Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School refers to a group of mid-twentiethcentury Marxist intellectuals (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Loewenthal, Franz Neumann, and Friedrich Pollock) originally based at the Institute for Social Research. The Institute was initially affiliated with the University of Frankfurt before the rise of National Socialism. That development forced the Institute and its members, all socialists and Jews, to leave Germany, and they decided to relocate to New York City.

Following World War II, the Institute was reestablished in Frankfurt under Adorno and Horkheimer. Both in Germany and elsewhere, it has continued to exert significant influence, chiefly because of the ambitious endeavors of its most important “second-generation” representative, Jürgen Habermas, who has creatively reformulated many early Frankfurt School themes as part of his own critical theory of society.

Working in fields as diverse as philosophy, aesthetic theory, literary criticism, social psychology, political economy, and law, the “first generation” Frankfurt thinkers sought to overcome the mechanistic Marxism of the Second International. They did so by offering provocative analyses of what earlier Marxists typically had disdained as the societal “superstructure” (culture, ideology, and law) to explain the rise of fascism and the apparent integration of the working class into capitalist society. The Frankfurt School experienced complex programmatic shifts, with its key figures moving from an interdisciplinary brand of humanist Marxism to a radical critique of Western rationality that suggested Marxism itself was partly complicit in the pathologies of contemporary society. However, a preoccupation of its most influential work from the 1930s and 1940s concerned the demise of liberal democracy and freemarket capitalism and subsequent replacement by authoritarianism and new forms of late capitalism.

Labor lawyers Kirchheimer (1905–1965) and Neumann (1900–1954) were the Frankfurt School's resident legal scholars. Both chronicled the demise of the liberal rule of law in mid-century Europe, arguing that the Nazi destruction of liberal law pointed to the existence of ominous legal trends at work in every capitalist society. In Neumann's influential version of this argument, the regulation of contemporary monopoly capitalism necessarily generated open-ended, ambiguous, antiformal modes of law inconsistent with the liberal rule of law, according to which clear general norms should predominate. General law suited the imperatives of a competitive market economy based on a roughly equal distribution of property, but it no longer matched practical needs when the state faced the task of regulating mammoth economic monopolies by means of individual measures. Neumann offered a rather ambivalent interpretation of this trend: while arguing forcefully against attempts to resuscitate traditional liberal law, he worried that the demise of the rule of law would pave the way for dictatorship.

More recently, Habermas undertook to revitalize the tradition of Frankfurt School legal theory in Between Facts and Norms (1996), which, like the early work of Kirchheimer and Neumann, took the accomplishments of legal liberalism seriously while trying to integrate them into a broader social democratic critical theory of society.