Critical Theory

The Frankfurt School

The ideological and philosophical underpinnings of critical theory are generally associated with the Western European philosophers and social theorists who forged the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in 1929. By the early 1930s, scholars such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcus, Franz Neuman, and Walter Benjamin, like others across Western Europe, were deeply concerned about the rise of fascism, mass consumer culture, and the state's desire to circumscribe intellectual inquiry and critical dissent by the masses through science and technology.

Unlike other radical scholars in this era, who linked the ruling elite's power to purely the antagonistic relationship between labor and capital, the group excavated the intellectual work of scholars such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche, to understand how the political and economic elite might cement their control over social institutions and the means of production. For instance, the group provided a complex portrait of how institutions, such as the media, schooling, and political and government bodies breed a sense of false consciousness among the masses, enabling multiple forms of oppression and domination and engendering unjust practices and systemic barriers that perpetuate asymmetrical relationships in most social contexts.

Their interdisciplinary approach to understanding the social world also concerned itself with how their intellectual contributions can breathe life into building social movements that have the critical capacity to critique what gives rise to oppression and domination in economic and social contexts. They promoted the belief that it is possible to get beyond current social realities and build social and economic institutions predicated on improving the human condition and on embracing the values of democracy, equality, and justice.

The Frankfurt School scholars' ideas inspired and informed many marginalized scholars during the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, some African American, feminist, and neo-Marxist scholars and activists in the United States examined Herbert Marcuse's critique of U.S. society to gain insight in relation to how oppression on the axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality is promulgated by the dominant economic and cultural elite as well as to find inspiration that their intellectual and cultural work had the power to forge a Utopian social world. Gradually, the theoretical contributions and visions of social and economic emancipation proffered by Frankfurt scholars and other enlightened citizens infiltrated schools of educations.

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