Frankfurt School

Frankfurt School, philosophical and sociological movement associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) founded in 1923 within Frankfurt University. The spokesman for the school in its early days was Max Horkheimer, who became director of the Institute in 1930 and expounded the “critical theory” of the school in its journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1968; Critical Theory: Selected Essays, 1972). The school was inspired by Marxism, but was also sympathetic to other forms of liberation such as psychoanalysis. Marxism, they believed, like any other one-sided doctrine, must be open to criticism. The flow of their argument was as follows. Modern society is afflicted with ills that can be cured only by a radically transformed theory and practice. Technology is one of those ills, not, as Marx had supposed, a remedy for them. A proletarian revolution that will liberate mankind is not inevitable. Theoretical thought is relatively independent of social and economic forces, but not wholly so. Critical theory must trace the origins of theories and concepts in social processes. It must not, like empiricism and positivism, simply accept the concepts; to do so is to accept implicitly the processes and conditions from which man is to be emancipated. The sciences, they felt, are not value-free; they involve implicit assumptions, whose status as values is concealed by their apparent self-evidence. These value-judgements, such as the desirability of dominating nature by technology, must be unmasked and exposed to criticism.

In 1930 Theodor Adorno became an associate of the Institute. He was outstandingly gifted and versatile, with expertise in music as well as in philosophy and sociology. His friend Walter Benjamin also collaborated with the Institute. In 1933 Herbert Marcuse, a former pupil of Martin Heidegger, became an associate. The following year the Institute was forced to close by the Nazi regime, owing to its Communist leanings and the Jewish descent of many of its members, and was reconstituted in New York as the New School for Social Research. Many of its members, including Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, went into exile. Several works appeared in this period: Reason and Revolution (1941), Marcuse's Hegelian interpretation of Karl Marx; Adorno's and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947; trans. 1972); Adorno's Minima Moralia (1951; trans. 1974); and The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a work of empirical psychology by Adorno and others. The Institute returned to Frankfurt in the early 1950s, along with Horkheimer and Adorno, who was its director from 1958 to 1969. Marcuse and the others stayed in the United States.

The most eminent member of the school in recent years has been Jürgen Habermas. In his Theory and Practice (1963; trans. 1974) and Knowledge and Human Interests (1968; trans. 1971) he endorsed Adorno's and Horkheimer's view that the sciences involve ideological presuppositions and interests, and that enlightenment reason has become a means of oppression. In The Theory of Communicative Action (1981; trans. 1984, 1989), he advocates an ideal of communication involving all rational subjects and wholly free of domination and interests.