ADVERTISEMENTS:
This article provides information about the totalising societies:
An important part of critical theory is related to their critique of totality and totalising forces. They were always opposed to any form of totalitarianism, whether it was the totalitarian society of fascism in Germany or the totalising form of administered socialism in the Soviet Union.
Image Courtesy : img.docstoccdn.com/thumb/orig/114705414.png
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Their arguments here make sense given the system that emerged in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union, where the structures to “control more and more aspects of life” were established and acquired great power. Totalitarian here could mean any system which attempts to govern many or all aspects of social life.
Since the critical theorists came from, were living in, and were affected by the fascist form of political and social organisation, it is no surprise that they developed a model of this totalitarian system. Their intimate knowledge of this system and their later observation of it from exile in the United States each provided them with useful insights concerning the nature of totality.
Critical theorists looked on fascism as a new form of monopoly or state capitalism, whereby “the state assumed functions previously carried out by a market economy and thus became the primary arbitrator of socio-economic development”.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
They looked on this system as a result of political and economic disorder, a system that capitalism developed to survive in the face of challenges from the working class and its own inability to govern itself. This was then a new phase of capitalism, “a new synthesis of monopoly capitalism and the totalitarian state which threatens to dominate the world and to eliminate its opponents and all vestiges of the earlier forms of liberal economy and politics”.
Attractive as this analysis was, this prediction turned out to be incorrect and capitalism has taken a different form, perhaps totalising, but in a different manner. However, the experience of the critical theorists with fascism and totalitarianism helped shape their later analysis.
In particular, they focus on the ways such a political-economic system achieves a rational, efficient form of production, but eliminates alternatives and debate over them. The reading from Marcuse will show how he interpreted and developed these ideas of totality and administered society as applying to societies that are normally considered more democratic and liberal.
Marxists tended to argue that the state and political forces operate in the interest of the owners of capital. Some of the arguments of the critical theorists questioned this, pointing out that the political sphere sometimes was dominant, and the interests of the administered, totalitarian society might dominate the economic in some aspects.
Another aspect of the analysis of such a system was the “socio-psychological analysis of the cultural roots of fascism in attitudes towards the family and authority”. For Marxists, this was a new direction for social analysis to take and Erich Fromm, one of the key critical theorists, incorporated Freudian and other psychoanalytic theories into the social theory of the Frankfurt School.