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.