The Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School was an academic community composed of, among others: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. While they engaged a dazzlingly diverse group of intellectual disciplines and theoretical approaches, the guiding thread of all of their analyses was the diagnosis of the ruined, pathological world of the early 20th century. Under the shadows of full-blown industrial capitalism and National Socialism, the Frankfurt School asked two familiar questions: How did we get here? and Where does salvation lie? What was so tremendously original about their collective responses was that the answers lay not in political activism or in a revolutionary labor movement, but in such abstruse phenomena as avant-garde art, psychoanalysis, dialectical philosophy, and a messianic religious faith. Their studies-which go under the general name of "Critical Theory"-were among the first which can be properly labeled interdisciplinary, encompassing insights from so many different areas. By the time of their mature works-most notably Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment-the members of the Frankfurt School no longer referred to their work as philosophy, sociology, aesthetics or psychology; it was, simply, "Theory."

Before the Institute could really develop their approach, however, they were forced into exile by the ascendancy of the Nazi Party to power in 1933. The Frankfurt School was doubly damned, being not only "left-wing radicals" but Jewish to boot. Initially scattered throughout Europe in exile, their next permanent base would be Columbia University in New York, with which they formed an association which would last from July 1934 until early 1943. Their financial needs were met by an endowment from Weil, so they were able to remain relatively independent and free to carry out their own work.

After the war, only Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Frankfurt, the others preferring to remain in America. The tone of their works became, if anything, more melancholy and distressed as they realized that the the culture of German-Jewish intellectuals from which they had emerged was now hopelessly lost. Nevertheless, they both assumed academic posts at Frankfurt and carried on their theoretical work, which-especially for Adorno-was far more oriented towards memory and meditation on the past than toward a diagnosis of the present. This is evidenced in the subtitle of one of Adorno's last books: Minima Moralia: Reflections From a Damaged Life. In it, he lamented the culture destroyed by fascism while attempting to exorcise his guilt at having survived the war. All this he managed to sum up beautifully in one sentence: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

People of the Movement

Theodor W. Adorno
Max Horkheimer
Herbert Marcuse
Walter Benjamin.

Related Movements

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