Frankfurt School

Conceptual Overview

The Frankfurt School was established in February 1923. Its formal name was the Institute for Social Research and it was administratively associated with the University of Frankfurt. However, an endowment from the son of a wealthy grain merchant provided a significant amount of autonomy. The first director of [Page 524]the new institute was Carl Grünberg, who was unique in being the first professed Marxist to hold a chair at a German university. He was also unique among chaired professors of his time in his concern for what he saw as a tendency for German universities to focus on teaching at the expense of research and to produce academics that were only capable of supporting the status quo upon which their privilege and power depended. He also believed that Marxism provided the theoretical infrastructure to challenge this situation.

From the beginning, the institute's program focused on using Marxism as a frame for the empirical investigation of the social world. But Grünberg's view of Marxism was very different from the monistic materialism of many Marxists of the time who believed in transhistorical laws that explained the relation of the social and the economic and in simple, universal truths. Instead, he believed in a version of Marxism that was much more situational and limited in focus than was commonly believed by Marxists at the time.

While setting the stage for critical theory, Grünberg's view, however progressive, was largely rejected by the central figures of the Frankfurt School. In particular, his belief that the social was simply a product of the economic was rejected, along with his optimism about the general improvement of social institutions over time. What was retained, however, was a commitment to empirical research and a belief in the importance of history. The critical moment of Marxism combined with these latter beliefs in methodology provided an initial foothold for the development of critical theory as it became known.

The turning point for the Frankfurt School occurred when Grünberg retired in 1929 and Horkheimer took over as the director of the institute. Horkheimer quickly gathered together a diverse group including Fromm, Adorno, and Marcuse. Horkheimer continued Grünberg's concern for theoretical analysis and empirical investigation but moved the focus of the institute toward a much more radically historical and theoretical mode. He also believed strongly in the need for a reintegration of the disparate disciplines of the social sciences, as the state of fragmentation he saw was so advanced that no discipline could say it had any real ability to explore the historical reality at a place and time.

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