Frankfurt School

What does the name refer to?

'Frankfurt School' names both a group of thinkers who shared a theory and the institution where they worked, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. The members did not call themselves that: the label 'Frankfurter Schule' came into wide use in the late 1960s.

They drew on Hegel, Marx and Freud to analyse society as a whole and critically. Their theory is called Critical Theory, a name taken from Max Horkheimer's 1937 essay 'Traditional and Critical Theory'. The school's chief work is Dialectic of Enlightenment, written by Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. The school is the people and the institution; Critical Theory is what they produced, and the theory itself has its own entry.

How was the institute founded? (1923–1933)

The Institute for Social Research was founded in 1923 with an endowment from the merchant and patron Hermann Weil and his son Felix Weil. In May of that year the 'Marxist Work Week' met, regarded as the institute's first theory seminar. According to Felix Weil its initiator was Karl Korsch. Korsch, György Lukács, Friedrich Pollock and Karl August Wittfogel, both later on the staff, and Richard Sorge took part.

The building opened on 22 June 1924. German Wikipedia describes it as the first research centre for scientific Marxism. Its first director was the Austro-Marxist Carl Grünberg, until then a professor in Vienna, who said openly in his inaugural address that the institute was Marxist in character. He brought his Archive for the History of Socialism and the Labour Movement with him. Under Grünberg the institute made its name with work on the history of socialism and on economic history, and it worked with the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow on the first Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), photographing 150,000 pages of the Marx and Engels papers held by the German Social Democratic Party.

After Grünberg's stroke in 1928 Pollock ran the institute as acting director. Horkheimer led it in practice from 1930 and became director formally in 1931. In his inaugural address of 24 January 1931 he called for philosophy and the individual sciences (sociology, economics, history, psychology) to work into each other. The aim was to show how a society's economic life, the psychological development of individuals and changes in culture hang together. This programme is called 'interdisciplinary materialism'. In 1932 the institute launched its journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.

What did it do in exile? (1933–1949)

Horkheimer saw the danger early. After the National Socialists became the second-largest party in the elections of September 1930, the endowment was moved to the Netherlands in 1931, and in the summer of 1932 a branch opened in Geneva beside the International Labour Organization. The institute was closed on 13 March 1933. On 13 July 1933 the Gestapo declared its property confiscated under the law on the seizure of communist assets.

The headquarters moved to Geneva. In 1934 Columbia University gave the institute a building and it was re-established in New York. Pollock, Marcuse and Löwenthal soon joined it; Adorno came from London only in 1938 to become a full member. In 1941 Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock moved to Los Angeles.

The main work of the exile years:

• Studies on Authority and the Family (1936): a joint study of the family, authority and character structure, built on Erich Fromm's social psychology.
• Dialectic of Enlightenment (typescript 1944, published 1947): the diagnosis that reason itself had become an instrument of domination, the source of the concepts of instrumental reason and the culture industry.
• The Authoritarian Personality (1950): the first volume of the Studies in Prejudice series sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, an attempt to measure the character drawn to fascism.
• Franz Neumann's Behemoth and Pollock's theory of 'state capitalism', which divided the institute over how to understand the Nazi regime and its war economy.

The institute did not speak with one voice. The economist Henryk Grossmann and Wittfogel stood in the orthodox tradition of the Grünberg years and defended the Soviet Union, apart from Horkheimer's inner circle. Fromm was pushed out of the institute in 1939 after a falling-out with Adorno.

How did it return to Frankfurt after the war?

Horkheimer and Adorno returned to the University of Frankfurt around 1950. The institute moved into a new building and formally reopened on 14 November 1951. Of the exiled staff only Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock came back; Marcuse, Löwenthal, Neumann and others stayed in the United States.

The rebuilt institute's first large project was the 'Group Experiment' (Gruppenexperiment). West Germans were gathered in small groups to talk freely about sensitive subjects such as the persecution of the Jews, German guilt, the occupying powers and democracy, and their reactions were analysed. In the 1960s the school's ideas strongly shaped the West German student movement, though Adorno and the students also clashed.

The institute's directors:

How are the generations divided?

The school is usually described in generations, though who belongs to which varies by author, and lists of the third generation differ widely.

How does it relate to Marxism?

The first generation were Marxists outside communist party orthodoxy. They held that party Marxism repeated only part of Marx and ignored his philosophy. Faced with the failure of the workers' revolutions after the First World War and with National Socialism taking power in civilised Germany, they asked why workers turned to authoritarian politics against their class interests. To answer, they joined Marx with Freud's psychoanalysis and Max Weber's theory of rationalisation.

The name 'Critical Theory' also reflects a guarded relation to Marxism. German Wikipedia notes that it let them avoid the politically loaded label 'Marxism'. When Dialectic of Enlightenment was published in 1947, Marxist terms were replaced with less loaded words: 'capital' became 'economy', 'relations of production' became 'forms of the economy'. In the conservative climate of post-war West Germany they kept their Marxist roots out of view.

Their focus also moved. In the 1930s they tried to unite the critique of political economy with empirical social research. In Dialectic of Enlightenment in the 1940s the critique of 'instrumental reason', borrowed from Weber, came to the front. Behind this shift lay Pollock's analysis of state capitalism: with the state intervening in the economy, the primacy of the economy that Marx had posited had given way to the primacy of politics.

Who criticised it, and how?

Marxist critics took aim at the separation of theory from practice. In a preface to a new edition of The Theory of the Novel, Lukács mocked the school's intellectuals as watching the world's misery from the terrace of the 'Grand Hotel Abyss' (Grand Hotel Abgrund), between 'comfortably enjoyed meals or artistic productions'. The phrase became a stock criticism of the school. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski called Horkheimer's Critical Theory of the 1930s 'Lukács's Marxism without the proletariat', a 'halved Marxism' whose other half was replaced by nothing.

From the conservative side came Joachim Ritter's school. Günter Rohrmoser, in The Poverty of Critical Theory (1970), charged Adorno, like Heidegger, with taking part in the destruction of reason. Hermann Lübbe accused the school's theory of ideology of being out of touch with reality.

There was criticism from within as well. Habermas argued that Dialectic of Enlightenment, by doubting reason wholesale, lost the ground for its own critique, and he rebuilt the theory on communicative reason.

What is the 'Cultural Marxism' conspiracy theory?

'Cultural Marxism' is not a scholarly term. It is the name of a conspiracy theory spread by the far right and antisemitic circles. It claims that the Frankfurt School planned a culture war to destroy Western society, and that today's progressive movements and 'political correctness' are its results. Scholars who have studied the theory conclude that it has no basis in fact.

How it spread:

• 1930s: the phrase 'cultural Marxism' already appears in 1938 in the British Union Quarterly, the journal of the British Union of Fascists. Nazi propaganda attacked cultural currents with many Jewish intellectuals, such as the Frankfurt School, as 'Cultural Bolshevism' (Kulturbolschewismus).
• 1992: Michael Minnicino's essay 'New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and "Political Correctness"', written from within the LaRouche movement, is regarded as the starting point of the American version. After the 2011 attacks in Norway, Minnicino all but withdrew it, saying it had been 'hopelessly deformed' by the wish to support LaRouche's world-view.
• Late 1990s–2000s: the American cultural conservatives Paul Weyrich and William Lind spread the phrase, equating political correctness with Cultural Marxism.
• 2011: Anders Breivik, who carried out the attacks in Norway, invoked the theory in his manifesto. From the 2010s it entered mainstream political discourse.

Conspiracy theory and history compared:

The American historian Martin Jay called the conspiracy theory an 'impoverished cartoon' of the school's actual ideas. The test for telling it apart is simple: does an account fold the varied work of many people into a single intention, assume a secret plan that nothing could disprove, and single out an ethnic group as its target?