Critical Theory

The Frankfurt School

Critical theory in this sense is associated primarily with the influential branch of Western Marxism known as the Frankfurt School. This name derives from its association with the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, which was founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt. The institute's associates have included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Carl Grünberg, Erich Fromm, Otto Kirchheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Henryk Grossmann, and Walter Benjamin. It was originally set up for the pursuit of Marxist studies with the support of the wealthy philanthropist Felix Weil. However, under the leadership of its second director, Max Horkheimer, the institute's most prominent members increasingly moved away from Marxist orthodoxy.

Frankfurt theorists were disillusioned by the increasingly authoritarian course of the Russian Revolution after 1917. In the West, sporadic communist uprisings in Germany, following its defeat in World War I and the abdication of the kaiser, were short-lived. Later events only confirmed the need to rethink Marxist orthodoxy. Marxist revolutionary parties either drifted toward reformist social democracy or maintained a theoretically [Page 155]pure but practically ineffectual isolation. The prospects for genuine socialist revolution declined further with the cataclysm of German fascism and the Holocaust. After World War II, an affluent consumer society in the West ensured a mostly quiescent working class. By the end of the 20th century, communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe had collapsed and China was reverting to an authoritarian variant of capitalism. “Revisionist” social democracy, which originally promised a gradual advance toward socialism, had abandoned the socialist ideal altogether.

Despite such gloomy historical prospects for socialism, the writings of Karl Marx remained an inspiring beacon of rigorous intellectual activity, pursued on behalf of the exploited masses of capitalism. Frankfurt theorists followed the lead of the Hungarian communist intellectual, Georg Lukács who, in “What Is Orthodox Marxism,” sets out to rescue the critical method embodied in Marx's writings from what had become the unquestionable dogmas of the Third International. The valuable kernel of Marx's method should not be sought in his detailed economic and sociological predictions, which had proved eminently fallible, but rather in his revolutionary understanding of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, between philosophy and political action. In the famous words of Marx's 11th “Thesis on Feuerbach,” until now “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

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