Frankfurt School

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The Frankfurt School is a

Institute for Social Research founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Formed during the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was composed of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s; namely, capitalism, fascism, and communism
.

The Frankfurt theorists proposed that existing social theory was unable to explain the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics, such as Nazism, of 20th-century liberal capitalist societies. Also critical of Marxism–Leninism as a philosophically inflexible system of social organization, the School's critical-theory research sought alternative paths to social development.

What unites the disparate members of the School is a shared commitment to the project of

Marxist tradition, psychoanalysis, and empirical sociological research.[1][2][3][4]

History

Institute for Social Research

Main article:
Institute for Social Research
The Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

The term "Frankfurt School" describes the works of scholarship and the intellectuals who were the Institute for Social Research, an adjunct organization at Goethe University Frankfurt, founded in 1923, by Carl Grünberg, a Marxist professor of law at the University of Vienna.[5] It was the first Marxist research center at a German university and was funded through the largess of the wealthy student Felix Weil (1898–1975).[6]

Weil's

doctoral dissertation dealt with the practical problems of implementing socialism. In 1922, he organized the First Marxist Workweek in effort to synthesize different trends of Marxism into a coherent, practical philosophy; the first symposium included György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel, and Friedrich Pollock. The success of the First Marxist Workweek prompted the formal establishment of a permanent institute for social research, and Weil negotiated with the Ministry of Education for a university professor to be director of the Institute for Social Research, thereby, formally ensuring that the Frankfurt School would be a university institution.[7]

Korsch and Lukács participated in the Workweek, which included the study of Marxism and Philosophy (1923), by Karl Korsch. Their Communist Party membership precluded their active participation in the Institute for Social Research; nevertheless, Korsch participated in the School's publishing venture. Moreover, the political correctness[

contentious label] by which the Communists compelled Lukács to repudiate his book History and Class Consciousness (1923) indicated that political, ideological, and intellectual independence from the Communist Party was a necessary work condition for realizing the production of knowledge.[7]

The philosophical tradition of the Frankfurt School – the multi-disciplinary integration of the social sciences – is associated with the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who became the director in 1930, and recruited intellectuals such as Theodor W. Adorno (philosopher, sociologist, musicologist), Erich Fromm (psychoanalyst), and Herbert Marcuse (philosopher).[6]

European interwar period (1918–39)

In the

Hegelianism and Marxist philosophy
.

As the anti-intellectual threat of Nazism increased to political violence, the founders decided to move the Institute for Social Research out of Nazi Germany (1933–45).[8] Soon after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the Institute first moved from Frankfurt to Geneva, and then to New York City, in 1935, where it joined Columbia University. The School's journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung ("Journal of Social Research"), was renamed "Studies in Philosophy and Social Science". This began the period of the School's important work in Marxist critical theory. By the 1950s, the paths of scholarship led Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock to return to West Germany, while Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Kirchheimer remained in the U.S. In 1953, the Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) was formally re-established in Frankfurt, West Germany.[9]

Critical theory

See also: Critical theory
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The works of the Frankfurt School are to be understood in the context of the intellectual and practical objectives of critical theory. In "Traditional and Critical Theory" (1937), Max Horkheimer defined critical theory as social critique meant to effect sociologic change and realize intellectual emancipation, by way of enlightenment that is not dogmatic in its assumptions.[10][11] Critical theory analyzes the true significance of the ruling understandings (the dominant ideology) generated in bourgeois society in order to show that the dominant ideology misrepresents how human relations occur in the real world and how capitalism justifies and legitimates the domination of people.

According to the theory of cultural hegemony, the dominant ideology is a ruling-class narrative that provides an explanatory justification of the current power-structure of society. Nonetheless, the story told through the ruling understandings conceals as much as it reveals about society. The task of the Frankfurt School was sociological analysis and interpretation of the areas of social-relation that Marx did not discuss in the 19th century – especially the base and superstructure aspects of a capitalist society.[12]

Horkheimer opposed critical theory to traditional theory, wherein the word theory is applied in the positivistic sense of scientism, in the sense of a purely observational mode, which finds and establishes scientific law (generalizations) about the real world. Social sciences differ from natural sciences because their scientific generalizations cannot be readily derived from experience. The researcher's understanding of a social experience is always filtered through biases in the researcher's mind. What the researcher does not understand is that he or she operates within an historical and ideological context. The results for the theory being tested would conform to the ideas of the researcher rather than the facts of the experience proper; in "Traditional and Critical Theory" (1937), Horkheimer said:

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 perception.[13]

For Horkheimer, the methods of investigation applicable to the social sciences cannot imitate the

natural sciences. In that vein, the theoretical approaches of positivism and pragmatism, of neo-Kantianism and phenomenology failed to surpass the ideological constraints that restricted their application to social science, because of the inherent logico–mathematic prejudice that separates theory from actual life, i.e. such methods of investigation seek a logic that is always true, and independent of and without consideration for continuing human activity in the field under study. He felt that the appropriate response to such a dilemma was the development of a critical theory of Marxism.[14]

Horkheimer believed the problem was epistemological saying "we should reconsider not merely the scientist, but the knowing individual, in general."[15] Unlike orthodox Marxism, which applies a template to critique and to action, critical theory is self-critical, with no claim to the universality of absolute truth. As such, it does not grant primacy to matter (materialism) or consciousness (idealism), because each epistemology distorts the reality under study to the benefit of a small group. In practice, critical theory is outside the philosophical strictures of traditional theory; however, as a way of thinking and of recovering humanity's self-knowledge, critical theory draws investigational resources and methods from Marxism.[11]

Dialectical method

In contrast to modes of reasoning that view things in abstraction, each by itself and as though endowed with fixed properties, Hegel's "dialectical" innovation was to consider reality according to its movement and change in time, according to interrelations and interactions of its various components or "moments". The Frankfurt School attempted to reformulate Hegel's idealistic dialectics into a more concrete method of investigation.[16]

According to Hegel, human history can be reconstructed to show how what is rational in reality is the result of the overcoming of past contradictions. It is an intelligible process of human activity, the

prescriptive and normative, because philosophy comprehends only in hindsight.[18][19] The study of history is limited to descriptions of past and present human realities.[17] For Hegel and his successors (the right Hegelians), philosophy can only describe what is rational in the reality of the present, which in Hegel's time was Christianity and the Prussian state
.

Karl Marx and the

contradictions inherent to capitalism must lead to its negation, which according to this theory, will be the replacement of capitalism with communism, a new, rational form of society.[22]

Marx used dialectical analysis to uncover the contradictions in the predominant ideas of society, and in the social relations to which they are linked – exposing the underlying struggle between opposing forces. Only by becoming aware of the dialectic (i.e., attaining class consciousness) of such opposing forces in a struggle for power can men and women intellectually liberate themselves, and change the existing social order through social progress.[23] The Frankfurt School understood that a dialectical method could only be adopted if it could be applied to itself; if they adopted a self-correcting method – a dialectical method that would enable the correction of previous, false interpretations of the dialectical investigation. Accordingly, critical theory rejected the historicism and materialism of orthodox Marxism.[24]

Critique of capitalist ideology

Dialectic of Enlightenment

instrumental rationality and its application within the capitalism of the post-Enlightenment era was made long before ecology and environmentalism
became popular concerns.

They claim that

Instrumental rationality is the new means of cultural reproduction within the mechanical age. It is a fusion of domination and technological rationality that brings all of external and internal nature under the power of the human subject. In the process the subject gets swallowed up and no social force analogous to the proletariat
can be identified that could enable the subject to emancipate itself.

It is their contention that, 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."[25]

From a sociological point of view, Adorno and Horkheimer's works demonstrate an ambivalence concerning the ultimate source of social domination, an ambivalence that gave rise to the "pessimism" of critical theory about the possibility of human emancipation and freedom.

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 gradually had been replaced by the more central role of management hierarchies at the firm level and macroeconomic interventions at the state level in contemporary Western societies.[28]
The dialectic through which Marx predicted the emancipation of modern society was suppressed, effectively subjugated to a positivist rationality of domination.

Philosopher and critical theorist Nikolas Kompridis writes:

According to the now canonical view of its history, Frankfurt School critical theory began in the 1930s as a fairly confident 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.[29]

Kompridis argues 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, Ausgang, according to Kompridis, this would not come until later – purportedly in the form of Jürgen Habermas's work on the intersubjective bases of communicative rationality.[29]

In psychoanalytic terms, consumption culture and mass media displaced the role of a father figure in the paternalistic family. Rather than serving to liberate society from patriarchal authority however, this merely replaced it with the authority of the "totally administered" society. Christopher Lasch criticized subsequent liberatory movements of the 1960s for failing to reckon with this dynamic, which in his view led to a "culture of narcissism".[30] Lasch believed the "later Frankfurt School" tended to ground political criticisms too much on psychiatric diagnoses like the authoritarian personality: "This procedure excused them from the difficult work of judgment and argumentation. Instead of arguing with opponents, they simply dismissed them on psychiatric grounds."[31]

Art and music criticism

Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is a canonical text in art history and film studies.[32] Benjamin is optimistic about the potential of commodified works of art to introduce radical political views to the proletariat.[33] In contrast, Adorno and Horkheimer saw the rise of the culture industry as promoting homogeneity of thought and entrenching existing authorities.[33] For instance, Adorno (a trained classical pianist) polemicized against popular music because it had become part of the culture industry of advanced capitalist society and the false consciousness that contributes to social domination. He argued that radical art and music may preserve the truth by capturing the reality of human suffering. Hence, "What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man.... The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music".[34]

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.[citation needed] In particular, Adorno criticized jazz and popular music, viewing them as part of the culture industry that contributes to the present sustainability of capitalism by rendering it "aesthetically pleasing" and "agreeable". Martin Jay has called the attack on jazz the least successful aspect of Adorno's work in America.[35]

Praxis

Members of the Frankfurt School were academics and generally avoided (direct) political action or praxis.[36] Max Horkheimer opposed any revolutionary rhetoric in the institute's publications, since it could jeopardize funding from the West German government.[37] Theodor Adorno showed some sympathy to student movements, particularly after the killing of Benno Ohnesorg, but he did not believe street violence had the potential to effect change.[38][39] Angela Davis, a student of Marcuse, recounted advice given to her by Adorno that critical theorists working in the radical movements of the 1960s were, "akin to a media studies scholar deciding to become a radio technician".[37][40]

In The Theory of the Novel (1971), György Lukács criticized the "leading German intelligentsia", including some members of the Frankfurt School (Adorno is named explicitly), as inhabiting the Grand Hotel Abyss, a metaphorical place from which the theorists comfortably analyze the abyss, the world beyond. Lukács described this contradictory situation as follows: They inhabit "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 enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered."[41][38]

The singular exception to this was Herbert Marcuse, who engaged with the

third-world communist revolutionaries. Marcuse took an active role in the New Left, organizing events with students in the United States and the West German student movement.[36]

Marcuse's relationship with Horkheimer and Adorno was strained by their divergence of opinion about the student movements.[36][39] The Socialist German Students' Union was harshly critical of Adorno for his lack of political engagement and would disrupt his lectures.[39] When a student's room was trashed for refusing to take part in protests, Adorno wrote, "praxis serves as an ideological pretext for exercising moral constraint." Adorno further said it was a manifestation of the authoritarian personality.[38] Adorno's student Hans-Jürgen Krahl was also critical of Adorno's inaction.[39] When in January 1969, Krahl led a group of students to occupy a room, Adorno called the police to remove them, further angering the students.[39] Marcuse criticized Adorno's decision to call the police, writing "I reject the unmediated translation of theory into praxis just as emphatically as you do. But I do believe that there are situations, moments, in which theory is pushed on further by praxis — situations and moments in which theory that is kept separate from praxis becomes untrue to itself".[39]

In the 1970s, perceiving the limitations of the new left, Marcuse de-emphasized the third world and revolutionary violence in favor of a focus on social issues in the United States.

women's liberation, seeing in it echoes of his earlier work in Eros and Civilization. Seeing that the revolutionary moment of the 1960s was over, Marcuse advised students to avoid even a suggestion of violence. Instead, he advocated the "long march through the institutions" and recommended educational institutions as a refuge for radicals in the U.S.[36]

Criticism

Psychoanalytic categorization

The historian Christopher Lasch criticized the Frankfurt School for their initial tendency of "automatically" rejecting opposing political criticisms, based upon "psychiatric" grounds:

The Authoritarian Personality [1950] had a tremendous influence on [Richard] Hofstadter, and other liberal intellectuals, because it showed them how to conduct political criticism in psychiatric categories, [and] to make those categories bear the weight of political criticism. This procedure excused them from the difficult work of judgment and argumentation. Instead of arguing with opponents, they simply dismissed them on psychiatric grounds.[42]

Economics and communications media

During the 1980s, anti-authoritarian socialists in the United Kingdom and New Zealand criticized the rigid and deterministic view of popular culture deployed within the Frankfurt School theories of capitalist culture, which seemed to preclude any prefigurative role for social critique within such work. They argued that EC Comics often did contain such cultural critiques.[43][44] Recent criticism 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 niche cultural text for niche audiences.[45]

See also

References

  1. ^ Bohman, James (7 January 2024). "Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)". Critical Theory. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  2. ^ Corradetti, Claudio. "The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  3. ^ Held, David (1983). "Frankfurt School". In Bottomore, Tom (ed.). A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (2nd ed.). Blackwell. pp. 208–13.
  4. ^ Held, David (1980). Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. University of California Press. p. 14.
  5. ^ Corradetti, Claudio (2011). "The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (published: 21 October 2011).
  6. ^ a b "Frankfurt School". (2009). Encyclopædia Britannica Online: https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/217277/Frankfurt-School Archived 22 May 2010 at the Wayback Machine (Retrieved 19 December 2009)
  7. ^ a b "The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory", Marxist Internet Archive Archived 27 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine (Retrieved 12 September 2009)
  8. ^ Dubiel, Helmut. "The Origins of Critical Theory: An interview with Leo Löwenthal", Telos 49.
  9. ^ Held, David (1980), p. 38.
  10. ^ Geuss, Raymond. The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt school. Cambridge University Press, 1981. p. 58.
  11. ^ a b Carr, Adrian (2000). "Critical theory and the Management of Change in Organizations", Journal of Organizational Change Management, pp. 13, 3, 208–220.
  12. ^ Martin Jay. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950. London: Heinemann, 1973, p. 21.
  13. ^ Horkheimer, Max (1976). "Traditional and critical theory". In: Connerton, P (Eds), Critical Sociology: Selected Readings, Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 213
  14. ^ Rasmussen, D. "Critical Theory and Philosophy", The Handbook of Critical Theory, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996. p .18.
  15. ^ Horkheimer, Max (1976), p. 221.
  16. ^ dialectic. (2009). Retrieved 19 December 2009, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/161174/dialectic Archived 29 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine
  17. ^ a b Little, D. (2007). "Philosophy of History", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (18 February 2007), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/history/#HegHis Archived 28 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine
  18. Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk" – Hegel, G. W. F. (1821). Elements of the Philosophy of Right
    (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts), p.13
  19. ^ "Hegel's philosophy, and in particular his political philosophy, purports to be the rational formulation of a definite historical period, and Hegel refuses to look further ahead into the future." – Peĺczynski, Z. A. (1971). Hegel's political philosophy – Problems and Perspectives: A Collection of New Essays, CUP Archive. Google Print, p. 200 Archived 4 May 2016 at the Wayback Machine
  20. ^ Karl Marx (1859), Preface to Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie.
  21. ^ Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern Geographies. London: Verso. (pp. 76–93)
  22. ^ Jonathan Wolff, PhD (ed.). "Karl Marx". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford. Archived from the original on 8 February 2012. Retrieved 17 September 2009.
  23. ^ Seiler, Robert M. "Human Communication in the Critical Theory Tradition", University of Calgary, Online Publication Archived 14 January 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  24. ^ Bernstein, J. M. (1994) The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments, Volume 3, Taylor & Francis, pp. 199–202, 208.
  25. ISBN 978-1-84467-051-2
    .
  26. ^ Adorno, T. W., with Max Horkheimer. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 242.
  27. ^ "Critical Theory was initially developed in Horkheimer's circle to think through political disappointments at the 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, Jürgen. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Massachusetts: 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.
  28. ^ "[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.
  29. ^ a b Kompridis, Nikolas. (2006), p. 256
  30. JSTOR 41035493
    .
  31. ^ Blake, Casey and Christopher Phelps. (1994). "History as Social Criticism: Conversations with Christopher Lasch", Journal of American History 80, No. 4 (March), pp. 1310–1332.
  32. ^ Kirsh, Adam (21 August 2006). "The Philosopher Stoned". The New Yorker.
  33. ^ a b Ross, Alex (15 September 2014). "The Naysayers". The New Yorker.
  34. ^ 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. 41–42.
  35. JSTOR 487894
    .
  36. ^
    ISBN 9780815371670
    .
  37. ^
    ISBN 9-781-78478-569-7
    .
  38. ^
    ISBN 9-781-78478-569-7
    .
  39. ^
    ISBN 9-781-78478-569-7
    .
  40. ISBN 9780815371670
    .
  41. ^ Lukács, Georg. (1971). The Theory of the Novel. MIT Press, p. 22.
  42. ^ Blake, Casey and Christopher Phelps. (1994). "History as Social Criticism: Conversations with Christopher Lasch", Journal of American History 80, No. 4 (March), pp. 1310–1332.
  43. ^ Martin Barker: A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign: London: Pluto Press: 1984
  44. ^ 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
  45. ^ Cowen, Tyler (1998) "Is Our Culture in Decline?" Cato Policy Report, http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v20n5/culture.pdf Archived 4 November 2012 at the Wayback Machine

Further reading

External links