The Frankfurt School rejected the totalitarianism-versus-pluralism dichotomy as a false polarity

Evidence

Nor had political democracy in its representative form been the Institut’s final goal. Yet The Authoritarian Personality gave little evidence of the traditional Marxist critique of “bourgeois democracy,” which had informed the Institut’s earlier work. There was a further irony in Shils’s claim that the old left-right dichotomy had been outmoded. As we have already noted, Horkheimer stressed the necessity of unmasking domination in any political form, whether fascist, ostensibly socialist, or otherwise. From its first years in Frankfurt the Institut had been skeptical about the Soviet experiment. With time, skepticism had turned to outright disillusionment. As Pollock had argued, the Soviet Union was no more than a state capitalist system with little to distinguish itself from similar systems in the West. The key difference with Shils and other American thinkers was that the Institut refused to contrast totalitarianism to an individualist, libertarian, nonideological pluralism as a polar opposite. As we have seen in looking at its treatment of mass culture in the West, the Institut saw domination working in new and subtle ways to destroy the vestiges of true individuality behind a facade of diversity. Dialectic of the Enlightenment extended its gloomy analysis of current trends to all modernized societies. Thus, in a way, the Frankfurt School agreed that the left-right dichotomy, at least as it was embodied in actual political structures, was no longer relevant. Where it did disagree, of course, was on the level of theory, where its sympathies remained basically the same as before. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 755

Categorization

• XREF: The refusal to oppose totalitarianism to liberal pluralism connects to critiques of Cold War binary thinking, and to the reader’s other sources on ideology critique (Communication as Culture, Milgrom on institutions). — connects to: The Frankfurt School saw Enlightenment’s collapse into totalitarianism as latent in its own reason — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 342; The Frankfurt School critiqued both Stalinism and Western capitalism in equal measure — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 685; The Frankfurt School publicly declared its philosophy incompatible with Soviet doctrine. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1739
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does ‘state capitalism’ as Pollock’s label for the USSR later get recuperated by and differ from Neumann’s competing ‘totalitarian monopoly capitalism’ thesis covered earlier?

Broader Connections

• The Frankfurt School saw Enlightenment’s collapse into totalitarianism as latent in its own reason #expands (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 342
• The Frankfurt School critiqued both Stalinism and Western capitalism in equal measure #expands (0.78) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 685