Frankfurt School

FRANKFURT SCHOOL

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FRANKFURT SCHOOL. Although founded in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923, the Institute for Social Re-search (or Frankfurt School) established itself at Columbia University in New York City in 1934 in response to the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. The Frankfurt School's principal members included the institute's director Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and Herbert Marcuse. The institute reestablished itself in Frankfurt in the early 1950s, though several of its members—including Fromm, Lowenthal, and Marcuse—remained in the United States.

The diverse intellectual contributions of the Frankfurt School were linked by a common attempt to develop what they called "critical theory." Critical theory was an ambitious attempt to understand modern society through an interdisciplinary approach integrating philosophy, political economy, history, psychoanalysis, sociology, and cultural theory. Frankfurt School members were revisionist Marxists who sought both to understand society and to make it more rational and just. However, with the rise of fascism and Stalinism, they became increasingly disillusioned with the prospects for progressive social change. Thus, for the Frankfurt School, critical theory represented an intellectual challenge to the social order when a political one failed to materialize.

At the heart of critical theory was a trenchant critique of the modern "totally administered society." The Frankfurt School's analysis of fascism stressed its parallels with contemporary capitalism. Its influential critique of the "culture industry" claimed that commercialized mass culture produces conformity and political passivity, thus upholding the repressive capitalist social order.

Ironically, the influence of critical theory on American intellectuals was greater after the institute moved back to Germany. The most recognized work by a Frankfurt School member during its American exile was The Authoritarian Personality, a sociological study conducted by Adorno and a team of American researchers that rated its subjects on an "f" scale to determine the potential for fascism in America. But The Authoritarian Personality was not the most representative expression of the distinctive approach of the Frankfurt School. The full weight of critical theory's political critique was not felt in the United States until the publication of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man in 1964, which found a receptive audience among the growing New Left student movement.

Not until the 1970s did many American intellectuals discover the important theoretical works of critical theory. An English translation of Horkheimer and Adorno's crucial book Dialectic of Enlightenment, though written in the United States in the early 1940s, did not appear until 1972. Later, American intellectuals were much influenced by the work of Jürgen Habermas, a second-generation member of the Frankfurt School who made significant contributions to understanding the public sphere, the social sciences, the nature of language, and postmodernism. Thus, the insights of the Frankfurt School continued to make their way across the Atlantic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bronner, Stephen Eric, and Douglas McCay Kellner, eds. Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

———. Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Daniel Geary

See also Philosophy ; Sociology .