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Communicative
Turn
Adorno, Habermas,
and the Problem of
Communicative
Freedom
MARTIN MORRIS
Rethinking
_ THE

RETHINKING THE COMMUNICATIVE TURN

S U N Y SERIES IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

RETHINKING THE COMMUNICATIVE TURN
ADORNO, HABERMAS, AND THE PROBLEM OF
COMMUNICATIVE FREEDOM
MARTIN MORRIS
State University of New York Press

Published by
State University of New York Press
© 2001 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used in any manner whatsoever without written
permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or
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magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without
the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street,
Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207
Production by Kelli Williams
Marketing by Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morris, Martin, 1962-
Rethinking the communicative turn : Adorno, Habermas, and the problem of
communicative freedom / Martin Morris.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in social and political thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-4797-9 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-4798-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Sociology—Philosophy. 2. Communication—Philosophy. 3. Habermas, Jurgen. 4.
Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. I. Title. II. Series.
HM585 .M67 2001
301'.01—dc21
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
00-057353

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
ABBREVIATIONS ix
1. INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 The Frankfurt School and Habermas:
A Snapshot View 3
1.2 Conflicting Paradigmatic Issues 11
2. CRITICAL THEORY AND THE ECLIPSE OF 'IDEOLOGY':
THE EARLY FRANKFURT VISION AND ITS TRANSFORMATION 17
2.1 The Program of Critical Theory and
the Problem of 'Ideology' Critique 21
2.2 The Dialectic of Enlightenment 41
2.3 Concluding Remarks 65
3. HABERMAS AND THE CRITIQUE OF REIFICATION 67
3.1 The Habermasian Critique of
Reification in Late Capitalism 67
3.2 Capitalism and Social Crisis 75
3.3 Real Abstraction and Ideology 87
3.4 Concluding Remarks 93
4. FROM THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH TO THE PARADOXES OF APORIA
AND CONTRADICTION: HABERMAS AND ADORNO 95
4.1 The Primacy of Language-Use 96
v

vi Contents
4.2 Validity and the Ethical Force
of Language-Use 105
4.3 The Performative Contradiction in
the Radical Critique of Domination 118
4.4 A Concluding Note on Contradiction
and Dialectic 139
5. RECOVERING THE ETHICAL AND POLITICAL FORCE OF
ADORNO'S AESTHETIC-CRITICAL THEORY 143
5.1 The Priority of the Object and the
Passion for Critique 144
5.2 Language and the Subject: Adorno 158
5.3 Art and the Recovery of Negativity
and Non-Identity: Toward a Politics
of the 'Mimetic Shudder' 168
6. CONCLUSION 193
Notes 201
Bibliography 221
Index 237

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My understanding of the important questions raised and issues
addressed here was assisted especially by my graduate work with Asher
Horowitz in Political Science at York University and the continuing dis-
cussions that have followed. Also invaluable were my exchanges with
Fredric Jameson (Wm. A. Lane, Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature
and Chair of the Graduate Program in Literature) and Romand Coles
(Political Science) at Duke University during my fellowship stay there.
Others who read, commented, and otherwise advised on elements or
earlier versions of this text were Robert Albritton, Mildred Bakan, Anto-
nio Callari, Nadine Changfoot, Michael Hardt, Martin Jay, Alkis Kontos,
Dieter Misgeld, David Shugarman, Tracy B. Strong, Kenneth Surin, and
Candice M. Ward. The anonymous reviewers at the State University of
New York Press provided fine recommendations for improvement of the
text as a whole. I wish to make special mention of Morton Schoolman's
enthusiastic reading of the manuscript during its final phases. Zina
Lawrence and Michael Rinella at the State University of New York Press
kindly supported the project. Drucilla Cornell, Vassilis Lambropoulos,
and Lambert Zuidervaart offered welcome encouragement regarding the
project and its elements during the various phases of its completion.
Among the many with whom I have learned, the following deserve special
mention: my early teachers with whom I have kept in touch and who
have offered kind words regarding this project, Cary J. Nederman and
Rob Steven, and my other teachers, friends, and colleagues with whom I
have engaged, David Bell, David Denemark, Gad Horowitz, Russ Janzen,
Christian Lenhardt, Graham Longford, Stephen Newman, Steve Patten, Ross
Rudolph, Tim Sinclair, Michael Stevenson, Graham Todd, and William
vii

viii Acknowledgments
Walters. While I take responsibility for the written words contained within,
I extend my sincerest gratitude to all those above for bestowing on me
the generosity of their thoughts.
A Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Post-Doctoral Fellowship, 1996-98 took me to Duke University, which I
greatly appreciate. I thank Fredric Jameson for his kind hospitality as
Chair of the Graduate Program in Literature during my postdoctoral
residency at Duke. I was privileged to have the opportunity to partici-
pate in such a highly stimulating environment and to come into contact
with so many fine minds. This book was completed while teaching at
York University and Wilfrid Laurier University.
Many people gave me their support during the course of this
project in countless ways through their friendship and love, for which I
am deeply grateful. My spouse, Nadine Changfoot, and my parents, Renee
and Jim, are prime among them. Many years ago, at the beginning of my
university studies in my native New Zealand, I sat with my Grand-
mother as she lay on her deathbed. At one point I told her of my inten-
tions one day to write a book. I have never forgotten her smile and the
complete conviction conveyed in her reply: "I know you will." This book,
my first, is dedicated to the memory of Althea Forward.
Selected components of this text were published previously in
article form, but all of these elements have undergone further, often sig-
nificant revision and adaptation for their inclusion here. I thank the editors
of the Review of Politics, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Rethinking Marxism
for their permission to use this material. Back cover photo by Nadine
Changfoot.

ABBREVIATIONS
Note: for GS, MM, ND, and DA the German edition is cited first,
the English second. I have generally followed the German originals for
these texts, using my own translations and adjusting accordingly. No
notice of altered existing translations is given. Where English versions do
not exist, the translations are mine. Any changes to other translations are
noted in the text.
J. Habermas
BFN Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law
and Democracy, Trans. William Rehg, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1996.
KHI Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1971 [1968].
MCCA Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christian
Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT,
1990 [1983].
PDM The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans.
Frederic G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1987 [1985].
PT Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Trans. William
Mark Hohengarten. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1992 [1988].
TCAI The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationaliza-
tion of Society. Vol. 1. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1984 [1981].
TCAII The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Cri-
tique of Functionalist Reason. Vol. 2. Trans. Thomas McCarthy.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1987 [1981].
ix

x Abbreviations
T. W. Adorno
AT Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: Uni
versity of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1970].
GS Gesammelte Schriften (Rolf Tiederman, ed.). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1970-.
HTS Hegel: Three Studies. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT, 1993 [1963].
MM Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschddigten Leben. Frank
furt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951.
Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N.
Jephcott. London: New Left Books.
ND Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, s.t.w. 113, 1975 [1966].
(Also in GS 6).
Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum,
1973.
T. W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer
DA Dialektik der Aufklarung: Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt:
Fischer, 1969 [1947].
Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York:
Continuum, 1972.

0
(INTRODUCTION)
This book is about the communication of the human condition
and the condition of human communication. Its theme addresses cen
tral issues of concern for those interested in understanding the inher-
itance of Frankfurt critical theory and the contributions to contemporary
democratic visions such understanding can offer. The focus is theoreti-
cal but the intent practical—which characterizes all worthwhile politi-
cal theory. I hope to show the promise of a concept of communicative
freedom coupled with an ethic of communicative interest in and respect
for the other and for otherness that are inspired by a reconsideration of
Theodor W. Adorno's critical theory. It is my belief that Adorno's highly
complex but often misconstrued thought furnishes important insights
for the development of critical social and political thought under con-
temporary conditions.
In making these contentions, however, I will directly challenge
the work of one who has championed the possibilities of intersubjective
communicative relations for freedom and for democratic society today
and who claims a direct relation to the tradition of Frankfurt critical
theory in which Adorno worked: Jiirgen Habermas. Habermas aims to
preserve the critical spirit of modernity and the original aims of Frank-
furt critical theory during a time when critical reason has become subject
to serious questioning. He values a social and political theory that would
reassure modern selves of their identity and the possibility of their rea-
son in the face of the disasters and disappointments with which enlight-
ening and rationalizing political action has been associated in the twentieth
1

2 Rethinking the Communicative Turn
century. Habermas believes that theoretically informed critique can re
main reasonable while criticizing society, and indeed, that critical ar-
ticulations are essential for freedom and democracy. He does not believe
that we should give up on the idea of a rational society or on the
possibilities of its realization through social change. But he thinks such
an idea must be conceived according to his communicative theory and
under the historical limit conditions of modern, differentiated, liberal-
democratic society if the practical dangers associated with the Utopian
visions of planned socialist economies, neoliberal markets, or reaction-
ary fundamentalisms are to be avoided.
For Habermas, critical theory itself took a 'dark' and ultimately
fatal turn in the 1940s with the publication of Horkheimer and Adorno's
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972 [1947]), after which the development of its
original program of a comprehensive social science with practical-politi-
cal intent seemed impossible. From the 1960s, Habermas has led a broad-
based effort among a new generation of critical theorists to reconstitute
critical theory and recover this vision of a practical-political social sci-
ence, an effort that culminated in his two-volume magnum opus, Theory
of Communicative Action (1984; 1987). Central to this project was the clari-
fication of the theoretical foundations for a universal human sociality by
means of the concept of communicative rationality, which would meet
the requirements of a critical social theory. While he has since stepped
back from the original scope of this grand project, believing it to be
overly ambitious at present, he has nevertheless remained true to the
core concept of communicative rationality in his subsequent work. His
social and political thought are still informed by a commitment to this
notion, despite his shifts in focus and formulation. Recognition of the
universal basis of communicative rationality, Habermas believes, offers
the best hope for stability in the face of social complexity and human
diversity, while at the same time it affirms the crucial political values of
individual freedom, autonomy, and social solidarity.
I do not quarrel with Habermas about the importance of such
calls for critique, communicative freedom, autonomy, solidarity, or achiev-
ing more effective democracy. Instead, I raise serious questions concern-
ing his central ideas and the extent to which his theory actually meets the
liberatory expectations of a critical social theory. In challenging Habermas's
critical theory, I wish to propose an alternative reading of Adorno's criti-
cal theory that might better address these contemporary concerns. As a
consequence, what I present here takes the overall form of a critique of
Habermas via a recollection and interpretation of Adorno's work.

Introduction 3
(1.1. T H E FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND HABERMAS:)
A SNAPSHOT V i E w
Both Adorno and Habermas are major figures associated with
so-called Frankfurt school "critical theory," a twentieth-century tradition
of philosophy and social criticism that emerged in the context of Western
Marxism. However, it should be noted that the appellation critical theory
has proliferated in recent decades. It no longer primarily refers to the
Frankfurt tradition but can apply to diverse theoretical perspectives and
preoccupations in fields such as sociological theory, historiography, liter-
ary theory, and aesthetic criticism. For the sake of simplicity, in this book
I shall use the term critical theory to refer to the Frankfurt tradition,
though I acknowledge that many of the central concerns of critical theory
are also taken up by others in the Western Marxist tradition, as well as
in post-Marxist and poststructuralist theory.
Frankfurt school critical theory refers in the first instance to the
writings of a loosely knit group of critical philosophers and social scien-
tists associated with the privately endowed Institute for Social Research
in Frankfurt, the first establishment in the West founded explicitly to
give institutional expression and support to Marxist research (for that
reason alone, a unique and remarkable institution). Under the director-
ship of Max Horkheimer, who took over in 1930, the Institute supported
the work of a number of thinkers and researchers who were involved in
developing a comprehensive Marxist theory of social analysis that ad-
dressed the changed conditions of twentieth-century capitalism.
Horkheimer was an adept and visionary 'managerial scholar' who as-
sembled a core group of intellectuals to develop a new program of theo-
retical and historical research that came to be described as critical theory.
The Institute for Social Research came into existence officially in 1924
and was affiliated with and located at Frankfurt University during the
1920s and early 1930s. Forced into exile after the rise of Nazi Germany,
the Institute was eventually moved to New York City, where it continued
to operate with a reduced level of support and activities. The Institute
was reopened in Frankfurt in 1951 with the return of several core mem-
bers, where it sustains activities in conjunction with Frankfurt University.
But Frankfurt critical theory is more properly a tradition of thought
rather than a school, per se. There was no collectively held doctrine or set
of propositions followed by all members since critical theory was con-
ceived in opposition to orthodoxy and aimed instead at a supradisciplinary
approach (see section 2.1). Moreover, many of the foundational analyses

and texts of the early figures that came to represent "Frankfurt" theory
were written in exile from Germany—primarily in the United States and
France. However, the measure of coherence that identifies this tradition
for critical theorists is provided by the institutional setting (the Institute
existed for the core members their entire careers), a founding 'manifesto'
outlined in Horkheimer's inaugural address in 1931 to which he and
other members repeatedly referred during their careers, and the Institute
journal, Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschuung (Journal for Social Research), in which
members published their work. Admittedly, this coherence most clearly
applies to the early period of the Institute for Social Research, but enough
continuities have persisted by which a tradition of thought can be traced
(even while the term "Frankfurt school" itself came into use only in the
1960s and was coined by outsiders). Among the figures commonly asso-
ciated with Frankfurt critical theory besides Horkheimer, Adorno, and
Habermas are Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Pollock, Otto
Kirchheimer, Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, and Leo Lowenthal, many
of whom became quite well known in Anglo-American intellectual circles.1
(I provide a more detailed account of the Institute and its development
in Chapter 2.)
Indeed, what is called the Frankfurt school tradition of critical
theory has proved to be one of the most enduring forms of critical
reflection in the twentieth century. This endurance can be seen not only
in the persistent if loose intellectual cohesion and complementarity of
those originally associated with the Institute during their careers (al-
though there were also serious disputes and falling outs, such as that
involving Fromm). Continuity is also evident in the substantial influ-
ence of the teachings of core figures such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and
Marcuse on young intellectuals in the decades following the second
world war. Marcuse became a special authority for the student and
counterculture movements of the 1960s, and critical theory acquired a
rather mythical status in this period. Despite controversies with and
condemnations from the student movement of the late 1960s and from
New Left intellectuals, which afflicted Adorno perhaps most of all, the
influence of Frankfurt school writings extended well into the 1970s. If
there was a moment that signaled a crisis in radical social thought and
practice, it may be the dashed hopes that followed the events of May
1968. As a crucial turning point for the popular movements for social
change and their intellectual supporters, this moment fueled the devel-
opment of alternate critical positions such as poststructuralist, post-
Marxist, and feminist theory. A general decline in the influence of
Marxism on critical thought has occurred in Europe and the West since

Introduction 5
the end of the 1960s, and Frankfurt critical theory was most closely
associated with the Marxist tradition.
The 1990s, however, saw a certain resurgence in interest in Adorno
in the humanities, especially by Anglo-American critical thought, which
has, inspired by his work, reassessed the aesthetic as an ethical category.
Adorno has thus become, for some, the "conscience of our political and
aesthetic crisis."2
Benjamin's work also maintains a substantial intellec
tual presence today—among other things he is venerated as a founding
figure in the relatively new but expanding field of cultural studies.
But besides these legacies of philosophy and social analysis, per-
haps the most important contribution to the endurance of Frankfurt criti-
cal theory is Habermas's grand effort to substantially revise and reconstitute
this tradition for a whole new generation of students and scholars. In no
small way is Habermas's success related to the crisis of the 'crisis of Marx
ism' in Western thought—the apparent decline in vitality of much Marxist
discourse and analysis that emerged in the 1980s (see Agger, 1990).
While Adorno was a member of the inner circle of figures asso-
ciated with the Frankfurt school from the 1930s to his death in 1969,
Habermas is of a later generation. Habermas, whose relationship with
Frankfurt critical theory began when he became Adorno's assistant dur-
ing the latter 1950s, is widely regarded as the direct inheritor of the
mantle of this tradition from Adorno. This inheritance, however, has
been substantially transfigured under Habermas's intellectual leadership.3
Notably, Habermas's transformation of critical theory involves an ex-
plicit rejection of Adorno's central negative dialectic and what I might
call his aesthetic-critical theory, which were developed as responses to
the latter's analysis of the fateful dialectic of enlightenment. Habermasian
critical theory instead (sometimes) claims a heritage more directly from
the original conception of critical theory articulated in Horkheimer's early
writings. Yet Habermas has introduced a number of new and quite dif
ferent aspects to the program of critical theory in an attempt to revitalize
and continue its critical spirit in the face of various theoretical and prac-
tical difficulties attributed to its later 'Adornian' developments. Thus
Habermas is a contemporary figure of continuity and discontinuity in
the tradition of critical theory.
Habermas has championed the turn to linguistic philosophy in
critical theory with the thesis that the theory of communicative action
provides the key to a comprehensive understanding of social action. In
conjunction with these philosophical and sociological elements, he has
also developed a robust political theory. The analysis of the universal
communicative presuppositions of speech affords insight into the shape

of a rational and just politics at the same time as it indicates how a
rationalized, self-reflective culture can also realize 'utopian' desires; that
is, in traditional formulation, how the just citizen can also have a good
life. Such bold and far-reaching claims rely on a theoretical move from a
subject-centered, epistemological, and representational focus to an
intersubjective, pragmatic, and linguistic one.
Habermas's rational orientation toward theory locates him within
the modern tradition, but with a postmetaphysical twist: reason is no
longer understood in the last analysis as a capacity or endowment of
human subjects themselves (for this is a characteristic of subject philoso
phy). Instead, reason is to be understood as the organizing feature of
linguistically mediated communication or communicative sociality itself.
Human beings grow into language and their use of language transforms
them: they are pragmatically 'communicating animals' whose needs,
beyond basic physiological needs, and whose full life are realized only at
the level of autonomous and free communication with others. It is ideally
the life of fully rational linguistic communication that sets people free
from the unreflective prejudice of tradition, the obscurity of myth, and
the blind imitation of others. Reason and democracy are immanently
related for Habermas. The rationality of modern language-use constrains
and imposes limits, but it also establishes the genuine condition for the
autonomy of the human self and the freedom for it to develop and grow.
The specific idea of freedom here is tied to the act of human sociation
through linguistically mediated truth-seeking. Any concept of truth that
deserves its meaning entails the freedom to determine it. If truth is im-
manently related to practical language use, then the concept of freedom,
too, can be discerned in the contours of linguistically mediated life. Clari
fying the nature of reason can hence lead us to politically consequential
conclusions.
Habermas's main critical claim is that the possibility of such a
life has been systematically denied and distorted by the one-sided devel-
opment of the potentials of modernity under the influence of capitalism
and administrative power. Indeed, the logical and social limits of com-
municative action are limits beyond which only the subversion of lan-
guage, society, and self occurs. The telos of communicative action—the
free and equal achievement of mutual understanding and agreement—is
undermined by all forms of systematically distorted communication,
which becomes the new term for ideology. The critique of systematically
distorted communication takes over certain aspects of the former Marxist
critique of ideology and entails an idea of the conditions for non-dis-
torted communication. Manipulative or distorted communication can be

Introduction 7
condemned not only because it is evidence of unfreedom, of domination
or oppression, but also because it undermines the basis of stable and
successful human interaction. Limited communication prevents genuine
interpretive action and thereby denies the realization of the communicat
ing actor's life, potentials, and meaningful relations with others. Habermas
thus continues to be concerned with questions central to critical theory
such as those of freedom, autonomy, solidarity, ideology critique, and the
possibility of a genuinely rational democratic society. But with this turn
to a linguistic, intersubjective-centered approach, he has necessarily aban-
doned as aporetic, dangerous, or at least paradigmatically outdated criti-
cal theory's fixations with the aesthetic and a 'new sensibility'—that is,
with a substantially new ability to perceive and experience that would
help constitute the liberated society. Such involvements were central to
critical theorists' aims to foster a non-instrumental concern for and rela-
tionship to others, a new compassion or passionate care that could be
universalizable. For Adorno, it should be noted, there were important
limits to such new sensibilities. Christian love, as one example of an
ancient "new sensibility," cannot be universalized in large, complex,
modern societies; it is best suited to small, intimate communities where
the intensity and identifications required for such ethical relations can be
concentrated. Adorno, by contrast, sought a new sensibility and commu-
nicative ability that approaches the other not on the ethical levels of the
familial or the intimate, which assume and oblige significant knowledge
of and closeness to the other, but as a stranger, as different and alien.
Adorno wanted to foster a "nearness by distance" (MM: 112/89-90) in
which difference could be maintained, even celebrated, in a process of
self-reflective contemplation, learning, and communication that would
not require the kind of constitutive identification of traditional concep-
tions of community. A new sensibility was also important for better or
more liberatory encounters with the non-linguistic sources of human
existence, from human bodily drives and desires that were being increas-
ingly manipulated by new media and industry technologies to the non-
human otherness of the natural world that was being destroyed or
assimilated by capitalist development. These preoccupations contributed
so much to the critical theorists' utopian visions.
However, Habermas's model has by no means received univer-
sal assent among those sympathetic to the tradition of critical theory nor
indeed has his theory been readily adopted as a political guide by any
contemporary social movements dedicated to progressive democratic aims.
Indeed, it is severely criticized and in general dismissed by contempo-
rary poststructuralist and deconstructionist critics who themselves claim

to articulate a far more compelling and defensible intellectual spirit that
might be adopted in contemporary progressive and democratic struggles
against domination and oppression. This kind of latter claim has become
more commanding after the much heralded 'death' of Marxism, since
critical theory in general is most consistently associated with Marxist
theory and practice. Postmodernist critics are insistent of the need to
abandon any kind of grand or totalizing theory in the face of the barba-
rous realizations and utter failures of the universalizing modern project
in its various guises, including the brutal examples from the former Soviet
empire. It bears mentioning in this context that figures of the Frankfurt
school were highly critical of Soviet-style Marxism during a time when
this was exceptional among left intellectuals in the West.4
In light of the
fall of actually existing European socialism, early Frankfurt figures such
as Adorno—who was consistently critical of command as well as market
economies—now deserve further attention and might even seem fresh to
critical intellectuals today.
Adorno, I shall argue, was also centrally concerned with communi-
cation, with the way in which a communicative freedom could be fostered.
Yet unlike Habermas, the former pursued this through the cultivation of an
awareness of the 'objectivity of subjectivity' and reflection on the non-iden-
tical content of human sociality. Adorno presents a very different version of
the communicative awareness and ethical understanding of reason than that
theorized by Habermas—one that is, I will contend, quite incompatible and
non-contiguous with Habermas's but still of great value today.
My general contention in this book is that, despite the many
valuable insights and contributions to critical social theory offered by
Habermas's theory, there are serious difficulties with and drawbacks to
it that reach 'paradigmatic' proportions when gauged against the achieve-
ments of Adorno's critical theory. In the last analysis the communicative
direction suggested by Adorno's negative dialectic indicates the more
promising route for critical theory and democratic politics today. This is
not to say that Adorno's theory does not contain substantive problems of
its own—it does. Any critical theory today inspired by his theory will
need to be aware of such problems while drawing on what is essential
and valuable in the call of his work. For now, given that the Habermasian
(mis)construal and criticism of Adorno's position are generally better
known today than the actual content and claims of the latter's theory,
clarification and elaboration are still necessary tasks. My specific argu-
ment, which I hope to sustain in various ways throughout the text, is that
the focus on the aesthetic and the concerns with new sensibility and
understanding born of an awareness of the objectivity of subjectivity

Introduction 9
(which animated much of Adorno's most important writing) are crucial
for a critical theory and for democracy and cannot be abandoned without
substantially weakening the possibilities of both. But it is precisely the
critical Adornian insights into the objectivity of subjectivity that must be
sacrificed if one is to accept the paradigmatic 'advance' Habermas offers.
Yet it is not that Habermas is all that disrespectful of his teacher.
Adorno occupies a special position for Habermas not only in Frankfurt
critical theory, but in the philosophical tradition itself. Adorno's remorse
less critical insistence on the paradoxes of the "philosophico-historical
concept of reason" inherited from Lukacs and the Western Marxist tradi-
tion leads Habermas to describe him as "the most systematic and effec-
tive thinker" he has known (1986a: 97-98). Habermas's praise is for
Adorno's unflinching stand in the face of the philosophical implications
of the dialectic of enlightenment, without ever giving up on the critical
idea of reason no matter how bleak the possibilities for freedom seemed
historically. It is instead Adorno's inability to get beyond the limits of
what is called subject-centered reason except by way of the allegedly
inadequate appeal to aesthetic mimesis that Habermas finds his greatest
and most unambiguous fault.
The crux of the Habermasian position is that Adorno fails to make
the paradigmatic turn to the pragmatics of language and communication
that must be made if critical theory is to break definitively with the phi-
losophy of consciousness (Bewufitseinsphilosophie) or philosophy of the
subject (Subjektsphilosophie). Central to my treatment of Habermas and
Adorno will thus be the analysis of this so-called "paradigm shift," which
I regard to be decisive in assessing their respective positions. More gener-
ally, given the influence of linguistic philosophy on social thought across
the board, this switch may be one of the most important theoretical issues
for critical social theory today. Hence the achievements—but really more
important the failures—of this paradigm shift in critical theory provide
general topics for the present work. But Habermas does not exactly claim
to have given up on the utopian critique of Frankfurt school critical theory.
For as Habermas has developed the core elements of his theory, which find
their single most comprehensive expression in his major Theory of Commu-
nicative Action, he has also sought to use the characterization of a paradigm
shift to establish the way in which the most worthwhile features of Frank-
furt critical theory can be preserved in his theory. Not only is there here a
claim to continuity with critical theory, but also a claim that the important
limits of older critical theory can be traced to the 'paradigm' of conscious-
ness philosophy—that its aporias and dead-ends can be resolved only in
the shift to the theory of communicative action.

This meta-theoretical shift is inaugurated in the context of critical
theory by Habermas and K. O. Apel and has proved to be highly influ
ential among many social and political theorists over the last decades.
Indeed, according to one Habermasian commentator, the paradigm shift
in critical theory has brought with it "irreversible gains" (Benhabib, 1986:
345). This transformation in critical theory is inspired by the achieve-
ments of the more general shift to linguistic philosophy in twentieth-
century philosophy and social theory pioneered by those such as Gottlob
Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand Saussure, J. L. Austin and Noam
Chomsky; of late, the work of Jacques Lacan has also been emphasized
in association with a linguistic turn.5
Habermas draws especially from
the speech pragmatics of Austin and John Searle and from the transcen-
dental-pragmatic arguments of Apel. The very phrase paradigm shift speaks
to the significance of this dimension in Habermas's theory, and I think it
not an exaggeration to say that this meta-theoretical and methodological
shift provides the basis for much of his substantive theory within and
after Knowledge and Human Interests (1971a), although evidence of the
turn to language and communicative theory is present as early as
Habermas's inaugural lecture at Frankfurt University in 1965 (KHI: 301-
17). Even before this his commitment to free public communication in
the context of the structural transformation of the (bourgeois) public sphere
is central to his Habilitationschrift (1989c). But it was only with the em
phatic paradigmatic shift in Theory of Communicative Action that Habermas
ceased to struggle with the reconstruction of historical materialism (see
Habermas, 1979a) and explicitly replaced it with his new theory. It is also
in Theory of Communicative Action that he formulates his most devastating
critique of Frankfurt critical theory.
The paradigm shift is thus ostensibly the Aufhebung of older criti-
cal theory. The German Aufhebung is an apt term for this shift (although
it is rarely used in this context) for, among other things, it underlines in
Habermas's relationship to Frankfurt critical theory the sense of negation
and preservation. This said, however, the present effort should not be
understood as dogmatic: an original critical theory is not to be defended
against its watering down, corruption, or destruction in the new critical
theory. Neither can Habermas's theory simply be dismissed from the
perspective of postmodernity as modernist, rationalist, or formalist and
hence itself outdated (the accusation of modernism and the commitment
to a rational society may also implicate Adorno from this position). One
of the contentions of the present work is that Habermasian critical theory
is altogether a different kind of critical theory to that committed to nega-
tion—which might group Adornian, poststructuralist, or deconstructionist

Introduction 11
critiques together (this is an assessment Habermas himself would not
entirely disagree with, of course). Yet Habermasian theory has more in
common with what critical theory rejects as traditional theory than
Habermas would like to admit. This is why the paradigm shift can be
emphasized so usefully: understanding Habermas depends on under-
standing his translation of the language of critical theory. What follows
in these pages is a critical examination of the logic and arguments that
lead Habermas, and those who by and large agree with him, to abandon
the older 'paradigm' of critical theory for the new line of critique.6
Naturally, the criticism of the philosophy of consciousness and
subjectivity was a dominant concern for Adorno, as summed up in his
critical concept of the dialectic of enlightenment itself. But, according to
Habermas, Adorno is nevertheless trapped within the paradigmatic lim
its of the subject's concern with knowing and acting even while he re-
mains such an unyielding critic of its philosophical and social
self-reflections. In the absence of the turn to language and communica-
tive action, Habermas sees no defensible alternative to the subject of
modern philosophy and he will not tolerate its utter effacement as might
be discerned in structuralism or poststructuralism. For him, the ultimate
emptiness of the philosophy of consciousness must be overcome by the
theory of communicative action which accounts for subjectivity in a far
more satisfactory way. This is to be achieved by moving the self-reflec
tion of reason into this new field rather than, as in Niklas Luhmann's
systems theory, for example, attempting to overcome the subject simply
by switching from a metaphysics of subject and object to a 'metabiology'
of relations between systems and environments that succeeds only to the
extent that it loses any purchase on critique (PDM: 368-85). Adorno is
also important in this respect for Habermas (and for myself) precisely
because he sought to take the self-reflection of reason to a higher level
and thereby to negate the philosophy of consciousness without sacrificing
a profound and unrelenting critique of domination.
That Adorno did not finally succeed in this endeavor, according
to Habermas, is arguably less important than the spirit of the former's
critique. Habermas's critique of Adorno is certainly intended to be final,
to foreclose on the project of the negative dialectic once and for all. But,
in contrast to his earlier criticisms of Adorno that advocated a break with
the orientation toward reconciliation or utopia, Habermas now recog-
nizes a fundamental utopian element in Adorno's critique that he, along

with others such as Albrecht Wellmer (1985; 1991) and Seyla Benhabib
(1986), believe is (indeed, must be) preserved in the theory of communi
cative action for it to qualify properly as a critical theory. In Wellmer's
words, Adorno's utopian projection of a "'non-violent' synthesis" is not
to be found in some new relationship to the Other of discursive reason,
but rather is precisely the regulative idea that discursive reason has of
itself, rooted in the conditions of language (cf. Habermas, 1986a: 156-57;
Wellmer, 1991: 14). Once the move to the theory of communicative action
is made, an ethic of discourse can be uncovered in the dialogic relation
between participants in rational speech that meets Adorno's requirement
for the recognition of difference—but within rather than beyond the world of
logos. A normative foundation for critique is then to be discovered within
a communicative rationality that draws upon the suppressed rational
potentials of modernity and hence offers theory a secure basis from which
to criticize current conditions.
It is indeed precisely a freedom equivalent to the freedom pro-
jected by Adorno that Habermas claims to have determined with the
theory of communicative action—and without the need for a radical rup-
ture with capitalist modernity. Whoever "meditates" on Adorno's enig-
matic statement that the reconciled state would "find its happiness where
the alien remains distant and different in its lasting nearness, beyond the
heterogeneous and beyond that which is one's own" (ND: 192/191) will
become aware, Habermas contends, "that the condition described, al-
though never real, is still most intimate and familiar to us. It has the
structure of a life together in communication that is free from coercion.
We necessarily anticipate such a reality... each time we speak what is
true. The idea of truth, already implicit in the first sentence spoken, can
be shaped only on the model of the idealized agreements aimed for in
communication free from domination" (Habermas, 1983d: 108-9). What
Adorno was looking for, Habermas asserts, were the structures of "reci-
procity of mutual understanding based on free recognition," in which
"the ideas of reconciliation and freedom are deciphered as codes for a
form of intersubjectivity" (TCAI: 390-91). Although this form of
intersubjectivity is, for Habermas, idealized in presuppositions made most
transparent in the rather specialized form of discursive speech, it can be
discerned even at the level of everyday speech and action.
For Habermas, this avenue of inquiry is far preferable than the
resolution to leave the potentials of modernity completely behind, which
he sees as philosophically irresponsible and politically dangerous or
regressive. According to Habermas, it is especially the radical critiques of
reason and language by such post-Nietzschean critics as Michel Foucault

Introduction 13
and Jacques Derrida that entail a loss of the subject and of reason, the
abandonment of enlightenment in an attempt to escape from its dialectic
of reason and domination. The radical critique of reason and language
ultimately escapes the (totalizing) domination of reason and language
only at the price of its own coherence. The critique of instrumental rea-
son must, for Habermas, remain rational if it is to have a voice at all, but
this effort continually seems, at root, to refer to something beyond reason,
beyond language, for the sake of which the truth of its critique stands.7
Habermas believes there is something fundamentally wrong with such
programs of critique.
Although Habermas is rather less critical of Horkheimer and
Adorno in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987) than he is of the
other, mostly post-Nietzschean figures discussed in this text, it is never-
theless significant that Horkheimer and Adorno are included in the radi-
cal line along with these contemporary critics. His inclusion of them
ironically lends Adorno a contemporaneity that Habermas no doubt does
not really intend, but which has not been lost on commentators (see the
introduction and essays in Pensky, 1997). I draw this parallel between
Habermas and Adorno to suggest branching critical routes from similar
sources and concerns. Each figure is to be seen in his own way as nego-
tiating alternative, yet incompatible paths away from the philosophy of
consciousness and the subject. As such, I want to affirm the relevance of
Adorno's critical theory distinct from Habermas's. But I also suggest that
Adorno's position is nevertheless divergent from current poststructuralist
critical theory that seeks to address quite similar concerns. These distinc-
tions, I think, make Adorno's theory a stronger contender for progressive
allegiances in light of Habermasian and dialectical critiques of
postmodernism. The work at hand seeks to clarify these alternatives in
order to show what has been lost, sacrificed in the shift to Habermasian
theory, yet what must nevertheless be preserved for a reconstructed criti-
cal theory at the turn of the millennium.
Nonetheless, many current commentators sympathetic to the re
construction and revitalization of Frankfurt critical theory accept in large
part Habermas's critique of Horkheimer and Adorno and his assessment
of the latter's contribution to critical theory. Habermas does appear to offer
a way out of the self-consciously aporetic critical theory that Adorno de-
velops in his major texts, and perhaps this also enhances the former's
appeal. Many critical writers who align themselves with the Habermasian
project and in opposition to poststructuralist critical theory find Habermas's
formulation of the issues for critical theory compelling and hence largely
ignore Adorno. For those who embrace full-fledged poststructuralist

theory, a selective appropriation of Adorno is possible, but significant
revision or abandonment of older critical theory also seems necessary.
My sympathies and position seem to lie somewhere in between the two.
We may now discern two central and related issues concerning
the paradigmatic transitions that are to be addressed in the present study.
The first concerns the very real problems with the philosophy of con-
sciousness and subject philosophy and the entwinement of critical theory
with these problems. This issue requires an account of the main reasons
why Habermasian theorists regard as necessary the general paradigm
shift in critical theory. This entails a specific elaboration of Habermas's
critique of Adorno, which is given primarily in Chapter 4 along with a
more general discussion of the paradigm shift. Adorno's own unsystem-
atic critiques of the philosophy of consciousness appear especially in
sections 2.2, 4.4, and Chapter 5. For Adorno, as for Habermas, the kind
of thought represented by the philosophy of consciousness contains fun-
damental faults. For the purposes of the present study, there is no ques-
tion that an alternative is required.
The second main issue is whether, as Habermas contends, Adorno
is finally to be located within this thinking, even as the latter is funda
mentally critical of it (although not quite in the kind of 'paradigmatic'
way Habermas advocates). In Chapters 2, 4, and 5 I present my reasons
for thinking that Adorno's critical theory offers a route away from the
philosophy of consciousness that is more promising than Habermas's. In
the course of my contrasts of Adorno's and Habermas's critical theories,
I contest the success of Habermas's solution to the aporias of Frankfurt
theory and, more broadly, to the aporias of subject and consciousness
philosophy themselves. Due to the entwinement of the paradigm shift
with the substance of Habermas's theory, this is also hence a contestation
of the Habermasian inheritance of critical theory, a contestation under-
taken for the sake of the democratic potential lost in the abandonment of
the negative dialectic. While Habermas's systematic misunderstanding
of Adorno enables him to present the paradigm shift and the develop-
ment of his theory in a rational and compelling way,8
he neglects the
crucial arguments and claims of Adorno that threaten his position most
centrally. These arguments and claims in no small part address conscious-
ness philosophy, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and ideology critique.
Habermas's criticisms of Adorno as well as his theory of communicative
action beg many questions concerning these topics—questions Adorno
attempts to answer most centrally.
The substance of the study opens in Chapter 2 with an explora-
tion of some main motifs of early Frankfurt critical theory. This serves as

Introduction 15
an introduction to some of the central issues pursued in the book. The
theme of this chapter is the crisis of ideology critique, which all contem
porary critical theory has been obliged to address in some way. This
includes a discussion of the decisive dialectic of enlightenment to which
both Habermas's theory and Adorno's later work respond. In Chapters
3 and 4, I turn to an examination of the specific achievements of the
paradigm shift as they appear through the lens of Habermas's notion of
communicative rationality. Chapter 3 examines Habermas's theory as a
critical theory of society, that is, as a theory of social pathology or repres
sion, with a particular focus on the analysis of the Marxist concept of real
abstraction in section 3.3. In this chapter I assess Habermas's view of the
systematically suppressed rational potentials of modernity from the per-
spective of the critique of reification. In Chapter 4 I converge on
Habermas's claim to have discovered the universal basis of sociality in
the pragmatic relations of speech. Having established the intellectual
context of Habermas's engagement with critical theory in the previous
chapter and the basis for his own paradigmatic shift in the early sections
of this one, a reconstruction and assessment of his critique of Adorno
follows in second half of Chapter 4. The central Habermasian criticism of
performative contradiction (which is leveled at poststructuralism as well
as Adorno's theory) is given special attention with respect to the radical
critique of reason and the negative dialectic. Here I offer a defense of
Adorno on the basis of dialectical consistency rather than Habermas's
preferred performative consistency, and draw out the inadequacies of
Habermas's notion. Finally, in Chapter 5, I offer a further critique of
Habermasian theory as non-utopian coupled with an interpretation of
Adorno that attempts to move his thought in promising directions for
contemporary concerns. In the final sections I investigate the possible
alternatives toward which Adorno's thought points that can be drawn
from a reading of his aesthetic-critical theory. I defend the Adornian
notion of the mimetic 'shudder' as a pivotal point through which to
access an alternative communicative ethic and freedom appropriate for a
renewed critical politics.

CRITICAL THEORY AND THE ECLIPSE
OF 'IDEOLOGY': THE EARLY FRANKFURT
(VISION AND ITS TRANSFORMATION
'Ideology' is a key concept in Marxist critical theory, though its
proper meaning and use have been subject to intense and lengthy debate.1
Its problematization as an analytical category and critical concept under
conditions of 'late' capitalism or postmodernity has required that it be
rethought significantly, if not completely abandoned. Indeed, many alter-
natives have been developed to take its place in contemporary critical
theories. Since the late 1950s, moreover, conservative thought has included
an end of ideologies thesis corresponding to the view that fundamental
social change does not offer an advance over capitalist democracy.2
But there is also a distinct sense that contemporary politics can
no longer be understood adequately in terms of coherent and identifiable
positive political ideologies. This condition exists not only as a result of
mass or catch-all political parties in the twentieth century and the trans-
formation of political contestation in an era of televisual and sophisti-
cated mass-mediated politics. Indeed, political parties themselves are in
a period of critical transformation if not in outright decline as a result of
such changes and other factors such as the less autonomous and smaller
role of the political state itself in the globalizing political economy. Nei-
ther is the decline of ideology quite a condition of the failed political
projects of 'previously' existing socialism in Eastern Europe or the
century's deradicalization of left political parties in the West to the point
17

at which, in the 1990s, so-called "Third Way" social democratic parties
can hold power in almost all European countries while continuing to
implement capital-friendly neoliberal restructuring. New modes of po-
litical dominance also emerged in the 1980s such as Thatcherism and
Reaganism that deployed ideological strategies in new and complex ways
and have colonized and transformed the political space in which older
ideological battles were once fought. Indeed, severely complicating con-
temporary ideological mapping are the shifts or transformations in spa-
tial and temporal experience under the conditions of multinational or
late capitalism, which has problematized the historical consciousness it-
self. The seriousness of this new postmodern condition or "dilemma" of
representation corresponds to a disjunction in our very perceptual abili
ties, which were themselves formed under a different cognitive environ
ment (high modernism) for much of the century and which have not yet
evolved to match the experience of the new "postmodernist hyperspace"
(Jameson, 1991; see also Harvey, 1989).
Moreover, resistance has also proliferated in the twentieth cen-
tury with multiple critical positions and objects of contestation that have
fragmented political opposition to dominant social power. It is difficult
to conceive of a systematic logic to the production of ideas, which the
concept of ideology as the logic of the idea suggests, if there is no deter-
minant system or level of society onto which ideas can be mapped. Not
only capital and class, but the operation of patriarchy, environmental
destruction and pollution, consumerism, heterosexuality, Eurocentrism,
and racism are among those manifestations of social power producing
vital resistance movements. However, the critical theories that have ac-
companied these new movements of resistance do not often claim to be
addressing the systematic totality of social relations as Marxist theory
claimed to do for the (revolutionary) working class. Neither do they
necessarily seek the universal liberation from domination and ideology
toward which Marxism aimed, though there are still some positions that
do make this claim, if in modified form.
At the global political level, the conflict between the two grand,
contesting ideological visions of a universal political order—the free world
versus communist society—has given way to the regressive flourishing
of increased regional instability, intensified regional social and military
violence, religious and political fundamentalisms, racism, ethnic hatred
and exclusion, and genocide. But again, these new conflicts tend to be
divided along particularistic lines such as those established by ethnicity
or nationalist identities rather than between contesting political causes
with universal visions, which the concept of ideology used to name as

Critical Theory and the Eclipse of 'Ideology' 19
encompassing theoretical or visionary constructs. Overlaying the global
system is nevertheless the same basic political relations of domination
and inequality between the 'developed' centers and the 'underdevel
oped' periphery that became established with the European imperialisms
in the sixteenth century. But current neocolonial domination, which op
erates through free trade, foreign investment and development, interna
tional aid, and the dissemination of Western consumer culture instead of
direct rule, and which is enforced by the disciplinary efforts of interna-
tional organizations such as the World Bank, the W.T.O., and the I.M.F.,
is far harder to identify and to effectively resist today than were the
spatially centered colonial administrations for the former resistance
movements of national liberation.
Politics, however, concerns far more than battles between ideo
logical positions or cultures, be they universalist or particularist. Con-
versely, the question of ideology is politically important far beyond the
articulation and dissemination of a specific logic of ideas. The need to get
beyond a relativist view of ideologies (or their equivalents) and a simple
pluralist view of politics are twin tasks centrally important to critical
theory. Our aim in this chapter is to consider how Frankfurt critical theory
began to recast the critique of ideology early in what might be called a
growing crisis in ideology critique in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury that has only been fully realized at century's end. The Marxist roots
of ideology critique were substantially transformed though not completely
abandoned during the trajectory of Frankfurt critical theory's account of
the historical transformation of capitalist society. Yet this is an indication
more of critical theory's adherence to a non-dogmatic dialectical materi-
alism than of any loss of faith. Indeed, critical theory seeks to respond in
general to the historical need for new critical knowledge of society and
politics under ever changing social conditions. Its social ontology thus
cannot be static, which means it does not quite hold to a social ontology
at all.
The critique of ideology that concerns us here includes but en-
tails more than a theory of ideology. That is, it is also oriented toward
overcoming the power ideology exerts on human beings. Ideology cri-
tique is thus often regarded as essential for a critical social theory that
seeks social change. In Marxist theory, the critical concept of ideology
acquires crucial political content by naming the ideational part of the
relations of social domination: the 'false' ideas and systematic blockages
that mask the real underlying class relations of domination by presenting
them as something other than they are or hiding them completely from
social subjects. Ideology operates in the service of those with material

interests in perpetuating these relations of domination. To criticize ideo
logical views is thus to attempt to reveal what otherwise might seem to
be rational or reasonable 'ideas' as operations of domination and there
fore not at all as rational or as reasonable as they seem. What appears as
universal, legitimate, natural, empirically factual, or simply unalterable
aspects of life or human nature are really historical and changeable, merely
hidden particulars that masquerade as universals in a historical milieu.
Inherent in this notion of ideology is the desire to overcome it, to dis-
pense with falsity and disguise in the interests of a 'true' condition free
of such distortion.
What might constitute such a projected true state of affairs is
revealed by the practical-political dimension of critical theory. This is
not supposed to offer just another 'positive' ideology but a state free
from the pejorative and deceptive senses of ideology themselves (see
Geuss, 1981). The true state of affairs in this sense is equivalent to
political freedom—the utopian projection that inspires critical theory to
work for liberation. But it is just such a utopian projection, along with
its desirability as a political force, that has been seriously called into
question with the problematization of the critical concept of ideology.
One of the major themes introduced in this chapter and indeed pur-
sued in this book is how the critique of that which was named as
ideology can be understood (within the tradition of critical theory) and
defended without abandoning the political motivation provided by a
certain utopian articulation.
I will begin this chapter with a rehearsal of some main themes in
the original program of Frankfurt critical theory and its intellectual his
tory in order to provide context for the major arguments of this book.
This will by no means be a comprehensive treatment of critical theory
but a highly selective account relevant to present aims. My guiding motif
is the crisis of ideology critique, which might also be taken as a manifes-
tation of the more general crisis of Marxism and critical thought in the
twentieth century. Coupling the present chapter with the next, the im
portant differences between Adorno's and Habermas's respective ap-
proaches to the concept and critique of ideology will be discussed in
order to assess the value of their critical theories. It will also be useful to
examine some contemporary poststructuralist responses to the question
of ideology along the way (introduced in section 2.1.2). Tracing the path
of Frankfurt critical theory away from its early program in section 2.2, I
give an account of Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of enlightenment
as a fateful dialectic bound up with the highest urges of intellectual
thought and culture. The overall discussion in this chapter will also serve

as a genealogy of certain concerns that emerge in the Habermasian cri
tique of Adorno's critical theory to be discussed in Chapter 4. But the
reconstructive argument I pursue later in this chapter aims to begin the
alternative interpretation of Adorno's critical theory (explicitly against
the Habermasian view) that I will develop over the course of the entire
text and that I hope will offer promising insights for the self-understand-
ing of contemporary critical theory.
2.1. THE PROGRAM OF CRITICAL THEORY AND
W
THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE ~~'
2.1.1. The Institute for Social Research and
the Program of Critical Theory
During the 1920s, the Institute for Social Research conducted
historical research that employed a fairly orthodox historical material-
ism. Under Carl Grunberg, the Institute's theoretical program centered
on Marxian political economy and emphasized the history of socialism
and the labor movement. Many Institute figures at this time emerged
from or had strong links with the labor movement, the German Commu
nist Party (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The Institute
also maintained relations with the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow,
occasionally participating in joint projects. Grunberg's achievement was
unique in the German (and not only the German) academic world at this
time. For now a full professor who was openly committed to Marxism
taught political economy at a major university where Marxism and the
history of the labor movement were recognized as legitimate academic
pursuits, where they could be studied for the award of higher degrees,
and where Institute members became part of the permanent teaching
faculty (Wiggershaus, 1994: 34).
When Grunberg suffered a serious illness and had to step down,
Max Horkheimer was appointed to the position of Director. Horkheimer
was the son of a bourgeois, Jewish factory owner and had rebelled against
his father's intention for him to take over the family business. Instead,
Horkheimer chose an academic career and was drawn to socialism. Al-
though sharing the disappointment and disillusionment felt by other
leftist intellectuals, activists, and later Institute members at the failed
European revolutions following the First World War, especially the Ger-
man revolution of 1918, he remained a committed socialist who was
convinced that capitalism and class domination must be abolished if

human suffering was to be alleviated. The first Institute publications
under his leadership continued the focus on Marxist political economy—
indeed, political economy would remain central to the Institute's activi
ties right up through the 1940s. But Horkheimer was far from an orthodox
thinker or an uncritical defender of Soviet Marxism. Neither did he (or
any of the core Institute members he assembled) affiliate directly with
the socialist parties in Germany. The interest of his early essays from the
1920s—paralleling and influenced by others such as Karl Korsch and
Georg Lukacs—was to explain the failure of socialist revolution despite
the presence of 'objective' revolutionary conditions. By the time he took
over the Institute, Horkheimer had formulated a vision of a new research
program intended to assist in advancing a critical knowledge and a criti-
cal politics that would contribute to the revitalized struggle for an eman-
cipated society.
However, while questions of theory and practice remained impor
tant, and while many themes and projects central to Grunberg's Institute
were maintained under Horkheimer during the 1930s, the new vision of
critical theory tended to take theory as its politics rather than forge intel-
lectual links with the political movements of the time. Indeed, dissatisfac-
tion with the existing political possibilities (including those presented by
the Soviet Union) motivated the articulation of a new political vision in the
face of the decline in class consciousness, which became more urgent with
the working-class embrace of fascism. There was a pressing need to com-
prehend the new social formation with more sophistication and depth
than was permitted with the prevailing reductionist, scientistic Marxist
model that privileged an economic 'base' at the expense of the social,
political, and cultural spheres, which were neglected as mere epiphenomenal
superstructure. Revision and further development of Marxist theory under
these changed circumstances were clearly in order.
The Institute preoccupations with the analysis of the new picture
of capitalist society that had been emerging in the 1920s and 1930s can
thus be usefully understood at the intellectual level as a response to the
crisis in the theory and practice of Marxism and the analytical and po-
litical limits of existing ideology critique. Indeed, regarding the latter,
Horkheimer's first major essay at the Institute consisted of a critique of
his Frankfurt University colleague Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia
(1936 [1929]). Mannheim was an important opponent because he was
widely seen as offering an alternative to the critical theory being devel-
oped at the Institute. Horkheimer's 1930 critique of Mannheim thus
provides a useful context for understanding the former's articulation of
the original program of critical theory.

Mannheim's influential sociology of knowledge, which he ex
plicitly conceived as a revision and application of Marxist theory, sought
to develop a new concept of ideology beyond its use as a party instru-
ment that merely impugned an opponent's ideas as disguised manifes-
tations of class interest. Instead, Mannheim refused to exclude Marxism
itself from such an analysis by extending the concept of ideology to
apply not just to the deceptions of 'ruling-class ideas' but to all theo
ries—including those reflecting the interests of the working class.
The sociology of knowledge seeks to reveal the 'situational de-
termination' of all cognition and thought such that the structure of any
particular representation can be understood in relation to the specific
historical structure and social conditions out of which it emerges. It supple-
ments ideology as deception with a notion of ideology as a socio-histori-
cally bound worldview (Weltanschauung). Mannheim accordingly
distinguished between the "particular" concept of ideology, which refers
to distortions that "range all the way from conscious lies to half-con
scious and unwitting disguises; from calculated attempts to dupe others
to self-deception," and the "total" notion, which refers to "the ideology
of an age or of a concrete historico-social group, e.g. of a class . . . of the
total structure of the mind of this epoch or of this group" (Mannheim,
1936: 55-56). But once the "total" concept of ideology is generalized in
this manner and all theories at all times are understood as ideological in
a non-moral, reflective sense rather than as 'false' in some way, it falls to
the sociology of knowledge itself to reveal the meaning of each epoch
and their development. For otherwise the sociology of knowledge would
amount merely to a cataloguing of differences. Horkheimer criticizes this
result as a repetition of just the kind of idealist metaphysics Marxian
theory is out to demolish.
Drawing parallels to the metaphysics of Dilthey's philosophy of
history, Horkheimer cites as evidence Mannheim's expression of "real-
ity" as "the ascent of human beings"—that is, his evolutionary concep-
tion of human value, his related reference to the "essence" of humanity
and to an "ineffable element" that in this case can only mean the divine.
The sociology of knowledge, despite its protestations to the contrary,
points to a meaning in history that is above history, a context beyond
context that it conveniently leaves unexamined. For Horkheimer, "there
is no adequate justification for claiming that, in a thoroughly conditioned
and mutable reality, the 'development of humanity' alone should occupy
this exceptional position. Nor is it convincing to argue that, of all kinds
of knowledge, the anthropological is not ideological" (1993b: 136).
Mannheim's approach amounts to a mode of assessment of the history

of thought that relies on something other than social science and there
fore unnecessarily mystifies history and social existence.
Horkheimer does not deny that Marxism escapes historical de
termination—indeed, critical theory is most attentive to the question of
its own conditions of existence and emergence. For Horkheimer, how-
ever, the truth or falsity of a position or theory cannot be decided simply
by reference to its socio-historical determination. The question of ideol-
ogy is instead inherently political. That is, ideological positions are al-
ways articulated in a context of social conflict and struggle, which cannot
be abstracted from any assessment of their truth or falsity. Thus besides
Mannheim's recourse to metaphysical rather than scientific explanation,
Horkheimer objects to the absence of the political dimension in his con
cept of 'total' ideology. The Marxist analysis of society as divided into
classes in conflict is opposed to any notion of society that somehow
escapes the contradictions of class antagonisms and, consequently, it is
opposed to any meaningful notion of a 'total' worldview. This theoretical
position cannot be reduced to the ideology of a specific social group
without de-politicizing its view of the ideological distortions, deceptions,
and deployments arising from social interests in conflict. Consequently
in the sociology of knowledge, for Horkheimer, "attention is diverted
from the social function of the 'ideology' to exclusively intellectual con-
siderations" that "leads to the idealist reinterpretation of existing contra-
dictions as mere oppositions of ideas, 'styles of thought,' and 'systems of
Weltansckauung'" (1993b: 148-49).
After Horkheimer assumed the Directorship of the Institute, the
concern with the critique of ideology became central to Institute work.
This was motivated by the concern to develop a Marxist-inspired,
postmetaphysical and materialist conception of history that would unite
various disciplines in the interests of a comprehensive vision.
Horkheimer's inaugural address as Director in January 1931
outlined the new research program that he and other Institute members
would refer back to on many occasions throughout their careers. Later
critical theorists have also taken special notice of this early program, in
particular following Habermas's explicit invocation of it in order to
contextualize his revision of the tradition in Theory of Communicative
Action.3
Essentially, Horkheimer calls for the cultivation of a new rela-
tionship between social philosophy and the empirical sciences that is
inspired by the Marxian vision of a critical social science. Social philoso-
phy, for Horkheimer, concerns the great principal questions such as "the
relationship of the individual to society, the meaning of culture, the for-
mation of communities, or the overall status of social life" (Horkheimer,

1989: 31), while the empirical sciences investigate concrete social phe
nomena as they exist in reality. The new formulation should conceive of
each in terms of "an ongoing dialectical permeation and evolution" for
neither should or can be immune from criticism or correction by the other.
Drawing on the latest in scientific techniques of social investigation, a
'supradisciplinary' organization of research was proposed that would bring
together "philosophers, sociologists, political economists, historians, and
psychologists" in order to "pursue their philosophical questions directed
at the big picture... to transform and to make more precise these ques
tions as the work progresses, to find new methods, and yet never lose
sight of the whole" (1989: 31-32). This integration of philosophy and sci
ence would demystify metaphysical social philosophy—even Marxism was
criticized as having declined into a dogmatic, reductionist, and objectivist
materialist metaphysics—and it would overcome the fragmentation of the
sciences via this supradisciplinary materialism.
Kellner (1989) emphasizes this supradisciplinary approach as what
is most distinctive about critical theory's early program. It is to be distin-
guished from an interdisciplinary approach, which fosters communica-
tion across disciplines but allows them to remain detached and
independent. In Kellner's words, "Critical Theory is guided by the con-
viction that all inquiry, all thought, all political action and all informed
human behavior must take place within the framework of a comprehen-
sive and global Critical Theory of society which contains a synthesis of
philosophy, the sciences and politics" (1989: 44).
Hence each member of Horkheimer's circle at the Institute ini-
tially took specific research responsibilities that would contribute to
this overall vision: Lowenthal was to work in the sociology of litera
ture, Pollock political economy, Fromm the psychological dimension,
and Adorno the sociology of music. Marcuse later joined as a fellow
philosopher.
In a series of essays in the 1930s, Horkheimer and other Institute
members elaborated this vision. These writings were intended as pro-
grammatic for what emerged definitively as Frankfurt critical theory and
thus were also taken as points of departure by many among the core
group associated with the Institute. Horkheimer's general approach was
to distinguish the new critical theory from the prevailing European philo-
sophical movements and positions, which were collectively referred to as
"traditional theory." As the distinctive term for the Institute approach,
"critical theory" was adopted at first as a prudent code word for its
Marxist theory while its members were in exile in the United States—an
environment quite hostile to the theory associated with socialism and the

Soviet Union. But thereafter the term became thoroughly associated with
the Horkheimer circle and the specific tradition they inaugurated.
Horkheimer discerned two broadly defined sides to traditional
theory or 'bourgeois' philosophy and ideology,4
each opposed to the other
but nevertheless related uncritically to the existing society as attempts to
harmonize human relations within its essentially contradictory social
conditions. On one side was the new metaphysics of the early twentieth
century, among which Horkheimer included Romantic spiritualism,
Lebensphilosophie, and material and existential phenomenology. These
intellectual movements, he argued, are akin to the theological spirit (in
which they are rooted) that offers to the bourgeois individual a meta-
physical reassurance of genuine identity with the supernatural or
suprapersonal, a true reality that confirms that his or her real suffering
is but appearance in the grand scheme of things. (These philosophies
might hence also be seen as equivalents to what Marx criticized in his
early writings as the false, idealistic critiques of bourgeois society and
politics in the first half of the nineteenth century, and they extend in
various lineages to include New Age spiritualism at the end of the twen-
tieth century.)
On the other side, looming larger, was positivism in its various
manifestations. By using the goals and methods of the natural sciences,
chiefly physics, as models for the philosophical determination of valid
knowledge, positivism is radically opposed to all metaphysics. But, as
Horkheimer observes, the positivist aversion to questions concerning what
a thing is extends its critique of metaphysics to all knowledge claims that
do not or cannot admit of scientific verification. Since such knowledge
can only concern the appearances of things of which observation allows
the discovery of laws, all thought can be divided into that which counts
as knowledge and that which does not. Scientific knowledge is viewed
as authoritative and reliable, whereas all non-scientific knowledge is not
really knowledge at all but rather 'fancy' or 'nonsense'. "Besides science
there is art" (Horkheimer, 1972a: 139). Once the distinction is no longer
recognized between what an entity appears to be and what it is, valid
knowledge of the human condition can be attained only through the
behavioral sciences like psychology, physiology, or biology. Valid social
or political knowledge is not thereby abandoned, according to the posi-
tivist position, but rather it must meet the strict requirements of scientific
form and method in order to be counted.5
But more insidious than this scientization of politics is the par-
ticipation of science and the scientistic worldview in what I will later
discuss as the dialectic of enlightenment. Instead of acting as a force of
rational progress in human knowledge and freedom as the Enlighten-

ment philosophers had hoped, the commitment to scientific truth free
from mystical taboos or ideological taint declines into technological fetish
and a myopic epistemology. Science instead introduces new constraints to
knowledge and acts as an ideological weapon for a new class of rulers.
Science's progressive philosophical opposition to the questions that occu
pied 'ideological' metaphysics ends up functioning in the interests of the
newly established order by reducing politics merely to contesting value
judgments and the manifestation of historical struggles to the abstract givens
of empirical study (1972a: 178). Indeed, for Horkheimer the concerns of
metaphysics should not be regarded as simply meaningless, no matter
how misguided and false the particular ideas were.
Yet positivism, by radically eliminating the knowing subject as a
determinate moment in cognition, erases all difference between existing
individuals and all difference between the historical moments of theory.
The positivist principle that all theoretical disagreement and conflict are
to be decided by some form of scientific verification is extended in time
and space, which harmonizes all individuals under the unity of the 'one'.
It thereby posits an "eternal fact" of an "even more general character
than a law of nature" (1972a: 148). Hence, following Horkheimer, one can
ultimately discern a 'secret' or unstated metaphysics in positivism, itself
one of the most explicit and trenchant bourgeois expressions of anti-
metaphysical thought, because it defines absolutely what counts as truth
through an eternally valid and untouchable principle. In large part posi-
tivism and metaphysics are "simply two different phases of one philoso-
phy which downgrades natural knowledge and hypostatizes abstract
conceptual structures" (1972b: 40). Therefore they lack the specifically criti
cal perspective of a genuine, open-ended pursuit of truth because they
each insulate certain historical values and "abstract conceptual structures"
from doubt and criticism. A critical perspective that refuses this kind of
hubris and philosophical irresponsibility is available only to a theory that
is able to properly grasp the dialectical relation of intellectual and material
reality. For critical theory, neither positivism nor 'bad' metaphysics can
thus truly advance the self-understanding of reason (Vernunft).
Theorizing the relation between intellectual and material reality
turns us toward the dynamics of comprehension itself. On Horkheimer's
understanding of dialectical materialism (or critical theory), a concrete
understanding of the knowing subject is crucial for any adequate social
theory; conversely, a historical account of society is likewise essential for
any adequate notion of the knowing subject. Only by adequately grasp-
ing these two aspects can theory hope to penetrate the hypostasis of the
individual's own perceptual abilities that occurs in current society. The
scientific Marxism of the time likewise had no theory of the subject,

which not only compounded its inability to adequately explain the fail
ure of socialist revolution but also meant it was unable to say why a new,
'inevitable' socialist society was even desirable. The subsequent attention
critical theory gave to Freud and psychoanalysis was new in the context
of Marxist theory, and it was intended to address the need to account for
the subjective aspects of social existence far better than philosophy and
sociology had managed to date.6
"The facts which our senses present to
ourselves are pre-formed in two ways," Horkheimer writes: "through the
historical character of the perceived object and through the historical
character of the perceiving organ . . . and yet the individual perceives
himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception" (1972c: 200). It
is this that entails an adequate conception of the social totality in which
the individual's nature and perceptual capacities are developed and
formed, for otherwise such a radical historicizing of human traits would
not make sense—that is, it would not be possible to make sense of histori-
cal development and change at all.
For the early Horkheimer, the critical theory of society finds the
meaning of the whole not in the 'facts' that exist, that can be scientifically
determined, and not in the dreams produced by metaphysical desires,
but in the idea of the concrete transformation of contemporary society
"into the right kind of society" (1972c: 218). What gives it its critical
character in contrast to traditional theory's ideological harmonizing of
the individual to the status quo is its purchase on a future freedom
promised by the (radical) structural transformation of the present society.
A critical theory of "society as it is," Horkheimer argues, is "a theory
dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life"
(1972c: 198-99). Evocative of Marx's theory of alienation and critique of
capitalist society, critical theory
is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension
and to abolish the opposition between the individual's purpose-
fulness, spontaneity and rationality, and those work-process re-
lationships on which society is built. Critical thought has a concept
of man in conflict with himself until this opposition is removed.
If activity governed by reason is proper to man, then existent
social practice, which forms the individual's life right down to its
least details, is inhuman, and this inhumanity affects everything
that goes on in society (1972c: 210).
This concern with the realization of a genuinely rational society
expresses the centrality of transformative politics for the intellectual
endeavor of a critical 'theory'. Such a commitment follows from the con-

viction that a new set of social relations is necessary for a new way of
thinking, acting, perceiving, and experiencing that might realize free
dom. Indeed, in a response to Horkheimer's essay "Traditional and Criti
cal Theory," Herbert Marcuse contended that philosophy represented an
interest of human beings in freedom and happiness, an interest that nev-
ertheless could not be realized merely in and through philosophy but
required socially transformative political praxis. Insofar as philosophy
reaches its limit with "the concept of reason as freedom" in Idealism,
"the philosophical construction of reason is replaced by the creation of a
rational society" (Marcuse, 1968b: 137, 142). The rationality that is to
guide the future society cannot be merely the functional rationality of
planned production or distribution embodied in conventional bureau-
cratic direction. Such planning tends to ally utility with scientized poli-
tics in a massive administered world constructed to satisfy not the genuine
needs of people but those of the system itself, which are projected as the
actual needs of its social subjects. Marcuse argued that beyond this there
is a crucial link between the regulation of production and the rational
interest of "the freedom and happiness of the masses" (1968b: 144). This
"organization of the administration of the social wealth in the interest of
a liberated mankind" cannot simply be formal or procedural for freedom
and happiness are substantive, existential experiences of a concrete way
of life.
Yet unlike the political efforts of the philosophical tradition that
culminated in Hegel, critical theorists cannot and ought not mark out the
definitive or proper structure of the new society, its institutions or legiti-
mate political power, nor the precise substantive shape given to the free
and happy life. All this must "occur as the free creation of liberated
individuals" (1968b: 157, 135). Critical theory hence does not put forward
blueprints for a new society, even though ideology critique expresses an
interest in social transformation. Rather, in Marx's words, the task of a
critical theory is to clarify the interests of those engaged in the struggles
of the times with the aim of a liberated society in mind: to "show the
world what it is fighting for" (Marx, 1974a: 15). It thus orients itself
toward history and historical social movements without a dogma, at-
tempting instead to remain true to the progressive development of his-
torically emergent social relations identified within the 'womb' of the
existing system.7
Liberation, for Marcuse, was to be the result of success-
ful resistance to the domination of capitalism, which could take an in-
creasing variety of forms but which in the end still depended on some
final event, a "Great Refusal," that negated capitalism. Only after that
could human freedom be real and actual, if it was indeterminate at the
present time.

Thus Marcuse argued that philosophy and theory alone were
finally inadequate for a utopian consciousness that might inform and
aid groups struggling for progressive change. Expressing a major theme
of critical theory, he contended that the theoretical consciousness needed
to have a concrete relation to what he called "phantasy." Contrary to
positivism, phantasy is understood not as mere fancy—external de
sire—but actually as a kind of legitimate cognition that points toward
"the already possible unfolding and fulfillment of needs and wants"
(1968b: 155). Marcuse consistently stressed true as opposed to false
human needs—the "'biological' dimension in which the vital, impera
tive needs and satisfactions of man assert themselves" (1969: 16-17). He
persisted with a search for the soul of revolt in marginalized groups as
well as in peoples in peripheral countries as an alternate or supplement
to the integrated and transformed proletariat. These positions are some-
times taken to indicate a problematic left Hegelianism that implies a
'bad' metaphysics of nature or philosophy of history. Yet Marcuse nev-
ertheless consistently emphasized the historical orientation of critical
theory on such points. Critique must finally find its 'confirmation' (but
not 'foundation') in historical struggles of resistance and critical activ-
ity, which themselves in turn give rise to new theoretical critique along
with new, progressive needs. "That the true interest of individuals is
the interest of freedom, that true individual freedom can coexist with
real general freedom and, indeed, is possible only in conjunction with
it, that happiness ultimately consists in freedom—these are not propo-
sitions of philosophical anthropology about the nature of man but de-
scriptions of a historical situation which humanity has achieved for
itself in the struggle with nature" (Marcuse, 1968a: 192). It is this
historicizing of "the fulfillment of needs and wants," which, when ar-
ticulated as what is "already possible," politicizes critical theory and
gives it its transformative, liberatory orientation.
Indeed, the conservative force of the integrated working classes
in the West, the collusion of socialist parties in the limited Western rep
resentative democracies, along with the failures of Soviet socialism, were
evidence to Marcuse that the development and flourishing of a "new
sensibility" was crucial internally to the practice of any successful revo-
lutionary movement. This, however, required very different forms of
organization than the traditional modes of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century radical politics.
If the socialist relationships of production are to be a new way of
life, a new Form of life, then their existential quality must show

forth, anticipated and demonstrated, in the fight for their
realization.... Understanding, tenderness toward each other, the
instinctual consciousness of that which is evil, false, the heritage
of oppression, would then testify to the authenticity of the rebel-
lion. In short, the economic, political, and cultural features of a
classless society must have become the basic needs of those who
fight for it (Marcuse, 1969: 88-89).
Some have consequently seen just this kind of alternative mode
of organization coupled with a new sensibility emerging in the new social
movements, especially the peace and ecology movements. For Eder (1982),
the new social movements aim to advance beyond modern society to-
ward a post-industrial order in part by articulating new values and a
new mode of life, which is consistent with what Marcuse and other criti-
cal theorists called for (Kellner, 1989: 220-21).
Despite such continuations of spirit, however, it is possible to
discern limits to and problems with the original program of critical theory
that allegedly affect its durability and contemporary development.
Horkheimer's effort to distinguish critical theory from traditional theory
and to move beyond metaphysics is dogged by the apparent anomalous
reliance on certain categories and concepts critical theory is supposed to
have abandoned as elements of traditional theory. Many of these notions
seem extremely problematic from perspectives at the end of the twenti-
eth century. Horkheimer's confidence in the progressive outcome of his-
tory as a result of heightening contradictions in capitalism and the "new
barbarism" that accompanies it cannot be theoretically grounded, which
he realized, but nevertheless his confidence in this early period implies
a philosophy of history that receives very few advocates today. His belief
that "there will emerge in the future age the relation between rational
intention and its realization" (1972c: 217) seems to suggest the possibility
of a (completely) transparent society beyond the stage currently reached
by capitalism. This possibility perhaps can be traced to the Hegelian
idealist desire to overcome the forcible separation of subject and object,
which Horkheimer seems to endorse by claiming that "their identity lies
in the future, not in the present" (1972c: 211). Indeed, Horkheimer in-
vokes the philosophy of the subject at moments when he touches upon
the reason of the future: "[humankind] will for the first time be a con
scious subject and actively determine its own way of life" (1972c: 233).
Moreover, he seems to fall into a related metaphysics at other times when
he asserts that "the thrust toward the rational society. . . is really innate
in every man" (1972c: 251). Marcuse's later utopian call for the creation

of a new Subject or 'new man' through an aesthetic transformation seems
to have a strong affinity with such conceptions.
Habermas has pointed to the determinate systemic limits and
paradoxes of the philosophy of consciousness (or the subject) as the real
reasons the original program of critical theory foundered. This, he ar-
gues, becomes most clear in the 1940s with Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Horkheimer and Adorno reject the Hegelian-Marxist (ironic) return to an
objective idealism in Lukacs' theory of reification and class conscious
ness without finally breaking with the desire to project a radical unity to
theory and practice envisioned for the new society. But the problem
precedes and is even deeper than this. With the rejection of any return to
objective reason—that is, any hope of identifying the basis of social soli
darity that the metaphysical tradition found through a harmonized con-
figuration of the natural and social orders—there seems to be no basis on
which to judge the value or desirability of what is to be expressed through
and in the future state of freedom. The Marxist recovery of alienated
subjective powers and capacities through the achievement of a compre-
hensive autonomy and freedom, which would satisfy needs directly
through the actualization of those powers and capacities, cannot be rep-
resented substantively.
But neither, Habermas contends against Frankfurt theory, can
such meaning be indicated unproblematically by reference to the repres-
sive-expressive contents of phantasy, the sensuous power of imagination,
or the sphere aesthetic mimesis. The problem is that there simply cannot
be an unambiguous reading of Marx's overcoming of alienated human
powers and capacities or the satisfaction of needs in themselves precisely
because the identification of such human capacities and needs—what
Marcuse later repeated as "the already possible unfolding and fulfillment
of needs and wants" in the creation of an "aesthetic ethos"—always de
pends on interpretation. And the proper activity of interpretation cannot
simply be assumed. That is, any condition free from reification and capi-
talist domination will still require the determination of which powers and
capacities are to flourish and which needs are to be thereby met. The
facticity of capacities and needs, for Habermas, which always grounds
itself historically in the social structures into which human beings grow,
still demands a separate determination in order to be recognized, to
acquire validity. There is nothing automatic about this recognition of ca-
pacities and needs, even though the level of material production and
structure of the relations of production place real limits on the scope and
content of this recognition. This interpretive dimension entails processes
oriented toward mutual understanding and agreement that are different

from the historical capacities of material production and their matching
needs. For Habermas, these levels of facticity and validity cannot—or
should not—be collapsed into one another in an unreflective way. As we
will see, Habermas attempts to rescue the practical interpretation of needs
from the repression/expression model by transforming it into the lin-
guistically mediated activity of free communication with others. This
practical-political recovery of the self-reflective formation of the species
can be recognized, he argues, only by the paradigm shift to the theory of
communicative action.
Frankfurt school studies in political economy had already re-
vealed that the development of the forces of production no longer
seemed to pose a critical threat to the relations of production, and that
indeed progress in technological productive capacity no longer neces-
sarily produced conditions for social and cultural progress at all but
actually contributed to increased reification and domination. The ap-
parent disjunction between the forces and relations of production had
to be explained with recourse to a new theory of the capitalist state and
law (see Scheuerman, 1994), as well as a new approach to ideology and
culture in general.
If, according to Horkheimer, "(t)here are no general criteria for
judging the critical theory as a whole, for it is always based on the recur
rence of events and thus on a self-reproducing totality" (1972c: 242), then
how might critical theory gain a theoretical purchase on the "self-repro
ducing totality" itself? How might it do this without smuggling in an
external value orientation and contradicting its own radical historicizing
and critical premises? If just this sort of attempt is misguided, then one
might ask what alternative self-understanding could critical theory have
that would also avoid weakening itself into an ideology, in the manner
of the sociology of knowledge. Horkheimer's programmatic early work
contains tensions that seem to be resolved only by recourse to strategies
more appropriate to traditional than critical theory, which he really wishes
to avoid.
This is the point at which Horkheimer and Adorno undertake a
thoroughgoing and radical critique of reason and reification under the
heading of the dialectic of enlightenment that seeks to reveal an alternate
rationality in conjunction with an ethics of cognition. From Habermas's
viewpoint, it is a deeply paradoxical affair that cannot hope to succeed, for
Horkheimer and Adorno submit subjective reason "to an unrelenting cri-
tique from the ironically distanced perspective of an objective reason that
had fallen irreparably into ruin" (TCAI: 377). The totality, as we have in-
herited it in thought and in social relations, is fundamentally untrue, as

Adorno would emphasize. Yet it must still be grasped at least as such,
which does establish a tension at the core of critical theory. From a
poststructuralist perspective, these tensions in the early Frankfurt criti-
cal theory are vestiges of the idealist, humanist metaphysical tradition
that are unwarranted by critical theory's own "methodology of suspi
cion" (Hoy, 1994: 114). On this reading, critical theory's aspirations to
ward a "totalizing" theory must be abandoned if it is to avoid falling
back into a philosophy of history. It must relinquish the very desire for
a theory that informs critique and, if it is to remain true to its spirit,
instead write critical histories such as those exemplified in Michel
Foucault's work.
The notion of totality, of grasping the concept of the whole of
human relations, has been a central feature in the tradition of Western
Marxism—indeed, it would seem to be elemental (see Jay, 1984). It is a
concept that is explicitly rejected by poststructuralism and post-Marxism
because it is seen as a hangover from the imperialist, metaphysical phi-
losophies and linked with the errors of revolutionary utopian desires for
a new age characterized by the unity of subject and object, the harmony
of spirit and reality, individual and collective. Insofar as any kind of
positive totality is invoked, such a concept is also rejected by a consistent
negative dialectic. But as a number of writers have pointed out, the con-
cept of totality itself should not be automatically equated or associated
with some kind of totalizing urge toward total control or complete knowl-
edge of everything that exists, much less with totalitarian thought or the
mythical subject-object unity. Marxism already properly poses a chal-
lenge to all philosophical systems that might make use of 'totality' in a
'totalizing' way. The dialectic, Jameson has argued, is not a philosophy
in that sense but something else: "Its ideal (which famously involves the
realization and the abolition of philosophy all at once) is not the inven-
tion of a better philosophy that . . . seeks to do without premises alto-
gether, but rather the transformation of the natural and social world into
a meaningful totality such that 'totality' in the form of a philosophical
system will no longer be required" (1991: 334). Later, I will contend that
it is precisely the negative dialectic and the crucial productive tension
arising from the 'untrue Whole' that presents a consistent and promising
response to the contemporary need to acknowledge the limits of theory
while not finally requiring us to abandon a purchase on what its leading
advocate, Adorno, called the "non-existent social totality" (nichtexistente
Gesamtgesellschaft). The idea of a non-existent totality is a way of indicat-
ing a critical, utopian orientation without suggesting that one already
has or could have all the answers.

Another dimension to the problems that emerged in connection
with the original program of critical theory concerned Horkheimer and
Adorno's deepening critique of science. Overcoming the separation of
philosophy and science desired by Horkheimer seemed less and less
possible in the face of the hardening methodological exclusivity of the
sciences, the increasing integration of science into industry and politics,
and the appeal of positivism as a philosophy and an ideology. The failure
of psychoanalysis to become accepted as a science had further alienated
critical theory from the sciences, since many Institute members besides
Fromm—especially Adorno and Marcuse—incorporated psychoanalytic
insights into their theory and saw psychoanalysis as a parallel to Marx's
vision of critical social science. By the time of the Institute's return to
Germany and Horkheimer's installment as Rector of Frankfurt Univer
sity in 1951 (Horkheimer would not produce any significantly new work
from this point on), the hope of integrating the sciences into a
supradisciplinary program had been severely inhibited under the analy-
sis of the eclipse of reason, the dialectic of enlightenment, and the cri-
tique of positivism. Yet Adorno continued to engage in empirical work
through the 1940s and 1950s—for example, in his involvement with the
Princeton Radio Research Project and The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno,
et. al., 1950). He even seemed to present an Adornoesque version of
Horkheimer's original program in a 1951 lecture delivered in Germany
shortly before he was forced to return for two years to the United States
for immigration and financial reasons (Wiggershaus, 1994: 454^6). De-
spite this, the early hopes of the critical theory of society were, at best,
put on hold. Adorno developed his aesthetic-critical theory at a meta-
theoretical level with the hope that this could inform and further some-
thing of the original aims of critical theory in new ways, which I will
indicate in section 2.2 and argue in more depth in Chapter 5. Adorno's
later efforts will be thoroughly misunderstood if his concern with the
aesthetic is regarded as a despairing aestheticization of reason, a mis
guided Nietzschean transmutation of Marx, or some such view.
That Adorno did not withdraw politically—despite suffering
various accusations of resignation, excessive abstractness, quietism, etc.,
during the halcyon days of New Left activism—is also evident from his
continued and active critical participation in the public sphere during the
1950s and 1960s. He maintained a high profile as a public intellectual in
postwar Germany, giving radio talks and lectures and writing on prevail-
ing political, cultural, and social issues (see, for example, the work as-
sembled in Adorno, 1998). But the apparent lack of an addressee for the
kind of liberatory spirit that critical theory sought to awaken had led

Adorno to characterize critical theory during his exile as a "message in
a bottle" waiting out the foreseeable future (Wiggershaus, 1994: 279), a
view he found difficult to relinquish during the rest of his life.
2.1.2. Post-Marxism and the Recasting of Politics
Frankfurt theory and Habermas are not alone, of course, in
responding to the need to rethink the freedom of democracy in the
absence of a philosophy of the subject. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe (1985), for example, engage in a seminal effort to move the
discourse of the socialist project beyond the essentialist political and
epistemological bottlenecks created by the ostensible need for a uni-
fying or universalizing theory of society (as a social totality) that would
encompass ideology, social conflict, resistance, difference (race, class,
gender, sexuality, culture, etc.), and domination. They also seek to re-
vitalize critical thought under the conditions of a postmodernity in
which, as Lyotard (1984) has definitively put it, there is widespread
"incredulity" toward all such metanarratives of ideology and truth,
resistance and revolution, identity and difference, and so on. Laclau
and Mouffe aim to reorient the political self-understanding of the (radi-
cal) Left away from a theory that essentializes antagonism and the agents
and sites of political action from an external point of view (the theory
of history and class struggle). In the latter, privileged points from which
historical change is to be set in motion (for example, the Revolution, the
General Strike, the Party) are consequently designated as the focus of
political organizing. Instead, Laclau and Mouffe conceive of a radical
democracy that recognizes the fundamental openness of the social and
of social division and antagonisms that constitute the identities of indi-
viduals and groups.
If the various subject positions and the diverse antagonisms and
points of rupture constitute a diversity and not a diversification, it
is clear that they cannot be led back to a point from which they
could all be embraced and explained by a single discourse.... The
discourse of radical democracy is no longer the discourse of the
universal; the epistemological niche from which 'universal' classes
and subjects spoke has been eradicated, and it has been replaced
by a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irre-
ducible discursive identity.... Juridical institutions, the educa-
tional system, labor relations, the discourses of the resistance of
marginal populations construct original and irreducible forms of
social protest, and thereby contribute all the discursive complex-

ity and richness on which the program of a radical democracy
should be founded (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 191-92).
As a result of their step away from 'totalizing' theory—a rejec
tion of 'high' or 'meta-' theory (all of which are essentially equivalent to
Lyotard's metanarratives)—post-Marxist and poststructuralist critical
thinkers hope to avoid theoretical dangers as well as the danger of theory
itself: the intellectual arrogance, ethnocentrism, or imperialism associ-
ated with claims to comprehend the whole of identity and difference.
They also claim for themselves an improved critical eye that is more
attuned to the changed historical experience of late capitalism and more
attentive to the particular needs of its diversity of individuals and groups.
Although Laclau and Mouffe misrepresent the critical theory of revolu-
tion here—it is rather counterrevolution or conservative reaction that seeks
to lead particulars "back to a point from which they could all be em
braced and explained" (191; emphasis added)—the value of their call is
the importance it places on rethinking alliance politics among oppressed
and marginalized groups. The key political categories in Laclau and
Mouffe's recasting of the radical democratic project as an alliance politics
are those of the 'equivalence' and 'articulation' of struggles against domi-
nation and oppression, which are to be contrasted with the universaliza-
tion and thereby assimilation of such struggle under a single dynamic of
resistance. In order to preserve and remain sensitive to difference but
nevertheless provide a coherence to radical democratic politics, 'chains of
equivalence' must be articulated among the diverse groups and identi-
ties struggling against specific dominations and oppressions. Here, one
might argue, is a valuable notion of an antagonistic totality as alliance
politics centered on the hegemonic project of radical democracy that does
not require a single representative or theory for its existence.
From the perspective of critical theory, however, a wholesale and
undialectical rejection of categories that, while featured among those
traditionally central to metaphysics, are not in themselves necessarily or
wholly metaphysical, introduces different dangers. Accepting diversity,
even celebrating it, without the communicative effort to meet with, to
comprehend, to cooperate with, and possibly—or perhaps even prob-
ably—to contest with otherness, risks a different apathy or passiveness
that infects the relations of self and other. Such a tendency to passivity
lies at the opposite pole of the violent imperialism of assimilation that is
supposed to be done away with. It does not consist of an utter break with
its dialectic.8
The ethical call of a critical theory like Adorno's, as we will
see, is so thoroughly concerned not only with opening up to the other,

letting the other be, but also with allowing and encouraging the other and
otherness to open up, to speak and communicate, and to contemplate its
representations, to engage with them. Without this kind of ethical call,
ostensibly critical, postmodern thought may risk consequently falling back
into some form of positivism (which is sometimes alleged against Foucault
and his followers), or it may produce a new, as yet unrecognized myth or
metaphysics in the absence of adequate replacements for modern critical
concepts such as the subject, nature, interest, the social totality, reason, or
history (as scientism or Mannheim's sociology of knowledge do). All of
this may prematurely foreclose on the real political gains projected by
contemporary theorizing that are to be derived from a postmetaphysical,
yet ethically conscious and negative dialectical critical theory.
Perhaps just what is at issue in this respect is whether 'master-
codes' or 'master narratives' such as the subject, the totality, or history
are required for philosophically defensible critique at all.9
Once one rec
ognizes that language and communication are historical, have inextrica-
bly historical components out of which no timeless abstraction can
legitimately be conjured, then one must, in some sense, assume a direc-
tion for history. Otherwise, as I contended earlier, history becomes sim-
ply the reified logging of specific facts and statistics with no possibility
of making any sense of this data. Sense-making is just what the historical
understanding achieves. A further issue is how to deal with the assump-
tion of a history for critique without removing one's own position, the
position of critique, from examination, doubt, and possible revision or
rejection. This is an obligation to give an account of one's own premises
just as one gives an account of and criticizes others'. For critical theory,
such self-reflection intends to be internal to the theory, to the mode of
inquiry, which acknowledges its own historicity at the same time as it
criticizes the lack of such acknowledgment in 'ideological' thinking—or,
as Adorno was fond of saying, in the "one-track mind" (eingleisige
Gedankengang).
What is clear is that ideology critique has been transformed in
poststructuralism and certain forms of post-Marxism, severed from a
cognitive connection to systematic social-theoretic analyses or universal-
izing 'storied' accounts of domination, which raises crucial questions
concerning the very terms of left/progressive, democratic critical theory
itself. Less clear are the final implications of the abandonment of some
kind of cognitive relation to a concept of the social whole that animated
critical theory's original program. Careful consideration of the question
of critique and its relation to democracy, history, and the future of de-
mocracy, I would argue, thus continues to be necessary.

It is worth noting at this point that Habermas does not recognize
a 'sea-change' in or radical break with modernity that some theorists
attribute to the condition of postmodernity.10
For Habermas, the structure
of the contemporary situation has not essentially changed, only its ap-
pearance or surface has altered. Yet he thinks that the great progressive
modern effort to bring about a new state of affairs has dissolved, largely
as a result of the crisis in and "exhaustion" of the specific utopian project
that found historical expression in the cause of the welfare-state and
which crystallized around the potential of a society based on social labor
(Habermas, 1986c: 3-4). The current phase of modern society is charac-
terized instead by Habermas as a period of "new obscurity" in which,
among other things, the older utopian-modernism has given way to cri
tiques of modernity arising out of neoconservatism, old-conservatism,
and a relatively new "anti-modernism." Habermas views this anti-
modernism that has sometimes joined conservative critiques as an at-
tempt to step outside the horizon of the modern world (that is, as a
postmodernism). But, he argues, it is impossible to achieve (or institu-
tionalize) such a radical discontinuity and distance from the modern
without the risk of introducing far worse conditions.
Habermas, by contrast, remains committed to the liberal-demo-
cratic spirit of the Enlightenment, which he sees as worthy of preserva-
tion if only for the fact that its potential has not yet been fully realized.
He believes that modern society has brought to consciousness and to
social and political institutions certain universal structures that repre-
sent, if not the final and complete fruition of rational human develop-
ment and historical learning, then the conditions of their potential and
possibility as such. Indeed, for Habermas, the institutions and rational
universal structures explicit or lying potentially in modernity are binding
on us. As a consequence, these evolutionary gains cannot be denied or
left 'behind' without risking dangerous regression. For Habermas,
postmodernism is a version of philosophical modernism that tends to
become a 'young conservatism' because it obscures—through its uncriti
cal resort to the aesthetic or (following Martin Heidegger) the ecstatic—
rather than enlightens (1983b: 14). One of Habermas's main contentions
against postmodernist or poststructuralist writers is thus that the col-
lapse of validity into power is not only philosophically illegitimate and
at root a performative contradiction, but is politically highly ambiguous.
Jay voices a similar concern with Foucault's later attention to the political
potentials of sexuality and pleasure: "If there were no truth, but only
'truth effects' expressing certain power relations, then how could one be
confident that his call for a 'general economy of pleasure not based on

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Chris flushed up. 'Surely,' he began volubly, 'it is the bounden
duty, as I have just been writing, of the educated portion of the
community to leave themselves free for reasonable criticism by
supporting Government, wherever possible, by throwing heart and
soul----' The Englishman, holding his impatient mount in a grip of
iron, looked down with a bored expression.
'No doubt--no doubt; but the body fills a gap better on the whole.
Good-bye. I'll see to the invites, and you can drop me a line if you
hear anything definite.'

CHAPTER VI
THE MONEY OF FOOLS
'Finally, sirs,' came a high straining voice as Chris Davenant
entered Hâfiz Ahmad's house, 'the educated youngster of India
refuses to let his soaring aspirations remain cribbed, cabined,
confined, in the cruel shackles of a political despotism without
parallel in the whole history of civilisation!'
The peroration, though it seemed to afford the speaker much
satisfaction, only induced that faint desultory clapping which in
England is reserved for prize-days at school; that impersonal
applause for the results of diligence which remembers that other
pupils have yet to speak.
This was the case here, and Chris had barely wedged himself into
a chair between a writing-table and a waste-paper basket before
another orator was in full swing of adjective.
The row of bicycles in the verandah, and a knot of those green-
box hired carriages outside on the road, had told Chris already that
he had been right in calculating on an assemblage of young India;
but this was a larger gathering than he had expected, and he
remembered suddenly with a vague shame--since he was a
prominent member of the organisation--that it must be the monthly
meeting of the Society for Promoting the General Good of People. He

had quite forgotten all about it; still here he was, and here was his
audience for that roll of manuscript he held.
He glanced round the double room,--for both dining and drawing-
room had been thrown open, rather to Miriam-bibi's relief, since she
could now sit unreservedly in the screened verandah and play
'beggar my neighbour' with her foster-mother, who did duty as ayah-
-and recognised almost every one of note in young Nushapore.
Hâfiz Ahmad was in the chair, of course; a rather fat young man
of the coarser Mohammedan type, with a short curly beard. Like
many others in the room, he wore a scarlet fez; though why this
distinctive bit of a Turk's costume should be grafted on a quasi-
English quasi-Indian one is a mystery not to be beaten in
incomprehensibility by any other minor problem of our Indian
Empire.
Beside him was Lala Râm Nâth, the head, in Nushapore, of the
only real political organisation in India; that is the Arya Somaj; an
organisation all the more dangerously political because it denies the
basis of politics, and appeals to that of religion.
He, Chris knew, would be the last to admit the position taken up
in the roll of manuscript, namely, that it was suicidal on the part of
the little leaven of educated natives to pose as the party of
opposition, since that was, briefly, to array itself permanently,
inevitably, against what none could deny was the party of progress;
the party which had made this little leaven itself a possibility.
Râm Nâth, the breath of whose nostrils was adverse criticism to
Government, who, in bewildering defiance of the laws which govern
Indian life, had swallowed red-hot Radicalism wholesale, like a
juggler swallowing a red-hot poker, was not likely to admit this at
any time; still less now, when he was the champion of a wrongfully
dispossessed Municipal Committee. Chris knew exactly what the Lala
would say, and what the majority of the young men--there was not

one over thirty-five in the room--would say also. And yet their faces
were brimful of intelligence, of a certain eager earnestness. It could
hardly be otherwise, since the mere fact of their being in that room
proved them to be of those whose faculty and desire for acquiring
knowledge was so far superior to that of the average man, that it
had taken them, as it were, to a place apart. To be tempted of the
devil perhaps; though, none the less, the fact bore witness to a
certain nobility of type.
So it was all the more strange that when--the next speaker having
finished in a calculated chaos of words--Govind, the dissipated
editor, who had yawned his tacit approval of Dilarâm the dancer,
rose to denounce some trivial iniquity in the ruling race, his middle-
school English, and cheap abuse, was received with just the same
desultory applause. It seemed to Chris, listening impatiently, as if
the faculty of criticism had been lost in its abuse, as if the one thing
needful was antagonism pur et simple.
The great event of all such meetings in Nushapore followed next--
a paper by Râm Nâth. He spoke admirably, and if he wandered
occasionally from the point, the vast scope of his subject, 'The
Political, National, and Social aspect of Modern India,' must be held
responsible for that!
An Englishman listening would, of course, have challenged his
facts and denied his conclusions; but Chris did neither. He gave an
unqualified assent to many and many a point. And yet when he
listened to the assertion that 'the cup of our political evils is so full,
the burden of our social inequalities so intolerable, and the tyranny
of custom stands out so red and foul, that some militant uprising has
become essential to national salvation, and armed resistance the
only hope of amendment,' he wondered with a certain shame how
many of the millions of India would find a personal grievance in
social equality or political evil. And as for the tyranny of custom?
What militant uprising was possible among willing slaves?

For all that he listened, not without an answering heartbeat, to
the Lala's eloquence, as he skilfully fanned every burning question
with a wind of words, and let the fretting fingers of subtle
suggestion undermine the foundations of fact. He was specially
bitter against the plague precautions, and his hints that there was
more behind them than met the eye, aroused the only spontaneous
applause of the evening. Yet once more, when the well-reasoned,
admirably-delivered address was over, the audience listened with
exactly the same receptive expression to the recitation, by its author,
of a hymn for use in the approaching Congress in which delegates
were told they should--
'To croaking fools their folly leave,
Their canting puerile rant;
To noble mission steadfast cleave
And sprouts devoutly plant.'
It was a very long hymn, and it alluded, amongst other items, to the
'blazing sun of Western lore,' to 'duty's trumpet call,' to 'England,
dear home of every virtue, sweet nurse to Liberty,' and to 'India's
crying woes.'--It secured a rather more hearty meed of applause
than anything else, possibly because the audience--being above all
things scholastic--appreciated the difficulty of making English verse!
So, with a resolution that the 'Good of People' must be
encouraged at all costs, and a vote of thanks to Mr. Râm Nâth, the
actual business of the meeting ended, but not the speechifying. Half
a dozen minor men stood up with a surcharged look; but one, a tall
young fellow with a charmingly gentle, emotional face, caught the
chairman's eye first. He was a schoolmaster, and at his own expense
brought out a monthly magazine which was, briefly, the most high-
toned bit of printing that ever passed through a press. Bishops might
have read it and confessed themselves edified.
'Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen,' he began, 'although formal
recognition of our distinguished townsman's magnificent

elocutionary effort has not been wanting, I wish to record my
humble admiration, and to state my belief that his forecast of
possible difficulties regarding plague precautions may amount to
prophecy. Since, alas! our poor folk have been strangers to
beneficent sanitations from birth, and are now, as another
honourable speaker pointed out, in considerable states of ebullition.
Yet, instead of applying salutary balms to these uneducated minds, I
grieve to say that efforts are being made to increase terror; witness
the golden paper falling from Heaven, as bolt from the blue, in the
so-called Temple of Viseshwar. This trick of greedy Brahmins----'
Râm Nâth was on his feet in an instant, recognised champion of
his faith.
'I beg to submit, Mr. Chairman, that these words are out of order.
This society is pledged to neutrality, and "trick of greedy Brahmins"
is calculated to wound pious feelings.'
'I second the protest,' put in another eager voice, 'and beg the
objectionable phrase be withdrawn.'
A murmur of approval ran through the larger part of the audience,
and Hâfiz Ahmad, with the scowl of the true idol-hater on his face,
asked the speaker to withdraw the words; which he did, protesting
that, as a member of the Brahmo Somaj, he had only spoken with a
view to eternal and abstract truth. The paper, he continued, though
possibly only the outcome of the quarrel which, his hearers must
know, had been going on for some time between the priests of the
two rival temples regarding the relative supremacy of Kâli-mâ and
her consort Shiv-jee----
Here the chairman himself called with alacrity, 'Order! Order! This
meeting does not deal with such dogmatics,' and another and
smaller murmur of assent followed.
The gentle-faced schoolmaster apologised again. There could be
no doubt, at any rate, he said almost pathetically, that the

uneducated mind was, as the poet said, liable to be tickled by
straws, and so he conceived it to be his duty to draw the attention of
the 'Society for Promoting the General Good of People' to this paper,
which, he might add, he was going to pillory in his publication with
scathing criticism. So, drawing a slip from his pocket, he began to
read in the vernacular--
'I, Kali, will come. In my dark month I will come for blood. Woe to
them who seek to stay me in the city, since I will have blood on my
altar whether the hands of strange men stay Me, or smite Me. For I
am Kali the Death-Mother of all men, whether they will it or no. Yea!
I will come.'
The vague phrases, besprinkled with hollow-sounding mysterious
Sanskrit words, brought a curious hush even to that assemblage, till
Hâfiz Ahmad laughed arrogantly.
'Is that all, pandit-jee?' he asked; 'that bogey will do little.'
'As much, I venture to suggest,' put in Râm Nâth suavely, 'as the
bogey of supposed invasion of domestic privacy for women.'
The Mohammedan, though he professed himself above such
considerations, frowned. 'I demur. The caste prejudices will, in my
opinion, be more difficult to place on common-sense footings.'
They had embarked on the fencing-match which, as often as not,
ended discussion between these two recognised leaders of the two
communities, Hindoo and Mohammedan, and the attention of the
meeting had wandered after them, when a new voice brought it
back. It was Chris Davenant's. Taller than most there, fairer, and of
better birth than the generality of those who brave the dangers of
foreign travel, he was the show man of young Nushapore for pure
culture, as Râm Nâth was for ability; and as such he commanded
attention.

'Gentlemen!' he said, 'it seems to me that this paper, which pandit
Narain Das has just read, will give our society an opportunity for
practical work. It means nothing, or at most little, to any of us here.
But none will deny it will mean much to many; to our friends--let us
face the facts!--to our own families. And it is a dangerous paper,
gentlemen! None know that better than we, who have passed from
the influence of such words,'--here that faint desultory clapping
became audible--'and it is just because we have so passed, that I
ask this meeting what it is prepared to do in order to combat the
possible, the probable effect of these mysterious threats?'
'Hear! hear!' came several voices. And then came silence; until
the pandit said, in hurt tones--
'I have already told this meeting that I will publish in my monthly
magazine, together with criticisms of the most scathing character----'
'And,' put in Râm Nâth, rising to the challenge in Chris Davenant's
face, 'I venture to suggest, Mr. Chairman, that this meeting pass a
resolution condemning----'
'And who will know what resolutions we pass, Mr. Secretary?'
interrupted Chris, with a sudden passion which gave his face a look
that was half hope, half wistful doubt; 'who will read your diatribes,
Mr. Editor? We! We only, who pass the resolutions, who write the
criticisms, who know already how to appraise that paper! Printed
words, gentlemen, are no use to those who cannot read, resolutions
are naught to those who never hear of them. But we have tongues;
we can speak! We can, if we choose, throw the whole weight of our
personal influence on the side of truth, even though that side be
also the side of a government with which we have many a righteous
feud.'
As he paused for breath, there was a murmur of approval for the
eloquence, none for the thought it held. 'Gentlemen!' he went on, 'it
is futile for any one here to deny that this paper aims at rousing

religious opposition to any precautions whatever against the plague!
Well! some of us here, myself among the number, hold that many of
the precautions in the government programme are objectionable----'
'And more in the private instructions, if rumour says true,' put in
Râm Nâth spitefully.
'I have listened to reasonable criticism, reasonable resentment,
and I have agreed with it. But is there any one of us here who would
throw all precautions to the winds?' went on Chris, passing by the
interruption; 'is there any one who really believes that this golden
paper fell from heaven? If there are, I let them pass. But for the rest
of us, I call upon you not to write, not to resolve, but to speak; to
speak to our wives, our mothers, our sisters--to the timid women
whom such threats alarm; briefly to throw our whole personal
influence on what we know to be the side of truth.'
There was an instant's silence; then Hâfiz Ahmad, as chairman,
said perfunctorily: 'I am sure we are all completely at one with our
honourable friend. Such manifest attempts at preposterous
intimidation deserve the heartiest contempt of educated minds.'
'I second that proposition,' added Râm Nâth as head of his
following. 'We are morally bound to give heartiest co-operation in
the difficult task before government, in so far as is compatible with
strict deference to the private religious feeling of all parties
concerned. That is the groundwork of true liberty.'
A fine scorn showed on Chris Davenant's face; he was about to
speak when pandit Narain Das turned to him with a wistful apology
in his, and said: 'Without demurring to his general principle, I would
remind our honourable friend, whose educational career is a credit
to our town, that our influence, alas! is but a broken reed. Our
position, in a society of ignorami, is anomalous, not to say
precarious. And if we too freely kick against the pricks, we are in

danger of losing what we have, which would be undesirable. As John
Morley says in his valuable work on compromise----'
Chris turned on him almost savagely. 'There is no need to preach
compromise, pandit-jee! We practise it. We do not let our opinions
influence our own conduct, yet we expect them to influence the
conduct of our rulers! We write these opinions. Oh, yes! we write
them! Why? Because we know that only those read them who agree
with us! But which of us will go from here to-day, and braving
opposition, disregarding personal considerations, tell, even their own
immediate families, that the Brahmins who wrote that paper are--are
splendide mendax!'
He could not help it! He was keenly alive to the legitimate fun
made by the opponents of young India, out of its intolerable
aptitude for unsuitable quotation, but he fell a victim to it sometimes
himself. So, as he paused before his own words--a house, as it were,
divided against itself--he lost his opportunity. For a dapper little
gentleman who, by reason of a high appointment under
government, was generally allowed to apply the closure to heated or
unwelcome discussions, had risen, and caught the chairman's eye.
'What our honourable and esteemed townsman, Mr. Krishn
Davenund, has just said, must receive consensus of universal
opinion, since it is doubtless of supreme importance to national life.
Priest-craft, supernaturalism, et hoc genus omne, are clearly traits of
low civilisation, just as popular government, enlargement of
franchise, and diffusion of evolutionary theories are significant of
higher. Still, Rome was not built in a day. Nor is there use in raising
the wind, if we can't ride the whirlwind, or control the storm.
Therefore, in the interim, pending wider liberty of speech, I propose
that this meeting pass a unanimous resolution condemning such
paltry attempts at cockering up superstitious feelings, and that the
same be duly recorded in the minutes of our society.'

Before the relieved applause which greeted this diplomacy was
over, the waste-paper basket beside Chris Davenant had received
another contribution. His roll of manuscript, torn to shreds, lay in it,
in obedience to a sudden, swift intuition that if he was ever to rise
beyond the chaos of lofty aspirations, the strictly impersonal
admiration for great deeds in his fellows, he must leave words
behind.
So silent, alone, he walked home to his empty house, his empty
life.
But others, though they passed homewards in batches still full of
discussion, still drunk with words, were passing to environments
which were, in a way, even more empty than his. So empty of the
sentiments they had just been formulating, so much at variance with
the ideals they had just professed, that the very imagination grows
bewildered in the effort to reconcile the two.
Govind the editor, however, had less difficulty than most in
accommodating his mental position to a stool stuck over the reeking
gutter of a liquor shop, where he refreshed himself with a brandy-
and-soda and an infamous cigar. He was in an evil temper, because
the meeting, which he frequented chiefly because the speakers
provided him with ideas wherewith to spice his own broadsheet, had
been unusually discreet; so he would have to write his own sedition;
unless he could pick up some scurrilous news instead.
'Nay, friend! I know naught to suit thy purpose,' replied the stout
sergeant of police who frequented the same liquor shop, to whom
he applied; 'save the finding of the Lady-sahib's jewel-box.'
'And the pearls?' asked Govind, taking out a greasy stump of
pencil.
'The pearls!' echoed the policeman scornfully, 'as if pearls were to
be found by us! They can be hid in a body's very mouth, and then, if
there be not another mouth with a tongue in it, there is silence! But

the box is enough to keep the file of the case open, and the
inspector content for a while.'
'How many are in the lock-up concerning it?' asked Govind, out of
the fulness of his knowledge regarding police methods.
'Six,' yawned the sergeant. 'The coolie who found the box broken
and empty, flung in the bushes by the Lat-sahib's house; he was
setting the fireworks for the big spectacle to-morrow. He sold it to a
pawnbroker. That makes two for us. Then a woman bought the
velvet lining from a rag-merchant. That makes four. She gave it to
Hashim, tailor, who works for the Huzoors, as a cap to her
grandchild. And he, having doubts, informed us. So he makes five.
Then the firework-maker's people were turbulent, therefore we
arrested one of them to show diligence.'
'And there was naught in the box when it was found?' asked
Govind. He was writing now on one of the smoothed-out squares of
white waste-paper which lay in a pile beside the liquor seller, who
used them for wiping the rims of the tumblers, out of deference to
the caste prejudices of his customers against a general cloth.
'God knows!' yawned the policeman piously. 'The man saith not;
but there were letters besides the trinkets and the pearls, and we
may find them, if not the others. Folk will not lose a cowrie's worth
of waste-paper these hard times.'
'Ay!' assented the liquor seller, eyeing Govind askance. 'Mine had
to be paid for, though some seem to think not. And paid high too,
since the firework-makers were in the market for their squibs and
crackers for to-morrow.'
A man lounging outside in the gutter laughed suddenly, viciously.
'They will find enough for them anyhow, even if they have the police
at their tails!' he said, moving off with a defiant salaam to the fat
policeman.

'I would I had handcuffed a pair of them,' remarked the latter
mildly. ''Twould have been one trouble, and 'tis well to save oneself
what one can these hard times.'
'Trouble!' echoed a passer-by, shaking his head, 'there will be no
saving of that in Nushapore. Jân-Ali-shân hath returned and brought
the plague, so folk say.'
The liquor seller turned in quick interest to the sergeant of police.
'Dost know if he hath returned?' he asked; for the loafer was a
customer who owed money, and must be got hold of while money
was in his pockets.
For answer the policeman chucked away his cigar end, stumbled
off the dais of the shop, and stood to attention, as a figure rounded
the angle of the next crossway street, followed by a crowd of ragged
half-naked urchins. It was Jân-Ali-shân himself, washed, shaved,
spruce, in a second-hand suit of khaki uniform and a white helmet
which he had redeemed from a pawnshop on the credit of his new
appointment as foreman of works. Jân-Ali-shân, who, from sheer
habit, had, on finding himself in the city with money in his pocket,
gone straight for his old haunt. From the new resolutions, however,
which with him always began with new work, he called for a
'gingerade plain' in a voice of authority, which made a little circle
gather round him admiringly, as after humming a stave of 'Drink to
me only with thine eyes,' while he was opening the bottle, he
proceeded to pour its fizzing contents down his throat.
The interest of the crowd seemed to amuse him, he sate down on
the plinth and drew out a handful of pice in lordly fashion.
'Two anna, over an' above,' he said, holding up the coins, 'and I
don't want no change. So which of you noble earls,' here he turned
to his following of lads, 'is goin' to fight for the balance? You
understand? Lurro abhi, jut put, an' be burra burra pailwân for two
pice a 'ed (fight now immediately and be great heroes).'

The vile admixture of tongues seemed quite comprehensible to
those acquainted with Jân-Ali-shân's methods, for two urchins
stepped forward at once, and the rest joined with the other loungers
to form a ring.
John Ellison, loafer, leant back against the wall at his ease.
'Now then, nap,'[6] he began, 'back to back fair and square. None
o' yer nigger blarney,[7]
you young devil! Fight seeda,[8]
or it ain't
worth fightin' at all. And I won't 'ave no buttin' in the stummick.
You're pailwâns m'henda nahin (heroes, not fighting rams). Sumjha?'
The boys professed to understand, and, having divested
themselves of their last rag, stood like slim bronze statues in the
sunlight.
'Are you ready?' asked Jân-Ali-shân with superb gravity. 'Then
chul (go), an' may the Lord 'ave mercy on your souls.'
They were locked in each other's grip in a second in true Western
fashion.
'Shab-bash!' said the holder of the stakes with an approving nod
'That's wrestlin'. None o' yer slappin's an' buttin's and boo-in's.
Shab-bash! boys. Shab-bash!'
The crowd grinned widely at the praise, and, as the combatants
struggled and swayed, discussed their family history and took sides,
after the manner of crowds all over the world. Quite a breath of
anxiety ran through it as a fall came, but came sideways. There was
no dust on the back yet!--there would not be!--yes! there would.
Aha! aha! there was, surely!
There would have been, doubtless, for the uppermost boy's small
brown hand had freed itself for a second from its grip and sought
blindly on the ground for that recognised weapon in Indian

wrestling, dust for the adversary's eyes, had not Jân-Ali-shân, seeing
the action, sprung to his feet, stooped over the writhing figures, and
seizing the top one by the scruff of its neck, held it up by one hand
and shaken it as a terrier shakes a rat.
'None o' yer monkey tricks, none o' yer niggar blarneying, you
young sneak,' he said roughly, as he dropped his whimpering
prisoner from mid air, 'or I'll make mutti[9] of you. Bus! (enough).
T'other Johnny's jeetgia (won). Here, sonny! take your do paisa.'
The crowd, however, which had been betting freely on the event,
hesitated; the supporters of the dust-thrower grumbled. They were
headed by Govind, who began with great pomp--
'I would have you aware, sir, that use of dust is not non-
regulation in our code; therefore the other boy is victor.
John Ellison looked at him condescendingly, and turned up the
cuffs of his coat with unnecessary elaboration.
'Ain't it in your code, baboo?' he said, with equally elaborate
civility, 'an' t'other chap 'as won, has he? I'm glad t'hear it. But this
is my show, and, 'by the Lord 'oo made me! I'm goin' to run it
myself. An' if any gentleman 'as a objection to make, let 'im make it
now, or for ever after 'old 'is peace.'
The crowd made way for him hastily, as he drove a three-feet
passage through it with his elbows; but as he walked jauntily down
the bazaar, the boys fell in behind him and kept step, as he did, to
the 'Wedding March,' which he whistled in reminiscent continuation
of his last words. For they knew Jân-Ali-shân of old as one who,
drunk or sober, always had a reward for fair fighting.
'What did the M'lechcha[10]
say?' asked a grumbler who did not
know English.

'That 'twas nothing to him what was our custom. It was his, and
that settled it. It is their word! Well! let them say it! We will see,
brothers, if it is true, will we not?' replied Govind viciously.
A murmur of approval ran through the bystanders, but an old
dodderer with a white beard, who, in Eastern fashion, was dozing
through his days, waiting for death, crouched up comfortably on a
string bed set in the sun, said dreamily--
'Didst say it was Jân-Ali-shân? Yea! it was his word. I have heard
him say it; and he keeps it, my sons! he keeps it!'
Govind turned on the speaker scornfully. 'Those were other times,
baba, and another Jân-Ali-shân. The times have changed and men
too----'
A thin musical laugh interrupted him. It came from Lateefa, the
kite-maker, who was passing with his bundle of kites for sale.
'Lo! baboo-jee!' he said. 'I know naught of time but my poor
portion of it, nor of man save my poor self! But I change not, and I
am as others. We are like kites; the form changes not unless the
maker chooses, and God, so say the Moulvies, changes not at all. He
makes men on the old pattern ever; the rest is but dye and tinsel.'
So he passed on, tossing his bundle, and chanting the street-
seller's cry--
'Your eyes use, and choose!
Use your eyes and choose!'

CHAPTER VII
CRACKERS AND SQUIBS
'Tinkle, tinkle, ootel ish-star. Ha-a-vunder vart-oo-ar.'
The damnable iteration went on and on, the fiddles twangled and
squeaked, the drum bangers banged, the nautch-girl sidled, and
smirked, and shrilled.
Lesley Drummond, sitting in the front row of guests at the
reception given by the nobles and landed proprietors of the Province
to welcome Sir George Arbuthnot to his new office, shut her eyes at
last in sheer despair of being able to reconcile the senses of hearing
and sight; then opened them again to stare with unappeasable
curiosity into the blaze of light, veiled by a fine film of misty smoke,
in which all things seemed clear, yet dim.
It came from the prism-hung chandeliers which hid the low white-
marble ceiling, from the wretched paraffin wall-lamps hung against
the white-marble pillars, from the paper lanterns swinging from the
scalloped white-marble arches. But it came most of all from the
garden beyond the arches in which this white-marble summer-palace
of a dynasty of dead kings stood, centring the formal walks and
watercourses; for it was lit up in long close rows of soft twinkling

lights stretching away into the purple shadows of the night, until,
climbing to every line, every curve of the purple shadow of the
distant city, they showed like new stars upon the purple shadow of
the sky.
The radiance of it, the brilliance of it, dazzled the eyes; the
dimness, the misty dreaminess of it clouded the brain. She felt
drugged, hypnotised out of realities, as she looked towards the dais
where Sir George, the Star of his Order almost hidden by one of the
huge tinsel garlands which had been thrown round the neck of the
guests as they entered, sat in a gilt chair, his solitary figure outlined
harshly, by reason of his dark political uniform, against the
background of white-marble tracery. Thence she looked to the
English ladies in gay décolletés dresses who, with a sprinkling of
black coats and red tunics, banked the dais on either side. So to the
line of officials and soldiers edging the gangway below the dais.
Finally, on to the hosts themselves who sate behind in rows. Rows
on rows ablaze with colour and sparkle. Rows on rows
imperturbable, passive, without a smile or a frown for the scene in
which they bore so large a part.
So far, however, despite those great tinsel garlands which were so
distracting a novelty upon black coats, scarlet tunics, and décolletés
dresses, a certain relevancy to the central idea, embodied in that
solitary figure of an elderly Englishman raised above the rest, was
not wanting in the details of the spectacle.
But what, thought Lesley, could be said of that group upon the
square of red and green-flowered Brussels carpet spread
immediately in front of the dais? Spread between the gilt sofa where
she sat with Jerry between her and Lady Arbuthnot, and a similar
gilt sofa on the other side occupied by the general's wife and her
two daughters.
What an inconceivably unsuitable surrounding they made, five
Englishwomen and a child, to those other five and a child? Two

ragged drum bangers, two dissipated fiddle and guitar twangers, a
dreamy-looking boy doing nothing, and the usual posturing dancer,
stout as to figure, bunchy as to petticoats, with glued bandeaux of
hair and a nasal quavering voice which paused only for furtive
swallowings of the betel-nut she was chewing all too palpably!
'Tinkle, tinkle, ootel ish-star.' She trilled with an affable, opulent
curve of hip and hand towards the sahib logue collectively, for whose
delectation she was singing 'Englis fassen'; an accomplishment she
had learned from a girl who had been taught hymns in a mission
school.
'Ha-a-vunder vart-oo-ar'--she simpered with a special coquettish
flirt of her fingers and full petticoat for that respectable father of a
family, Sir George, who, honest man, sat horribly conscious, still
more horribly bored, yet patient, waiting for the master of the
ceremonies to ask him if he had had enough.
Enough?
He looked past the pirouettings to that thin line of white faces,
bored yet patient like his own, which fringed those rows on rows of
impassive dark ones, and stifled his yawns duteously for the sake of
the Empire. No such reasons of state, however, swayed Jerry, who,
dapper and dainty in knee-breeches, silk stockings, ruffles, and a
little garland of his own, sate fidgeting and yawning, yawning and
fidgeting. As he looked across the pirouettings he could see his
dearest Mr. Raymond dozing with dignity in a chair opposite, with a
peculiarly magnificent garland festooned over him. It was bigger
than anybody's but dad's, Jerry told himself, feeling a trifle
aggrieved, and he wanted to ask why it was so large, when Mr.
Raymond was sitting oh! ever so far back!
'Tinkle, tinkle, ootel ish-star!'
The drums banged, the fiddles squeaked, the dancer postured,
and Jerry yawned with commendable monotony, till, suddenly, the

little lad's patience gave way at the two hundred and fifty-sixth time
of asking the question--'Ha-a-vunder vart-oo-ar.'
'Please!' he said, in his clear child's voice, 'it is the Star of India
dad's wearin'. The Queen gave it him for doin' his duty.'
'Hush--hush, Jerry!' came breathlessly from his guardians, but the
connection of ideas had been too palpable. A titter which broke from
the ladies behind him made Nevill Lloyd--who as aide-de-camp
flanked the dais, resplendent in his horse artillery uniform--
absolutely choke in his effort to be dignified, and the joyous crow
which resulted quite upset the general commanding. Then this
chuckle from the right row of officialdom did for the Secretary-to-
Government heading the left, so that his gurgle was the signal for a
general roar of laughter to go echoing up into the arches; general so
far only as the white faces were concerned. The dark ones of the
hosts were immovable, keeping even their surprise to themselves.
'Some one ought, surely, to explain,' said Lesley with a half-
puzzled frown, as, the laughter ending, a general stir of relieved
chatter showed that the audience had seized on the interruption as
an end.
'Explain, my dear?' echoed Sir George, when his wife took
advantage of the stir to repeat Lesley's suggestion, and point out the
dancing-girl standing sullen, uncertain, whispering to the drum and
fiddle; 'I don't think it's worth it, and I don't see how it's to be done.
Besides, they ought to have laughed too--they really ought! That
crow of Lloyd's----'
'I'm awfully sorry, sir,' put in the offender, trying to be penitent
through his smiles; 'I'll tell you what I'll do, Lady Arbuthnot.
Raymond is bossing the supper for them from the club, and all that.
He's president of the committee of entertainment, so I'll get him----'
Sir George frowned. 'We needn't trouble Mr. Raymond, Captain
Lloyd. And as for the interruption, Grace, it rested with me to stop

the nautch-girl at any time, and they saw we were amused. That is
really all they want.'
'Just so, sir,' assented the Secretary-to-Government, a trifle
ashamed of his lapse from strict etiquette. 'And she had been at it
nearly the proper time. Only five minutes short of the half-hour we
gave them. And you can use those, sir--as the fireworks will barely
be ready--in having some of the notables up for a talk. That will set
the business more than right.'
It seemed so, indeed, judging by the radiant faces of the favoured
few, and the hopeful interest of the many, who crowded round,
grateful for a word, even, from some lesser light.
So from its Eastern formality the scene changed to Western ways.
The crowd of well-dressed women became interspersed with red
coats and political uniforms, a buzz of voices and laughter replaced
the silence broken only by the shrillings and twanglings.
The change was a peculiarly welcome one to Mrs. Chris Davenant,
who, having, of course, been seated in strict accordance with her
husband's rank, right at the back among the commercial set, had
been growing sulky over her chance of getting into better society.
She had not, for the last two days, snubbed Mr. Lucanaster
persistently, in order that she and half a dozen tailors summoned
hastily should have time to turn out a gown worthy of Paris, simply
for the purpose of having him compliment her on the result. She
flew at higher game, and the movement of the crowd brought her
the quarry.
'Married a native, did she?' commented a big man in political
uniform with a row of medals, who was in from an out-station for
the show, and had asked who the wearer of the flame-coloured satin
was; flame-colour with ruby sparklings on the curves of hip and
bosom out of which the fair white shoulders rose barely. 'Well! I,
personally, don't find the husband in it, if the wife's pretty! Introduce

me, will you, or get some one else to do it who knows her, if you
don't.'
The man to whom he spoke looked round helplessly, and, his eye
falling on Jack Raymond, he appealed to him. People in Nushapore
had a trick of applying to the secretary of the club for odd jobs.
'Ask Lucanaster,' said Jack Raymond grimly, 'he knows her awfully
well, and I don't.'
And thereinafter he watched this seething of the kid in its
mother's milk with an almost fiendish amusement. It relieved him,
for one thing, of the necessity for speaking to Mrs. Chris himself. But
as he passed the group which was every instant growing larger
round the flame-coloured satin, he said a word to Chris who was
standing listlessly on the outside of it.
'Seeing a lot of old friends, I expect.'
Chris Davenant's flush made him curse the careless remark, and
at the same moment some one came hurriedly up behind him and
laid a hand on his arm. It was a tall old man with a dash and a
swing about him still; gorgeous still, though his brocades were worn
and old, and with great ropes of pearls wound round him, and a
straight bar of grey moustache on his keen brown face, matching
the grey heron's plume in his low turban. Briefly, a Rajpoot
nobleman of the old style.
'Ai! counsellor of the old,' he said, affectionate confidence
struggling with vexation in his face, 'give me some of thy wisdom
once more.'
'Hullo, Rana-sahib! what's up? something gone wrong with the
fireworks?' asked Jack Raymond, turning at once. His tone was
friendliness itself. And no wonder. Many a time had he, hard rider as
he was, wondered at the old Thakoor of Dhurmkote's dash and pluck
after boar. Many a time had they sate up in machâns after tiger

together, and many a time had Jack--wiser for the reckless, proud
old sinner than he was for himself--urged him to retrench, to keep
from the usurers. In vain. The old man, head of his clan, would only
say, 'Not so, sahib. If the son had lived, perhaps. But the tiger took
advantage of his youth. So let me live and die as my fathers lived
and died.' And then he would launch out into further extravagance,
as fine a specimen of the native gentleman before we meddled with
the mould, as could be found in the length and breadth of the land.
'Wrong with my fireworks?' he echoed indignantly. 'There is
nothing wrong with them, though the others stinted me, from the
beginning, out of jealousy! Yet I had fooled them. But now, because
folk laughed at God knows what, they want them earlier. It is
jealousy again. It is to ruin my reputation as connoisseur. I, who
have spent lacs on fireworks. I, who to prove what I could do with
the miserable pittance assigned to me, have paid Meena Buksh,
firework-maker, five thousand rupees extra--I had but two allowed
me, Huzoor--out of mine own pocket, or rather out of Salig Râm the
usurer's, since I reft it from him with threats--he owns land, see you,
as well as money----'
Here the old man, who had been carried away thus far by his
grievance, became aware that Jack Raymond's companion was not,
as he had deemed, some young Englishman who would either not
care to listen or would not understand if he did; and in any case
would not make mischief out of the confidence. For Chris Davenant,
hemmed in a corner beyond escape, had been unable to repress a
smile at the old chieftain's method of proving his good management
and economy.
'Let me introduce my friend, Mr. Krishn Davenund, Rana-sahib,'
said Jack Raymond hastily, noticing the old man's haughty stare. 'I
think you knew his father, Pandit Sri Pershâd, judge of the Small
Cause Court.'

Considering that the magistrate in question, being more or less in
feudal relations with the Thakoors of Dhurmkote, had strained many
a point in favour of their extravagance, the acquaintance was
indisputable; yet the Rana-sahib's salaam was of the curtest
compatible with courtesy to the introducer, and he drew Jack
Raymond aside to continue in a lower voice--
'They want me to be ready in ten minutes, and that means ruin;
for some fool set fire to a bit of my best set piece, and 'twill take
twenty to repair.'
'But why not begin with something else?' suggested his hearer.
The Thakoor's face was a study in triumph and disappointment.
'Because it is a welcome to the Lât-sahib, and a welcome must come
first. And it is new also--a welcome in roman candles and sulphur
stars; my reputation is in it.'
'Then why not show it as it is, and explain the accident?'
The Thakoor looked uncertain. 'That might be. How would it look,
think you, sahib, "God," then a blank--for that is where the damage
comes in--"our new Lieutenant-Governor"? Would it be
understanded, think you? Would it look well--in Roman candles and
sulphur stars?'
'God blank--that is where the damage lies,' repeated Jack
Raymond thoughtfully, and then he laughed. He had to recover
himself, however, hastily at the old man's bewildered face, and say
gravely, 'I don't think it would look very well, Rana-sahib, especially
in Roman candles and sulphur stars.' Here another laugh obtruded
itself, and he added as a cover to it, 'But I can tell you what I can do
for you--refreshments. I know they are ready. I'll go off now and get
the "roastbeef" sounded.'
The old chieftain stood looking after him as he went off
enthusiastically.

'May the gods keep him! that is a man,' he said aloud to himself.
'If all the sahibs were as he, a friend----'
'India would be the happier. She needs such friends,' said Chris
Davenant suddenly. He had been trying to make up his mind ever
since the meeting at Hâfiz Ahmad's house, to take some decided
step towards organising a real party of progress. To do this in a way
that would ensure confidence with both the Government and the
people, it was necessary to secure some men of real influence; and
the Thakoor was one. His word went far, both West and East; and
fate had placed him within earshot. So Chris had spoken; his heart,
to tell truth, in his mouth, as the old man turned scowling.
But something in the young one's face, perhaps a look of his dead
father, perhaps its own inherent goodness, made the Thakoor,
instead of ignoring the remark, say curtly--
'I see it not. What friends does India need?'
Then Chris pulled himself together for speech, and the old man
listened, first contemptuously, then with tolerance.
'Thou speakest well,' he said, nodding approval. 'And as thou
sayest, the people need leaders, not baboos. Come to my house
some day, and----'
'Have you my shawl, Chris?' said a woman's voice, interrupting
the invitation. 'Oh, I don't want it now, not till the fireworks, but you
can bring it then, to the supper-room.' So, satisfied at having shown
her husband that if he were talking to pearls and brocade, she had
annexed a uniform and medals; satisfied also at having shown both
the uniform and the brocade in what good company they were, Mrs.
Chris Davenant passed on, all white arms and back, edged
perfunctorily with flames and rubies.
'Who--who is that mem?' asked the old Rajpoot swiftly, for one of
the white arms had, incredible to say, nudged Chris's black one, to

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