The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical theory. It is associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded on February 3, 1923, at the University of Frankfurt am Main (today known as Goethe University Frankfurt). Formed during the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was composed of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the socio-economic systems of the 1930s: namely, capitalism, fascism, and communism. Significant figures associated with the school include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas.
The Frankfurt theorists proposed that existing social theory was unable to explain the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics, such as Nazism, in 20th-century liberal capitalist societies. Also critical of Marxism–Leninism as a philosophically inflexible system of social organization, the School's critical-theory research sought alternative paths to social development.
What unites the disparate members of the School is a shared commitment to the project of human emancipation, theoretically pursued by an attempted synthesis of the Marxist tradition, psychoanalysis, and empirical sociological research.
History Institute for Social Research
The term "Frankfurt School" describes the works of scholarship and the intellectuals who were the Institute for Social Research, an adjunct organization at the University of Frankfurt am Main, founded in 1923, by Carl Grünberg, a Marxist professor of law at the University of Vienna.Corradetti, Claudio (2011). "The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (published: 21 October 2011). It was the first Marxist research center at a German university and was funded through the largess of the wealthy student Felix Weil (1898–1975)."Frankfurt School". (2009). Encyclopædia Britannica Online. (Retrieved 19 December 2009)
Weil's doctoral dissertation dealt with the practical problems of implementing socialism. In 1922, he organized the First Marxist Workweek in an effort to synthesize different trends of Marxism into a coherent, practical philosophy; the first symposium included György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel, and Friedrich Pollock. The success of the First Marxist Workweek prompted the formal establishment of a permanent institute for social research, and Weil negotiated with the Ministry of Education to appoint a university professor as director of the Institute for Social Research, thereby ensuring that the Frankfurt School would be a university institution."The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory", Marxist Internet Archive (Retrieved 12 September 2009) Korsch and Lukács participated in the Workweek, which included the study of Marxism and Philosophy (1923), by Karl Korsch. Their Communist Party membership precluded their active participation in the Institute for Social Research; nevertheless, Korsch participated in the School's publishing venture.
The philosophical tradition of the Frankfurt School—the multi-disciplinary integration of the social sciences—is associated with the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who became the director in 1930, and recruited intellectuals such as Theodor W. Adorno (philosopher, sociologist, musicologist), Erich Fromm (psychoanalyst), and Herbert Marcuse (philosopher).
European interwar period (1918–39) In the Weimar Republic (1918–33), the continual political turmoils of the interwar years (1918–39) much affected the development of Frankfurt School critical theory. The scholars were especially influenced by the Communists' failed German Revolution of 1918–19 and by the rise of Nazism (1933–45), a German form of fascism. To explain such reactionary politics, the Frankfurt scholars applied critical selections of Marxist philosophy to interpret, illuminate, and explain the origins and causes of reactionary socioeconomics in 20th-century Europe (a type of political economy unknown to Marx in the 19th century). The School's further intellectual development derived from the publication, in the 1930s, of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1932) and The German Ideology (1932), which were interpreted as showing a continuity between Hegelianism and Marxist philosophy.
As the anti-intellectual threat of Nazism increased to political violence, the founders decided to move the Institute for Social Research out of Nazi Germany (1933–45).Dubiel, Helmut. "The Origins of Critical Theory: An interview with Leo Löwenthal", Telos 49. Soon after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the Institute first moved from Frankfurt to Geneva, and then to New York City in 1935, where it joined Columbia University. The School's journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung ("Journal of Social Research"), was renamed "Studies in Philosophy and Social Science". This began the period of the School's important work in Marxist critical theory. By the 1950s, the paths of scholarship led Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock to return to West Germany, while Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Kirchheimer remained in the U.S. In 1953, the Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) was formally re-established in Frankfurt, West Germany.Held, David (1980), p. 38.
Critical theory
The works of the Frankfurt School are to be understood in the context of the intellectual and practical objectives of critical theory. In "Traditional and Critical Theory" (1937), Max Horkheimer defined critical theory as social critique intended to effect sociological change and realize intellectual emancipation, through an enlightenment that is not dogmatic in its assumptions.Geuss, Raymond. The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge University Press, 1981. p. 58.Carr, Adrian (2000). "Critical theory and the Management of Change in Organizations", Journal of Organizational Change Management, pp. 13, 3, 208–220. Critical theory analyzes the true significance of the ruling understandings (the dominant ideology) generated in bourgeois society to show that the dominant ideology misrepresents how human relations occur in the real world and how capitalism justifies and legitimates the domination of people.
According to the theory of cultural hegemony, the dominant ideology is a ruling-class narrative that provides an explanatory justification for the current power structure of society. Nonetheless, the story told through the ruling understandings conceals as much as it reveals about society. The task of the Frankfurt School was the sociological analysis and interpretation of areas of social relations that Marx did not discuss in the 19th century—especially the base and superstructure aspects of capitalist society.Martin Jay. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. London: Heinemann, 1973, p. 21.
Horkheimer opposed critical theory to traditional theory, wherein the word theory is used in the positivistic sense of scientism, as a purely observational mode that finds and establishes scientific law (generalizations) about the real world. Social sciences differ from natural sciences because their scientific generalizations cannot be readily derived from experience. The researcher's understanding of a social experience is always filtered through their biases. What the researcher does not understand is that they operate within an historical and ideological context. The results for the theory being tested would conform to the ideas of the researcher rather than the facts of the experience proper; in "Traditional and Critical Theory" (1937), Horkheimer said:
For Horkheimer, the methods of investigation applicable to the social sciences cannot imitate the scientific method applicable to the natural sciences. In that vein, the theoretical approaches of positivism and pragmatism, of neo-Kantianism and phenomenology failed to surpass the ideological constraints that restricted their application to social science, because of the inherent logico–mathematic prejudice that separates theory from actual life, i.e. such methods of investigation seek a logic that is always true and independent of, and without consideration for, continuing human activity in the field under study. He felt that the appropriate response to such a dilemma was the development of a critical theory of Marxism.Rasmussen, D. "Critical Theory and Philosophy", The Handbook of Critical Theory, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996. p .18.
Horkheimer believed the problem was epistemological. He called for a reconsideration of "not merely the scientist, but the knowing individual, in general."Horkheimer, Max (1976), p. 221. Unlike orthodox Marxism, which applies a template to critique and to action, critical theory is self-critical, with no claim to the universality of absolute truth. As such, it does not grant primacy to matter (materialism) or consciousness (idealism), because each epistemology distorts the reality under study to the benefit of a small group. In practice, critical theory is outside the philosophical strictures of traditional theory; however, as a way of thinking and of recovering humanity's self-knowledge, critical theory draws investigational resources and methods from Marxism.
Dialectical method In contrast to modes of reasoning that view things in abstraction, each by itself and as though endowed with fixed properties, Hegel's "dialectical" innovation was to consider reality in terms of its movement and change over time, according to the interrelations and interactions of its various components or "moments". The Frankfurt School attempted to reformulate Hegel's idealistic dialectics into a more concrete method of investigation.dialectic. (2009). Retrieved 19 December 2009, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
According to Hegel, human history can be reconstructed to show that what is rational in reality results from the overcoming of past contradictions. It is an intelligible process of human activity, the , which is the idea of progress towards a specific human condition; namely, the actualization of human freedom.Little, D. (2007). "Philosophy of History", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (18 February 2007), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/history/#HegHis However, the problem of future contingents (considerations about the future) did not interest Hegel, for whom philosophy cannot be prescriptive and normative, because philosophy comprehends only in hindsight."When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. . . . The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk" —Hegel, G. W. F. (1821). Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts), p.13"Hegel's philosophy, and in particular his political philosophy, purports to be the rational formulation of a definite historical period, and Hegel refuses to look further ahead into the future." —Peĺczynski, Z. A. (1971). Hegel's political philosophy—Problems and Perspectives: A Collection of New Essays, CUP Archive. Google Print, p. 200 The study of history is limited to descriptions of past and present human realities. For Hegel and his successors (the right Hegelians), philosophy can only describe what is rational in the reality of the present, which in Hegel's time was Christianity and the Prussian state.