FRANKFURT SCHOOL

The Institute for Social Research had been founded in Frankfurt in 1923 with a huge
endowment from Felix Weil, an orthodox Marxist. The typical ideas of Frankfurt school did
not emerge until Max Horkheimer took over the directorship in 1930 from Carl Grunberg.
Politically, members of the institute tended to reject both the reformism of the social
democrats and the increasingly ossified doctrines of Moscow-oriented Communism. Without
any specific political affiliations, they attempted to re-examine the basis of Marxist thought
concentrating above all on the cultural superstructure of bourgeois society, these thinkers had
given valuable emphasis to the subjective and psychological dimensions of human life that
seemed to be erased through the growing technical mentality of the society under monopoly
capitalism. Class struggle and Political economy took second place to analysing the
expansion of mass culture and the way in which the relationship between man and nature had
become vitiated. It was Erich Fromm, who achieved a significant advancement of the
discipline; by synthesising Marxism and psychoanalysis- “the missing link between
ideological superstructure and socio-economic base”. The School’s interest in psychoanalysis
was manifested in Theodor Adorno’s paper Social Science and Sociological Tendencies in
Psychoanalysis (1946), as well as in Herbert Marcuse’s book Eros and Civilization (1955).
However, the Frankfurt School never denied Marx’s view of the crucial role played by the
economy in capitalist society.

In their disillusionment with the West and the Soviet Union (Comintern under Stalin), the
Frankfurt’s drew a certain amount of inspiration from the Council Communists of the 1920s.
The label preferred by Frankfurt School for their views was ‘critical theory’, aimed largely at
positivism- “a progressive force during the rise of capitalism”. The Frankfurt Schools view of
critical theory is best summed up in Horkheimer’s article Traditional and Critical Theory
published in 1937. He began by questioning “what is theory?” The discussion about method
has always been a constant topic for the critical theorists who have attempted since the
beginning to specify what it means to be “critical”. Originating from “revisionism” of
orthodox Marxism’s dichotomy between economic and social superstructure; Horkheimer
defined ‘critical’ by the use of dialectical mediation attempted to re-join all dichotomies
including the divide between consciousness and being, theory and practice, fact and value. It
was not philosophy they wished to be abolish in Marx, but its scientistic degeneration, in
their most extended essay in this philosophic tradition Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947);
Horkheimer and Adorno defined their subject as ‘the self-destruction of the Enlightenment’
to investigate the paradox that ‘the enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from
fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster
triumphant’. According to the Frankfurt logic enlightenment which is a specific cultural
phenomenon becomes totalitarian as it develops itself as a meta-narrative, viewing the world
with an objective truth, suspecting whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and
utility. The culmination of this value lay in the contemporary ‘culture industry’. For
enlightenment instead of creating a variegated and liberating culture following the breakdown
of constraints of pre-capitalist order, had infact achieved the reverse. The other
‘superstructural’ problem they came to concentrate was the nature and development of
authority and violence; essential to this was an understanding of psychoanalysis. The
Frankfurt school saw a direct connection between capitalism and Fascism: as the capitalist
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society evolved in a monopolist direction, liberalism evolved towards “Totalitarian
Monopoly Capitalism”. This approach saw Nazism as the culmination of the trend towards
irrational domination inherent in the growing emphasis on instrumental reason and
technological rationalisation that was the legacy of the liberal Enlightenment tradition of the
West. The most impressive achievement of the Frankfurt school lay in the field of aesthetics.
Their interest in culture was strengthened by their experience of United States’s achievement
of conformism by the spreading of mass culture rather than the use of terror. What mass
culture had in common with Fascism, in their view, was an increasing abolition of the
distinction between the private and public spheres by exploiting or creating needs in the
individual order to support a particular system of domination. In their treatment of arts the
Frankfurt school considered it as a protest against the prevailing social conditions and
transcended society in so far as it hinted at more humane values. They were entirely opposed
to any cultural ascetism which divorced arts from material needs. The trouble with mass
culture was that it was not truly popular. It was imposed on people rather than created by
them, serving the interest of domination and potentially of totalitarianism.

With the rise of Hitler, the school (they were almost all Jews) shifted to U.S.A in 1936, to
return to Germany only after the war. During this period the School got divided into two
different premises, New York and California, was paralleled by the development of two
autonomous research programs led, on the one hand, by Pollock and, on the other hand, by
Horkheimer and Adorno. Pollock directed his research to study anti-Semitism; Horkheimer
and Adorno, instead, developed studies on the reinterpretation of the Hegelian notion of
dialectics and eventually retreated completely from a revolutionary perspective; only Herbert
Marcuse continued to urge the necessity of emancipation from affluent society. The leading
exponent of second generation of Frankfurt school was Jürgen Habermas who attempted to
provide a theoretical framework for ideal communication, declaring that “today the problem
of language has replaced the traditional problem of consciousness”. The school returned to
Germany only after the war in 1950s, to finally dissolve in 1969.

The Frankfurt School consisted mostly of neo-Marxists who hoped for a socialist revolution
in Germany but instead got fascism in the form of the Nazi Party. Addled by their misreading
of history and their failure to foresee Hitler’s rise, they developed a form of social critique
known as critical theory. Whereas Critical Theory has aimed at fostering human
emancipation, it has remained incapable of specifying a political action-strategy for social
change. For the opponents to the Critical Theory paradigm, a clear indication in this sense
was exemplified by Marcuse’s idea of “the Great Refusal”, one predicating abstention from
real political engagement and pretences of transformation of the capitalist economy and the
democratic institutions. Marx said “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in
various ways; the point is to change it”; Frankfurt School’s non-availability of context-
specific political guidance answering the question “What is to be done?” rendered it as a
“realistic utopia”