What is the Frankfurt School? (1)

"Frankfurt School" refers primarily to a school of thought. It is also called "critical theory" and it appears that the latter term is used more often when referring to the trend of thinking and social criticism, while Frankfurt School tends to refer more to the leading individuals associated with it. The work of Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse are famously associated with critical theory. Jürgen Habermas also is generally considered to be working in the Frankfurt School/critical theory tradition of thought.

There are actual institutions associated with the Frankfurt School, the leading on being the Institut für Sozialforschung, which was formally associated with the University of Frankfurt as an independent academic institute. The Institut was formally founded by Kurt Albert Gerlach and Felix Weil, who developed the agreement with the University to establish the Institut in 1922. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Instutut shut down in Frankfurt and continued its work through offices in New York, London, Paris, Geneva and Los Angeles. In postwar Germany, the Institut was refounded and continues to exist today.

The dating of the founding can seem a bit murky. Rolf Hecker points out Es begann mit einem Theorieseminar in Thüringen Trend Online Zeitung June 1999 (which apparently first appeared in Neues Deutschland) that the formal opening of the Institut took place on June 22, 1924, with Carl Grünberg as Director. But the agreement with the University by Gerlach and Weil took place in 1922. So here I'm calling Gerlach the first Director even though the Institut didn't formally open until after his death and under Grünberg's leadership.

A useful source for the origins of the Frankfurt School is Grand Hotel Abgrund: Eine Photobiographie der Frankfurter Schule (1988), edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Willem van Reijen. Göran Therborn also provides a helpful history of the evolution of critical theory in New Left Review Sept-Oct 1970. Schmid and Van Riejen describe the original purpose of the Institut für Sozialforschung as being "research work on Marxism, the workers movement and the root causes of anti-Semitism". Ludwig von Friedeburg provides a Geschichte des Instituts für Sozialforschung at the Institut's present Web site, with an English summary also available.

Therborn describes the general approach of the Frankfurt School and the issues with which they wrestled. He writes, "Critical theory’s epistemological basis is a metaphysical humanism." He sees critical theory as a continuation of German Idealism that also took as it historical point of reference the Marxist concept of the development of capitalism leading to the taking of power and transformation of capitalism into socialism by the working class:

What was this philosophy which could thus be substituted for both science and politics in a revolutionary stance? In fact, the theory outlined in Horkheimer’s programme and developed by the Frankfurt School from the 1930’s to the present was by no means a completely original intellectual formation. It was rather an extreme development of the most philosophically self-conscious form of Marxism available to the Frankfurt theorists—the philosophy of the young [Georg] Lukács and [Karl] Korsch, which was itself a development of a whole trend of 19th- and 20th-century German sociological thought represented most completely by Max Weber’s work. The central concern of this tradition was that of ‘capitalist rationalization’.

Therborn speaks there as though Lukács and Korsch were outside the trend of critical theory, when actually they were key figures. This is part of the limitation of Therborn's approach in that article, in which he explicitly limits his focus: "The core members of the School are Horkheimer, Adorno
and Marcuse. ... [T]his article is devoted almost exclusively to the work of these three core members."

Social Democratic politics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had proceeded on an assumption, which was largely confirmed in the politics of those centuries, that the urban industrial working class constituted a relatively coherent interest group fundamentally opposed to that of the capitalist class. To a degree hard to imagine now, the events of the end of the Great War (First World War) had an apocalyptic cast. Four great empires collapsed: the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman Empires. The Social Democrats, despised by the royalists and the democratic capitalists alike, took power in Germany and Russia and established parliamentary democracies. A more radical faction of Social Democrats, the Bolsheviks, took power in St. Petersburg, with a bloody civil war ensuing. The Social Democratic parties of Europe and the rest of the world generally split into Social Democratic and Communist factions, the latter following the model of the Russian Revolution.

But despite these huge changes, the capitalist systems of Western Europe, inlcuding Germany's, the largest and most robust of them. And in the Weimar Republic other postwar regimes, the social-democratic parties provided workers a new level of participation in government and delivering real reforms that mitigated some of the worst abuses of the capitalists systems. All parties and political trends of thought had to adapt to a dramatically new situation and understand its implications for their perspectives and parties. The Frankfurt School was one of those attempts, a serious academic one, focusing heavily on cutting-edge work in sociology and philosophy.

Therborn also notes that the Frankfurt School was heavily influenced by Hegel's work, though critical theorist interpreted it still more in the sense of Marx's historical materialism, which itself was heavily indebted to Hegel's thought. And he talks about the central role that the analysis of fascism played in the work of the Frankfurt School.

However, a lot of Therborn's analysis strikes me as pretty seriously off-base. For instance:

Critical theory sees itself as humanity’s self-knowledge. Therefore it
cannot and must not have a structure which is (formally) logical and
systematic.

Therborn complains that the critical theorist didn't provide political strategies for addressing the issues they raised, which winds up sounding a lot like complaining that they were not a political party or faction instead of a research institute. And he argues that the critical theorists in their analysis of fascism "focused not on economic and political problems, but on ideological and cultural factors." But the Frankfurt School scarcely ignored economic factors.

And politics is politics. Those "ideological and cultural factors" are very much part of it, as they are of social development. Work like Erich Fromm's efforts to apply the findings of psychoanalysis to sociological and political issues wouldn't deserve to be dismissed as third-rate "ideological and cultural factors". And one of the most famous and influential products of the Frankfurt School, Franz Neumann's Behemoth: The Structure and Function of National Socialism 1933-1944 (1942, expanded edition 1944) very much focused on economic and political-science issues.

On Behemoth, see „Behemoth“ war die erste Strukturanalyse des Dritten Reiches von Manfred Funke PM 421/2004 and The Nazi Behemoth by C Wright Mills Partisan Review Sept-October 1942. Mills' evaluation of Neumann's book gives an idea of the reputation of critical theory in the West, and not just on the left (of which Mills was certainly a part):

Franz Neumann's book represents the best tradition of the social sciences in Germany, which came to full stature during the twenties. He looks down a neo-Marxist slant further subtilized by Max Weber's distinctions and deepened by a sociologically oriented psychiatry. His thinking is thus sensitively geared to great structureal shifts and to happenings in the human mind.

Such reporting as his book accomplishes is of central facts tied down by the best documentation available. And there is no repeating of formulae in it: Marx may bear a nineteenth-century trademark in some matters, but, as Neumann again makes clear by a fresh intellectual act, the technique the elements, and the drive of his thinking is more than ever relevant, and right now. There are so many who have "forgotten" what they once half understood and who take the easy ways out that it is downright refreshing to experience a book which displays a really analytic heritage with perception and with craftsmanship.

Therborn is also bothered by the criticisms of Enlightenment rationalism and positivism in science that Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse elaborated. He makes a point of being more complementary to Marcuse as a person than to Adorno and Horkheimer, noting that Marcuse embraced the radical student movement of the Sixties in a way that Adorno and Horkheimer did not. The particular issues Adorno and Horkheimer had with the German student movement are interesting in the history of the Sixties, but not especially important in understand their careers or their work on critical theory.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school