Frankfurt School

01/05/12

Frankfurt School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Frankf urt School
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Frankfurt School (German: Frank f urt er Schule) refers to a school of neo- Marxist interdisciplinary social theory,[1] particularly associated with the Institute for Social
Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main. The school initially consisted of dissidentMarxists who believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a narrow
selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist parties. Meanwhile, many of these theorists experienced that traditional Marxist theory could not adequately
explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of both capitalism and Sovietsocialism, their writings pointed to the
possibility of an alternative path to social development.[2]
Although sometimes only loosely affiliated, Frankfurt School theorists spoke with a common paradigm in mind, thus sharing the same assumptions and being preoccupied with
similar questions.[3] In order to fill in the perceived omissions of traditional Marxism, they sought to draw answers from otherschools of thought, hence using the insights of
antipositivist sociology, psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and other disciplines.[1] The school's main figures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied
thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Weber and Lukács.[4]
Following Marx, they were concerned by the conditions which allowed for social change and the establishment ofrational institutions.[5] Their emphasis on the "critical"
component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism and determinism by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and
its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of reality.
Sincethe 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has increasingly been guided by Jürgen Habermas' work on communicative reason,[6][7] linguistic intersubjectivity and what
Habermas calls "the philosophical discourse of modernity".[8] More recently, critical theorists such as Nikolas Kompridis have voiced opposition to Habermas, claiming that he
has undermined the aspirations for social change whichoriginally gave purpose to critical theory's various projects—for example the problem of what reason should mean, the
analysis and enlargement of "conditions of possibility" for social emancipation, and the critique of modern capitalism.[9]

Contents
1 History
1.1 The Institute for Social Research
1.2 The German prewar context
1.3 Theorists
2 Theoretical work
2.1 Critical foundations ofsocial science
2.1.1 Critical theory and the critique of ideology
2.1.2 Dialectical method
2.1.3 Early influences
2.2 Critique of Western civilization
2.2.1 Dialect ic of Enlight enment and Minima Moralia
2.2.2 Philosophy of modern music
2.3 Critical theory and domination
2.3.1 Negative dialectics
2.3.2 Habermas and communicative rationality
3 Criticism of Frankfurt School theorists
3.1Criticism of psychoanalytic categorizations
3.2 Horkheimer and Adorno's pessimism
3.3 Habermas' solutions: critical theory "between past and future"
3.4 Economic and media critiques
4 See also
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links

History
The Ins titute for Social Res earch
Main art icle: Inst it ut e f or Social Research
It should be noted that the term "Frankfurt School"arose informally to describe the thinkers affiliated or merely associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research; it is not
the title of any specific position or institution per se, and few of these theorists used the term themselves. The Institute for Social Research (Inst it ut f ür Sozialf orschung) was
founded in 1923 by Carl Grünberg, a Marxist legal and political professor at the...