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the ideals of freedom, consent, and individualism which provided the legitimation of this social order. 'With the disappearance of the autonomous market', as hypothesized by Pollock, the critique of political economy can no longer serve as the basis for a critique of the new social formation.To put it differently, a critical social theory of state capitalism cannot be a critique of the political economy of state capitalism, for two reasons: with the disappearance of the autonomous market under a system of direct state controls, the social distribution of wealth, power, and authority becomes 'politicized'. This distribution is no longer a consequence of the laws of the market but of political directives. To analyse the social structure of state capitalism, one needs not a political economy but a political sociology. With the 'politicization' of the once autonomous market, the normative ideals and ideological foundations of liberal capitalism are also transformed. The forms of legitimation in state capitalism need to be analysed anew: with the decline of the autonomous market, the 'rule of law' also declines; liberalism is transformed into political authoritarianism and eventually into totalitarianism. 26 The core of what has come to be known as the 'critical social theory of the Frankfurt School' in the English-speaking world since the late 1960s is this analysis of the transformation of liberal nineteenthcentury capitalism into mass democracies on the one hand and totalitarian formations of the national socialist sort on the other. Between 1939 and 1947, members of the Frankfurt School devoted themselves to analysing the economic, social, political, psychological, and philosophical consequences of this shift. While Pollock's work centred around political economy, Franz Neumann 27 and Otto Kirchheimer 28 concentrated on political sociology and political theory; Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse focused on developing the sociological, psychological, and philosophical consequences of this transformation. 29 [. . .]Although differences exist in this period between Marcuse on the one hand and Horkheimer and Adorno on the other, concerning the appropriate political-economic definition of National Socialism, 30 the following describes the implicit sociological model which all three utiflize:
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• liberal capitalism and free market competition is correlated with the liberal state, patriarchal bourgeois family, rebellious personality type, or strong superego; |
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• state capitalism ( Adorno and Horkheimer) or monopoly capitalism ( Marcuse) is correlated with the Fascist state, authoritarian family, and authoritarian personality type; |
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