“Frankfurt School”, or Institute for Social Research, set up by a group of Marxist intellectuals in Germany in 1923, affiliated to the University of Frankfurt and independently of the Communist Party, which has been influential in the development of Marxist theory.

The founding of the Institute marked the beginning of a current of “Marxism” divorced from the organized working class and Communist Parties, which over the decades merged with bourgeois ideology.

In 1933, Nazis forced it to close and move to the US, where it found hospitality at Columbia University.

Max Horkheimer

Friedrick Pollock

Theodor Adorno

Erich Fromm

Herbert Marcuse

Franz Neuman

Leo Lowenthal

Henryk Grossman

Arkadij Gurlarland

Walter Benjamin

Jürgen Habermas

Axel Honneth

Action orientation and critique of society

Platform to change society for the better

Uses psychoanalysis

Subjectivity

They refuse the point “Knowledge would be simply a mirror of

the reality”.

“The facts which our sense present to us are socially

preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the

object perceived and through the historical character of the

perceiving organ” – Horkheimer

Critical Theory characterizes itself as a method which does not

“fetishize” knowledge, considering it rather functional to

ideology critique and social emancipation. In the light of such

finalities, knowledge becomes social criticism, and the latter

translates itself into social action, that is, into the

transformation of reality.

It was directed against dogmatic, reductionist and economistic

forms of Marxism

The school has developed an account of the "culture industry" to call attention to the industrialization and commercialization of culture under capitalist relations of production.

During the 1930s, the Frankfurt school developed a critical approach to cultural and communications studies, combining political economy, textual analysis, and analysis of social and ideological effects.

They coined the term "culture industry" to signify the process of the industrialization of mass-produced culture and the commercial imperatives that drove the system.

Marxism sought to understand Capitalism mainly in terms of its tendency towards structural or objective crisis, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, etc.

The Frankfurt School comes into its own as by placing greater emphasis on forms of subjective crisis generated by capitalist social relations, the rise of authoritarian personality structures, a crisis of memory, experience and, ultimately, agency. It sought to understand such a subjective crisis in psychoanalytical terms.

To bring emancipation from ideological

blinders

To bring awareness to the conditions of our

own knowledge of the world

The social world can be understood as a

social world. The social world lacks the

"given" character of the natural world and

must be seen as our construction.

The guiding concern of Frankfurt School is

with emancipation through reflective social

science, focused on the experience of the

working class in particular.

Stand in the center of leisure activity;

Are important agents of socialization;

Are mediators of political reality;

Should be seen as major institutions of contemporary societies with a variety of economic, political, cultural and social effects.

an instrument for control and domination

Cultural industries are a form of the integration of

the working class into capitalist societies.

Culture industries and consumer society are

stabilizing contemporary capitalism and accordingly

sought new strategies for political change, agencies

of political transformation, and models for political

emancipation that could serve as norms of social

critique and goals for political struggle

The system of cultural production dominated by

film, radio broadcasting, newspapers, and

magazines, was controlled by advertising and

commercial imperatives, and served to create

subservience to the system of consumer capitalism.

Major force of production

Formative mode of social organization and control

Entire "mode of organizing and perpetuating social relationships

Manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns

Instrument for control and domination

Habermas looked to the ideal of free

interpersonal interaction as it was found in

ordinary life and, specifically, in linguistic

communication, to serve as the key source

of emancipatory impulses.

Typical themes:

A conception of history and society based on the struggle for recognition by social groups

A contextualization of normative foundations in the deep structures of subjective experience

Greater attention to the "Other of reason"

An early criticism, 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.

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 promise is withdrawn, as it is by Adorno and Horkheimer

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