Authority and the Family Revisited Or_ a World Without Fathers_Jessica Benjamin

Authority and the Family Revisited: Or, a World without Fathers?Author(s): Jessica BenjaminSource: New German Critique, No. 13, Special Feminist Issue (Winter, 1978), pp. 35-57Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3115186 .

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Authority and the Family Revisited: or, A World without Fathers?

by Jessica Benjamin

Is it true that we live in a fatherless society, or that we are traversing a path toward it?1 For the last thirty years critics of mass culture, consumerism and conformity have pointed to the change in the role and image of the father as a source of weakness in the socialization of today's children. It is said that children who lack the model of paternal authority, competence and moral consistency are helpless prey to the manipulative apparatus of mass society. This view of the passing of the era of personal, paternal authority and religious morality, this critique of the present in light of the past, contains its own image of revolt. It is this image which must be carefully considered by those who wish to analyze from a feminist perspective the historical change in sexual and psychological domination. A conversation I had with a Spanish feminist several years ago illustrates what is at stake. Not only did it worry her that this new and tentative feminism was not legitimate because, after all, the activity of the male-dominated parties was more directly concerned with the seizing of state power from the fascists. She was still further troubled by the possibility that the task of confronting power could never be undertaken with feminist methods. In psychoanalytic language, did we not first have to internalize the father, to identify with the strength of the aggressor, in order to be able to fight and defeat him?

A truly critical analysis of society always presupposes or implies an image of revolt, a vision of a different way of life. Assumptions about human nature and possibility are its beginning even as a vision of the future is its consequence. With this caveat in mind I will discuss Max Horkheimer's effort to conceptualize the problem of "fatherlessness": how the form of domination peculiar to this epoch expresses itself not directly as authority but indirectly as the transformation of all relationships and activity into objective, instrumenal, depersonalized forms. The upshot of this development Horkheimer thought, is a change in personality type, based no longer on the internalization of authority but conformity to external standards.

Horkheimer, and later Adorno and Marcuse, his collaborators in critical

1. The term "fatherless society" was coined by Alexander Mitscherlich in his book Aufdem Weg zur vaterlosen Gesellschaft (Munich, 1963), which appeared in English as Society Without the Father.

35



36 New German Critique

theory, argued that resistance to the social order was being undermined in a new way.2 Paternal authority has been replaced by bureaucratic state institutions and the moral image of the father by a secular ideology provided by the culture industry and science. The principle of instrumental reason - a rationality of efficient, calculable means which is unconcerned with the ends it serves - replaces the substantive reason which judges moral values and goals. In the broadest sense of the term, an instrumental orientation implies a relation to objects and to one's own actions which uses them purely as a means to an end, instead of enjoying the relation or process for its own sake. Given this meaning, a fateful ambiguity arises in the concept of instrumental rationality. So understood, instrumental rationality can be seen not so much as a replacement of earlier forms of traditional authority or patriarchal morality, but as an extension or generalization of tendencies within them. Perhaps, as Horkheimer and Adorno sometimes suggest, domination was always the underlying intent of reason or enlightenment.3 The instrumental orientation which originally developed within the male role in the division of labor, which characterized the male repudiation of maternal nurturance in favor of competition and control, always existed alongside and beneath the idealized imagery of Western patriarchy. Hence, however depersonalized or obscured, the new form of rationality which has superseded patriarchal religion and the visible role of pater familias should be understood as the embodiment of male domination in the culture as a whole. The original split and antagonism between the sexes in our society would thus persist through the objective, generalized denial of nurturance and the supremacy of instrumental activity. We could think of this as patriarchy without the father. With this approach it is possible to build upon the insights of critical theory as to the changing nature of domination, without falling into their nostalgia. We can view with less dismay the decline of a family form in which resistance to paternal authority always implied a prior acceptance and identification with it.

Critical theory introduced the category of instrumental reason in order to show how social activity is reduced to an orientation toward calculable and formal processes, which, in turn, eliminate the question of the social intentions and implications of human action. First used by Max Weber in the notion of Zweckrationalitiit (instrumental or goal rationality), the idea implies that abstract, calculable and depersonalized modes of interaction

2. While I will often refer to the work of all these writers as "critical theory," I have also chosen to focus on Horkheimer because his first contribution on "Authority and Family" is not only seminal but of continuing importance today. It first appeared in 1936, Studien iiber Autoritdt und Familie (Paris: Felix Alcan) but is now available in English in Critical Theory, trans. J. Cummings (New York, 1972). 3. This position is articulated most dramatically in the joint work of T. W. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944 (New York, 1972).



Authority and the Family Revisited 37

have replaced a society founded on values and common beliefs.4 This condition, which Weber referred to as a "disenchanted world," is seen as a state in which ends or values have been obviated. Instead, means are elevated to the status of ends.5 The process of disenchantment, through which means rationality becomes a generalized form of social life, Weber termed rationalization.

Weber's analysis of modernity stressed the loss of individual authorship or intentionality - the ends of an activity cannot be considered, only the means of achieving ends. He drew the distinction between formal and substantive (material) rationality to express the difference beween rationality as an end in itself and rationality with reference to human needs or values.6 Following Weber, Mannheim further developed the idea that both modern relativism and traditionalism have in common the inability to make reasoning judgments about ends or values. But modern relativism, while denying reason its ultimate due, intensifies the function of rationality as self- rationalization, control over impulses, and the observation and organization of the self. Unlike real judgment or decision making, such functional rationality is seen to spring from helplessness to determine the course of social life in the face of the advancing division of labor.7

Of course, the loss of authorship in social life had been articulated by Marx in his discussion of alienation and commodity fetishism in capitalism. Marx also emphasized the loss of agency, the way in which the productive activity of individuals disappears behind the overwhelming cumulative process of capital. The relations between the producers of commodities do not appear in the market place as personal relations among individuals, but are concealed behind the process of exchange, a "social relation between things."8 The pervasive interpolation of things between persons, and the corresponding view of self and other as things - reification9 - is the other aspect of capitalist development which critical theory incorporated in the idea of instrumental reason.

Common to both Marx and Weber's analysis of the change in the nature of domination in capitalism is the idea that authority is no longer visibly embodied in persons. In feudalism, Marx wrote, "the social relations

4. Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Giinther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. E. Fischoff et al. (New York, 1968). Originally published 1922. 5. Ibid., pp. 85-87. 6. Ibid., p. 85. 7. Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London, 1940). 8. Karl Marx, Capital I (New York, 1974), p. 75. 9. The analysis of reification was developed by Georg LukAcs who synthesized Marx's concept of commodity fetishism with Weber's analysis of rationalization and the division of labor. See "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 83-222. Lukaics' concept of reification and his critique of culture formed the basis of critical theory, even when it departed from them. For a useful exposition and discussion see Andrew Arato, "LukAcs Theory of Reification," Telos, 11 (Spring 1972), 25-66.




between individuals in the performance of their labor appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labor." l0 Weber, who wrote of the "peculiarly impersonal" character of bureaucratic relations in contrast to "feudal orders based upon personal piety,""11 stressed the aspect of secularization, the decline of moral and religious authority.

The significant step within this tradition made by critical theorists was the explicit connection between the categories of individual psychic development - psychoanalysis - and the critique of instrumental reason. Thus they applied the depersonalization theorem to the change in the character of the father figure, in family structure, and its consequences for psychological compliance. On the one hand they ascribed the father's loss of moral authority to the growing helplessness of individuals within monopoly capitalism, to the loss of entrepreneurial freedom, responsibility and decision making. As a result of this loss of authority children no longer internalized paternal authority - nor did they rebel against it. On the other hand, especially in the first Study of Authority and the Family12 Horkheimer maintained that the father's authority in early capitalism was not substantively grounded in values, but rather represented the unadorned power of the purse. The child's acceptance and internalization of this father image was, in fact, the development of the rational faculty for acceptance of the given conditions rather than for criticism.

Ultimately, critical theory accepted the view that internalization of authority is the best or only basis for the later rejection of authority. 13 This view has, indeed, been the mainstay of mass culture criticism and it is perhaps not alien to those feminists like de Beauvoir who believe that women must develop the transcendent qualities of men in order to make their own history. Freud, too, saw internalization as a necessary form of civilizing children whose nature must be brought from impulsiveness to reason. However, there is also a critical thrust in his theory of internalization which resonates with Horkheimer's early critique of instrumental reason and socialization in the bourgeois era.14 I shall argue that this theoretical

10. Marx, Capital I, p. 77. 11. Weber, Economy, p. 672. 12. See footnote 2. 13. This position is expressed most dramatically in his essay "Authority and the Family Today," in The Family: Its Function and Destiny, ed. R. Anshen (New York, 1949), pp. 359- 374. 14. Illustrative of these antithetical positions are these statements which closely follow one another in Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason (New York, 1974), originally published in 1947: "In the era of free enterprise, the so-called era of individualism, individuality was most completely subordinated to self-preserving reason;" (p. 138) and then: "In this age of big business. . .the individual subject of reason tends to become a shrunken ego, captive of an evanescent present, forgetting the use of the intellectual functions by which he was once able to transcend his actual position in reality" (p. 140).




confluence is still important for feminist theory, while the retrospective justification of internalizing authority rests on these theorists' implicitly patriarchal standpoint.

Freud's theory of internalization showed how individuals transform themselves by doing to themselves what has been done to them. In the narrowest sense, internalization is the creation of an internal agency (super- ego) which embodies the external prohibition (morality). In this sense, internalization is often understood as the creation of conscience, the acceptance of values (a rather harmless way of perceiving the process favored by many sociologists). In the broader light of his entire theory of repression and neurosis, the concept of internalization has a sharper edge. The creation of an internal censoring agency involves the conscious denial of the experience of fear and is helpless in the face of the authority figure. It means the repression of the reality which demands repression.15 Internal- ization, in the sense of self-blame and guilt, means not only assuming the attitude of the other as one's own, but also assuming responsibility for the other's acts as inevitable responses to one's own behavior. Thus the unemployed in the depression assumed their own failure and inadequacy to be the cause of their conditions rather than the economic crisis which affected millions of other workers as well. The effort at self-control fosters and is fostered by the illusion that one can be responsible for everything, determine one's fate alone.

In the broader sense of internalization as self-control and discipline, Horkheimer wrote that "the history of Western civilization could be written in terms of the growth of the ego as the underling sublimates, that is internalizes, the commands of his master who has preceded him in self- discipline." This is the ego of "domination, command and organization."16 Thus the development of instrumental reason brings with it the development, through internalization, of an ego whose principle is "to win in the fight against nature in general, against other people in particular, and against its own impulses .... Its dominance is patent in the patriarchal epoch." New in our era is not mastery which, Horkheimer thinks, "can be traced back to the first chapters of Gensis. . . . [but] the idea that reason, the highest intellectual faculty of man, is solely concerned with instruments, nay, is a mere instrument itself, is formulated more clearly and accepted more generally today than ever before."17 When "subjective reason," the faculty or function of rationality, is separated from "objective reason" which considers the ends to be served, the tendency toward domination triumphs over reflection and critical consciousness. It was this side of reason, developed as conscience in the more narrow sense of internalization, which provided critical theory with its elusive image of revolt.

15. Sigmund Freud, "The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis," in General Psychological Theory, ed. P. Rieff (New York, 1963), p. 203. 16. Horkheimer, Eclipse, p. 105. 17. Ibid.




In modern culture, then, the capacity for rational authorship - the determination of ends or values - diminishes and domination becomes an end in itself. This is the verdict which critical theory pronounces upon centuries of scientific and intellectual endeavor, upon enlightenment. Thus, for example, science can invent methods of mass destruction and ecological disaster, but cannot make "value judgments" about the consequences of such production. The victory of instrumental reason is a victory against nature. The world of objects becomes simply a field of resistance or an empty reflection of the subject's will to dominate.18 As nature is increasingly subordinated to the principle of instrumentality, it ceases to have a life of its own. The reality of the outer world disappears for the subject.

However much this process represents, in psychoanalytic terms, a state of mind like the infantile omnipotence of thought, it is actually based on the material reality created by instrumental rationality. Horkheimer and Ador- no wrote, "there can be no 'over-evaluation of mental processes against reality' where there is no radical distinction between thoughts and reality. The 'unshakeable confidence in the possibility of world domination' which Freud anachronistically ascribes to magic, corresponds to the realistic world domination. ..." The premise of this behavior then is not narcissism, that is, not a pre-social state in which the world seems to exist in order to serve the infant, but rather "the autonomy of idea in regard to objects ... achieved by the reality-adjusted ego."19 Unfortunately, Horkheimer and Adorno sacrifice this analysis of the relationship between a destructive rationality and nature when they move to their analysis of conformism in the present. They move from a view of mental violence as a function of the ego to a condemnation of "primary instinctual wishes" no longer controlled by internalized values.20 Nonetheless, they were able to stress that instrumental rationality includes not only the reduction of the world to standardized, abstract equivalence (as in the commodity form) but also violence against nature in thought and practice - the creation of a material culture of domination, an instrumental culture.

The creation of an alien object world involves not only the labor which alienates,the production of fetishized objects and processes. It also entails the inability to recognize the subjectivity of the object world, to recognize self in nature. This inability to recognize the subjectivity of the other, the existence of objects as independent and apart from the subject, is simply another aspect of the inability to recognize one's own subjectivity, the results of one's own activity, as materialized in the object world. Subjectivity

18. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, p. 190. 19. Ibid., p. 11. 20. For a perfect example of the reasoning which sees violence as loss of control see Mitscherlich, Society, pp. 175-176. This idea figures strongly in Adorno's discussion of fascism in "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda," (1951) in Gesammelte Werke 8; Soziologische Schriften I (Frankfurt, 1972), pp. 408-433. And it is perhaps best captured by Horkheimer's expression, "The Revolt of Nature," in Eclipse of Reason.




and agency are denied to the other, even as they are denied to self. The essence of instrumental culture is that it expresses this denial in material form, it reproduces and creates anew the relationships which pepetuate this denial in consciousness and in action.

Horkheimer and Adorno remind us that this denial of recognition of the object's reality is grounded in the loss of direct participation in the transformation of nature (labor), the loss of recognition between master and slave which Hegel formulated.21 "The distance between subject and object, a presupposition of abstraction, is grounded in the distance from the thing itself which the master achieved through the mastered."22 The loss of recognition between subjects, the split between author (authority) and agent (subordinate) in which slave works for master is the precondition for the thinking subject's alienation from the object world. It is no longer the expression or objectification of her/his activity, but of her/his slave's. The slave's activity, in turn, no longer expresses her/his own will or intention, but the authorship of the master whose instrument s/he has become. Once society is divided into masters and slaves, subjects and objects, the unity of authorship and agency is also broken. The way is paved for a rationality without authorship, that is, without conscious intention.

In essence, this perspective makes the domination of subject by subject the root of the domination and violence toward nature. The paradigm of the male-female division is, of course, suggested by this simultaneous subjugation and equation of nature and other.23 While control over nature, in the sense of growing mastery and knowledge, need not imply that nature is given the status of object or other, this has been the case in Western culture. The orientation toward cultivating, nourishing and raising, that is, the attitude of nurturance rather than control or exploitation, exists in certain cultures despite the subordination of women.24 The objectifying and instrumental- izing attitude which is so pronounced in Western patriarchy thus implies not merely the subjugation but the repudiation of the mother by the father. It is in this sense that ours has been a society dominated by the father and that, insofar as instrumental rationality prevails, we are far from fatherless.

The historical change which, in critical theory's view, brings the con- trolling, instrumental side of rationality to the fore brings a simultaneous

21. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J. R. Baillie (New York, 1967), pp. 234-240. 22. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, p. 13. 23. For a discussion of this point see Sherry Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture," in Woman, Culture and Society. Rosaldo and Lamphere, eds. (Stanford, 1974), pp. 67-88. 24. Gayle Rubin makes the point that women are exchanged in all cultures but not necessarily objectified. See "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. R. Reiter (New York, 1975), pp. 157-210. Margaret Mead's study of the Arapesh in Sex and Temperament (New York, 1968) demonstrates how in a culture in which men retain control the fundamental orientation toward humans and toward nature is that of nurturance and cultivation rather than possession or domination.




change in the persons who practice it. This change is attributed to the decline of familial solidarity which, in turn, is related to the role of the father. Robbed of his activity and authority in public life, deprived of his economic independence, the male father figure is no longer the mainstay, the ideal, the public representative nor the economic power of the family. The father as authority figure who could be respected, and with whom the child could identify, has been undermined by virtue of his helplessness under monopoly capital. And, even as the independent entrepreneur has been eliminated by monopolization, so the functions of the family have been taken over by the state and its institutions.25 Now that impersonal, extra-familial forms of authority hold sway over the individual, a dramatic shift has occurred in the nature of compliance: internalization of authority is replaced by conformity.

If this thesis on the family and authority seems familiar, it is because it has been reiterated in numerous forms since Horkheimer's first articulation in 1936, and subsequent versions in 1944 and 1949. Notwithstanding his assertion that the notion of conformism resting not in "the power of familial authority but its collapse. . .never received any systematic exploration in the work of the Frankfurt school," the recent and numerous statements by Christopher Lasch on current family life26 are wholly anticipated by the work of Horkheimer. The critique of consumerism, of professional childrearing and guidance, the assertion that families lack emotional intensity and mothers are cold, as well as the use of the term narcissism to describe the new personality type were, indeed, developed by Horkheimer and Adorno, and further refined by Marcuse in the fifties and sixties. Another important contribution to this perspective was the work of the psychoanalyst Mitscher- lich, Society Without the Father, who critiques the apathy of individuals in consumer society where regressive satisfaction is sought from the all- providing mother.27 Mitscherlich sees the civilizing process as overcoming the instincts which instrumentalize the other as a mere function of one's own satisfaction, the learning of empathy as well as ethics. Marcuse,who is more positively disposed toward the image of maternal provision and satisfaction of instinct, shares with Mitscherlich the belief that revolt is injured by fatherlessness: "Freedom from the authority of the weak father, released from the child-centered family, well equipped with the ideas and facts of life as transmitted by the mass media, the son (and to a still lesser degree, the daughter) enter a ready-made world. . . ." But freedom "turns out to be a liability rather than a blessing: the ego that has grown without much struggle appears as a pretty weak entity, ill equipped to become a self with and

25. See Horkheimer, "Authority," p. 123, and Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, p. 198. 26. See especially Haven in a Heartless World (New York, 1977). 27. For the use of the idea of narcissistic regression in mass movements see Adorno, "Freudian Theory." For the general application of the idea that consumer society feeds on regressive tendencies and pre-oedipal feelings, see Mitscherlich, Society, pp. 269-271. The classic work by David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, 1950), anticipates much of that which Lasch and other contemporary critics have seen as the current dilemma of the family.




against others, to offer effective resistance ...

."28 There are two problems in this search for a rationality and a critical

consciousness which, stimulated by the childhood experience of authority, has the strength and the integrity to defy it. First, there is the suggestion that the impact of the mass media, state institutions, professional guidance is so overwhelming that people are now directly manipulated into unthinking conformity. This view rests upon an important but questionable method- ological and ontological assumption. The assumption is that the active nature of subjectivity is only brought into being by external pressure, and therefore that it can be extinguished. This assumption breaks with the concept of alienation, which contains the notion that a fundamental need or capacity takes on an objective form which is opposed to, yet depends on, the original need or capacity. Not by extinguishing it (which is impossible), but by "feeding" upon it, changing it, does abstract labor become the form into which concrete labor must be bound, living labor becoming dead. So, too, the life-activity, the need and capacity for mutual recognition, become alienated into objective forms of instrumental culture which imprison and distort them.

However primary the forms created by it appear to us, alienation is actually an intersubjective process, the alienated product is a result. And the alienation of intersubjective needs and capacities, so that they appear as secondary characteristics which reification can extinguish, is actually the way that reification is brought into being. So powerful are the appearances which human interaction creates that it is often difficult not to take them for reality, to confuse second nature with nature. Critical theory, despite its analysis of the domination of inner and outer nature by reason, finally attributes the results of domination to the nature of the subject. Despite their promising analysis of internalization as just such a process of creating and reproducing instrumental culture, the critical theorists end up collapsing appearance and reality.29

The second problem in their image of critical reflection as resistance to domination is the tendency to equate internalization with the acceptance of substantive (objective) rather than formal (subjective) rationality, with morality rather than with instrumentalism. This leads to a false antithesis between moralistic and instrumental aspects of paternal authority which, as Horkheimer otherwise suggests, are united in Western patriarchy as aspects of mastery. Authority, by definition, implies the existence of a subject who submits voluntarily because s/he has internalized the legitimating principles

28. See Herbert Marcuse, "The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man," in Five Lectures (Boston, 1970), pp. 44-61, p. 50. The accusation that youth from permissive, child- centered families are incapable of resistance is peculiar since such families were most often blamed or praised for producing the anti-war activists, the moral protest of the sixties. 29. For a discussion of the way in which the lack of intersubjective categories, especially in the use of psychoanalysis, as the basis for critical theory's acceptance of internalization, see my "The End of Internalization: Adorno's Social Psychology," Telos, 32 (Summer 1977), 42-64.




of that authority. Critical theory would have done well to remember Weber's ideas on the legitimacy of rational authority. In his view, modern, bureaucratic authority was legitimized by the universality and consistency of its rules, that is, by formal rationality. Not the content of the rules, but the fact that they applied to everyone alike constituted their rationality. It was this rationality which could be internalized in such abstract and formal ideals as support of the bourgeois legal system.30 The strength of Horkheimer's first treatment of the problem of authority does, in fact, lie in its demon- stration of the way that authority in the bourgeois epoch is internalized as the rational acceptance of necessity, adjustment to reality.

The first and perhaps most critical use of the concept of internalization by critical theory can be found in the early Studies on Authority and the Family. Here, too, we find a remarkable synthesis of the ideas of commodity fetishism and the Protestant ethic with the proposition that (subjective) reason becomes the mode of reproducing authority. Other and later formulations notwithstanding, here Horkheimer is clear that the appeal to individual self-interest can be sufficient basis of an authority relationship. Individual interest is achieved by sacrificing the need for social agency and authorship. Here we see far more clearly the role played by reason itself both within the family and the cultural apparatus as a whole, "to anchor the domination of man over man in the hearts of the dominated themselves."31 And, as throughout his work, the thematic opposition of reason as conscious critical insight into social relations and reason as accommodation and conformity is crucial. At this stage, Horkheimer does not yet distinguish conformity (fear of external authority) from internalization. But here Horkheimer delivers what is surely the best critique of the implicit internalization embodied in the appearance of bourgeois individuality.

Horkheimer wanted to demonstrate that reason takes the form of accommodation rather than insight in the bourgeois epoch, because it gives up the claim to determine intentions or authorize actions which transcend the single individual and her/his interest. While bourgeois reason opposed authority in the name of universal liberation, it brought about only the partial freedom of the entrepreneur. The ideal bourgeois liberation is embodied in the connection between freedom and thought, in which the subject is the thinking individual. This individual is the monad, a self-

30. Weber, Economy, pp. 868-890. According to Weber there was only a brief span of the bourgeois revolt against the traditional forms of legitimation in which substantive values were seen as a basis of rational legitimation. For example, nature moved from a substantive to a formal principle. 31. Horkheimer, "Authority," p. 67. My translation.




contained reality who affects no one and is affected by no one. The individual's freedom to grapple with authority is purely intellectual, bought at the price of her/his ineffectuality. What makes her/him an individual is the fact that s/he no longer recognizes the self or self-activity as part of the disembodied social relations which have become a power over and against her/him.32

The opposition between individual and society is raised to a fact of nature. Social relations "appear to be a self-contained reality, another principle confronting the knowing and acting subject. .... When it attempts to bridge the gap between self and world by means of thought it is already acknowledging reality as a principle in its own right. ..which reflects the incompleteness of his freedom: the impotence of the single individual in an anarchic, contradictory inhuman reality."33 The other side of the human subject is the abstract society, objective and immutable, whose origins in human labor and cooperation are obscured. Society takes on the appearance of nature, determined by its own laws, and reason seeks to grasp not to shape it, to accommodate not to act upon it. Thus the members of all classes, mystified by the opacity of social relations, see themselves bowing to necessity, acknowledging facts (e.g., property relations), when they play their roles in producing a system of domination.34 Reason as the acceptance of necessity - and, of course, the attempt to make the best of it - is interwoven with rationality as the acceptance of responsibility for one's individual fate. The work ethic, or performance principle,35 is based upon the seeming consistency between individual effort and success. Precisely because of the "nature" of social relations, a competitive framework appears in which the individual seems to be master of her/his own destiny, or seems to be to blame for her/his own fate. For example, class does not appear as a structural relationship (between groups) but as an attribute between individuals who merit their position. It takes the form of a comparison between individuals in their relation to fortune, rather than a mutually conditioning relation in which one group has power over another. Consequently authority - and authorship - lies not in a class but in "fortune." No one is responsible for the whole, but everyone is responsible for himself.36 The reification of authority, its arbitrariness and uncontrolla- bility, is the basis of that unique modern freedom to blame oneself for everything. The necessity of internalization grows inescapably out of the limitations on social action and authorship.

For both classes, then, acceptance of authority is built into the very form

32. Ibid., pp. 78-79. 33. Ibid., p. 79. 34. Ibid., p. 89. 35. The expression "performance principle," is a translation of the German term Leistungs- prinzip which more unambiguously refers to the English variants of achievement and is more suggestive of work, production and the compulsory discipline which accompanies them. 36. Ibid., pp. 93-94.




which purports to deny authority: reason. The form in which authority is internalized in capitalism is the faculty of (subjective) reason: insight into reality, acceptance of facts. The authority itself is never recognized as such. Reason as a faculty, as calculation of self-interest, is the basis of compliance to that which is never recognized as authority, but rather as law. The pursuit of individual self-interest by adjusting to apparent facts and laws - unre- strained by any "irrational" authority such as personal fealty - constitutes the practice of reason. Helpless before the laws and facts of nature, the individual internalizes her/his isolation as responsibility or self-blame, construes her/his fortune as the result of her/his own acts. S/He takes the action of social forces upon her/himself to be her/his own action. Hork- heimer's analysis shows how the monadic concept of the individual, both in its philosophical and everyday forms, is virtually created through internalization of the loss of social activity and responsibility. And rationality is a form of internalization.

How does this form of internalization develop, in which repeatedly and throughout life the individual accepts the rationality of and responsibility for events s/he is powerless to control? How, psychologically speaking, does the attitude and practice of self-control develop which corresponds to the helplessness to see through or act against reified social relations? Hork- heimer attempted to answer this question by reference to the family, the earliest point of confrontation with authority in the individual's life. He accepted the proposition that character or psychic structure is formed in early childhood as a consequence of interaction with socializing adults. However, his understanding of this interaction was largely restricted to the structural roles assigned to family members, rather than particular concrete patterns of behavior. Thus he attempted to explain internalization in terms of the structural role of the father, even as he later assumed that the change in this structural role brought internalization to an end.

The structural relation of the family, above all the objectified roles that derive from the father's participation in and the mother's exclusion from production, determine the nature of the childhood relation to authority. "The self-control of the individual, the disposition for work and discipline, the ability to hold firmly to certain ideas, consistency in practical life, application of reason," were all developed under the aegis of paternal authority.37 The father's authority derived not from any intrinsic admirable characteristics, but by virtue of his status as breadwinner, his power of the purse. Even in the period of early capitalism, obedience as such was demanded, and the father's power was naked, devoid of any legitimating, mystifying cover. He is right because of his might-this acknowledgement is the appropriate form of respect for his power and success. Horkheimer draws an analogy to the formalism of Protestantism, in which God must be loved not because he is good, but simply because he is God. Were love for

37. Ibid., p. 101.




him based upon any substantive virtues, the love would be conditional and his order could be challenged. He would imply that his authority as God was not unconditional and sufficient in itself.38 Obviously an authority which is no longer substantively appropriate can be outgrown or discarded. The irrational demand for obedience raises obedience itself to a formal ideal, according to which the rationality of the child's acts is judged-the more obedient the child, the more reasonable s/he is judged to be. The measure of how rationally the child is behaving becomes how acceptable it is to father - and acceptability becomes the definition of rationality. Reason is thereby equated with "recognizing and accepting facts" - not with substantive values.39

The mother's structural role, its interplay with that of the father, contributes to the same development of obedience and conformity. She sets an example of submission to the father, however supportive she is to the children. However, the mother's structural role also contains an anti- authoritarian moment, precisely because her subjugation by the father inspires a certain opposition to him on the part of the child who loves her. Equally important, it is by virtue of her exclusion from the public world that the mother preserves the female principle of love - the old sexual division of labor thus partially preserved within the family the opportunity to be human, to show solidarity and to express warmth.40

In the modern era, Horkheimer thinks as the state begins to subsume the function of socialization, these positive aspects of the family dwindle. The family no longer offers the solidarity which protects the individual because relationships are not based on market exchange.41 The female principle of love and the maternal encouragement of anti-authoritarianism are dis- solved. Although the dissolution of the sexual division of labor and male authority might have led to a more egalitarian family, their replacement by the state foils this hope.42 Furthermore, the undermining of the apparent consonance between effort and reward (due to the economic crisis), which had given credibility to the father's insistence that the child take blame and responsibility for actions, seems to encourage not criticism but resignation. The persistence of authority, both in the state and the home, has lost its last vestige of rationality. But this, it seems to Horkheimer, makes it more unacountable for its actions - it has lost any semblance of legitimacy and therefore no one expects it to act according to legitimate principles. Indeed, if the market system according to which society appeared to be lawful (second nature) becomes disorderly, the absence of identifiable human authorship leads to more, not less, self-blame (internalization).

38. Ibid., p. 104. 39. Ibid., pp. 100-101. 40. Ibid., pp. 114-119. 41. Ibid., p. 114. This idea that the family no longer offers sanctuary is particularly developed in Lasch, Haven. 42. Horkheimer, "Authority," p. 116.




Horkheimer has difficulty in sorting out the consequences of authority becoming implausible, no longer rationally legitimated (and hence perhaps no longer authority but naked domination) in the crisis of market relations. This is partially due to the fact that his theory bridges two vastly different experiences, the German and the American, in which the crisis of liberal capitalism was resolved in favor of fascism and monopoly, respectively. Hence the idea that the state begins to intervene increasingly in formerly private areas of social life refers to different processes. And the difficulty in his theory also comes from the ambiguity inherent in the idea that instrumental reason was always present, but now dominates more openly and clearly. At times, then, Horkheimer can stress the role of instrumental reason in the early bourgeois epoch, as in his 1936 analysis of internalization of formal, subjective reason. Or, as in the 1949 essay on the issue of authority today, he can stress that formal, instrumental rationality is embodied in institutions rather than internalized. He then looks favorably to the past and stresses the moral, rather than the formally rational, element in paternal authority. Dialectic of Enlightenment also portrays the continuity of the development from substantive reason to pure domination, such that the moment when revolt and critical consciousness were possible is now past.43 Despite his 1936 analysis of the father, in which he described obedience as a formal response demanded by a structural role rather than substantive behavior, Horkheimer returns to a positive image of the father. He inaugurates an era of nostalgic romanticization of paternal authority in the age of reason which has not yet ended.

"The socially conditioned weakness of the father prevents the child's real identification with him. In earlier times a loving imitation of the self-reliant prudent man, devoted to his duty, was the source of moral autonomy in the individual. Today the growing child, who... .has received only the abstract idea of arbitrary power, looks for a stronger, more powerful father ... Authoritarian submissiveness is still being inculcated. . .but the instinctual relationship to the parents is greatly injured."44 Although these assertions represent a substantial revision of Horkheimer's earlier view of paternal authority as abstract, he is consistent in maintaining that the old bourgeois family had a measure of solidarity, cooperation, and the presence of maternal love. Furthermore, he argues that-children cease to depend upon their families now after the period of early infancy, turning instead to impersonal institutions which lack affective content - teachers, peer groups - which inspire conformity rather than independence.45

43. The differences between the different writings should not be overemphasized, so much as the ambiguity that runs throughout the writings. To some extent the differences depend upon whether the effects of capitalist development upon the family are emphasized, or instead the development of rationality throughout Western civilization as a whole. 44. Horkheimer, "Authority. . .Today," p. 365. 45. Ibid, p. 366.




In addition to strong fatherhood Horkheimer cites the decline of maternal nurturance as the important cause of change. This follows from the professionalization of motherhood, that is, its modelling according to the new principles of social hygiene and efficiency. The intervention of childrearing experts and mass media, as well as the emotional coldness of mothers who now work outside the home, results in a lack of real emotional relationship between mother and child.46 Instrumental rationality, then, has extended to the sphere of mothering, even as mothers have been drawn into social production which was its original habitat. At its most extreme, this viewpoint suggests that women's equality is simply another aspect of the trend toward instrumentalization. At any rate, it clearly favors the view that the family was once a private sanctuary over the view that privacy has been a trap for women, like involuntary conception and housework. It is, however, important to inquire into the institutional and personal supports for maternal nurturance in contemporary society, as well as the consequences for children of the change in woman's image both at home and in the media.47

Horkheimer explained the consequences of these changes in the family in terms of less visible models for identification and weaker emotional bonds to mitigate parental power over children. Consequently, the power exer- cised over the child develops in her/him the fear of external authority, and this fear is no longer replaced by internalization and identification with emotional figures. The child remains at the stage in which external authority is feared and power is respected, so that s/he conforms to whatever stereotyped values are currently powerful.48 Although powerful figures are still idealized, and impersonal authorities repersonalized (a lasting feature of mass media), the self-scrutiny and conscience which made the individual critical of the authority s/he identified with is missing. The individual develops no substantive criteria for measuring authority, no judgment, no experience of authorship even in her/his own limited self-interest.

It should be noted that this analysis which, as we shall see, has its weaker and stronger points, is not quite as contradictory with Horkheimer's earlier critique of instrumental rationality as may first appear. His early arguments rested on the supposition that the plausibility of bourgeois social relations worked because they really appeared rational from the point of view of individual self-interest. While in fact the market was neither natural nor rational, the appearance of being so did give rise to certain ideals of freedom

46. Ibid. 47. The idea that the home was a sanctuary and that women represented and provided love and peace may reflect an idealization rather than the reality of 19th-century life. Given the struggle against involuntary conception and for women's equality in that century, not to mention the nature of motherhood for working-class women, a rather different view of domesticity could be developed. The assumption of one unitary "family" obscures class and cultural differences which Horkheimer does not discuss. 48. Ibid., p. 369.




which, Horkheimer believes, could have been realized by a different social form (equality, liberty, etc.). If the reified forms of cultural life no longer preserve these ideals, then the nature of authority has indeed changed - it has dispensed, even, with the appearance of substantive rationality and is openly, cynically instrumental. Hence Horkheimer believes that domination through instrumental reason has replaced the older form of authority, which could, as an abstract, formally rational value system, be internalized. Now, he believes, domination works through the direct manipulation of the subject whose agency is no longer required, and through the abolition of the conscious ideals which preserved the hope of authorship.49

This view of the need for a substantive basis of resistance to authority corresponds to Horkheimer's earlier distinction between the rejection of authority out of hand and the recognition that the authority of knowledge and values must be developed and liberated from its basis in egoistic self- interest.50 Fromm, in the same volume, made the distinction between rational and irrational authority, proposing that the former is potentially democratic because it provides the possibility of the subordinate outgrowing dependency, of becoming like the authority figure. Fromm stated that the earlier phase of capitalism had made the father's position of authority an attainable, rational goal which the child could one day hope to attain.51 A plausible relationship seemed to exist between self-discipline and the promise of reward, so that internalization of renunciation and of obedience "made sense."

But this viewpoint raises more problems than it solves. These are of both a theoretical and an empirical nature - I shall analyze the theoretical issues first, and then turn (necessarily briefly) to the empirical assumptions and the theoretical considerations they raise. First, even for Freud the distinction between early fear of authority- and for that matter early identification - and the later internalization of it as super-ego is not so hard and fast. Both fears generate guilt.52 The fear of super-ego must usually be experienced and expressed by projecting it in some external form as fear of a real other - it then appears as conformity and the desire to keep up appearances. It is very difficult to distinguish fantasy from reality, internal from external. The distinction between fear of external authority and internalization cannot be operationalized as need for approval vs. self-control, since the person who has internalized still may seek external approval to counteract or confirm her/his guilt. Weber shows how those individuals, the Puritans, constantly looked to their standing in the community as substantiation of their inner being. Since there was no way of knowing if they were saved they

49. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic. 50. Horkheimer, "Authority," pp. 96-97. 51. Eric Fromm, Studien iiber Autoritat und Familie (Studies on Authority and the Family) (Paris, 1936), p. 91 and p. 133. 52. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (New York, 1965), p. 73.




were forced to rely on the judgment of peers.53 Guilt and self-blame persist in modem life precisely because of the inscrutability of fate, the opacity of the social relations which cause suffering. The feeling of helplessness continues to be translated into the sense of personal responsibility for failure.54

A more serious problem in Horkheimer's thought is his insistence on the link between the identification with the father, internalization, and the independent conscience. This way qf thinking has a number of important consequences and implications, which become apparent later in critical theory. It implies that the child has no spontaneous desire to individuate, to become independent, nor the mother to encourage independence - therefore the father's intervention is required to save civilization from regression. The idea that the father is required for individuation of the child reappears in radical theories of psychoanalysis from Marcuse to Mitchell.55 It is based upon a confusion of gender identification with separation-individuation from the mother - the child can only leave the mother by identifying with the father, whose masculinity consists (at least partially) in the repudiation of maternal dependency.56 Necessarily, then, this view is less convincing when applied to female children.

Above all this view is problematic because it denies the possibility of a maternal nurturance which actually encourages autonomy. But what is nurturance if not the pleasure in the other's growth? if not the desire to satisfy the other's needs, whether it be the need to cling or the need to be independent? It promotes the undialectical and individualistic proposition that freedom consists of isolation. All of these problematic assumptions point to the way in which masculine identity, in particular, assumes the denial of the need for the other to be the route to independence - perhaps the most negative aspect of internalization.57

53. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (New York, 1958). 54. A good example of the way members of the working class internalize the idea of individual control over one's own fate and therefore assume responsibility for their "failure" to be upwardly mobile is portrayed by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb in the Hidden Injuries of Class (New York, 1972). 55. See Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York, 1962), p. 73, and also Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York, 1974). 56. For an especially insightful discussion of this point, and several related ones that follow, see Nancy Chodorow, "Family Structure and Feminine Personality," in Rosaldo and Lamphere, pp. 43-66. 57. Chodorow also points out that the oedipal difference between boys and girls seems to lie in the fact that girls internalize loss of love while boys internalize fear of castration. Hence what is called the narcissistic rather than the social element would be stronger in male internalization. This, too, suggests that girls would have stronger conscience than boys. Quite differently, Freud stated that women have less super-ego and morality than men, and that they resist




This view, which legitimates renunciation of love for the parent as much as it does internalization, is linked to the idea that in the past the child could practice self-control in the hopes of becoming like the father, and that this hope would actually be realized. This promise, in Horkheimer's view, was the rational consistency and plausibility which had promoted internalization as self-interest, insight into necessity, and accommodation to the facts. But at the same time, an instrumental attitude toward self is implied in this regulation of needs and desires, and a lack of consideration is given to self- determined need in favor of accepting "the facts." While this attitude implied a renunciation of gratification in favor of future power by the bourgeois child, it implied only the illusion of self-blame and personal failure for the proletarian. Finally, the acceptance of (instrumental) rationality implied by the identification with the father diverted the interest in social control over the conditions of life to self-control - the essence of internalization being to act upon oneself since external reality is immutable. The rationality of self-control and of paternal authority was formal, at best a real appearance. This did not deter Horkheimer's retrospective approval of it since he thought that the conformity to convention which replaced this appearance is even more destructive. He did not see the possibility that such a breakdown of appearances might ultimately lead to a less individualistic, less instrumental view of gratification and mastery of social life.

In one sense, Horkheimer's idea that internalization was declining was overly optimistic, that is, premature. Empirical studies do not give credibility to the idea that internalization is on the wane. Some of the more significant empirical studies and discussions58 bring out this point: internalization increases with "psychological techniques" of childrearing such as are increasingly preferred by parents of both classes, although the middle class is "ahead." Bronfenbrenner notes the evidence which points to the fact that children who internalize are more dependent upon authority than children who relate to peer groups-a proposition suggested in particular by the lesser independence of lower middle-class girls. They tend to be more "loved" and subjected to psychological punishment and therefore internalize more than boys.59 Kohn further bears out the proposition that internalization is not on the wane by demonstrating high tendencies toward internalization induced by precisely those fathers who are employed in bureaucratic occupations.60

civilization. See his "Femininity," in New Introductory Lectures (New York, 1965), and Civilization. For an exhaustive discussion of these and other issues see Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, 1978). Forthcoming. 58. See Uri Bronfenbrenner, "Socialization and Social Class Through Time and Space," in Readings in Social Psychology, ed. E. Maccoby, et al. (New York, 1958), and "The Changing American Child," in Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 7 (1968), 73-85. See also Melvin Kohn, "Social Class and Parental Values," in The Family, ed. R. Coser (New York, 1974), pp. 334-353, and "Bureaucratic Man: A Portrait and an Interpretation," American Sociological Review, 36, 461- 474. And see Philip Slater, "Parental Role Differentiation," in Coser, pp. 259-275. 59. Bronfenbrenner, "The Changing," p. 79. 60. Kohn, "Bureaucratic Man," pp. 461-471.




Internalization, interestingly enough, is defined in these studies in a manner which shows its consonance with formal instrumental rationality: it means the ability to generalize rules from experience, to demand rational consistency of self and other, and to show competitive, individual self-reliance.61 The formal consistency of behavior and values are considerably less important in working-class communities where traditional values are fostered and held in common by everyone - the child experiences their validity as universal, rather than as consistently embodied by a single individual. Paradoxically, the values entertained by middle-class parents may be less instrumental than those of working-class parents, but the form of internalization embodies the instrumental calculus of the individual rather than the solidarity of the group. Kohn, logically enough, links these differences to the phenomena that working-class survival is much more dependent upon kin and workplace solidarity, whereas middle-class people are more independent of kin networks and more reluctant to organize at their work place.62 The question of solidarity within and between families is crucial, and is linked to the issue of the changes in women's position in the family and production in this century. There may be real value in Horkheimer's assumption that the female principle of nurturance is reduced by the instrumentalization of motherhood, the reliance upon experts and standardized media transmission of advice - as historians have recently argued. In any case, however, his explanation for this encroachment of instrumental culture into the domain of that which is most opposed to instrumentality - nurturance - does not seem viable. He links it to the weakness of the father63 rather than to the breakup of kin-group ties and other networks, especially among women, which would provide personal solidarity rather than impersonally mediated expertise. Classical studies of families in social networks indicate that solidarity between spouses is more common among mobile families with a loose network; sex-segregation is far more intense among families, often working-class, which are less mobile and retain their old kin and friendship network.64 Patently it is those mobile, tightly-knit families with lesser parental role differentiation and sex-segregation in which internalization is a more prominent feature of child development.65

61. Ibid. 62. Kohn, "Social Class," pp. 351-353. 63. The assumption that fathers spend less time with their children or play a smaller role in childrearing does not seem warranted, and should be distinguished from the related point, that fathers' work and workplace are no longer accessible to nor shared with the child while growing up. The latter change would not, however, weaken identification with the father as person, but only as function or structural role. Therefore it would seem that the father plays a less, rather than a more instrumental role in present society. 64. See the studies of Elizabeth Bott, "Conjugal Roles and Social Networks," in The Family, pp. 318-333; and Young and Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Harmondsworth, 1972). 65. Slater, "Parental Role," pp. 267-71.




On the basis of these briefly reviewed empirical considerations we can make some assessments of Horkheimer's theory. Internalization becomes more prevalent in this century because due to urbanization, suburbaniza- tion, mobility, and work patterns, there are more families in which parental solidarity and cooperation take the place of sex-segregated, extended networks. In such modern nucleated families, particularly in the middle class where the father is not independent but "bureaucratic," both parents are more likely to play similar structural roles toward the child than was true in the past. When nurturance and discipline come from the same person, as it would if the parents did not divide their role toward the child, internalization increases.66 There is also considerable dispute about whether internalization actually increases independence from authority. In any case, the mother is clearly as capable as the father of bringing about a highly developed rationality in the child, of inducting internalization.

I have already pointed to the patriarchal implications of accepting internalization as the image of revolt, or the precondition of independent activity and authorship. In light of the research reviewed, there is reason to suspect, rather, that internalization is an insidious form of reproducing individualism and instrumental orientation. Whereas this orientation may have been represented by the father, there is reason to suspect that, gradually, instrumentally rational orientation has become de-gendered and has penetrated the forms of maternal nurturance and caretaking even of infants. This would increase internalization. Whereas internalization may once have been associated with particular forms of moral judgment, it can also be the basis for formally rational principles or even ostensibly permissive non-moralizing modes of upbringing.

Equally important is the issue of privatization. There is considerable evidence to suggest that women, the primary caretakers of small children then and now, are more isolated and lonely in their mothering activity. We should assume that this would make the mother both more dependent on the child and loathe to allow it autonomy, as well as make her more demanding that the child perform according to the reified standards she imbibes from the media.67 She wants the child's behavior to reflect well upon her as a mother. The consequences of such isolation may be that the mother demands the appearance of self-reliance with a lack of true independence: internalization of individuality as an ideal rather than a reality. For, as Horkheimer himself pointed out, true individuality flourishes not in opposition to community but within and through it.68

Horkheimer tries to establish a link between internalization and such individuation as would be possible when mutual recognition of social agency 66. Ibid., pp. 270-71. 67. For a discussion of privatization which does not take such an idealized view of the family as sanctuary and explores its consequences for motherhood see both Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston, 1970) and Chodorow, "Feminine Personality," pp. 63-64. 68. Eclipse, p. 131.




and authorship can be realized, but his link appears unconvincing. Rather, as his earlier analysis showed, it seems that internalization is a response to the deprivation of recognition, agency and authorship. Horkheimer appar- ently comes to this untenable contradiction in his own work because he adopts the position that the striving for recognition, for self-activity and social authorship, are "secondary" phenomena. Like the active and syn- thesizing functions of the Freudian ego, these capacities for activity and authorship seem only to emerge in response to outside pressure. This pressure toward activity was provided by the father and then internalized. I would argue just the opposite - that these capacities are distorted and take on the appearance of secondary, derivative phenomena because their growth is thwarted by instrumental culture. Critical theory misses the active intersubjective process which creates this culture, although it identified so clearly the loss of agency and authorship which prevail in and through it. For the critical theorists the subject was largely constituted by recourse to the idea of critical reflection, rather than by the idea of intersubjectivity. Their conception of instrumentality denies the subject the capacity to act - either against or with the cultural forms of instrumentalization. Nor does their conception of psychic nature include that ingredient which supports the nurturant activity whose decline they lament - the need for recognition of self in other and other in self. Thus, in asserting that authority has become depersonalized or cultural forms reified, they neglect the fact that personal strivings toward activity and recognition continue to underlie the fetishized appearances. Were it not so, we would need not a theory of alienation but only a theory of manipulation which presupposes that the subject is infinitely malleable.

The critique of instrumental reason and of the internalization of authority as reason must, finally, be seen to address different forms of the same phenomena. The new conformity based upon an openly instrumental orientation grows out of the denial of agency and authorship to one sex as the foundation for the mastery of the other. It grows out of an ethic of self- discipline and a repudiation of the capacity to nurture and be nurtured - the mutual recognition of dependency among equals. Internalization, understood correctly as the illusion of autonomy and the control of self rather than the conditions of one's life, underlies the new forms as it did the old. This could not be appreciated fully by the critical theorists because their model of autonomy, of revolt as critical consciousness, was graven in the image of the just and moral father. For them, the father whose "responsibility for wife and children [was] so carefully nurtured by bourgeois civilization ... [whose] conscience consisted in the devotion of the ego to the substantial outside world, in the ability to take into account the true interest of others," is the father who teaches the sons to revolt.69 In this cyclical drama70 the

69. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 198. 70. Marcuse's quandary in Eros and Civilization as to how the sons never avoid reinstituting the




sons first internalize the father's principles and prohibitions, then confront him with his failure to live up to them. They legitimate their revolt by him whom they overthrow. It is difficult, then, to distinguish revolt from restoration, for the search for the good father is never-ending.

If it be true that our society has largely dispensed with the image of the father as personal, moral authority figure, our task remains the inquiry into the forms and consequences of patriarchy generalized, the spirit of instrumental culture. Rejecting the alternatives of internalized authority versus seamless conformity, we may still inquire into the impact of this culture upon the character of motherhood and domestic privacy. It is also important to consider the consequences of the possibility that the degendering and depersonalizing of authority allows members of both sexes to play the roles formerly restricted to one. This suggests not only that women can be absorbed into the mainstream of male culture and maternal nurturance weakened, but also that, eventually, men can become mothers.

And the process of change has brought forth a feminist image of revolt quite different than the model of critical consciousness based upon the father ideal, his discipline and rationality. Had Horkheimer, like others seeking in the past an image of what the future might hold, sought his image of the anti-authoritarian mother, he would probably have found a lost utopia not of male-female solidarity but of women's kinship and friendship networks, of sisterhood.71 And perhaps he would have seen the logic by which contemporary feminism has articulated an image of revolt based upon identification with others stemming from awareness of one's own suffering and oppression. The knowledge which is based upon paying attention to one's feelings and denied aspirations implies, ultimately, a different view of human nature and the civilizing process as well.

This vision was articulated by one of the first great critics of the enlightenment, Rousseau: "Philosophy isolates [the civilized man]; because of it he says in secret, at the sight of a suffering man: Perish if you will, I am safe. No longer can anything except dangers to the entire society trouble [his] sleep. ... His fellowman can be murdered with impunity right under his window; he has only. . .to argue with himself a bit to prevent nature, which revolts within him, from identifying with the man who is being assassinated

. pity is a natural sentiment. .."72 This "revolt of nature," the revulsion againt human suffering and the refusal to cause it, has been the casualty of internalization, of centuries of socialization to authority. Contrary to

father authority, based on Freud's story of the primal horde, illustrates the predicament of those who see the father principle as inescapable because inherent in our psyche. 71. See Carrol Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth Century America," Signs, 1, no. 1 (Autumn, 1975), 1-30, for an illustration of this point. 72. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men, ed. Roger Masters (New York, 1969), p. 132.




Horkheimer's view of "the revolt of nature" as the primitive aggression which came to the fore in fascism, empathy and compassion are seen as innate, immediate responses rather than the blessings of civilization. It is this image of revolt springing from mutual recognition and nurturant activity which may guide us in our struggle against instrumental rationality toward a society without the father.

Call for Papers for

Women in German Anthology/Yearbook

We are seeking Manuscripts for a Women in German Anthology/Yearbook. We would like to select from among articles based on papers delivered at various Women in German sessions in the past as well as from new material. We are also interested in translation of shorter works by women. Please send one copy of your manuscript to each:

Susan Cocalis and Kay Goodman German Dept./Herter Hall GREAL/Irvin Hall University of Massachusetts Miami University Amherst, Mass. 01002 Oxford, Ohio 45056

Deadline: September, 1978



Authority and the Family Revisited Or_ a World Without Fathers_Jessica Benjamin

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