A Review of Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory (London: Verso, 2024).

The legacy of the Frankfurt School has never ceased to be contentious on the Left. For many, Adorno and company’s transdisciplinary incorporation of psychoanalysis and cultural theory was a necessary corrective to orthodox Marxist economism and determinism. This is especially vital to understanding why, in lieu of socialism, many in the twentieth century working and middle classes chose fascist barbarism. For others, the Frankfurt school constituted a retreat into intellectual elitism and even idealist insularity. Many agree with Domenico Losurdo’s claim in Western Marxism that there is a pronounced “element of regression in Horkheimer and Adorno”, who take the rather idealist step of locating the origins of fascism in the dialectic of Western reason rather than in the vast array of racist genocides and imperialism directed towards the non-Western world. To the critics, the Frankfurt school presented as left-wing radicals only to arrive at the very reactionary conclusion that the biggest symptoms of cultural decline were the Beatles and jazz music. 

This debate has gone to and fro for a long time. The ascent of Trumpism and other far right movements has rejuvenated serious interest in fascism, which has perhaps inevitably rejuvenated the “pro” wing of the Frankfurt School debate. References to their work abound as the left and even centrist commentariat comes to terms with a felon becoming an icon to authoritarian Christian nationalists and vulgar Nietzscheans alike. 

The publication of Gillian Rose’s seminal 1979 lectures on Frankfurt School critical theory is thus both well timed and likely to find a receptive audience. Rose was an accomplished and original thinker in her own right, and one might expect that this will read less like an introduction and more like a fusion. One formidable intellectual creatively and dialogically engaging with others. But while the lectures undeniably bear the stamp of Rose’s interpretation, much of them read as straightforward exercises in pedagogy by a young and emerging philosopher. This makes Marxist Modernism easy to recommend as both a reasonable entry point into Frankfurt School critical theory and Rose’s own oeuvre.

Defending a Critique of Critical Criticism 

Debates persist over who gets included in the Frankfurt School and who was a fellow traveller or influence. Rose notes that technically it refers to a “group of Marxist philosophers, economists, political theorists, critics, and artists who were members of the Institute for Social Research.” But her discussion also includes figures who were never members, but have become widely associated with critical theory, like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch. At points her readings veer too heavily into stressing the integration of all these figures, which can sometimes convey a sense of insularity and even score settling that seems unwarranted. For instance, Rose strongly foregrounds the influence of Lukács on the school, introducing “four important ideas in History and Class Consciousness on which you could say the whole tradition of the Frankfurt School is based.” When discussing the seminal socialist theologian Ernst Bloch’s 1930s work such as Heritage of Our Times, Rose credits his development of “multi-level dialectics” to “polemical criticism of Lukács, whose dialectics [Bloch] considered to be unilinear and monolithic.” 

True as this may be, the over-emphasis on integration and cross-pollinating criticism occasionally risks construing the Frankfurt School as more of a scholastic enterprise than it was. One can of course criticize the Frankfurt theorists for being too distant from praxis. But that is different from presenting them as hermetic theorists. These were, after all, thinkers whose work was profoundly shaped by the material events around them and who were as willing to polemicize against Heidegger or Nietzsche as each other. Beyond exegesis, this is important in negating the bad reputation left intellectuals have of shooting inwards at each other rather than outwards at the real targets. In many ways the resurging interest in the Frankfurt School owes much to their strengths not just as cultural analysts, but their capacity to respond in depth to the most cogent thinkers on the Right. This was pioneering in many respects, and as more writers on the Left resume this task, it is likely to become more influential.

On Illusion and Disillusion  

Beyond this slight criticism, Rose’s readings are always thoughtful, invigorating, and clear. Her written work has a reputation for being difficult, but the lectures are exploratory, focused, and lucid. Rose does a tremendous job explicating the importance of Lukács’ emphasis on reification, doing much to remind us why History and Class Consciousness generated so much excitement and why it was in many respects a breakthrough in not just Marxist thought, but social philosophy more generally.

Marx is not saying, for example, that the illusions that arise out of commodity fetishism are wrong: he is saying that those illusions are necessary and real, but nevertheless they are illusions. This is what the Frankfurt School from Lukacs onwards called ‘reification’-a term which Marx himself did not use, although for various reasons it has become associated with Marx himself. In fact, their adoption of this notion of reification gave different members of the Frankfurt School enormous liberty to interpret Marx differently.

Rose emphasizes the conceptual importance of reification for understanding the cultural turn undertaken by the Frankfurt school. This provides a key to grasping why the seemingly Hegelian and idealist turn to culture still moves in the orbit of Marxism. Rose notes how “by generalising Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Lukács was able to show that the dominant forces are not only economic and political, but [...]that the cultural is also political. Another word that is used to describe this is ‘cultural politics.’” Her description is clarifying and succinct, though I would go even further in affirming the generative implications. 

Since the pre-Socratics, Western philosophers have contemplated the distinctions between illusion, representation as correspondence, and reality. In a somewhat Nietzschean vein, we can say that since at least Socrates, “truth” has been ascribed not just epistemological but moral and aesthetic value. The role of philosophers has often been framed as combating the vulgarities of common sense dogmas; whether framed as doxa, heteronomy, conventional wisdom or the shadows on the cave wall. And yet many philosophers have been profoundly disappointed at the inability of rational argumentation, however carefully and even poetically presented, to break the crust of illusions that have gripped the masses and awaken them to the beauties of truth. Not coincidentally, this has also led philosophers as different as Plato and Nietzsche to declare the “herd” fundamentally ineducable. They failed to recognize the extent to which philosophical problems lay in deprioritizing philosophers and philosophy. And instead recognizing the importance of the broader lifeworld we all share.

What makes Marxism distinct is the recognition that many dimensions of epistemology have a fundamentally social dimension. When Marx declared that the philosophers had hitherto only interpreted the world, when the point was to change it, that was not just a call to action. Marx recognized that many of the “illusions” that ordinary people experienced were not the accidental result of some kind of cognitive limitation or mistake. Instead, as Lukács argued, the reification projected onto the world was the result of social forces. Moreover, they were maintained because the phenomenological illusions produced by reification were not simply illusions so long as they played a role in actual praxis. Commodity fetishism is a good example. A person who buys a Gucci bag isn’t wrong that she will be treated differently when carrying it around. She’s also probably well-aware that the bag itself is just a collection of relatively cheap materials more valuable for its social prestige than material function. But the prestige of having Gucci products is real; people aren’t wrong to buy them assuming people will treat them differently for having brand labels. And the prestige will remain real so long as the illusion of glamor continues to be ascribed to them by society. 

One needs to recognize the contingent social necessity of illusion to take a core step to eliminating it. An appeal to facts and reason will not lead people to escape reification. Illusions must be dissolved rather than condemned. To dissolve them the social relations that give rise to them must be replaced by social relations that ideally produce fewer, or at least less pathologically damaging, illusions. 

This is not to suggest that Marxism provides the answer to major epistemic and ontological problems of an asocial nature; the way, say, Engels seems to have supposed in texts like Dialectics of Nature . It’s not clear to me, for instance, that either the Frankfurt School or Marx has much to offer to a general philosophy of mind. Or that much turns for Marx and Marxism on whether scientific reductionist or dualist approaches to mind turn out to be vindicated as some appear to think. Marxism is a social and historical philosophy first and foremost, and many of the riddles posed at that level can be usefully approached through the idea of reification. 

Once More on the Far Right

Much of Rose’s lectures are taken up by explaining and generously evaluating the aesthetic arguments of the Frankfurt School, especially on the nature of fascist art. This had multiple dialectical dimensions, with the philosophers variously arguing that contemporary art reflected fascist impulses, contributed to its rise, counteracted the spread of irrationalism, or some combination thereof. This had special urgency during a time of high political drama and genocidal violence. During a 1922 speech in Naples, Mussolini declared that the fascists had 

created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything else.

Here we see a very good example of self-conscious reification; projecting into “existence” the fascist ultranation as a source of meaning and demanding all persons (and moral limitations as it turns out) be subordinated to it. Mussolini even acknowledges that it is not necessary for this reification to “be a reality” so long as it edifies. Facts very much care about right-wing feelings, as it turns out. 

Rose notes how Lukács’ antidote to this fascist irrationalism was to insist on socialist realism, perhaps to excess. For Lukács, romantic art’s focus on subjectivity dissociated the individual from their actual embeddedness in the material world and was thus inherently a road to irrationalism. This is one of the reasons he was deeply hostile to expressionism; by contrast, realist authors like Balzac were inoculated against the temptation. 

Rose largely doesn’t sympathize with Lukács’ perspective, contrasting Lukács with Bloch, for whom the failure of the orthodox Marxist Left to incorporate subjectivity into its dialectics as part of the real world was not just a philosophical failure; it resulted also from ceding the terrain of emotion and meaning to the Right. Rose notes that “Bloch was one of the only Marxists who took seriously the power of fascism as a cultural synthesis. It was…the young, the peasantry, the petit bourgeoise with their specific grievances, that fascism had appealed to. Fascism, unlike the left, had been able to appeal to the regressive and repressed forms in which the grievances of these groups expressed themselves.” Rose notes that this enabled fascists to obtain a… 

…Monopoly of appeal to the mystical and romantic anti-capitalism of these three classes. It had channeled the merely archaic and irrational aspects of their experience, while the left had neglected what Bloch wanted to call ‘revolutionary fantasy.’ The left had seen fascist ideology as a mere form of deception, instead of decoding it as a form of wish-fulfilment. Fascism-which would over any sort of reactionary political movement or ideology-according to Bloch, represents a distorted and inverted hope, what he called a ‘swindle of fulfilment.’ 

Rose indicates that Lukács and Bloch both raise salient points, though if she had to choose she would “take Bloch’s view of history and art as the more open-minded and flexible, as the more likely to produce an effective and non-authoritarian cultural politics.” I think this is exactly right. Dialectical materialism should not be reductive materialism. Or to put it in G.A Cohen’s idiom, we need a “restrictive” rather than “inclusive” dialectical materialism that either incorporates or respects the free-standing existence of subjective experience. Politically this means being more flexible than Lukács in recognizing that the yearning for meaning is powerful enough to induce even self-conscious forms of reification à la Mussolini. This can be ameliorated through a praxis that brings about a less alienated society, but I suspect the existential angst induced by the human condition will mean that some form of myth-making will always serve as the heart of a heartless world. Rather than cede that ground to the Right, let alone chastising the masses for their irrationalism, a process of socialist rationalization must involve offering a sense of hope and vision chastened by intellectual honesty. 

Saying that, this must always be tempered by a realization that things can go too far. One figure missing from Rose’s book is Erich Fromm. This is a pity, since his work offers some of the most psychologically acute analyses of the appeals of fascism and how to counter it through an appeal to love, freedom, and equality. But Fromm could be as deeply critical as anyone, and would likely caution against misinterpreting the fascist project of wish fulfillment. It is undeniably true that fascism, and much of the contemporary Right, is rooted in a strange form of ressentiment and associated fantasies—namely that of a self-understood superior who feels dispossessed of his rank and power by those he considers inferior and their allies. It is this outlook which is the source of the combined rhetorics of victimization and elitism that characterizes much right-wing rhetoric. At it is appealing. After all who would rather not live in the fantasy of being a dispossessed superior enjoying the self-pity of victimization over the reality of being another, equal material being? The “wish fulfillment” associated with this is of course vengeance and agonism; as one petty commentator put it, voting for Trump was the “only middle finger” available to stick it to their enemies. Progressive politics should never try to play at this level, even if there might be electoral harvests to reap from fostering feelings of resentment and disdain for genuinely threatening sources of power rather than Haitian refugees and their children.

Rose’s Marxist Modernism is not a major work, even if she is undoubtedly a major philosopher. The thinking is young, though not juvenile, cautious but not tentative. One can see her very much staying close to the thinking of the Frankfurt theorists, even as it’s obvious the intention was to use them to springboard into fresh innovations. But this is the charm of the lectures, not a defect. Rather than being a lost opus of Rose’s, the 1970s lectures come across as a succinct and generous guide to Frankfurt School critical theory that demonstrates its relevance in 2025. I found myself constantly provoked to sharpen my thinking and feeling about many of the core issues discussed. It must have been a hell of a class to sit through.    

Matt McManus is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan and the author of The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism amongst other books.