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#Post#: 913--------------------------------------------------
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
DIR By: mistermax
Date: December 5, 2016, 3:30 pm
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[...]
Mann was hardly the only Central European émigré who experienced
uneasy feelings of déjà vu in the fearful years after the end of
the Second World War. Members of the intellectual enclave known
as the Frankfurt School—originally based at the Institute for
Social Research, in Frankfurt—felt a similar alarm. In 1950, Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno helped to assemble a volume
titled “The Authoritarian Personality,” which constructed a
psychological and sociological profile of the “potentially
fascistic individual.” The work was based on interviews with
American subjects, and the steady accumulation of racist,
antidemocratic, paranoid, and irrational sentiments in the case
studies gave the German-speakers pause. Likewise, Leo Lowenthal
and Norbert Guterman’s 1949 book “Prophets of Deceit” studied
the Father Coughlin type of rabble-rouser, contemplating the
“possibility that a situation will arise in which large numbers
of people would be susceptible to his psychological
manipulation.”
Adorno believed that the greatest danger to American democracy
lay in the mass-culture apparatus of film, radio, and
television. Indeed, in his view, this apparatus operates in
dictatorial fashion even when no dictatorship is in place: it
enforces conformity, quiets dissent, mutes thought. Nazi Germany
was merely the most extreme case of a late-capitalist condition
in which people surrender real intellectual freedom in favor of
a sham paradise of personal liberation and comfort. Watching
wartime newsreels, Adorno concluded that the “culture industry,”
as he and Horkheimer called it, was replicating fascist methods
of mass hypnosis. Above all, he saw a blurring of the line
between reality and fiction. In his 1951 book “Minima Moralia,”
he wrote:
Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The
conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power, a
process that truth itself cannot escape if it is not to be
annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier
despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the
distinction between true and false, which the hirelings of logic
were in any case diligently working to abolish. So Hitler, of
whom no one can say whether he died or escaped, survives.
[...]
HTML http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-frankfurt-school-knew-trump-was-coming
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