The rational critique of rationality

The Frankfurt School argues that rationality is entangled in a paradox: its progress leads not to freedom but to domination. Science, democracy, and prosperity were all made possible by rational critique of the myths and ideologies that supported the ancien régime. This is what Habermas calls the “Enlightenment project.” It promises that domination will recede as rationality advances. The failure of this happy prospect has led to two different critiques of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, romantic critique calls for a retreat from rationality and all its works. On the other hand the Frankfurt School proposes a “rational critique of reason.” These two styles of critique imply different politics and it is therefore important to distinguish them clearly.

The romantic critique of reason begins in the late eighteenth century, accompanied by an idealization of the past. In literature the critique opposes passion to bourgeois calculation and social conformism. The familiar image of life versus mechanism captures the essence of the romantic critique. Modernity is often rejected in the name of traditional values.

This critique appears to be verified by the twentieth-century catastrophes of reason. Wars, concentration camps, nuclear weapons, and now environmental crisis threaten the Enlightenment project not from without but from within. But it is difficult to believe that the full content and significance of rationality is exhausted by its role in these disasters. The romantic critique is right to challenge a rationalism that blindly submits everything to markets and technology, but it goes too far when it rejects reason as such. Surely reason has self-critical and self-corrective potentials. This is the argument of the Frankfurt School’s critique of rationality. The Frankfurt School hopes to construct a coherent basis for a critical theory of modernity out of the flawed inheritance of the Enlightenment.

The Frankfurt School’s method was anticipated by Marx’s economic critique of capitalism. Capitalism claims to be a rational economic system. The market appears rational but, strangely, trading goods for money leads to inequality. This inequality escapes Enlightenment critique because it is not justified by narrative myths, as was feudalism, but by the exchange of equivalents—wages for labor.

The French anarchist Proudhon famously claimed that “property is theft.” He treated the market as a fraud rather than as a coherent system. This is the economic equivalent of romantic critique in literature.²¹ Marx was a more rigorous thinker. He realized that a system as complex and successful as capitalism could not be based on mere fraud. The origin of inequality would have to be found in the very rationality of the market. The equal exchange of wages for labor disguises the role of the length of the working day in determining the rate of exploitation. The deeper problem is not the unfairness of this system, but the larger consequences of capitalist management of the economy, such as the deskilling of work and economic crises. With this argument Marx showed that rational systems can be oppressive and he extended this type of critique to technology as well, although that aspect of his thought lay dormant until Lukács and the Frankfurt School revived it.

The methodological significance of Marx’s analysis lies in combining the apparently contrary notions of rationality and bias. This is precisely what the Frankfurt School does much later in its critique of the technological consequences of Enlightenment. The point of that critique is not to blame technology for social ills, as does romantic critique, nor to appeal to technological rationality as an antidote to the inefficiency of capitalism, as does traditional Marxism, but to show how technology has been adapted in its very structure to an oppressive system.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment this approach is expressed in a passage in which the authors describe the ambivalence of the machine as both representative of humanity as a whole and an instrument of domination.

The thing-like quality of the means, which makes the means universally available, its “objective validity” for everyone, itself implies a criticism of the domination from which thought has arisen as its means. On the way from mythology to logistics, thought has lost the element of reflection on itself, and machinery mutilates people today, even if it also feeds them. In the form of machines, however, alienated reason is moving toward a society which reconciles thought, in its solidification as an apparatus both material and intellectual, with a liberating living element, and relates it to society itself as its true subject … Today, with the transformation of the world into industry, the perspective of the universal, the social realization of thought, is so fully open to view that thought is repudiated by the rulers themselves as mere ideology.²²

The alienated reason embodied in machines is an objective reality and as such refers to a universal subject and not simply to its owners. The very objectivity of the machine implies that it should be controlled by all in the interests of all. This would be the “universal, the social realization of thought,” which is obstructed by the existing capitalist society. The availability of the apparatus for this purpose is now so obvious to the simplest reflection that the “rulers” must reject thought itself to maintain their power. The critical standard in terms of which rational achievements are measured is not extrinsic, as in romantic critique, but is contained in the implicit telos of rationality itself. Rationality supplies its own standard of self-critique.

In sum, the universal character of rational achievements promises universal benefits, but the promise is betrayed as the technical realization of rationality is biased toward domination. Adorno makes a similar argument with respect to the market: equal exchange promises a fairness belied by the actual realization of the market under capitalism.²³

This is the paradox of rationality: economic and technological progress have gone hand in hand with the progress of domination. To understand the paradox without romantic subtexts we need a concept of social bias appropriate for the analysis of rational systems. The Frankfurt School intended just such an analysis but developed only the rudiments of a method for performing it. This is why its style of critique is often confounded with romantic anti-modernism.

The difficulty lies in the departure from the usual concept of bias that is closely associated with prejudice. But bias in a less familiar sense appears in other spheres as well. For example, because right-handedness is prevalent, many everyday objects are adapted to right-handed use. This, too, could be called a bias but it does not involve prejudice. Rather it is built into the design of the objects themselves. In this it resembles the kind of bias exhibited by technology and other rational systems under capitalism.

The issue can be clarified by distinguishing what I call “substantive” bias from “formal” bias. Enlightenment critique addresses the more familiar substantive bias. Eighteenth-century philosophers were confronted with institutions that claimed legitimacy on the basis of stories about the past and religion. The Enlightenment judged according to facts and arguments and this was fatal to the ancien régime. Later, a similar critique attacked race and gender bias again in the name of rational ethical principles and scientific knowledge of human nature. I call the bias criticized in such cases “substantive” because it is based on pseudo-facts and emotions, specific contents that motivate discrimination.

But, as the Frankfurt School argues, technology and markets also discriminate in modern rational institutions. Prejudice is not involved. A biased technology is still rational in the sense that it links cause and effect efficiently. It appears “value-neutral,” since it is not an expression of belief and emotion. Indeed, it is often innocent, as in the case of right-handed tools. Nevertheless, some cases are far from innocent. These are cases involving the asymmetrical distribution of power through technical or economic arrangements. For example, when the division of labor is technologically structured in such a manner as to doom subordinates to mechanical and repetitive tasks with no role in managing the larger framework of their work, their subordination is technologically embedded. Inequality is enforced by the very rationality of the machine. This sort of bias is properly called “formal” because it does not violate formal norms such as control and efficiency under which technology is developed and employed.

Formal bias can arise from the relation of technologies to their context and it can also enter into the design of devices. Thus Adorno writes:

It is not technology which is calamitous, but its entanglement with societal conditions in which it is fettered … Considerations of the interests of profit and dominance have channeled technical development: by now it coincides fatally with the needs of control. Not by accident has the invention of means of destruction become the prototype of the new quality of technology. By contrast, those of its potentials which diverge from dominance, centralism and violence against nature, and which might well allow much of the damage done literally and figuratively by technology to be healed, have withered.²⁴

As technologies develop, their social background is forgotten, covered over by a kind of unconsciousness that makes it seem as though the chosen path of progress was inevitable and necessary all along. This is what gives rise to the illusion of pure rationality. That illusion obscures the imagination of future alternatives by granting existing technology and rationalized social arrangements an appearance of necessity they cannot legitimately claim. Critical theory demystifies this appearance to open up the future. It is neither utopian nor dystopian but situates rationality within the political where its consequences are a challenge to human responsibility.

But what if the masses fail to accept the responsibility the theory thrusts upon them? Critical theory establishes the possibility in principle, indeed the urgent necessity, of a social transformation it regards as extremely unlikely.