Critical theory and pre-fascist social thought (original) (raw)

1994, History of European Ideas

A certain well-known phenomenon in postmodern theoretical discourse strikingly expresses the failure of postmodernists to respond to the political history of modernity.' Postmodernists often rearrange conceptual references within a sensitive meta-theoretical divide between romanticism and rational modernism. Assuming the latter as its enemy, romanticism finds its presence in modernity increasingly suppressed.2 The life histories of Paul de Man, Carl Schmitt, Arnold Gehlen and, more importantly, of Martin Heidegger, stand out as warnings against an affirmative appropriation of their texts. It is their alleged fascist ancestry, in the final instance, that makes modern cultural criticism and romanticism so suspect. In the Discourse of Modernity,3Habermas related the counter-enlightenment to early romantic philosophy, Nietzsche and the life philosophers. This is to establish an anti-rational and anti-intellectual stance in cultural criticism, undermining the enlightening role of the 'deconstruction' movement4 One might read the attempts to reconstruct Marxism within a framework of postmodern theory, prosecuted by studious admirers of Giddens, as perhaps too simple and reductionist an undertaking to obtain relief from the bitter implications of the ambiguously enlightening assertions of romantic and cultural critical authors. However, the affinity between romanticism and the theory of modernity is difficult to deny.5 The microsurgical emphasis of this paper, therefore, is a suspicion of modern rationalism's claims to pure and 'enlightened' logic. Although modernist rationalism in the leading centres of Western social thought in the period succeeding the Second World War has brought about a fresh interpretation of its roots, there is, possibly, no avoiding the romantic foundations of theory. The barbarisms of two world wars and of the holocaust have been closely related to the effective history of the radical critique of industrialism and Western civilisation (the so-called Kulturkritik), which once found expression in the pathos of the life philosophers of turn-of-the-century Germany. The early 1920s debates on the event of mass extermination in the war fields of Verdun and at the Somme, indeed, form a prelude to the inquisitive turn taken by this critique since the 1950s. It was none other than Lukacs who held Nietzsche and life philosophy responsible for the advent of irrationality and the 'modern' barbarisms. Post-fascist rationalism levelled similar accusations against phenomenology