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Frankfurt school usually refers to a set of intellectuals of Marxist origins who worked within the framework of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research after Max Horkheimer became its director in 1930. This article discusses the impact of and the intellectuals within this school. It first reconstructs the profile of the first generation of Frankfurt school theorists and then analyzes the second and third generation as well as their contemporary legacy.

The First Generation

The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was funded in 1924, but it was only under the directorship of Max Horkheimer that it gained its distinctive character. The institute was an interdisciplinary research organization that brought together philosophers, economists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and literary and music critics, including Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin (although he was not a formal member), Erich Fromm, Leo Loewenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann, and Friedrick Pollock. After Hitler’s rise to power, the institute was closed, and its members emigrated to Switzerland first (in 1933) and then to the United States (in 1935). The institute was reopened in Frankfurt in 1950.

Horkheimer exercised a deep influence as director of the institute, pushing his colleagues to question the economicism of orthodox Marxism and take into considerations what earlier Marxists had relegated to the so-called superstructure of politics, law, culture, and ideology. In his contributions to the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the institute’s main intellectual organ, Horkheimer argued for the need to develop what he named a “critical theory” of society, an intellectual endeavor that, thanks to its multidisciplinary approach, is able to analyze human relationships in their complexity and thus better identify the conditions for emancipation from domination. While traditional social science simply reflects the way things are and is therefore aimed at perpetuating the status quo, a critical theory seeks to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.

What is typical of the Frankfurt school is its combination of an unorthodox Marxist theory of society with insights taken from German philosophical tradition (in particular Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel) and psychoanalysis (in particular Sigmund Freud). Authors in the Frankfurt school tradition typically combine such a theoretical background with empirical analysis. So while Neumann and Kirchheimer analyzed the rise of Nazism by looking at the way in which it destructed the traditional liberal legal protections such as the rule of law, others emphasized the psychological and sociological conditions that favored the emergence of an authoritarian personality. The latter generated a big multidisciplinary research project whose final results were published in 1950 as The Authoritarian Personality.

The critique of totalitarianism is, however, not limited to the sole European Fascism; Frankfurt school theorists are known for having diagnosed germs of a totalitarian domination in mass industrial democracies as well. In particular, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse put forward a powerful critique of the role of ideology in industrialized societies. In their influential Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer analyze the mechanisms of domination inherent to what they call “culture industry.” Although high culture once possessed a critical potential, this has vanished in contemporary mass culture; the latter has become a homogenizing system of entertainment that includes cinema, film, and music and is aimed at only reproducing and stabilizing the system of domination. Difference is tolerated only as it can be subsumed under universal domination. While Marcuse’s critique of industrial societies, as developed in Eros and Civilisation and One-dimensional Man, discloses a possible way out from domination in the liberation of the unnecessarily repressed instincts and the power of imagination, the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment seem to see no way out from the system of domination. In their view, the entire Western Enlightenment is based on an instrumental concept of reason as domination over nature that cannot but result in the opposite of reason, that is, myth and barbarism.

The critique of reason remains a crucial theme of Horkheimer’s writings, which assume a darker connotation toward the end of his life (showing the influence of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical pessimism). In his later writings, Adorno continues instead his critique of systematic philosophy by rethinking history and society in light of a negative dialectic.

The Second Generation And The Legacy Of The Frankfurt School

The most complex figure within the second generation of Frankfurt school theorists is Juergen Habermas. Professor of philosophy in Frankfurt until his retirement in 1994, Habermas’s contribution spans from social sciences to moral, legal, and political philosophy. Notwithstanding significant continuities with his predecessors, Habermas criticized Adorno and Horkheimer for overlooking the unfulfilled potential of emancipation of modern rationality. In his view, they failed to provide a solid basis for a critical social theory because their critique rested on the tacit assumption of a privileged standpoint from which to expose ideology.

In Habermas’s view, a critical theory must be concerned not only with the unmasking of domination but also with the validation of its own critical standards. Habermas put forward a new version of critical theory in which the Marxian legacy is as important as the Kantian one. In his Theory of Communicative Action, a work that combines the insights of German philosophy with the analytic philosophy of language, Habermas argues that the normative foundations for critical social theory must be found in the conditions for communicative action, that is, the “idealizing presuppositions” that must be undertaken by anyone trying to come to an understanding with someone else. Habermas’s attempt to ground reason in a universal pragmatics of communication has been extremely influential for the following generations of critical theorists. In his successive writings, and in particular in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas applies his discourse theory to legal theory and to the theory of democracy.

With the partial exception of the first research directly promoted by the Frankfurt Institute, it is impossible to identify a single method that unifies all Frankfurt school theorists. Yet it is perhaps in such a capacity to inspire critical social research in very different ambits that the main legacy of the Frankfurt school resides. Among the newest generations of critical theorists, some, such as Rainer Forst, have continued the search for the normative foundations of reason, whereas others, such as Axel Honneth, have recovered Hegel and psychoanalysis by emphasizing the importance of conflict and the struggle for recognition. Others, such as Albrecht Wellmer and Alfred Schmidt, have recovered insights from the first generation, in particular Adorno and Horkheimer. Finally, there are also those contemporary theorists who have enlarged the agenda of critical theory to new objects such as international relations or gender studies.

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