In Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel The Corrections, Chip Lambert liquidates his library. He sells off his collection of Frankfurt School books, as well as “his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers” in order to raise money to impress a new girlfriend.
Parting with his Frankfurt School books, in particular, though, proves a painful business. “He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each one of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society… But Jürgen Habermas didn’t have Julia’s long, cool, pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didn’t have Julia’s grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn’t have Julia’s artful tongue.”
The Frankfurt School – those (mostly) dead German Jews who thought and wrote during the Weimar republic, the Third Reich and the cold war – seemed irrelevant to Franzen’s hero in the new millennium. The critiques of capitalist society developed by Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and others seemed old hat or at best sophomoric.
And so, Lambert, the former lecturer on phallic anxiety in Tudor drama, adapts to the inevitable and trades in his $4,000 library for $65. He puts the proceeds towards “wild Norwegian salmon, line caught” for $78.40 at an upmarket grocery called the Nightmare of Consumption. This is the 1990s, a time, Franzen seemed to suggest, of a consumerism so brazen that it was advantageous, brand-wise, for high-end grocers to appropriate ironically the rhetoric of capitalist critique for their stores’ names.
It was also a decade in which the nightmare of the Frankfurt School came true. There was, as Margaret Thatcher put it, no alternative. No alternative to capitalism, to what Marcuse called one-dimensional society, to liberal democracy.
As if to clinch that point, in the 1990s the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama decided to erase a question mark. In 1989, he had written a paper called “The End of History?”, arguing that there can be no new stage beyond liberal democracy because it is that system which guarantees the greatest possible level of recognition of the individual. Three years later, when Fukuyama published his book The End of History and the Last Man, the question mark had gone. He may have smuggled a neoconservative agenda into his post-ideological thesis, but Fukuyama’s suggestion that the great ideological battles between east and west were over, and that western liberal democracy had triumphed, seemed incontestable.
All that remained was an eternity of what sounded very much like boredom: “The end of history will be a very sad time,” Fukuyama wrote. “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” Perhaps the prospect of that boredom, Fukuyama mused, might restart history.