summary SCHOOL OF FRANKFURT AND CRITICAL THEORY

SCHOOL OF FRANKFURT AND CRITICAL THEORY

            “Critical theory” stood as a weapon and code for the quasi-Marxist theory of society developed by a group of interdisciplinary social theorists collectively known as the Frankfurt School. The term Frankfurt School refers to the work of members of the Institute for Social Research that was established in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923 as the first Marxist-oriented research centre affiliated with a major German university. Max Horkheimer became director of the institute in 1930, gathering around himself many talented theorists, including Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Leopold Neumann, Henryk Grossman, Siegfried Kracauer, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Claus Offe, Axel Honneth, Oskar Negt, Alfred Schmidt, Albrecht Wellmer.

Under Horkheimer, the institute sought to develop an interdisciplinary social theory that could serve as an instrument of social transformation. The work of this era was a synthesis of philosophy and social theory, combining sociology, psychology, cultural studies, and political economy, among other disciplines.

In a series of studies carried out in the 1930s, the Institute for Social Research developed theories of monopoly capitalism, the new industrial state, the role of technology and giant corporations in monopoly capitalism, the key roles of mass culture and communication in reproducing contemporary societies, and the decline of democracy and of the individual. Critical theory drew alike on Hegelian dialectics, Marxian theory, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and other trends of contemporary thought. It articulated theories that were to occupy the centre of social theory for the next several decades. Rarely, if ever, has such a talented group of interdisciplinary intellectuals come together under the auspices of one institute. They managed to keep alive radical social theory during a difficult historical era and provided aspects of a neo-Marxian theory of the changed social reality and new historical situation in the transition from competitive capitalism to monopoly capitalism.

Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and the subsequent pressures arising from the commencement of the second (II) world war, the atmosphere became unconducive, the Institute left Germany for Geneva, before moving to New York City in 1935, where it became affiliated with Columbia University. This exile to the United States of America gave birth to Analytic Philosophy against Continental Philosophy. Some Analytic Philosophers include Willard Van Orman Quine, Rudolf Carnap, G.E. Moore, and Richard Rorty and so on. While Leo Lowenthal, Marcuse, Neumann, and others worked for the U.S. government as their contribution to the fight against fascism. Adorno and Horkheimer, meanwhile, moved to California, where they worked on their collective book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, which discussed how reason and enlightenment in the contemporary era turned into their opposites, transforming what promised to be instruments of truth and liberation into tools of domination. In their scenario, science and technology had created horrific tools of destruction and death, culture was commodified into products of a mass-produced culture industry, and democracy terminated into fascism, in which masses chose despotic and demagogic rulers. Moreover, in their extremely pessimistic vision, individuals were oppressing their own bodies and renouncing their own desires as they assimilated and created their own repressive beliefs and allowed themselves to be instruments of labour and war.

After World War II, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Friedrich Pollock returned to Frankfurt to re-establish the institute in Germany, while Lowenthal, Marcuse, and others remained in the United States. In Germany, Adorno, Horkheimer, and their associates published a series of books and became a dominant intellectual current. At this time, the term Frankfurt School became widespread as a characterization of this group's version of interdisciplinary social research and of the particular critical theory developed by them. They engaged in frequent methodological and substantive debates with other social theories, most notably "the positivism dispute" in which they criticized more empirical and quantitative approaches to theory and defended their own more speculative and critical brand of theory.

The Frankfurt School eventually became best known for their critical theories of "the totally administered society," or "one-dimensional society," which analyzed the increasing power of capitalism over all aspects of social life and the development of new forms of social control. During the 1950s, however, there were divergences between the work of the re-established institute and the developing theories of Fromm, Lowenthal, Marcuse, and others who did not return to Germany, which were often at odds with both the current and earlier work of Adorno and Horkheimer. Thus, it is misleading to consider the work of various critical theorists during the post-war period as members of a monolithic Frankfurt School. Whereas there was both a shared sense of purpose and collective work on interdisciplinary critical theory from 1930 to the early 1940s, thereafter, critical theorists frequently diverged, and during the 1950s and 1960s Frankfurt School as a term can really be applied only to the work of the institute in Germany under Horkheimer and Adorno.

THE AFTERMATH OF THE SCHOOL OF FRANKFURT

Two points ought to be noted here:

            Firstly, the goal of the school of Frankfurt was a failure due to lack of dialogue. But this lack of dialogue, Martin Buber corrected in his book ‘I and Thou.’

            Secondly, this school of Frankfurt also influenced the discourse on reason and religion between Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger in the book The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. This is precisely because, Jurgen Habermas was an erudite member of the school of Frankfurt.