The formation of critical theory thus mostly took place in exile. Adorno and Marcuse were particular rivals for Horkheimer’s affection and support. Here, he was rejoined by Friedrich Pollock, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, and later also Theodor Adorno. A few days later Horkheimer fled Germany, soon to refound the Institute for Critical Research on New York’s 117 th Street, as part of Columbia University. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was named Reich Chancellor with the help of President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservatives. Political events soon put an end to this plan. Through its “Marxist workshops,” his general goal was to develop a Marxian critique of society, based on a holistic approach which would overcome the disciplinary separation between philosophy and the social sciences. He then became director of the new Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt - what later became known as the Frankfurt School. In 1922, Horkheimer submitted his PhD thesis under Hans Cornelius, and in 1925 he finished his habilitation with a book on Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Horkheimer never became too practically involved - he rejected the Social Democrats (SPD) for surrendering their antiwar stance in 1914, and he also never joined the Communist Party (KPD) because he disliked the Soviet Union and the notion of violent revolution. Germany’s tumultuous post-1918 experience of social revolution and protofascist counterrevolution eventually led him to turn to Karl Marx. He then studied philosophy in Munich, Frankfurt, and with Edmund Husserl’s disciple Martin Heidegger in Freiburg. Returning, he decided - much to his father’s dismay - to become a philosopher, sparked by his interest in Schopenhauer. He grew up in this bourgeois environment and trained to become a businessman, but was then mobilized in World War I. Max Horkheimer was born as the son of a Jewish-German capitalist entrepreneur and millionaire in Stuttgart. This particularly owed to the context in which they wrote - and assumptions born of the vast historical defeats suffered by the interwar socialist movement. Yet when we historicize the Frankfurt School intellectuals’ works, we begin to see the shortcomings of their outlook. This is important not least because the rise of the far right - and, indeed, the Frankfurt School’s influence on contemporary radical academics - has drawn renewed interest in Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding of fascism and authoritarianism. Here, they established important contacts, published in English, and, in some cases, like Herbert Marcuse’s, stayed in the United States even after Europe was liberated from fascism.īut if the Frankfurt School insisted that all theories should be understood as historically specific, their own brand of Marxism is rarely put into its proper historical context. Partly, the Frankfurt School’s success owes to the fact that many of its thinkers were exiled (in many cases, as both Jews and leftists) in English-speaking countries after the Nazis surged to power. Yet there’s something rather amiss, here. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others, long after their deaths. This has led young radicals and activists to seek out the writings of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. He saw that his approach bore similarities with the Frankfurt School theory of how humanity’s mastery of nature through knowledge and technology turned into a tool for the domination of humans by other humans.įor all these reasons, the Frankfurt School is widely considered to be the most important outgrowth of postwar West German Marxism. Late in life, Michel Foucault said he wished he had learned more about this school, earlier. It has long held wide currency in academia as one of the key critiques of modernity - with the advantage, unlike postmodernism, of sticking to Enlightenment philosophy, while also making it reflexive. Not only the Frankfurt School’s analysis of authoritarianism marks it out as relevant today. The white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens complained that the school’s critique of right-wing authoritarianism - authored by foreign-born Jews - was “treason against the US Constitution and against America.” Far-right strategist William Lind associated the school with university campuses resembling “small ivy-covered North Koreas,” given the supposed tyranny of political correctness. Going by today’s panic over “cultural Marxism,” it must be vastly influential. The Frankfurt School has been credited - and blamed - for many things.
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