FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Establishment
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.
 First generation (Social
Research Institute in Frankfurt)
Max Horkheimer
Friedrick Pollock
Theodor Adorno
Erich Fromm
Herbert Marcuse
Franz Neuman
Leo Lowenthal
Henryk Grossman
Arkadij Gurlarland
Walter Benjamin
 Second
generation
Jrgen Habermas
 Third
generation
Axel Honneth
 Main concerns
Action orientation and critique of
society

Platform to change society for the

better

Uses psychoanalysis

Subjectivity
 Critical Theory
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

 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.
 Difference between Marxism and
Frankfurt school
Marxism sought to understand Capitalism mainly in
terms of its tendency towards structural
orobjective crisis, the tendency ofthe rate ofprofit
tofall, the contradiction between the forces and
relations of production, etc.

The Frankfurt School comes into its own as by

placing greater emphasis on forms ofsubjective
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 understoodasa

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.
Mass culture and communications:
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,
 Technology:
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

 Second generation
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.
 Third generation
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"

 Criticism of Frankfurt School
theorists
Anearly 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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