Frankfurt School
Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer founded the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt am Main in 1923. Through an inheritance from his father, Felix Weil contributed 120,000 deutsche marks to the new institute, which was affiliated with the Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University.
Its first director was Kurt Albert Gerlach, who was succeeded by Carl Grunberg in the first year of the institute’s existence. Grun- berg was a professor of political and legal studies at the University of Vienna. While there, he edited the Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers’ Movement for a while. He supported the institute’s desire for an interdisciplinary approach to the problems found in bourgeois society. In his opening address, he emphasized that the institute would pursue research over instruction, unlike most German universities, and would use a Marxist methodology in its studies.As time passed, the group began to incorporate new members: Karl August Wittfogel, Franz Borkenau, and Julian Gumperz, all of whom were Communists. Around the end of the twenties, Leo Lowenthal and Theodor Adorno joined Horkheimer and Pollock as members of the institute. Later, Erich Fromm, through his friendship with Lowenthal, also joined the group.
In 1927 Grunberg stepped down as director due to physical ailments. Hork- heimer became the new director in 1930 and was given a chair in social philosophy at the university. He created a journal for the institute, the Zeitschrift fur Sozial- forschung (Journal for Social Research). In the first issue, Horkheimer reiterated the interdisciplinary nature of the institute. He looked at the fissure of knowledge and blamed it on the current social situation. Horkheimer claimed the monopolistic nature of capitalism was at fault and believed it could be overcome only by a sociological understanding of current historical conditions.
He believed a social science was needed to create a method to help overcome the current social forces.Increasingly aware of the possibility of exile due to the political situation, Hork- heimer, with the financial support of Albert Thomas, opened an office in Geneva, which Lowenthal was in charge of establishing. In 1932, Herbert Marcuse joined the group and helped with the creation of the Geneva office. By February 1933, the Geneva office had twenty-one members, and the name of the group was changed to the International Society for Social Research. Its main members included Hork- heimer, Lowenthal, Pollock, Franz Neumann, Fromm, Adorno, and Marcuse.
In April 1933, Horkheimer was released from his duties at Frankfurt University. Afraid the Nazis would soon take over Geneva, he journeyed to New York in May 1934 to meet with several of his friends at Columbia University. Soon thereafter, they allowed the institute to be affiliated with the university and even donated a building for its work. At the same time, Felix Aldan, the publisher of the Zeitschrift fur Sozial- forschung, discontinued its publication due to his fear of the Nazis. He moved his operations to Paris in September 1933 and continued publishing the journal even when the Nazis took over Paris in 1940.
The institute was able to maintain its identity because of the money Felix Weil contributed when he arrived in New York in 1935. There, he donated another $100,000 so that the institute could remain secure and free from any obligations throughout the 1930s. Gradually, all the important members of the group began to move to New York, including Marcuse, Lowenthal, Pollock, Fromm, Neumann, and Adorno. In the United States the institute began work on a new methodology for studying cultural, social, and economic structures. This methodology became known as critical theory, a materialist theory based on the premise of social praxis, where theory is put into action.
Horkheimer, who had been studying Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, realized the dangers of systematic philosophy.
In his study of Kant, he came to see how the individual must never be lost in his or her relation to the totality. He began to question the existence of the absolute and even the notion of identity itself. In Hegel, he found that thought exists only in the socioeconomic conditions of human beings. His encounters with Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche helped Horkheimer to develop critical theory. Unable to see individuals as free, he saw them instead as entities controlled by various forces. Because of these beliefs, he claimed critical theory saw social realities as a process that can never be finished, nor could there ever be a definitive social being. For Horkheimer, critical theory became a critique of bourgeois society that would examine social realities rather than the current faςade they fashioned.Horkheimer and Adorno saw the regulated and automated aspects of modernity as a step toward the abolition of all that is human. Lowenthal believed the entertainment industry and consumer culture were destroying the identity of the masses. Marcuse, influenced by both Sigmund Freud and Marx, felt that the major institutions of modern capitalist society were destroying the autonomy of the individual and believed only art and aesthetics could save the world from false consciousness. For even though art may not create revolution, it is, nevertheless, a work of unending rebellion against the status quo.
For the majority of the Frankfurt group, Auschwitz revealed the progressive stages of science and reason. It showed them how the world is moving toward barbarity rather than the authentically human. They felt contempt for the bourgeois life because of its indifference to the madness of the times. For them, the end of Enlightenment thought was technological progress and the mastery of nature, which led to the illusion that there was no other possibility for living. After achieving control over nature, human beings’ attention would naturally turn to the conquest of humanity.
With reason tied to technology, social technology would soon follow. Seeing the problems associated with capitalism, along with the disintegration of liberal thought and the beginning of the authoritarian threat to society, they continued to develop a social philosophy throughout the 1930s.In the 1940s, Horkheimer began to look first at Hegel’s influence on Marx, especially the belief that Hegel’s dialectic was materialist in nature. Through his studies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Horkheimer came to doubt Hegel’s notion of absolute truth. He opposed Hegel’s systematic philosophy, with its belief that identity is found in the dialectic of subject and object. Instead, he believed the totality could eliminate subjectivity altogether. Most of all, he stressed the importance of reason and action. However, reason was not to be used to find a transcendental truth. It was not absolute and could only be found in social realities. Moreover, praxis, or social action, must come first, for truth was relative and could not be identified or classified as a static concept.
Like Horkheimer, Adorno was also influenced by existential philosophy. Adorno’s first publication was on S0ren Kierkegaard’s aesthetic. Referring to Kierkegaard’s definition of aesthetics as the relationship between subject and object and not merely the study of art, Adorno could no longer fathom absolute truths, nor could he conceive of a systematic philosophy. For Adorno, truth could only be found in the dynamics of subject and object. Like Horkheimer, Adorno believed truth could only be found in contingent social relations. He felt that it was only there that the subject could be saved from complete annihilation.
Studying Martin Heidegger yet firmly committed to Marx, Marcuse found that Heidegger looked carefully at contingency and historicity in its relation to social realities and found that these realities create within the self a desire to realize authenticity through action. However, Marcuse found that Heidegger overlooked how social conditions could hinder the self’s ability to realize its own authenticity.
Turning to Marx, he realized that the upper classes were the only ones who could act decisively in the way Heidegger described this form of action, and as a result, only revolution would make possible a world in which everyone could act authentically. Capitalism made this new society impossible. As Marx explained, revolution was not only about economic conditions but also about the awareness of true essences. And perhapsmore importantly, it was through labor that these essences could be discovered.
Although the influence of the members of the Frankfurt School on American critical theory has not been fully examined, there is evidence of their influence. For instance, Adorno had essays printed in The Kenyon Review and The New Left Review. Horkheimer has had important parts of his writings translated into English, and at the same time, he wrote numerous essays in the Studies of Philosophy and Science. There have also been numerous essays written about both the school and its members in Commentary, Dissent, Sewanee Review, Daedalus, and Salm.agundi. Many of their ideas now have been introduced to contemporary American thought through the writings of Frederick Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and others.
While living in the United States, the members of the Frankfurt School continued to publish their writings in German, especially in the Zeitschrift fur Sozial- forschung, and as a result their influence seemed negligible. If for no other reason, however, the Frankfurt School gained considerable influence through the writings of Marcuse, Fromm, and Neumann, each of whom had his own set of followers. Their influence can also be felt in their attempt to help refugees coming into the country during the 1930s and 1940s. Many of these refugees were intellectuals, and many of them became professors at American universities. Finally, their work and ideas have had a considerable influence on German philosophical and sociological thought. Through this influence, they were able to teach a whole new generation of German students.
Some, like Jurgen Habermas, would become members of the institute and build on its former members’ work to create their own important and influential theories.After the war, the Frankfurt School’s writings became of considerable importance to German students and intellectuals. Horkheimer himself was asked to return to Frankfurt University in 1947, and on July 13, 1949, he accepted a position as chair of philosophy and sociology, the same chair he lost in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power. All the original and remaining members of the institute gradually returned to Frankfurt, except for Leo Lowen- thal, who remained in the United States with his new wife and his new position with the Voice of America.
Jim Varn
See also Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund; Frankfurt am Main Citizens in the United States; Horkheimer, Max; Intellectual Exile; Marcuse, Herbert; New York City
References and Further Reading
Friedman, George. The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Held, David. Introduction to Critical Theory: From Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Martin, Jay. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923—1950. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
Schirmacher, Wolfgang, ed. German TwentiethCentury Philosophy: The Frankfurt School. New York: Continuum, 2000.
Wolin, Richard. The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Post-structuralism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.