represents a constellation in which all actors involved are forced to depart from their ideally preferred preference. Thus, the PD constellation refers to dividing the concept of subjective interests into a dualism of preferences.² The PD payoff matrix forces rational individual actors to orient themselves toward what I call “real preferences,” which rank below their “ideal preferences”—both her or his own and those of all other players in the game.

The question arises: Under which conditions may ideal preferences trump real preferences? In the case of the PD game, individual actors orient toward their ideal preferences if they have reasons to expect that all (or at least most) other actors will also act cooperatively. Already in 1984, Robert Axelrod explained in his seminal computer tournaments how a series of repeated, iterative games produces a new starting point to overcome the PD. If we follow Axelrod's tested theory of iterative games,³ then an actor can attain this guarantee—or at least justifiable grounds for it—within the instrumentally rational mode of action only if it is not a one-time game, but repeated games with an indeterminate or infinite time horizon.

The best strategy for solving the PD in iterative games is tit-for-tat. Tit-for-tat means that an actor selects a strategy of strict reciprocity for solving the game, responding to other players’ cooperation with cooperation and to their non-cooperation with non-cooperation. The tit-for-tat strategy intentionally takes the risk of making the first cooperative step. Its proponents initially behave according to their ideal preferences, yet not out of a virtuous motivation, human kindness, or other moral considerations, but out of the egoistic calculation of sending a clear signal to the other party to nudge it toward choosing its own ideal preferences. Only when the other player refuses to cooperate in response (real preference) does the first player react by switching to her or his real preference, thus employing a tit-for-tat strategy. The appeal of the strategy described lies in the fact that tests comparing it with all the other possible game strategies show it to be not only the morally sympathetic one but also the best in terms of positive payoffs. Following the work of Axelrod, tit-for-tat is one of the rare cases in which justness and self-interests coincide. In the context of my line of argument, tit-for-tat in iterative games describes a kind of “ideal game situation.” It corresponds to the case in which, in a world of egoists without a central supervisory body, ideal and real preferences become identical. The ideal game situation offers a normative point of reference without placing high ethical or moral standards on the actors’ orientations in an “individualistic society” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 28).

A critical reading of Rational Choice teaches an important lesson for Critical Theory: The political institutions of modern mass democracy are not organized in a way that motivates people to cooperate and to form and follow preferences that can be considered responsible (and thus morally defensible)—in other words, preferences that do not provide grounds for regrets in retrospect. Instead, political institutions should encourage individual censorship over those preferences that are less rational in terms of their political or social consequences—i.e., preference formation in a kind of mode of anticipated retrospect.

Whereas Horkheimer's approach later led him to the vision of an encompassing “theory of society” (Horkheimer, 1937a), the research program of Critical Institutionalism follows a different line in his speech, which is his prompt in the final sections to “keep in touch with reality” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 35) and to use “the experience of practitioners” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 35). Critical Institutionalism takes on the practical task to identify alternative institutional arrangements for modern democracies which encourage the formation and articulation of ideal preferences. The rich literature on aleatory democracy and citizen juries provides some examples of political institutions that encourage auto-paternalistic preference formation and articulation (see Buchstein, 2019).

At the very beginning of his speech, Horkheimer stated that due to the present situation in the sciences, “the traditional boundaries between disciplines are in question” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 25) and that one does not yet know where they might be drawn in the future. He also suggested “to find new methods” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 32) for critical social research and explicitly mentioned the work of “political economists” (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 32) in this context. I consider my proposal to make selective use of Rational Choice as an unorthodox way to follow his suggestion.