Frankfurt School

Frankfurt School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Frankfurt School
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Frankfurt School (German: Frankfurter Schule) was a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary [1] social theory, associated in part with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main. The school initially consisted of dissident Marxists who believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist parties. Meanwhile, many of these theorists believed that traditional Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of both capitalism and Soviet socialism, their writings [2] pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to social development. Although sometimes only loosely aliated, Frankfurt School theorists spoke with a common paradigm in mind, thus sharing the same assumptions and being preoccupied with similar [3] questions. In order to ll in the perceived omissions of traditional Marxism, they sought to draw answers from other schools of thought, hence using the insights of antipositivist sociology, [1] psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and other disciplines. The school's main gures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Weber [4] and Lukcs. Following Marx, they were concerned with the conditions that allow for social change and the [5] establishment of rational institutions. Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived signicantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism and determinism by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of reality. Since the 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has increasingly been guided by Jrgen [6][7] linguistic intersubjectivity and what Habermas Habermas's work on communicative reason, [8] calls "the philosophical discourse of modernity". More recently, critical theorists such as Nikolas Kompridis have voiced opposition to Habermas, claiming that he has undermined the aspirations for social change which originally gave purpose to critical theory's various projectsfor example the problem of what reason should mean, the analysis and enlargement of "conditions of [9] possibility" for social emancipation, and the critique of modern capitalism.
Contents
1 History 1.1 The Institute for Social Research 1.2 The German prewar context 1.3 Theorists 2 Theoretical work 2.1 Critical foundations of social science 2.1.1 Critical theory and the critique of ideology 2.1.2 Dialectical method 2.1.3 Early inuences 2.2 Critique of Western civilization 2.2.1 Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia 2.2.2 Philosophy of modern music 2.3 Critical theory and domination 2.3.1 Negative dialectics 2.3.2 Habermas and communicative rationality 3 Criticism of Frankfurt School theorists 3.1 Criticism of psychoanalytic categorizations 3.2 Horkheimer and Adorno's pessimism 3.3 Habermas's solutions: critical theory "between past and future" 3.4 Economic and media critiques
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4 5 6 7 See also References Further reading External links
History
The Institute for Social Research
Main article: Institute for Social Research The term "Frankfurt School" arose informally to describe the thinkers aliated or merely associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research; it is not the title of any specic position or institution per se, and few of these theorists used the term themselves. The Institute for Social Research (Institut fr Sozialforschung) was founded in 1923 by Carl Grnberg, a Marxist legal and [10] as an adjunct of the University of Frankfurt; it political professor at the University of Vienna, [1] was the rst Marxist-oriented research center aliated with a major German university. However, the school can trace its earliest roots back to Felix Weil, who used money from his father's grain business to nance the Institut. Weil (1898-1975), a young Marxist, had written his doctoral thesis (published by Karl Korsch) on the practical problems of implementing socialism. With the hope of bringing dierent trends of Marxism together, Weil organized a week-long symposium (the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche) in 1922, a meeting attended by Georg Lukcs, Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel, Friedrich Pollock and others. The event was so successful that Weil set about erecting a building and funding salaries for a permanent institute. Weil negotiated with the Ministry of Education that the Director of the Institute would be a full professor from the state system, so that the Institut would have the [11] status of a University institution. Although Gyrgy Lukcs and Karl Korsch both attended the Arbeitswoche which had included a study of Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy, both were too committed to political activity and Party membership to join the Institut, although Korsch participated in publishing ventures for a number of years. The way Lukcs was obliged to repudiate his History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923 and probably a major inspiration for the work of the Frankfurt School, indicated that [11] independence from the Communist Party was necessary for genuine theoretical work. The philosophical tradition now referred to as the "Frankfurt School" is perhaps particularly associated with Max Horkheimer (philosopher, sociologist and social psychologist), who took over as the institute's director in 1930 and recruited many of the school's most talented theorists, including Theodor W. Adorno (philosopher, sociologist, musicologist), Erich Fromm [1] (psychoanalyst), and Herbert Marcuse (philosopher).
The German prewar context

The political turmoil of Germany's troubled interwar years greatly aected the School's development. Its thinkers were particularly inuenced by the failure of the working-class revolution in Western Europe (precisely where Marx had predicted that a communist revolution would take place) and by the rise of Nazism in such an economically and technologically advanced nation as Germany. This led many of them to take up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify contemporary social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. Another key inuence also came from the publication in the 1930s of Marx's EconomicPhilosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology, which showed the continuity with Hegelianism that underlay Marx's thought. As the growing inuence of National Socialism became ever more threatening, its founders [12] Following Adolf Hitler's rise to decided to prepare to move the Institute out of the country. power in 1933, the Institute left Germany for Geneva, before moving to New York City in 1935, where it became aliated with Columbia University. Its journal Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung was accordingly renamed Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. It was at this moment that much of
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its important work began to emerge, having gained a favorable reception within American and English academia. Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock eventually resettled in West Germany in the early 1950s, although Marcuse, Lowenthal, Kirchheimer and others chose to remain in the United [13] States. It was only in 1953 that the Institute was formally re-established in Frankfurt.
Theorists
See also: List of critical theorists Which "theorists" may be included in what is now called the "Frankfurt School" will likely vary among dierent scholars. Indeed, the title of "school" can often be a misleading one, as the Institute's members did not always form a series of tightly woven, complementary projects. Some scholars have therefore limited their view of the Frankfurt School to Horkheimer, Adorno, [5] Marcuse, Lowenthal and Pollock. However, most pre-war theorists can be considered as having shared a very similar paradigm. Although he was initially part of the School's inner circle, Jrgen Habermas is generally considered as the rst to have diverged from Horkheimer's research program, thus giving rise to a new generation of critical theorists. Early members of the Frankfurt Later theorists with roots in School were: Frankfurt School critical theory include: Max Horkheimer Jrgen Habermas Theodor W. Adorno Claus Oe Herbert Marcuse Axel Honneth Friedrich Pollock Oskar Negt Erich Fromm Alfred Schmidt Otto Kirchheimer Albrecht Wellmer Leo Lwenthal Franz Leopold Neumann People who were associated with the Institute or its theorists include: Siegfried Kracauer Alfred Sohn-Rethel Walter Benjamin
Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jrgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg.
Theoretical work
Critical foundations of social science
Critical theory and the critique of ideology The Frankfurt School's work cannot be fully comprehended without equally understanding the aims and objectives of critical theory. Initially outlined by Max Horkheimer in his Traditional and Critical Theory (1937), critical theory may be dened as a self-conscious social critique that is aimed at change and emancipation through enlightenment, and does not cling dogmatically to its own doctrinal assumptions.[14][15] The original aim of critical theory was to analyze the true signicance of "the ruling understandings" generated in bourgeois society, in order to show how they misrepresented actual human interaction in the real world, and in so doing functioned to justify or legitimize the domination of people by capitalism. A certain sort of story (a narrative) was provided to explain what was happening in society, but the story concealed as much as it revealed. The Frankfurt theorists generally assumed that their own task was mainly to interpret all the other [16] areas of society which Marx had not dealt with, especially in the superstructure of society. Horkheimer opposed it to "traditional theory", which refers to theory in the positivistic, scientistic, or purely observational mode that is, which derives generalizations or "laws" about dierent
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aspects of the world. Drawing upon Max Weber, Horkheimer argued that the social sciences are dierent from the natural sciences, inasmuch as generalizations cannot be easily made from so-called experiences, because the understanding of a "social" experience itself is always fashioned by ideas that are in the researchers themselves. What the researcher does not realize is that he is caught in a historical context in which ideologies shape the thinking; thus theory would be conforming to the ideas in the mind of the researcher rather than the experience itself:
The facts which our senses present to us are socially performed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives himself as receptive and passive in the act of [17] perception.
For Horkheimer, approaches to understanding in the social sciences cannot simply imitate those in the natural sciences. Although various theoretical approaches would come close to breaking out of the ideological constraints which restricted them, such as positivism, pragmatism, neo-Kantianism and phenomenology, Horkheimer would argue that they failed, because all were subject to a "logico-mathematical" prejudice which separates theoretical activity from actual life (meaning that all these schools sought to nd a logic which would always remain true, independently of and without consideration for ongoing human activities). According to Horkheimer, the appropriate [18] response to this dilemma is the development of a critical theory. The problem, Horkheimer argued, is epistemological: we should not merely reconsider the scientist [19] Unlike orthodox Marxism, which merely applies a but the knowing individual in general. ready-made "template" to both critique and action, critical theory seeks to be self-critical and rejects any pretensions to absolute truth. Critical theory defends the primacy of neither matter (materialism) nor consciousness (idealism), arguing that both epistemologies distort reality to the benet, eventually, of some small group. What critical theory attempts to do is to place itself outside of philosophical strictures and the connes of existing structures. However, as a way of thinking and "recovering" humanity's self-knowledge, critical theory often looks to Marxism for its [15] methods and tools. Horkheimer maintained that critical theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specicity (i.e. how it came to be congured at a specic point in time), just as it should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology. While critical theory must at all times be self-critical, Horkheimer insisted that a theory is only critical if it is explanatory. Critical theory must therefore combine practical and normative thinking in order to "explain what is wrong with current social reality, identify actors to change it, and provide clear [20] Whereas traditional theory can only norms for criticism and practical goals for the future." mirror and explain reality as it presently is, critical theory's purpose is to change it; in Horkheimer's words the goal of critical theory is "the emancipation of human beings from the [21] circumstances that enslave them". Frankfurt School theorists were explicitly linking up with the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, where the term critique meant philosophical reection on the limits of claims made for certain kinds of knowledge and a direct connection between such critique and the emphasis on moral autonomy as opposed to traditionally deterministic and static theories of human action. In an intellectual context dened by dogmatic positivism and scientism on the one hand and dogmatic "scientic socialism" on the other, critical theorists intended to rehabilitate Marx's ideas through a philosophically critical approach. Whereas both Marxist-Leninist and Social-Democratic orthodox thinkers viewed Marxism as a new kind of positive science, Frankfurt School theorists, such as Horkheimer, rather based their work on the epistemological base of Karl Marx's work, which presented itself as critique, as in Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. They thus emphasized that Marx was attempting to create a new kind of critical analysis oriented toward the unity of theory and revolutionary practice rather than a new kind of positive science. Critique, in this Marxian sense, meant taking the ideology of a society e.g. the belief in individual freedom or free market under capitalism and critiquing it by comparing it with the social reality of that very society e.g. social inequality and exploitation. The
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methodology on which Frankfurt School theorists grounded this critique came to be what had before been established by Hegel and Marx, namely the dialectical method. Dialectical method The Institute also attempted to reformulate dialectics as a concrete method. The use of such a dialectical method can be traced back to the philosophy of Hegel, who conceived dialectic as the tendency of a notion to pass over into its own negation as the result of conict between its inherent contradictory aspects.[22] In opposition to previous modes of thought, which viewed things in abstraction, each by itself and as though endowed with xed properties, Hegelian dialectic has the ability to consider ideas according to their movement and change in time, as well as according to [22] their interrelations and interactions. History, according to Hegel, proceeds and evolves in a dialectical manner: the present embodies the rational sublation, or "synthesis", of past contradictions. History may thus be seen as an intelligible process (which Hegel referred to as Weltgeist) which is moving towards a specic [23] However, considerations about the future conditionthe rational realization of human freedom. [24][25] for whom philosophy cannot be prescriptive because it were of no interest to Hegel, understands only in hindsight. The study of history is thus limited to the description of past and [23] Hence for Hegel and his successors, dialectics inevitably lead to the approval present realities. of the status quoindeed, Hegel's philosophy served as a justication for Christian theology and the Prussian state. This was ercely criticized by Marx and the Young Hegelians, who claimed that Hegel had gone too far in defending his abstract conception of "absolute Reason" and had failed to notice the "real" i.e. undesirable and irrational life conditions of the working class. By turning Hegel's idealist dialectics upside-down, Marx advanced his own theory of dialectical materialism, arguing that "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being [26] Marx's theory follows a materialist law of history and that determines their consciousness." [27] where the development of the productive forces is seen as the primary motive force for space, historical change, and according to which the social and material contradictions inherent to capitalism will inevitably lead to its negation, thereby replacing capitalism with a new rational [28] form of society: communism. Marx thus extensively relied on a form of dialectical analysis. This methodto know the truth by uncovering the contradictions in presently predominant ideas and, by extension, in the social relations to which they are linkedexposes the underlying struggle between opposing forces. For Marx, it is only by becoming aware of the dialectic of such opposing forces, in a struggle for power, [29] that individuals can liberate themselves and change the existing social order. For their part, Frankfurt School theorists quickly came to realize that a dialectical method could only be adopted if it could be applied to itselfthat is to say, if they adopted a self-correcting methoda dialectical method that would enable them to correct previous false dialectical interpretations. Accordingly, critical theory rejected the dogmatic historicism and materialism of [30] Indeed, the material tensions and class struggles of which Marx spoke were orthodox Marxism. no longer seen by Frankfurt School theorists as having the same revolutionary potential within contemporary Western societiesan observation which indicated that Marx's dialectical interpretations and predictions were either incomplete or incorrect. Contrary to orthodox Marxist praxis, which solely seeks to implement an unchangeable and narrow idea of "communism" into practice, critical theorists held that praxis and theory, following the dialectical method, should be interdependent and should mutually inuence each other. When Marx famously stated in his Theses on Feuerbach that "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it", his real idea was that philosophy's only validity was in how it informed action. Frankfurt School theorists would correct this by claiming that when action fails, then the theory guiding it must be reviewed. In short, socialist philosophical thought must be given the ability to criticize itself and "overcome" its own errors. While theory must inform praxis, praxis must also have a chance to inform theory. Early inuences
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The intellectual inuences on and theoretical focus of the rst generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists can be summarized as follows: Transition from small-scale entrepreneurial capitalism to monopoly capitalism and imperialism; socialist labor movement grows, turns reformist; emergence of the welfare state; Russian revolution and the rise of Communism; neotechnic period; emergence of mass media and mass culture, "modern" art; rise of Nazism.
Historical context
Comparative historical analysis of Western rationalism in capitalism, the modern state, secular scientic rationality, culture, and religion; analysis of Weberian theory the forms of domination in general and of modern rational-legal bureaucratic domination in particular; articulation of the distinctive, hermeneutic method of the social sciences. Critique of the repressive structure of the "reality principle" of advanced civilization and of the normal neurosis of everyday life; discovery of the Freudian theory unconscious, primary-process thinking, and the impact of the Oedipus complex and of anxiety on psychic life; analysis of the psychic bases of authoritarianism and irrational social behavior. Critique of Positivism Critique of positivism as a philosophy, as a scientic methodology, as a political ideology and as everyday conformity; rehabilitation of negative dialectic, return to Hegel; appropriation of critical elements in phenomenology, historicism, existentialism, critique of their ahistorical, idealist tendencies; critique of logical positivism and pragmatism. Critique of "false" and reied experience by breaking through its traditional forms and language; projection of alternative modes of existence and experience; liberation of the unconscious; consciousness of unique, modern situation; appropriation of Kafka, Proust, Schoenberg, Breton; critique of the culture industry and "armative" culture; aesthetic utopia. Critique of bourgeois ideology; critique of alienated labor; historical materialism; history as class struggle and exploitation of labor in dierent modes of production; systems analysis of capitalism as extraction of surplus labor through free labor in the free market; unity of theory and practice; analysis for the sake of revolution, socialist democracy, classless society. Critique of mass culture as suppression and absorption of negation, as integration into status quo; critique of Western culture as a culture of domination, both of an external and internal nature; dialectic dierentiation of emancipatory and repressive dimensions of elite culture; Kierkegaard's critique of the present age, Nietzsche's transvaluation, and Schiller's aesthetic education.
Aesthetic modernism
Marxist theory
Culture theory
Responding to the intensication of alienation and irrationality in an advanced capitalist society, critical theory is a comprehensive, ideology-critical, historically self-reective body of theory aiming simultaneously to explain domination and point to the possibilities of bringing about a rational, humane, and free society. Frankfurt School critical theorists developed numerous theories of the economic, political, cultural, and psychological domination structures of advanced industrial civilization. The Institute made major contributions in two areas relating to the possibility of human subjects to be rational, i.e. individuals who could act rationally to take charge of their own society and their own history. The rst consisted of social phenomena previously considered in Marxism as part of the "superstructure" or as ideology: personality, family and authority structures (one of the earliest works published bore the title Studies of Authority and the Family), and the realm of aesthetics and mass culture. Studies saw a common concern here in the ability of capitalism to destroy the preconditions of critical, revolutionary political consciousness. This meant arriving at a sophisticated awareness of the depth dimension in which social oppression sustains itself. It also meant the beginning of critical theory's recognition of ideology as part of the foundations of social structure.
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Critique of Western civilization

Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia The second phase of Frankfurt School critical theory centres principally on two works: Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and Adorno's Minima Moralia (1951). The authors wrote both works during the Institute's exile in America. While retaining much of a Marxian analysis, in these works critical theory shifted its emphasis. The critique of capitalism turned into a critique of Western civilization as a whole. Indeed, the Dialectic of Enlightenment uses the Odyssey as a paradigm for the analysis of bourgeois consciousness. Horkheimer and Adorno already present in these works many themes that have come to dominate the social thought of recent years; indeed, their exposition of the domination of nature as a central characteristic of instrumental rationality in Western civilization was made long before ecology and environmentalism had become popular concerns. The analysis of reason now goes one stage further. The rationality of Western civilization appears as a fusion of domination and of technological rationality, bringing all of external and internal nature under the power of the human subject. In the process, however, the subject itself gets swallowed up, and no social force analogous to the proletariat can be identied that will enable the subject to emancipate itself. Hence the subtitle of Minima Moralia: "Reections from Damaged Life". In Adorno's words,
For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself. The subject still feels sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is [31] already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself.
Consequently, at a time when it appears that reality itself has become the basis for ideology, the greatest contribution that critical theory can make is to explore the dialectical contradictions of individual subjective experience on the one hand, and to preserve the truth of theory on the other. Even dialectical progress is put into doubt: "its truth or untruth is not inherent in the method itself, but in its intention in the historical process." This intention must be oriented toward integral freedom and happiness: "the only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption". Adorno goes on to distance himself from the "optimism" of orthodox Marxism: "beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption [i.e. [32] human emancipation] itself hardly matters." From a sociological point of view, both Horkheimer's and Adorno's works contain a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence which gave rise to the "pessimism" of the new critical theory over the possibility of human [33] This ambivalence was rooted, of course, in the historical emancipation and freedom. circumstances in which the work was originally produced, in particular, the rise of National Socialism, state capitalism, and mass culture as entirely new forms of social domination that could [34] For Adorno and not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional Marxist sociology. Horkheimer, state intervention in the economy had eectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and "material productive forces of society"a tension which, according to traditional Marxist theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The previously "free" market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) and "irrevocable" private property of Marx's epoch have gradually been replaced by the centralized state planning and socialized ownership of the means of production in contemporary Western [35] The dialectic through which Marx predicted the emancipation of modern society is societies. thus suppressed, eectively being subjugated to a positivist rationality of domination. Of this second "phase" of the Frankfurt School, philosopher and critical theorist Nikolas Kompridis writes that:
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According to the now canonical view of its history, Frankfurt School critical theory began in the 1930s as a fairly condent interdisciplinary and materialist research program, the general aim of which was to connect normative social criticism to the emancipatory potential latent in concrete historical processes. Only a decade or so later, however, having revisited the premises of their philosophy of history, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment steered the whole enterprise, provocatively and self-consciously, into a skeptical cul-de-sac. As a result they got stuck in the irresolvable dilemmas of the "philosophy of the subject," and the original program was shrunk to a negativistic practice of critique that eschewed the very normative ideals on [36] which it implicitly depended.
Kompridis claims that this "sceptical cul-de-sac" was arrived at with "a lot of help from the once unspeakable and unprecedented barbarity of European fascism," and could not be gotten out of without "some well-marked [exit or] Ausgang, showing the way out of the ever-recurring nightmare in which Enlightenment hopes and Holocaust horrors are fatally entangled." However, this Ausgang, according to Kompridis, would not come until later purportedly in the form of Jrgen [36] Habermas's work on the intersubjective bases of communicative rationality. Philosophy of modern music Adorno, a trained musician, wrote The Philosophy of Modern Music (1949), in which he, in essence, polemicizes against beauty itself because it has become part of the ideology of advanced capitalist society and the false consciousness that contributes to social domination. It hence contributes to the present sustainability of capitalism by rendering it "aesthetically pleasing" and "agreeable". Only avant-garde art and music may preserve the truth by capturing the reality of human suering. Hence:
What radical music perceives is the untransgured suering of man [...] The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks [...] Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the [37] shipwrecked.
This view of modern art as producing truth only through the negation of traditional aesthetic form and traditional norms of beauty because they have become ideological is characteristic of Adorno and of the Frankfurt School generally. It has been criticized by those who do not share its conception of modern society as a false totality that renders obsolete traditional conceptions and images of beauty and harmony.
Critical theory and domination

Negative dialectics With the growth of advanced industrial society during the Cold War era, critical theorists recognized that the path of capitalism and history had changed decisively, that the modes of oppression operated dierently, and that the industrial working class no longer remained the determinate negation of capitalism. This led to the attempt to root the dialectic in an absolute method of negativity, as in Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964) and Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1966). During this period the Institute of Social Research re-settled in Frankfurt (although many of its associates remained in the United States) with the task not merely of continuing its research but of becoming a leading force in the sociological education and democratization of West Germany. This led to a certain systematization of the Institute's entire accumulation of empirical research and theoretical analysis. During this period, Frankfurt School critical theory particularly inuenced some segments of the left wing and leftist thought, particularly the New Left. Herbert Marcuse has occasionally been
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described as the theorist or intellectual progenitor of the New Left. Their critique of technology, totality, teleology and (occasionally) civilization is an inuence on anarcho-primitivism. Their work also heavily inuenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. More importantly, however, the Frankfurt School attempted to dene the fate of reason in the new historical period. While Marcuse did so through analysis of structural changes in the labor process under capitalism and inherent features of the methodology of science, Horkheimer and Adorno concentrated on a re-examination of the foundation of critical theory. This eort appears in systematized form in Adorno's Negative Dialectics, which tries to redene dialectics for an era in which "philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed". Negative dialectics expresses the idea of critical thought so conceived that the apparatus of domination cannot co-opt it. Its central notion, long a focal one for Horkheimer and Adorno, suggests that the original sin of thought lies in its attempt to eliminate all that is other than thought, the attempt by the subject to devour the object, the striving for identity. This reduction makes thought the accomplice of domination. Negative Dialectics rescues the "preponderance of the object", not through a naive epistemological or metaphysical realism but through a thought based on dierentiation, paradox, and ruse: a "logic of disintegration". Adorno thoroughly criticizes Heidegger's fundamental ontology, which he thinks reintroduces idealistic and identity-based concepts under the guise of having overcome the philosophical tradition. Negative dialectics comprises a monument to the end of the tradition of the individual subject as the locus of criticism. Without a revolutionary working class, the Frankfurt School had no one to rely on but the individual subject. But, as the liberal capitalist social basis of the autonomous individual receded into the past, the dialectic based on it became more and more abstract. Habermas and communicative rationality Main article: Jrgen Habermas Habermas's work takes the Frankfurt School's abiding interests in rationality, the human subject, democratic socialism, and the dialectical method and overcomes a set of contradictions that always weakened critical theory: the contradictions between the materialist and transcendental methods, between Marxian social theory and the individualist assumptions of critical rationalism between technical and social rationalization, and between cultural and psychological phenomena on the one hand and the economic structure of society on the other. The Frankfurt School avoided taking a stand on the precise relationship between the materialist and transcendental methods, which led to ambiguity in their writings and confusion among their readers. Habermas's epistemology synthesizes these two traditions by showing that phenomenological and transcendental analysis can be subsumed under a materialist theory of social evolution, while the materialist theory makes sense only as part of a quasi-transcendental theory of emancipatory knowledge that is the self-reection of cultural evolution. The simultaneously empirical and transcendental nature of emancipatory knowledge becomes the foundation stone of critical theory. By locating the conditions of rationality in the social structure of language use, Habermas moves the locus of rationality from the autonomous subject to subjects in interaction. Rationality is a property not of individuals per se, but rather of structures of undistorted communication. In this notion Habermas has overcome the ambiguous plight of the subject in critical theory. If capitalistic technological society weakens the autonomy and rationality of the subject, it is not through the domination of the individual by the apparatus but through technological rationality supplanting a describable rationality of communication. And, in his sketch of communicative ethics as the highest stage in the internal logic of the evolution of ethical systems, Habermas hints at the source of a new political practice that incorporates the imperatives of evolutionary rationality.
Criticism of Frankfurt School theorists

Criticism of psychoanalytic categorizations
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In an interview with Casey Blake and Christopher Phelps, historian Christopher Lasch criticized the Frankfurt School's initial tendencies towards "automatically" rejecting opposing political criticisms on "psychiatric" grounds:
The Authoritarian Personality had a tremendous inuence on Hofstadter and other liberal intellectuals, because it showed them how to conduct political criticism in psychiatric categories, to make those categories bear the weight of political criticism. This procedure excused them from the dicult work of judgment and argumentation. Instead of arguing with opponents, they simply dismissed them on psychiatric [38] grounds.
Horkheimer and Adorno's pessimism

An early criticism, originating from the left, argues that Frankfurt School critical theory is nothing more than a form of "bourgeois idealism" devoid of any actual relation to political practice, and is hence totally isolated from the reality of any ongoing revolutionary movement. This criticism was captured in Georg Lukcs's phrase "Grand Hotel Abyss" as a syndrome he imputed to the members of the Frankfurt School:
A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the Grand Hotel Abyss which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as "a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the [39] enjoyment of the subtle comforts oered."
Philosopher Karl Popper equally believed that the school did not live up to Marx's promise of a better future:
Marx's own condemnation of our society makes sense. For Marx's theory contains the promise of a better future. But the theory becomes vacuous and irresponsible if this [40] promise is withdrawn, as it is by Adorno and Horkheimer.
Habermas's solutions: critical theory "between past and future"

In 2006, Nikolas Kompridis (a former student of Jrgen Habermas) published new criticisms of Habermas's approach to critical theory, calling for a dramatic break with the proceduralist ethics of communicative rationality. He writes:
For all its theoretical ingenuity and practical implications, Habermas's reformulation of critical theory is beset by persistent problems of its own In my view, the depth of these problems indicate just how wrong was Habermas's expectation that the paradigm change to linguistic intersubjectivity would render "objectless" the dilemmas [41] Habermas accused Hegel of creating a conception of the philosophy of the subject. of reason so "overwhelming" that it solved too well the problem of modernity's [need [42] It seems, however, that Habermas has repeated rather than for] self-reassurance. avoided Hegel's mistake, creating a theoretical paradigm so comprehensive that in one stroke it also solves too well the dilemmas of the philosophy of the subject and the [43] problem of modernity's self-reassurance.
In addition, he writes that:
The change of paradigm to linguistic intersubjectivity has been accompanied by a dramatic change in critical theory's self-understanding. The priority given to questions of justice and the normative order of society has remodeled critical theory in the image of liberal theories of justice. While this has produced an important contemporary variant of liberal theories of justice, dierent enough to be a challenge to liberal theory, but not enough to preserve sucient continuity with critical theory's past, it
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has severely weakened the identity of critical theory and inadvertently initiated its [44] premature dissolution. In order to prevent that dissolution, Kompridis suggests that critical theory should "reinvent" itself as a "possibility-disclosing" enterprise, incorporating Heidegger's controversial insights into world disclosure and drawing from the sources of normativity that he feels were blocked from critical theory by its recent change of paradigm. Calling for what Charles Taylor has named a "new [45] with a possibility-disclosing role that Kompridis calls "reective department" of reason, disclosure", Kompridis argues that critical theory must embrace its neglected German romantic inheritance and once again imagine alternatives to existing social and political conditions, "if it is [46] to have a future worthy of its past."
Economic and media critiques

During the eighties, anti-authoritarian socialists in the United Kingdom and New Zealand criticised the rigid and determinist view of popular culture deployed within the Frankfurt School theories of capitalist culture, which seemed to preclude any pregurative role for social critique within such [47][48] Recent criticism work. They argued that EC Comics often did contain such cultural critiques. of the Frankfurt School by the libertarian CATO Institute focused on the claim that culture has grown more sophisticated and diverse as a consequence of free markets and the availability of [49][50] niche cultural text for niche audiences. Cultural Marxism and the Frankfurt School are also targets of criticism in the United States and Europe. In particular, Anders Behring Breivik's manifesto adopted the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory circulating in US right-wing circles, labelling the Frankfurt School as one of the main [51][52] enemies of Western civilization.
See also
Analytical Marxism Birmingham School of Cultural Studies Cultural Marxism Fredric Jameson Gerhard Stapelfeldt Leo Koer Neo-Gramscianism New Marx Reading Praxis School Psychoanalytic sociology Western Marxism Zygmunt Bauman Frankfurt School conspiracy theory
References
1. ^ a b c d "Frankfurt School". (2009). In Encyclopdia Britannica. Cited from Encyclopdia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com /EBchecked/topic/217277 /Frankfurt-School (Retrieved December 19, 2009) 2. ^ Held, David (1980). Introduction to critical theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. University of California Press, p. 14 3. ^ Finlayson, James Gordon. (2005). Habermas: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.1 4. ^ Held, David (1980), p. 16 5. ^ a b Held, David (1980), p. 15 6. ^ Habermas, Jrgen. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action. Third Edition, Vols. 1 & 2, Beacon Press. 7. ^ Habermas, Jrgen. (1990). Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, MIT Press. 8. ^ Habermas, Jrgen. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. MIT Press. 9. ^ Kompridis, Nikolas. (2006). Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future, MIT Press 10. ^ Corradetti, Claudio (2011). "The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory" (http://www.iep.utm.edu /frankfur/), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Originally published: October 21, 2011). ^ a b "The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory", Marxist Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org /subject/frankfurt-school /index.htm) (Retrieved Sept. 12, 2009) ^ "The Origins of Critical Theory: An interview with Leo Lowenthal" by Helmut Dubiel in Telos 49 ^ Held, David (1980), p. 38 ^ Geuss, Raymond (1981). The idea of a critical theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt school. Cambridge University Press, p. 58 ^ a b Carr, Adrian (2000).
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"Critical theory and the management of change in organizations". In: Journal of Organizational Change Management, 13, 3, p. 208-220 ^ Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 19231950. London: Heinemann, 1973, p. 21. ^ Horkheimer, Max (1976). "Traditional and critical theory". In: Connerton, P (Eds), Critical Sociology: Selected Readings, Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 213 ^ Rasmussen, D. (1996). "Critical theory and philosophy". In: Rasmussen, D. (Eds), The Handbook of Critical Theory, Blackwell, Oxford, p .18 ^ Horkheimer, Max (1976), p. 221 ^ Bohman, J (1996). "Critical theory and democracy". In: Rasmussen, D. (Eds), The Handbook of Critical Theory, Blackwell, Oxford, p. 190 ^ Horkheimer, Max (1976), p. 219 (see also p. 224) ^ a b dialectic. (2009). In Encyclopdia Britannica. Retrieved December 19, 2009, from Encyclopdia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com /EBchecked/topic/161174 /dialectic ^ a b Little, D. (2007). "Philosophy of History", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Sun Feb 18, 2007), http://plato.stanford.edu /entries/history/#HegHis ^ "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). Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, p.13 ^ "Hegel's philosophy, and in particular his political philosophy, purports to be the rational formulation of a denite historical period, and Hegel refuses to look further ahead into the future."
absence of revolution in the West, the development of Stalinism in Soviet Russia, and the victory of fascism in Germany. It was supposed to explain mistaken Marxist prognoses, but without breaking Marxist intentions" Habermas, Jrgen. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 116. See also: Dubiel, Helmut. (1985). Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory. Trans. Benjamin Gregg. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London. ^ "[G]one are the objective laws of the market which ruled in the actions of the entrepreneurs and tended toward catastrophe. Instead the conscious decision of the managing directors executes as results (which are more obligatory than the blindest price-mechanisms) the old law of value and hence the destiny of capitalism." Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 38. ^ a b Kompridis, Nikolas. (2006), p. 256 ^ Adorno, Theodor W. (2003) The Philosophy of Modern Music. Translated into English by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. Continuum International Publishing Group, pp. 4142. ^ Blake, Casey and Christopher Phelps. (1994). "History as social criticism: Conversations with Christopher Lasch" Journal of American History 80, no.4 (March) (p.1310-1332) ^ Lukcs, Georg. (1971). The Theory of the Novel. MIT Press, p.22 ^ Karl R. Popper: Addendum 1974: The Frankfurt School. in: The Myth of the Framework. London New York 1994, p. 80 ^ Habermas, Jrgen (1987), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, MIT Press,
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Peczynski, Z. A. (1971). Hegel's political philosophy problems and perspectives: a collection of new essays, CUP Archive. Google Print, p.200 (http://books.google.no /books?id=JEI4AAAAIAAJ& pg=PA200&lpg=PA200& dq=Hegel+future+prescripti ve&source=bl& ots=0plHOHrVVX& sig=IPPBkTg_9XhhWuYCh3W cx8Zat00&hl=no& ei=fgg5S_uFDYnSQaQp5CvCg& sa=X&oi=book_result& ct=result&resnum=2& ved=0CBAQ6AEwAQ#v=one page& q=Hegel%20future%20prescr iptive&f=false) ^ Karl Marx (1859), Preface to Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen konomie. ^ Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern Geographies. London: Verso. (esp. pp. 7693) ^ Jonathan Wol, Ph.D. (ed.). "Karl Marx" (http://plato.stanford.edu /entries/marx/). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford. Retrieved 2009-09-17. ^ Seiler, Robert M. "Human Communication in the Critical Theory Tradition", University of Calgary, Online Publication (http://people.ucalgary.ca /~rseiler/critical.htm) ^ Bernstein, J. M. (1994) The Frankfurt School: critical assessments, Volume 3, Taylor & Francis, p. 208 (See also pp. 199202) ^ Thoedor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reections on a Damaged Life, Verso (2006), pp. 1516. ^ Adorno, Theodor W. (2006), p. 247. ^ Adorno, T. W., with Max Horkheimer. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 242. ^ "Critical Theory was initially developed in Horkheimer's circle to think through political disappointments at the
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1987. p. 301 42. ^ Habermas, Jrgen (1987), p. 42 43. ^ Kompridis, Nikolas. (2006), pp.2324 44. ^ Kompridis, Nikolas. (2006), p.25 45. ^ Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments pp. 12, 15. 46. ^ Kompridis, Nikolas. (2006), p.xi 47. ^ Martin Barker: A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign: London: Pluto
Attack on Imagination," http://rado.com/blog/2010 /05/27/attack-imagination/ 51. ^ "Criticising Cultural Marxism doesn't make you Anders Breivik" (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk /news/edwest/100178296 /criticising-cultural-marxismdoesnt-make-you-andersbreivik/). 52. ^ "Anders Breivik, Reader" (http://www.newyorker.com /online/blogs/books/2011/07 /anders-breivikmanifesto.html).
Press: 1984 48. ^ Roy Shuker, Roger Openshaw and Janet Soler: Youth, Media and Moral Panic: From Hooligans to Video Nasties: Palmerston North: Massey University Department of Education: 1990 49. ^ Cowen, Tyler (1998) "Is Our Culture in Decline?" Cato Policy Report, http://www.cato.org /pubs/policy_report/v20n5 /culture.pdf 50. ^ Rado, Jon (2010) "The
Further reading
Arato, Andrew and Eike Gebhardt, Eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, 1982. Bernstein, Jay. Ed. The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments. New York: Routledge, 1994. (in six volumes). Benhabib, Seyla. Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Bottomore, Tom. The Frankfurt School and its Critics. New York: Routledge, 2002. Bronner, Stephen Eric and Douglas MacKay Kellner, Eds. Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1989. Brosio, Richard A. The Frankfurt School: An Analysis of the Contradictions and Crises of Liberal Capitalist Societies. (http://libx.bsu.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/BSMngrph&CISOPTR=21& CISOBOX=1&REC=11) 1980. Friedman, George. The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Held, David. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Gerhardt, Christina. "Frankfurt School. The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 1500 to the Present. 8 vols. Ed. Immanuel Ness. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009. 12-13. Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research 19231950. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1996. Kompridis, Nikolas. Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Schwartz, Frederic J. Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Shapiro, Jeremy J. "The Critical Theory of Frankfurt". Times Literary Supplement 3 (October 4, 1974) 787. Scheuerman, William E. Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Signicance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Wheatland, Thomas. The Frankfurt School in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
External links
Ocial website of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt (http://www.ifs.uni-frankfurt.de/english/index.htm) "Critical Theory" on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries /critical-theory/) The Frankfurt School on the Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/subject /frankfurt-school/)
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BBC Radio 4 Audio documentary "In our time: the Frankfurt School" (http://www.bbc.co.uk /iplayer/episode/b00pr54s/In_Our_Time_The_Frankfurt_School/) Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt_School&oldid=561494589" Categories: Frankfurt School Critical theory Cultural studies Marxist theory Political philosophy Social philosophy Sociological paradigms Theories of history Goethe University Frankfurt This page was last modied on 25 June 2013 at 10:23. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-prot organization.
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