Critical Theory

The Frankfurt School grew out of a group of political and cultural theorists that formed in the 1920s at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, which was called the Institute for Social Research. The leading Critical Theorists of this group include Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Erich Fromm. Later, Jürgen Habermas, who was Adorno's student, is identified as a second-generation Frankfurt School Critical Theorist. The Frankfurt School theorists referred to their cultural critique, which sought to change society, as Critical Theory. Critical Theory grew out of Marxism but abandoned the totalitarian turn of an economic determinist Marxism and infused Marxism with Freudian psychology and a focus on the culture industries. Many of the Frankfurt School theorists fled Germany in the 1930s after the Nazis seized their library. Adorno, Horkheimer, and others came to Columbia University in New York, where they stayed until 1950. Fromm and Marcuse did not return to Germany. Benjamin committed suicide during an attempt to escape the Nazis from Paris to Spain in 1940.

Turning away from economic Marxism, the Critical Theory perspective studied the media and popular culture as economic forces that were central to creation and maintenance of the capitalist culture of consumption. When capitalized, Critical Theory refers to the Frankfurt School's particular brand of cultural, political, and economic critique, analyzing mass culture in order to challenge the status quo and change society. With lowercase letters, critical theory more broadly refers to all approaches to communication and culture studies that put forward a critique of the existing social system.

Critical Theory and Western Marxism countered the failed Marxism of the Soviet Union and responded to capitalism's increased monopoly structures and government intervention in the economy. Marx's theory of a revolutionary working class coming to power and the withering away of the state to create a socialist system had become unworkable after World War I created the opposite: international capitalism. The Frankfurt School theorized that culture industries had co-opted the working class. To counter this negative impact of mass culture, the Frankfurt School sought to liberate individuals from the use of reason as an instrument of domination. Critical Theory undertook the systemic study of society with the purpose of using social critique as a basis for praxis, or activist social change. Critical Theory also incorporated Freudian psychoanalysis into its social critique, as well as an attack on instrumental rationality.

At its heart, Critical Theory is concerned with ideology and false consciousness in relation to critical self-awareness. As Critical Theorists became concerned with cultural and ideological forces that thwarted revolutionary movements and furthered the system of domination, they turned to the problems of authority and mass culture. The Frankfurt School Critical Theorists were faced with the fact that capitalism had produced fascism and Nazism rather than a workers' revolution. Civilization had produced its opposite: barbarism. The Frankfurt thinkers argued that the dominated classes had been bought off by mass media. Their goal was to create radical philosophical consciousness against instrumental [Page 45]reasoning, commercialization, mass culture, and mass media as forms of political domination.

...