The Franco-Frankfurt-Frankenstein’s Monster: Ludwig Klages and the Magical Foundations of Critical Theory
Philosophical dialectic springs from the impulse to overcome conceptual thinking.
—Ludwig Klages, Rhythmen und Runen, 1944
Continental philosophy’s main role in the American academy is to serve as the home for certain kinds of skepticism, particularly those directed toward stable conceptions of knowledge and meaning. Nonspecialists use the words deconstruction and critical theory to evoke critical insight, cynical wisdom, or the speaking of truth to power. Meanwhile, those of us who teach or write on poststructuralism, postmodernism, or critical theory often do so in reference to linguistic or antifoundationalist skepticism, critiques of modernity and reason, or the “Romantic counter-Enlightenment.”
In what follows, I aim to upend the commonly received view. I locate the origins of much of critical theory in the occult milieu of fin-de-siècle France and Germany, where an alternative to modernity arose that presented itself first and foremost in reference to spiritualism, paganism, Hermeticism, mysticism, and magic. Focusing on the controversial German poet and neo-pagan mystic Ludwig Klages and what he referred to as “magical philosophy” (magische philosophie), I will explore Klages’s influence on key critical theorists and in particular the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin.
At the outset, I want to make it clear that I am not trying to rehabilitate Klages as a thinker, nor am I trying to condemn critical theory by recovering its associations with European esotericism. Instead, I aim to retrieve a version of critical theory that was not primarily a critique of knowledge, but rather a vehicle to deliver esoteric wisdom. Along the way I expose the metaphysical underpinnings of poststructuralist antimetaphysics, unearth the buried ontologies of the antifoundationalists, and recoup hints of a vanished utopia that lies only half-submerged in this most dystopian of contemporary philosophical terrains.
The Cosmic Circle
The Cosmic Circle: There was no natural community that connected the three eccentrics—the blond Viking, the tanned Roman, and the dark Oriental—it was more an alliance of three individual wizards (Einzelzauberer) for the collective purpose of conjuring up the [powers] of Life.
—Friedrich Wolters, Stefan George und Die Blätter für die Kunst, 1930
The collection of Munich-based poets, mystics, and neo-pagans known as the Cosmic Circle (Kosmikerkreis, Kosmische Runde, or Kosmiker) had many similarities to other fin-de-siècle esoteric groups: they were originally led by a charismatic medium who saw spirits; they performed arcane rituals and engaged in psychical research; they celebrated a mother goddess and the pagan past; they wrote poetry and visionary tracts; they criticized their contemporary world as sick with materialism; and they read and debated with other occult thinkers. One feature that made the movement distinctive—but not unique—in the late nineteenth-century occult milieu was that they shared an intense reverence for Friedrich Nietzsche, whom they described as one of the great “pagan martyrs: whose soul fought and died for the ardor of Life.” But the crucial thing about the Kosmikers is that they followed Nietzsche by authoring an influential antiphilosophical philosophy. This occult philosophy will be our main subject, but first I will describe the particularities of their occultism.
The Cosmic Circle began to coalesce in 1893 when Ludwig Klages moved to Munich to work on a dissertation in chemistry. There, he encountered the visionary and mystic Alfred Schuler. They were soon joined by the neo-pagan German-Jewish poet and translator Karl Wolfskehl, who introduced the others to Johann Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht with its depiction of primordial matriarchy (a text whose influence on Aleister Crowley has already been examined). Schuler and Klages will be discussed in detail momentarily, but in brief, Wolfskehl was initially attempting to articulate a non-monotheistic form of Judaism that could resist the rationalization process of modernity. Klages, Schuler, and Wolfskehl formed the core of the Cosmic Circle (they are the trio of wizards referred to in racialized terms by Friedrich Wolters above); but its periphery included the mystic and writer Ludwig Derleth and the famous German poet, mystic, and prophet Stefan George. Ultimately, a personality conflict between George and Klages, combined with Wolfskehl’s increasing alienation from the group in the face of rising anti-Semitism, resulted in its disintegration in 1904.
Many of the Cosmic Circle’s particular features came from the influence of the group’s leader, Alfred Schuler (1865–1923). Born in Mainz, Schuler had moved to Munich, where he intended to study archeology before deciding that his mystical insights were more real than anything that could be discovered in dry academic writings. Schuler claimed that he was the reincarnation of a pre-Christian Roman leader and that he received clairvoyant visions and direct communications from pagan gods. Although Schuler published little during his lifetime, he became infamous for ecstatic lectures he gave about his revelations. In the most influential of these, Vom Wesen der ewigen Stadt (On the essence of the eternal city, originally 1917), Schuler shared not only his idiosyncratic understanding of paganism, but also his insights into an eternal realm of the dead (Totenreich) beyond the veil of ordinary space and time. This was Schuler’s twist on a claim common to Swedenborg and later spiritualists that there is a timeless spirit world parallel to our own.
Like other spiritualists, Schuler had his own necro-vitalism. When he peered within, he claimed to be aware of a mystical force of throbbing pure life and light. When this “telesmatic” force is connected with the general and maternal “cosmic radiance,” it results in the erotic explosion of an inner glow, or what he called the Blutleuchte (literally “blood-light”). Later Klages described this blood-light poetically as “a continuously deepening shudder, a dark strangeness, which throbs and ferments in hidden places. A wild woeful shout mixed with the crashing of storms. . . . In it the mysteries of the maternal cosmos are revealed.”As this quote illustrates, the blood-light and telesma energy was part of an effort to recover the lost power of maternal, pagan antiquity.
The Kosmikers’ neo-paganism was also partially a gesture toward sexual revolution. Schuler and George were both homosexuals, and they rejected the Christian sexual morality of their day. While not all the members of the Cosmic Circle were queer, they shared a common enemy in monogamy and the period’s restrictive gender norms. They often embraced the figure of the divine Androgyne as a countermodel to the traditional male and female binary. Hence, as a way to sacralize a new sexuality, Schuler and company promoted an eroticized pansexual paganism.
The Kosmikers saw themselves as re-enchanters, but we can be more specific about their philosophy of magic. After spending several years with the group, Countess Franziska zu Reventlow wrote Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen (Notes of Mr. Lady, 1913), a thinly fictionalized novel describing her experiences. Crucially for our purposes, she summarized the core of their project as follows:
They claim to have discovered secrets of immeasurable importance and thereby have gone so far as to achieve mastery of certain inner powers. Hence sooner or later they will be in a position to work magic (zaubern). . . . They explained it to me like this: one succeeds by means of a mystical procedure—I believe by absolute self-absorption in the primordial cosmic principle (kosmische Urprinzip). . . . When this is successful, one’s essence is completely permeated by the primordial cosmic substance, which is in itself all-powerful. Then one is made just as powerful, and those who are all-powerful can work magic (zaubern).
This passage illustrates a key point. The Kosmikers claimed access to extraordinary powers, and they explained their magic by reference to a particular vibrant ontology. Indeed, as Reventlow also noted, they saw the “cosmic” as the primordial life force or organizing principle behind being. Accordingly, cosmic magic was a communion with the lively principle in matter. New materialists should take note because put in a contemporary idiom, the Kosmikers are firstly granting nonhuman agency, or “thing-power”; and secondly, suggesting that union with this agency is the basis for magic. A host of current thinkers would grant the first, but, while a non-magical vitalism is certainly possible, it might be trickier to exclude the second because such an account of agency seems tailor-made for enchantment. Indeed, one might get the sense that the Kosmikers were working backward, adopting a particular ontology in order to justify or explain the reality of sorcery. This is even clearer in the more expansive form elaborated by the movement’s primary theoretician, Ludwig Klages.
Ludwig Klages was born into a “carefully constrained middle-class world” in Hannover in 1872. Already as a young man, Klages had dreams and visions of the “dark abysses of past eons,” but he initially ignored these interests to take a more conventional path. In 1893, he came to Munich to write a dissertation on the synthesis of menthone (completed in 1901). But he also met Schuler, who reawakened his youthful interest in poetry and esotericism. Soon Klages left chemistry behind—first for graphology and then philosophy. During the First World War, Klages was a pacifist and immigrated to Switzerland, where he wrote most of his important works. In 1932, he was awarded the Goethe Medal for Art and Science by German President Hindenburg. Although Klages was not without supporters among the Nazis, in 1936, he was publicly criticized by Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg, and the Gestapo dissolved his Leipzig research institute. Klages remained largely based in Switzerland until his death in 1956.
What is important for our purposes is that Klages attempted to render the Cosmic project into philosophy; basically, he sought to define magic in a way that—while it might not work in a philosophy department today—was thought through and fully argued. This is how he summarized it in Rhythmen und Runen (Rhythms and runes, 1944):
Magic is the practice of our philosophy and our philosophy is the theory of magic. . . . Magical philosophy (magische philosophie) works with images and symbols, and its method is the method of analogy. The most important terms it uses are: element, substance, principle, demon, cosmos, microcosm, macrocosm, essence, image, primal image, vortex, tangle, and fire. Its final formulas are spells that have magical power.
What did this magical philosophy look like? The following section will explicate.
Magical Philosophy and Disenchantment: Ludwig Klages
The philosophy of the academy is mechanistic theory, and their practice is mechanical. Magical philosophy rejects the [Aristotelian] law of identity [in favor of flux]; hence it denies unity, objects, duration, recurrence, and mathematics; it denies concepts and causality, because causality is the functional parallel to the logical correlation.
—Ludwig Klages, Rhythmen und Runen, 1944
The best way to introduce Ludwig Klages’s magical philosophy is to paint a recognizable pastiche figure so we have something to compare it to. If we threw everything we teach in American “continental philosophy” or “theory” courses into a blender, what would it look like? Put differently, I think if one were to assemble a Franco-Frankfurt-Frankenstein’s monster out of oft-taught fragments from German critical theory, French poststructuralism, a dash of feminism, and more than a hint of Heidegger, it might have the following qualities.
Despite writing philosophy, our monster would be resolutely antiphilosophy and especially antimetaphysics. It would position modernity, instrumental rationality, and enlightenment. It would challenge the value of the binary opposition between civilized and primitive. Our monster would argue that the myth of “progress” is rooted in “the domination of nature”; that science and technology are nothing less than an abuse of the natural world, an attempt to render it lifeless in order to extract energy that can be exploited to further human goals.
It would accuse us of holding on to an absurd faith in technology while nature has lost its mystery, becoming “disenchanted” and “reified.” In compensation for our alienation from the natural world, it would suggest, we have seen the rise of a meaningless cult of reason that despite its criticisms of fantasy and myth, has replaced the old myths with new cults. Our monster would characterize this process in terms of the privileging of the logos and instrumental or calculable reason, for which it would coin the term “logocentrism.”
The Franco-Frankfurt-Frankenstein’s monster would also observe that this same process of rationalization has been connected to the rise of the patriarchy. That logocentrism has been rooted in the domination of men over women and the suppression of feminine ways of knowing and being. That modern heteronormative sexuality is fragmented into artificially rigid heterosexual norms and embodies a distorted form of the universality of human love and desire. It would argue that the contemporary world is fundamentally opposed to the natural flows of desire. To round out the picture, our monster would be harshly critical of Hegel’s Geist and would draw on Nietzsche as its progenitor, while at the same time distancing its project from Nietzsche’s “will to power.” To these claims, it would add a criticism of the globalization of the modes of American capitalism (or we might say today, neoliberalism) and draw our attention to the violence of colonization. Ultimately, in opposition to logocentrism, the monster would remind us of the importance of the body. It would emphasize the primacy of writing, and call for a renewal of our connection to a vitalized nature and the unleashing of the productive force of an orgasmic or unbounded desire.
The monster I have just described might sound like I am patching together Derrida’s criticisms of logocentrism, Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of enlightenment, alongside Heidegger’s interrogation of technology and rejection of philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari’s celebration of productive desire, and Hélène Cixous’s challenge to the patriarchy and call for feminine embodiment, and perhaps even echoes of deep ecology or Jane Bennett’s new vitalism, among a dozen other fashionable philosophers. It is easy to imagine teaching this pastiche at a contemporary American college, but we would be unlikely to take it too seriously. The project just sounds excessively derivative.
But I misled you when I claimed to be presenting a mixture of other thinkers. The problem is that just such a monster once walked. As you may have guessed, I have just surreptitiously summarized the writings of Ludwig Klages. Take a moment to reread those paragraphs, because if they reflect some version of what you have been writing or teaching, you have in some sense been doing “magical philosophy.”
It should also be emphasized that Klages’s most important writings date from the 1910s and ’20s and thus preceded Horkheimer’s leadership of the Frankfurt School (1930), Heidegger’s “Question on Technology” (1954), and necessarily the birth of poststructuralism. The likeness between Klages and critical theory is unlikely to be a complete coincidence. To tip my hand a little: Adorno, Benjamin, Cassirer, Habermas, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Löwith, and Lukács; and even so-called post-structuralist thinkers Agamben, Bataille, Foucault, Guattari, Lacan, and de Man all read and cited Klages’s work. So why have more people not heard of Klages? He is found in many footnotes and is frequently referenced in works on Walter Benjamin or in the context of German irrationalism, or Lebensphilosophie, but Klages’s major monographs have never been translated into English, and he is rarely studied on his own terms.
The heart of magical philosophy’s uncanny resemblance to critical theory can be found in the critique of modernity Klages inherited from the occult milieu and subsequently elaborated. Already Alfred Schuler had described the rise of Judeo-Christian rationality producing alienation from the sacred maternal cosmos. Like some other neo-pagans, Schuler believed that Christianity and “exoteric science” had expelled the gods and severed the connection to the natural world. Moreover, he described modernity as characterized by various forms of estrangement from both the world and one’s fellows, as though a positive Gemeinschaft had been sacrificed to a dehumanizing Gesellschaft. Succinctly put, the Kosmikers, like many similar groups, characterized modernization in terms of disenchantment even as they proposed to supply the missing magic.
The core of Klages’s philosophical work was an attempt to diagnose the causes and consequences of this “disenchantment.” Tellingly, in his critique of modernity, Klages occasionally deployed the very terminology Max Weber would make famous—not just “Entzauberung,” but later even the expression “the disenchantment of the world” (die Entzauberung der Welt). Note that for Klages, this meant not a sober sociological theory but an ontological estrangement from nature and magic.
Klages’s project appears in embryonic form in his first major philosophical work, Mensch und Erde (Man and earth), originally a lecture for Free German Youth Day in 1913 and later expanded for publication. Klages opened by interrogating what he saw as the central ideology of his age: the celebration of “progress” (Fortschritt). While older civilizations often had a collective project that they were working toward, Klages thought his contemporaries merely embraced progress for its own sake. No longer in aid of any particular objective, technological advancement and cultural change had run wild and have come to mean largely the ability to remake the natural landscape, to slaughter animals, and to strip away local culture. For this reason Klages argued that the rhetoric of “progress” is really just the public face of the domination of nature and the exploitation of indigenous peoples. The heart of progress is the lust for power.
Instead of the positivistic celebration of scientific advancement and enlightenment, Klages provided a counternarrative—that of rationalization as tragedy and alienation from Mother Earth. In his version of this narrative, the ancients knew the earth to be a “living being” and that “forest and spring, boulder and grotto were filled with sacred life; from the summits of their lofty mountains blew the storm-winds of the gods.” Primitive humans were in harmony with nature, which they sought to safeguard by means of rituals and prohibitions. But then Christianity suppressed the old gods and stripped nature of animating forces. Modern Europeans, he went on to argue, see the earth instead as nothing but “an unfeeling lump of ‘dead matter.’” Thus there is nothing to stop them from plundering and polluting until all that remains is desolation.
At first pass, this might remind you of Schiller; and indeed, Klages even quoted from “The Gods of Greece” at a key moment in the speech. Klages’s narrative is like Schiller’s account, with the neo-pagan and ecological elements thrust to the fore and the criticisms of Christianity amplified. Klages argued that it is only Christendom that gave birth to the “ruthless expansive-impulse (Erweiterungsdrang) to enslave non-Christian races” and that “capitalism, along with its pioneer, science, is in actuality the fulfillment of Christianity.” Christianity had not only killed the gods and exploited nature, but it had also given the world slavery, imperialism, science, and capitalism. In sum, as a committed neo-pagan philosopher, Klages had no problem identifying Christianity as the ultimate source of alienation, but this was a position he would later nuance.
The striking feature of Klages’s project is that already in 1913, he had begun to formulate an account of phenomenological alienation. Modernity meant not just environmental exploitation, but also a new way of thinking. Klages argued,
He who imagines enriching himself—when he stomps earth’s blossoms into dust—is man as the bearer of calculating reason (rechenverständigen) and the will to appropriation, and the gods whom [modern man] has shorn from the tree of the life are the ever changing souls of the phenomenal world, from which he has separated himself.
This poetic passage would be easy to mistake for a pagan account of the loss of divinities. But Klages elaborated the theme further in his most important project, “Geist und Seele” (Mind and soul, 1916 expanded into three volumes as Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, The mind as enemy of the soul, 1929–32; hereafter GWS).
The best entrée into GWS is to see it as an inversion of the Hegelian dialectic. As any student of philosophy will remember, Hegel’s main thesis was that world history is nothing less than the self-actualization of the absolute Spirit (Geist). We might vulgarize Hegel’s narrative by describing it as an account of the dialectical history of the mind articulating itself via matter, during which the whole of the world would gradually be made to accord with reason. Hence one could read Hegel’s philosophy as the master narrative for the ideology of progress that underwrote modern technological advancement and imperialism alike.
The surprise is that in GWS, Klages largely grants Hegel’s description of world history, of Geist working itself out in the world, as mind has increasingly asserted dominance over matter, forcing it to submit to reason. As Klages put it, “The [grand] trajectory of ‘world history’ is in fact what Hegel suggested, the self-actualization of the absolute Geist, but in a destructive counterposition to life and with the foreseeable result of its extermination.” Klages reversed the Hegelian dialectic to make the narrative a travesty instead of a triumph. He saw the en-minding of the world in terms of the destruction of the natural environment, the expansion of colonialism, the disintegration of life, and the alienation from Being itself. If for Hegel the Geist was in some sense God, for Klages it is the Demiurge (or devil) that has shattered the harmony of existence.
To make sense of this, I need to place Klages’s critique of Geist in his own ontology. As he observed, the ongoing philosophical debates of his era generally presumed a Cartesian split between mind and body even as philosophers worked to resolve this dualism by granting one term or the other primacy or collapsing the two into one bimodal substance. For Klages, these debates overlooked both (1) the part of the mind that escapes conscious understanding (aka the unconscious), and (2) more important, the animating principle behind living and even nonliving things. Neither the unconscious nor this animating force fit well into the categories of body or mind. Hence Klages attempted to sidestep contemporary debates by reviving the classical triad: body, Geist (hereafter translated “mind”), and Seele (soul).
The key thing about Klages’s trinary is that the Seele is the foundation, and both body and mind emerge from the more fundamental basis of the soul. The soul for Klages is not the individual spirit or personality; nor is it some kind of eternally present shadow person. Rather, it is the fundamental force of life itself. I want to head off at the outset the most widespread misunderstanding of his project. It is often asserted in passing that Klages was a vitalist. But in GWS, Klages attacked “vitalists,” and he did so because either he thinks that they covertly see mind as a conscious organizing principle behind all matter, or because they see life force only in humans, animals, and plants. By contrast, Klages’s “soul” is not just a feature of living beings. For him, a fundamental level of the soul (Die Elementarseelen) is behind the whole of the sensible cosmos; it is rooted in the ever-proliferating, ever-changing foundation of nature itself. The whole cosmos is en-souled.
That we do not feel at one with the cosmos is evidence that we have become estranged from Being. Klages identified the source of this ontological alienation as resulting from an in-break of Geist that appears like a “wedge” inserted between body and soul, such that it has begun to “de-soul the body and disembody the soul, and in this way finally to deaden all life.” Before Geist, beings were at harmony with Being. Humans did not see themselves as separate from the natural world. We had no need to dominate or dematerialize the world with thought.
One can see Klages’s basic paganism peeking out here because he claims that prehistorical humanity was matriarchal. Women ruled the timeless world. Before the imbalance of Geist, natural humans saw nature and the cycle of life and death as a Great Mother Goddess (Die Magna Mater). That is to say, the ancients worshipped the Earth Mother. While based in an essentialized gender binary that contemporary feminism would reject, Klages was progressive for his day insofar as he was privileging the power of the feminine. The rise of the logos or Geist was therefore first and foremost a displacement of this older way of looking at the world, a kind of matricide against primordial women rulers and the earth. By objectifying and abstracting Mother Nature, humanity made her exploitation and violation inevitable.
Klages argued that at its basic level, “actuality” (Wirklichkeit) is constantly unfolding vibrancy, a stuttering, shifting chaos of activity. This is a kind of process ontology that we might associate today with thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead or Gilles Deleuze, but Klages’s reference is to Heraclitus, arguing: “Heraclitus discovered actuality, which he described with the famous phrase: Panta Rhei. Everything is flux. The flux itself is the very essence of the world; or, in other words, the world is events without a substrate.” At its most fundamental, actuality is continual flux and change. It should not be a surprise that even today European practitioners often ground their understanding of magic in similar ontologies. As Tanya Luhrmann generalized from her ethnography of magicians in 1980s London: “The idea of magic emerges naturally from a philosophy of a world in interacting flux. . . . One could forge a magical theory solely from that account of flux.”
As illustrated in the section epigraph, Klages too understood flux as the foundation of a philosophy of magic, but it was also the core of his phenomenological account of reification. As he contended: “The thought cosmos is a mechanical confusion of things; the living cosmos, on the other hand, to which our languages can only allude, cannot be conceptually grasped, for it only reveals itself in the instantaneous flash of its here and now appearance.” Klages maintained that we are all animists at heart. His evidence is the ability of poetry to capture the particularity of a specific moment: the sudden curl of a woman’s lips just before she breaks into a full smile, the dappled light of one particular May afternoon, or the ferocious beauty of an oncoming storm. As Klages would argue, these flashes of beauty are outside our rational mind and the closest we come to experiencing bare life. For that reason they are pleasurable and necessarily erotic.
The Geist, however, needs to render the world comprehensible, which means that it must abstract from the world. As Klages put it elsewhere, “The will to rational truth is the will to deactualize the world.” Accordingly, Klages described the transformation from a phenomenological “world of images” (Bilderwelt), which is the flicker of raw experiences into its fundamental opposite, a “world of objects” (Dingwelt), rooted in false abstractions (Phantoms). The world of images is mysterious and dreamlike, full of surprises, but the Geist renders the world lifeless and comprehensible, a taxidermy butterfly In his words: “Whatever is touched by the ray of Geist is instantly changed into a mere thing, a quantifiable object that is afterward connected to other objects only ‘mechanically.’” This is Klages’s version of something Marxists have long critiqued—namely, the process of reification, which, after all, literally means “thing-ification.”
To summarize, Klages argued that the thinking subject tends to objectify sense experience. The human mind creates static mental objects from the un[1]folding diversity of actuality. This is an exploitive process that transforms the living vibrant chaos of being into a world of tools or things, apprehended instrumentally and rendered functionally inanimate. We do not see the flour[1]ishing and individual character of a particular tree in a particular instant of space and time; we see a specimen of the genus Quercus, or we see a club with which we can beat our donkey into submission. Rather than being free to experience the world, we internalize the abyss of abstraction that requires that we make comprehensible objects from our sense experience. This might strike the reader as evocative of Adorno or Heidegger, but the difference is that Klages is explicit about the ontology that undergirds the critique of reification.
Finally, it is worth emphasizing that Klages’s master narrative in GWS is that a progressively hyper-potentiated mind (Geist) or quantifying reason became yoked to the domination of nature, leading to the domination of humanity, and which unchecked could lead to the potential annihilation of all life on earth.
If Klages’s narrative reminds you of Dialectic of Enlightenment with Aufklärung standing in for Geist, it is no accident, as the work cites Klages’s GWS in the footnotes. Tellingly, Horkheimer and Adorno admit that
Klages [and company] recognized the nameless stupidity which is the result of progress. But they drew the wrong conclusion. . . . The rejection of mechanization became an embellishment of industrial mass culture, which cannot do without the noble gesture. Against their will, artists reworked the lost image of the unity of body and mind for the advertising industry.
In other words, Klages and his fellows understood the problem with enlightenment, but their solution was wrong. As Horkheimer and Adorno added, “The body cannot be turned back into the envelope of the soul.”
For Adorno in particular, the problem was that the rejection of disenchantment has been commercialized, leading to everything from homeopathy to astrology. It would seem that Klages and the occultists were right to identify disenchantment as a problem, but their attempt to resupply the missing magic was doomed to failure insofar as it was trapped within the horizon of capitalism. Succinctly put, while the Frankfurt School was suspicious of magical revivals, they inherited Klages’s apocalypticism.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted THE MYTH OF DISENCHANTMENT by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm. © 2017 by The University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.