Frankfurt School

Frankfurt School, a group of researchers associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research), founded in 1923 as an autonomous division of the Univ. of Frankfurt. The institute's first director, Carl Grünberg, set it up as a center for research in philosophy and the social sciences from a Marxist perspective. After Max Horkheimer took over as director in 1930, the focus widened. Leading members, such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, influenced by aspects of psychoanalysis and existentialism, developed a version of Marxism known as "critical theory." They formulated influential aesthetic theories and critiques of capitalist culture. After a period of exile in the United States because of the Nazis, the institute returned in 1949 to Frankfurt, where Jürgen Habermas became its most prominent figure.

Bibliography

See M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (1973); R. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (1981).

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Frankfurt school

Group of thinkers associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), founded in Frankfurt in 1923 by Felix J. Weil, Carl Grünberg, Max Horkheimer, and Friedrich Pollock. Other important members of the school are Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Horkheimer moved the institute to Columbia University in New York City, where it functioned until 1941; it was reestablished in Frankfurt in 1950. Though the institute was originally conceived as a centre for neo-Marxian social research, there is no doctrine common to all members of the Frankfurt school. Intellectually, the school is most indebted to the writings of G.W.F. Hegel and the Young Hegelians (see Hegelianism), Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. See also critical theory.

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Frankfurt School 

a trend in German philosophy and sociology that took shape in the 1930’s and 1940’s around the Institute of Social Research of the University of Frankfurt am Main. The institute was headed by M. Horkheimer from 1931. Between 1934 and 1939, when Horkheimer and most of his colleagues had emigrated from Germany because of the Nazis’ rise to power, the institute was located in Geneva and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; in 1939 it was moved to Columbia University, in the United States, and in 1949 it was reconstituted in Frankfurt am Main, in the Federal Republic of Germany, after Horkheimer and Adorno had returned to that country. The most prominent representatives of this school of thought are T. Adorno, E. Fromm, H. Marcuse, and J. Habermas; its principal organ is the journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.

On the basis of Horkheimer’s and Marcuse’s “critical theory of society”—a philosophical and sociological theory developed by them in the 1930’s—the Frankfurt school sought to combine Hegelian and Freudian ideas with certain elements of K. Marx’ critical approach to bourgeois culture. The concept of “rationalization,” as derived from M. Weber, has been transformed into one of the central concepts of the Frankfurt school’s philosophy of culture. The “enlightenment” is identified with rational mastery of nature as a whole; according to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1948), the analysis of the internal contradictions of the “enlightenment” provides the key to understanding modern culture and society, and particularly the “mass culture” and “mass society” of the 20th century. Hegel’s dialectic is transformed into an antisystematic “negative dialectic,” and one of the focal concerns is the problem of alienation.

During the postwar period the divisions between members of the Frankfurt school grew more profound—as reflected, in particular, in the arguments between Fromm and Marcuse during the 1950’s and 1960’s; another example of such divisions was the evolution of Habermas and of younger members of the Frankfurt school away from the ideas of its founders, leading in effect to its disintegration in the early 1970’s. The Frankfurt school was an important influence in non-Marxist social and philosophical thought, both in the Federal Republic of Germany and in the United States, as well as in the theoretical formulations of the “new left” ideology, although Adorno and Horkheimer, and Habermas as well, disassociated themselves from the left-radical tendencies of that movement.

REFERENCES

Sotsial’naia filosofiia frankfurtskoi shkoly. Moscow, 1975.
Die “Frankfurter Schule” im Lichte des Marxismus. Frankfurt am Main, 1970.
Rohrmoser, G. Das Elend der kritischen Theorie. Freiburg, 1970.