The Frankfurt School was a school of neo-Marxist cultural theory.
It started life as the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research), part of the University of Frankfurt in Germany, in 1923. It was founded by Felix Weil and its first director was Carl Grünberg, who was succeeded by Max Horkheimer, the guiding spirit of the Frankfurt School. It focussed on interdisciplinary study. In 1933, after the rise of Hitler it left Germany for Geneva and then (in 1935) for New York City, where it became affiliated with Columbia University. It re-opened in Frankfurt in the 1950s and has as its most prominent contemporary representative Jürgen Habermas.
The Frankfurt School gathered together dissident Marxists, severe critics of capitalism who believed that some of Marx's alleged followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist Parties. Influenced especially by the failure of working-class revolutions in Western Europe after World War I and by the rise of Nazism in an economically, technologically, and culturally advanced nation such as Germany, they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in perceived omissions in Marx's. Max Weber exerted a principal influence, but Herbert Marcuse, for example, sought to combine the views of Marx and Freud. Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, crude materialism, and phenomenology by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on negation and contradiction as inherent properties of reality, as well as the publication in the 1930's of Marx's Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology, which showed the continuity with Hegelianism that underlay Marx's thought.
The Frankfurt School was primarily a research institute and intellectual network, but its members also taught at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt during the Institute's residence there. Its members shared no one method, ambition, or conclusion unanimously. However, they expressed a broad emphasis on criticizing the culture of capitalism (and of orthodox communism). The title of one book, Leo Lowenthal's Literature, Popular Culture, and Society, suggests their interests. In Habermas, the work focuses on the question of what cultural conditions are needed to make good intellectual work possible -- or, more pessimistically, how far economic interests and political dogma can corrupt science and philosophy.
Its views of cultural Marxism and critical theory have tended to influence large segments of Left wing thought (particularly the New Left) including the phenomenon known as political correctness.
Famous Frankfurt school thinkers and scholars
- Theodor Adorno
- Max Horkheimer
- Walter Benjamin
- Herbert Marcuse
- Leo Lowenthal
- Franz Neumann
- Jurgen Habermas