On Michael J. Thompson’s Twilight of the Self

Michael J. Thompson’s Twilight of the Self is a highly sophisticated theoretical analysis of the present day, deeply informed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Thompson reawakens the antecedents and the legacies of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and updates them for the twenty-first century. The book demands much of its reader, and at the same time, offers several trenchant insights. It presumes familiarity with Western philosophy, beginning with Plato and Aristotle for whom the “good life” was rational contemplation and civic involvement. Thompson argues that the enfeebled, atrophied, colonized self of today has internalized the dominant reified norms, values, and logic of contemporary capitalism—what he terms “cybernetic society”—and enacts its standardized routines of work, leisure, and even religion. Echoing C. Wright Mills’s call for a sociological imagination, Thompson insists the contemporary self has little understanding of society or of how its own subjectivity has been shaped, especially in ways that alienate the individual, stifle autonomy and creativity, fragment community, and reproduce domination. Bereft of critical reason and devoid of intentionality, the self is rendered incapable of envisioning alternatives to the system that benefits the few.

Touching on Spinoza, Rousseau, and—above all—German idealism (primarily Kant and Hegel), Thompson then turns to Marx and Lukács, who were among the major influences on the early Frankfurt school, especially Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, and Marcuse. The relevance of this intellectual inheritance today is often obscured by later developments within the Frankfurt School, that gradually “domesticated” critical theory—moving it away from an emancipatory theory rooted in Marxist critique toward a more “acceptable” and uncritical philosophical perspective. At the same time, various post-structuralist and postmodern approaches, popular among cultural theorists and identitarian movements, have further distracted from the critical perspective demanded by our times. Nevertheless, many of the early Frankfurt insights into instrumental reason, the reification of consciousness, the erosion of paternal authority, the authoritarian drift towards fascism, and the colonization of consciousness by the “culture industries require reexamination.

Perhaps the most fitting starting point for Twilight of the Self is with Hegel, especially his writings on alienation, the struggle for recognition between Lord and bondsman, the “unhappy consciousness” and dialectical movement of Spirit, the collective Geist, moving through history in various stages, impelled by negation and its overcoming, culminating in a telos of freedom and Absolute Knowledge. The alienation of consciousness was an essential concern of Hegel’s epistemology, ontology, and perhaps ethics. Critical Theory’s indebtedness to Hegel can be traced through Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts (Fromm and Marcuse were among the first readers), The German Ideology, and Kapital. In these works, the commodity plays a central role in deconstructing capitalism. How so? “Abstract labor”—wages paid to workers producing commodities for the capitalist class to be sold in the “free” market—becomes the fundamental basis of (surplus) value, class differences, and class domination. The understanding of that social relationship—based on property ownership and class conflict—is obscured by ideology, which, like a camera obscura, “turns things upside down,” legitimating the social order and systematically obscuring the fundamental nature of “normalized” private property, capitalism, and commodity production to secure “consent”. It is not by accident that Marx began Kapital with the critique of the commodity or more specifically, “commodity fetishism”, in which the commodity, qua appearance, embodied the alienated human labor that produced it yet the underlying social relationship was rendered invisible.

But Marx was writing primarily in the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century capitalism had been radically transformed by mass production. What became especially important however, was the general rationalization of society. As Weber pointed out, rationality, calculability, and predictability had already been essential to the rise of capitalism, enabling the development of corporations, meritocratic/hierarchical organization, and double-entry bookkeeping to track costs and profits. Drawing upon both Marx and Weber, Lukács’ critique of reification of consciousness becomes central to Thompson’s analysis of the atrophied self of today—at cognitive, evaluative, and affective levels.

With the rise of the Enlightenment, came “civil society,” the realm of interaction apart from kinship, and its “public spheres,” inaugurated as an emancipatory moment based on freedom from the Church and dynastic rule. The historical movement toward freedom that informed Critical Theory, dialectically fosters its own negation. Eventually, following the explosion of bureaucratic government and industrial capital the Enlightenment itself, extolling “freedom” of the marketplace along with Instrumental Reason, became a new form of domination and dehumanization as people became entrapped in the “cage of reason” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1947). Moreover, by the early twentieth century, Freudian psychoanalysis with its views on character, desire, defense and consciousness were incorporated into the perspective of the Frankfurt school, with authoritarianism understood as a particular kind of social character, and/or response to crises. Finally, between advances in printing, photography, film, radio, we saw the beginning of what would later be considered the “culture industries.” It was at this point in the late 20s, that a group of Hegelian Marxist scholars founded the Institute for Social Research, and attempted to update Marxist theory from its official “economism” by including cultural and psychological factors. Given the social context of the time, namely the psychological allure of fascist movements, authoritarianism was seen as a palliative response to capitalist crises (Fromm 1941; Adorno,1950).

Twilight of the Self revisits and updates several themes of the early Frankfurt School to provide a critical, emancipatory, interdisciplinary theory of the present age. In the process, Thompson also criticizes the later Frankfurt School trajectory away from its critical roots toward a more “acceptable” liberal bourgeois perspective—beginning with the later Habermas, whose “chatterbox” theory of society focuses on discourse abandoning both political economy and the underlying psychodynamics of character. Axel Honneth and his students have moved even further in this direction. In its latest iteration, Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance—communing with the trees outside Heidegger’s hut—hardly qualifies as a theory at all. Similarly, Thompson finds post-structuralism, especially the work of Foucault, irrelevant to his critique. For Thompson, the power of contemporary capitalism is not diffuse, but part and parcel of “cybernetic society” that fosters compliant, powerless subjects dominated by a power invisible to them that benefits the few.

Twilight of the Self is difficult to summarize briefly, but revisiting many of the central themes of the early Frankfurt school covers some of the major points. Thompson incorporates Weber’s analysis of rationalization—the domination of Instrumental Reason, routinization, and calculation—showing how these processes demystify the world. As Lukács shows, the reification of consciousness insinuates bourgeois logic, in which contemporary expressions of “false consciousness” thwart class consciousness and ultimately, genuine freedom and autonomy. At the same time, a decline in paternal power and associated “ego weakness” leads to the internalization and acceptance of alienation, false consciousness, and domination. Thompson’s argument, if his complex analysis can be abridged, is that contemporary capitalism—or “cybernetic society”—is a globalized, digitalized system, legitimated by neoliberalism, with almost total control of the socialization of character by a variety of interconnected institutions. These institutions—including the modern family, and mass media (especially online “communities” like Facebook or X)—collectively shape socialization and character development and have “displaced the organic forms of community and mechanical forms of solidarity and replaces them with an ideology rooted in efficiency, control and confirmed socialization” (p. 22). The result is attenuated subjectivity: “the subsumption of self becomes incorporated into the self-regulating matrix of social norms and practices that erode critical autonomy,”  both cognitively and emotionally, limiting the capacity for intentionality and a proper understanding of the social structures and processes benefiting an affluent minority (p. 23). A seamless web linking political, economic, technological, and cultural spheres privileges administrative rationality—the context in which meanings, values, and subjectivity now form—securing power and profits for an elite while producing cultural, economic, and psychic disadvantages for the rest. By valorizing control and hierarchical organization devoid of ethical values, the cybernetic society erodes autonomous, critical selfhood. The internalized norms that enforce conformity, consumerism, superficiality, and social emptiness serve to consolidate the wealth of capitalist elites.

One of the most important aspects of Thompson’s argument is his insistence on “bringing alienation back in”. He treats alienation as a crucial concept for the critique of capitalism—one obscured by methodological positivism (which often reduces alienation to a measurable individual trait rather than an intrinsic aspect of capitalism) and dismissed by postmodernism as a component of a “grand narrative.” Rooted in Hegel and embraced by Marx, alienation names the objectification and estrangement of workers from raw materials and tools they did not own and from labor processes that they did not control. By such alienation workers were rendered powerless and dehumanized within fragmented, atomistic communities—estranged from their unique human potentials and their fundamental human nature as “species beings.” In a rationalized, demystified society—the “iron cage”—alienation migrated from the factory floors of industry to the many bureaucracies within social life, where reified work processes foster mindless conformity. As Erich Fromm put it, once people feared becoming slaves, now they were becoming robots serving to reproduce social order and deaden critical thought in a process of “automaton conformity.” “The institutions and values of the society become intuitive [to the] individual who comes to see his or her world as self-justified and lacking any need for moral reflection” (p. 132). With the almost complete loss of ethical autonomy, this atrophied moral cognition reproduces conditions benefiting only a few.

Building on this analysis, Thompson describes contemporary alienation as a “pathology of self-consciousness and agency.” He argues that the ideological consequence of contemporary alienation is a disposition toward “false consciousness”. Yet he’s careful in distancing this from the crude Second Internationale view in which the elites of a vanguard party alone possess the “truths” hidden by ideology and demand uncritical acceptance of its “official” views. Rather, the institutional norms of “cybernetic society” socialize actors into limited cognitive and epistemic capacities, naturalizing the world and rendering power relationships opaque. As Lukács noted, it is not just the contents of consciousness, but the very ways and styles of thinking, qua routinization and reification that reproduce capitalist domination and produce an “uncritical compliance” that is the essence of irrationality. False consciousness is thus not simply the coercive power of structures, nor a form of individual pathology, but a dialectical interaction culminating in the “incapacity to distinguish essence from appearance.” Gramsci observed that, “awareness and criticism can only begin once individuals have abandoned ways of thinking” that keep them from understanding the objective world by embracing schemas and concepts fostered by institutions, especially, the ideological institutions from families to schools to media and “national populars.”

For Thompson, the result of alienation and the embrace of false consciousness is compliance to the system and the erasure of autonomous critical thought. Thinkers as different as Weber and Gramsci have long pointed out how consent, arising from within, is far more effective for domination than coercion, which merely forces a choice under threat. Compliance renders submission to domination invisible as “common sense,” producing what Gramsci called “willing assent.” Crucially for Thompson’s analysis of compliance, it is not only erroneous ideas that matter but the socialization and internalization of norms and values that shape cognition and emotional dispositions alike. While Gramsci understood how hegemonic discourses constructed, normalized, and naturalized the system, he neglected to chart the extent to which the normalization of the status quo was the systematic consequence of the socialization of the subject by agents and institutions that were part of the power structure. Again, as Erich Fromm put it, people become socialized to “want to do that which the political economy requires them to do.”

The early post-Enlightenment stages of capitalism—though emancipating society from the domination of church and dynastic rule—still allowed space for autonomy and critiques of Enlightenment impulses towards “robust individuality … and democratic citizenship.” This helped shape the bourgeois public spheres that did “envision a better world,” as well as spaces for aesthetic creativity. However, that space narrowed with industrialized mass production and its norms of rationality, efficiency, calculability, and predictability, together with new systems of hierarchy and instrumental logics of control. Thompson’s  “cybernetic society” is a fundamentally different iteration of capitalism, legitimated by globalized neoliberalism—a shift from the production of material commodities to financialization for the elites and, for the masses, privatized hedonism through consumption, valorization of “having over being”, and the proliferation of mass consumption and mass media (Fromm). The ultimate consequence has been the intertwining of reification, routinization, alienation, and false consciousness within socialization. The “withering [constriction] of the self and regression of the ego,” result in a loss of the capacity for self-governing and critical examination of the structures of social domination. This, in turn, thwarts the intentionality that might otherwise expose or challenge the more invisible structures and processes of contemporary power. One consequence is the bifurcation of relationships into those that are exploitative versus those that are mutually enhancing. Too often relationships today are based on some form of instrumental advantage. The predominance of such relationships undermines any commitment to the “public good”—especially at the cost of personal sacrifice. Contemporary anxiety fosters a compensatory “malignant group narcissism,” deepening atomization and further weakening the possibility of collective critique. In his discussions of theorists from Hegel to Kohut to Sennett, Thompson develops an ontology of the social commitment to genuine democracy that has been undermined by cybernetic society.

Is this a hopeless predicament? While on the one hand, Thompson’s analysis appears a bit pessimistic, he resists the assumption of an “over socialized” view of character. Instead, he suggests that the erosion of meaningful social relationships has produced an “under socialized” character—solitary, often lonely narcissists seeking personal advantages and  gratification while dialectically undermining the capacity for meaningful social connection, self-awareness, fulfillment, and critical autonomy. What, then, is to be done? Thompson concludes with a very strong appeal to “regenerate the individual, and value autonomy as critical agency as an antidote to the many adversities of cybernetic society.” What is needed is a new form of reason that can challenge reification and cultivate the self-awareness to perceive, understand, and critique the contemporary norms, practices, and systems of domination that obstruct autonomous self-determination. Genuine self-fulfillment and a society oriented around the common good, he insists, depend upon “autonomy as critical agency—as a cloud able to resist and questions the ends and purposes inscribed in our reality and permeate our inner world well the same time reclaiming the capacity to deposit new engine purposes to become genuine authors of new values and forms of meaning in the world.” (p 231). Importantly, however, Thompson does not embrace any form of unfettered, “monadic” individualism. Drawing on Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lukács, as well as contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives, he emphasizes that human beings are social creatures whose fundamental ontology is geared toward “the kinds of reason utilized in one’s reflection about self and world to overcome the alienated and reified structures of self and world offered by the systems of domination (p. 231).

Here I begin to question the analysis, which in some ways seems closer to that of Adorno and Horkheimer, rather than a more optimistic vision of a postcapitalist society dependent on the prefigurative emergence of a new form of social character suggested by Fromm, the Marcuse’s “new sensibility,” or Block’s utopianism. There is, of course, no question that a transformation of consciousness, requiring a degree of openness, is sine qua non for progressive social change. Indeed, such a vision was already prefigured in Hegel’s notion of Spirit (Geist) moving through history, impelled by negation and the negation of negation, culminating in freedom and Absolute Knowledge. Marx accepted Hegel’s dialectical perspective, but grounded it in material conditions, envisioning that a revolutionary proletariat class facing exploitation, alienation, precarity, and poverty would gain an awareness of the structural basis of its immiseration and move from a class in itself, to a class for itself. This did not occur, for many reasons: nationalism, rights of citizenship and political participation, improvements in wages and benefits, as well as consumerism in which privatized hedonism obscured the collective good. As Fromm put it, having consumer goods would become more gratifying to elites in the short run than being fully human. Thompson is absolutely right about the necessity of a transformation of consciousness, but what follows? History suggests that educating, organizing, and mobilizing groups becomes a way of realizing social changes that may be progressive or indeed reactionary. This has traditionally been the role of the public sphere which for Habermas has been a place “undistorted communication”—a seedbed for various ideas which ultimately became a political force. Historically, this change has been spearheaded by organizations like labor unions or political parties, but today, much of the organizing, mobilizing, and direct action consists of youth-led, bottom-up, grassroots—think of Greenpeace, #Me too, BLM, Slut Walk, Earth Justice, and Greta Thunberg. In reaction to the general shift toward the authoritarian right, young people have also flocked to a variety of political organizations like Our Revolution or the Democratic Socialists of America which  has recently quintupled its membership, noting that the average age of its members has plummeted to 33 years old. Karl Mannheim’s insight into generations helps explain why: coming-of-age under neoliberal precarity, many Gen Z college graduates experience the crunch personally—low pay, student loan indebtedness, and a return to a parental home—predisposing them toward more progressive orientations. Their politics aren’t gleaned from reading Kapital or the Grundrisse, but rather felt adversities among themselves, friends, and families. Here Fromm’s concept of “dynamic character change,” suggesting that one’s character is not fully formed but can continually change and adapt as society changes comes into play. If we locate these progressive social movements, as the driving force of Geist moving through history, impelled by contradiction and resolution, the youth voters of today will become the dominant generations of tomorrow and carry with them progressive skills as well as organizing experience. Thus, while older voters are generally more conservative and resistant, if not recalcitrant to efforts to change society, the younger generations have personally experienced the adversities of globalization and will seek major transformation. While “generation” as a concept never captures everyone, large shares of Gen Z prefer socialism to capitalism and reject the binaries and prejudices. Research on social movements shows  that strong supporters of certain causes undergo lasting shifts in consciousness that shape future political commitments.

Twilight of the Self is a major book whose erudition and scope should have a considerable impact, not just for Critical Theory, but also for political theory in general and debates over norms, including Thompson’s engagements with figures like Rawls. Thompson’s analysis of the internalization of rationality and reification within a disempowered subjectivity—lacking awareness and understanding of the dominant social order, yet viewing it as “normal and natural”—adds a crucial psychological dimension to Gramsci’s account of hegemony: why it is embraced and how it can be challenged by organic intellectuals. His discussions of epistemology and ontology likewise warrant serious consideration.