The Frankfurt School and critical theory

I've been making an effort to familiarized myself with the history of the left in Germany and Austria, and of the Frankfurt School in particular. I'm going to be doing periodic posts on this theme.

This is not entirley new for this blog. I've placed links at the bottom of this post to some of the previous posts in which I engaged with topics touching on the Frankfurt School and its history.

I want to acknowledge here that there are a lot of loony-tunes ideas that pass for political thought in the Republican Party, which is currently blessed with political theorists of the caliber of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. The have many disciples among Republicans elected to office and among the rank-and-file. Language that would have seemed like a hick version of McCarthyism in the 1950s have become common as dirt among "respectable" Republicans like Beck and chief Party ideologue Limbaugh.

In their alternative narrative of reality, Marxism and fascism and socialism and Communism and Nazism and liberalism and the Democratic Party in the US are all pretty much synonymous. Since I'm going to be dealing in this post with people who were involved in various ways in the German social-democratic and communist movements of the first four decades of the 20th century, I thought about whether I should try in these posts to put in explanations to address the Beck-Limbaugh-Republican Party McCarthyist worldview of the moment.

I decided that for the most part I will not. I can't put a whole history textbook's worth of information into a blog post. And attempting de-programming via blogs seems like a pretty unproductive undertaking. So I won't waste my time.

I'm going to assume that readers of these posts will have some minimal ability to form a realistic picture of the history of the 20th century. I don't see how that is possible in the Birchized view of today Republican media stars like Beck and Limbaugh.



Past posts relating to the Frankfurt School

Are there problems with tolerance?

Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"

Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance

Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy

Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance

The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form

Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

"Critical theory" and war

Herbert Marcuse and the end of Utopia (1 of 3)

Herbert Marcuse and the end of Utopia (2 of 3)

Herbert Marcuse and the end of Utopia (3 of 3)

Tags: frankfurt school