König argued utopian criticism of capitalism itself degenerates into violence and terror.

Evidence

The concept of criticism being used here needs to be examined, however. It cannot be merely a matter of denouncing' one aspect or another of the capitalist economic system, for example, or of measuring a given reality against a vague concept. Sorel has already shown that this method of utopian attack itself ultimately leads to absolute violence and terror when it is put into practice; forto quote Geiger againtoday’s rebel is tomorrow’s possible dictator’. There is also a crypto-totalitarian critique of totalitarianism, which appears most strongly in the cultural criticism inspired by Marx. By contrast, the critique of power, as Geiger sees it, develops along entirely different lines, namely through the empirical social sciences, which measure the ideological pretensions of dictators against reality and thus work towards genuine `enlightenment’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2405

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines König’s (via Geiger) distinction between ‘utopian attack’ critique, which collapses into terror, and empirical ‘critique of power’ which enlightens.
• XREF: Geiger’s claim that ‘today’s rebel is tomorrow’s possible dictator’ resonates with Zamyatin’s We and the revolutionary-to-tyrant arc.