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Frankfurt School: Institute for Social Research
Frankfurt School: Institute for Social Research Dustin B Garlitz, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA Hans-Herbert Ko¨gler, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, USA Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract The Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, is an interdisciplinary research center associated with the University of Frankfurt in Germany and responsible for the founding and various trajectories of Critical Theory in the contemporary humanities and social sciences. Three generations of critical theorists have emerged from the Institute. The first generation was most prominently represented in the twentieth century by Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Leo Löwenthal, and also for some time Erich Fromm. The so-called ‘second generation’ of the Institute is centrally represented by Jürgen Habermas, whose work has functioned as the focal point of a wide range of critical theorists. The third generation of the Frankfurt School is represented by Axel Honneth who emerged as a new center, with different strands or readings of who else belongs to the third generation, some in Germany, some internationally, and some more in sociology and social and political theory than philosophy.
Introduction The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), an academic institution of the University of Frankfurt in Germany opened in 1924 and commonly referred to as the Frankfurt School, comprises a group of scholars who promote a critical theory of society, or simply critical theory, and approach its study from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives. The critical theorists who made up the first generation of the Frankfurt School include social philosopher Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), philosopher and political theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), social psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900–80), philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69), social scientist and philosopher Friedrich Pollock (1894–1970), sociologist Leo Löwenthal (1900–93), as well as political and legal theorist Otto Kirchheimer (1905–65) and political theorist Franz Neumann (1900–54). These scholars shared a common Jewish ancestry and a Marxist political and scholarly orientation. Cultural theorist and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a loose affiliate of the Institute in its first generation, as were cultural critic and sociologist Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1996) and philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977). Other lesser known full-members of the Institute in its first generation included historian Karl August Wittfogel (1896–1988) and economist and historian Henryk Grossman (1881–1950). The so-called second generation of the Frankfurt School is most prominently represented by philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (1929–present), whose work, however, has been flanked and aided by Albrecht Wellmer (1933–present) and Claus Offe (1940–present). The third generation is represented by the social philosopher Axel Honneth (1949–present) at the center, the latter of whom is currently director of the Institute. There exist different strands or readings of who else belongs to the third generation, some in Germany, some internationally, some more in sociology and social theory. Marking the internationalizing of Critical Theory, social philosophers Nancy Fraser (1947–present) and Seyla Benhabib (1950–present) are in some readings considered
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representatives of the third generation of the Frankfurt School. Other readings regard the work of political theorist Claus Offe and philosopher and social theorist Oskar Negt (1934– present) as representative of the third generation, while others also consider the work of social theorist Hans Joas (1948–present) as representative of this generation. The Institute was founded on an endowment made possible by Felix Weil (1898–1975), an Argentinean-born German Marxist scholar and son of a millionaire businessman. Philosopher Carl Grünberg (1861–1940) was the Institute’s first director. In October 1930, Max Horkheimer succeeded Grünberg as the Institute’s director. In 1934, the Institute relocated to the United States, finding a home at Columbia University in New York City, where it stayed until 1950, at which time it was then moved back to the University of Frankfurt in Germany.
History of the Frankfurt School I: From 1923 to 1969 Historical Background and Institutional Beginnings The Institute for Social Research opened in 1924, founded on money given from Felix Weil, an Argentinean-born German Marxist scholar and son of a millionaire businessman. Sociologist Kurt Albert Gerlach (1886–1922), a left-wing socialist professor, was an important figure throughout the creation process, despite dying before the Institute’s founding. Weil intended to found an Institute that served first and foremost for the study and broadening of scientific Marxism. Weil, with Gerlach’s assistance, created an institute connected to the University of Frankfurt but independent from it in that is was directly answerable to the Prussian Ministry of Culture. Weil and his father financed the building and equipment of the Institute, paid it a yearly grant of 120 000 marks, and offered the lower floor to the university’s Faculty of Economics and Social Science, in addition to later on funding the professorial chair which the Institute’s director held in that faculty. Authorization from the ministry for the foundation of an Institute for Social Research as an academic institution of the University of Frankfurt which will also serve the University for
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teaching purposes’ came through at the beginning of 1923. Construction began in March of that year. Marxist philosopher Carl Grünberg became the Institute’s first director in 1924. In Grünberg, Weil had found a director of the new Institute who was both a full Marxist and a recognized scholar. The Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences in Frankfurt agreed to Grünberg as director at once and voted unanimously at the beginning of January 1923 to nominate him to the ministry for appointment to the professorial chair funded by the Institute for Social Research. On Sunday, 22 June 1924, at 11 a.m., the academic ceremony celebrating the opening of the Institute for Social Research was held in the hall of the University of Frankfurt. Grünberg’s first two assistants were social scientist and philosopher Friedrich Pollock and economist and historian Henryk Grossman. Pollock had taken his doctorate in Economics at the University of Frankfurt in 1923, and had temporarily been director of the Institute until Grünberg arrived. Grünberg offered him a position as a research associate at the Institute, and he accepted it immediately. Grossman joined the Institute in 1926 at Grünberg’s invitation, also as a research associate. Another of the Institute’s very first assistants was Rose Wittfogel, who was a librarian. In 1925, her husband, historian Karl August Wittfogel, became a full-time research associate of the Institute. Sociologist Leo Löwenthal started receiving a scholarship from the Institute in 1926.
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(equally disabling) complacency with the existing order of injustice via consumerism and the culture industry. The approach, as we saw, was to combine Marx’s analysis of economic macrostructures with a Freudian social psychology such that the lack of revolutionary agency could be explained: Capitalism, so their argument, undermines the familial structures necessary for autonomous agency, and thereby opens the door for cultural-political formations such as fascism and consumerism. Here the subject identifies with surrogate pleasures, its own inability to change anything, or the submission under a strong leader who falsely represents one’s own fake powers. The subtlety and comprehensiveness with which this research program was played out in all possible domains of social and cultural experience still today looks for an equal. From Horkheimer’s, Adorno’s and Marcuse’s critique of ideology in philosophy; Adorno’s, Löwenthal’s and Benjamin’s analysis of music, literature, and film; Pollock’s and Kirchheimer’s analysis of the economy and the state; as well as numerous other studies; the reconstruction of how economic and political powers shape agents such that the normative overcoming of an unjust social order remains impossible still today defines a practically unmatched standard for the fusion of empirical social research and philosophical conceptualization.
The Historical Unfolding of a Collaborative Social Theory The Turn toward a ‘Critical Theory of Society’ The decisive turn for the Institute for Social research came when Max Horkheimer assumed the position of its second director. In January 1928, Grünberg had to stop work and resign as director of the Institute due to a stroke. There was an interim period when Pollock served as acting director. In October 1930, Pollock (who had been Weil’s executive agent since 1925), representing the board of the Institute of Social Research, and social philosopher Max Horkheimer, who had been appointed 2 months before by the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt to Professor of Social Philosophy, signed a contract making Horkheimer the Institute’s new director. On 24 January 1931, Horkheimer gave his inaugural lecture on taking up the Chair of Social Philosophy and the directorship of the Institute for Social Research. Horkheimer launched a new research program which intended to overcome the crisis of Marxism by fusing social philosophy and empirical social science. Horkheimer proved a highly integrative and formidable research organizer, who understood to be highly influential less by fully defined ideas and theories and more by suggesting the broad outlines within which inter- and multidisciplinary work of original scholars could unfold. The perspective which he developed in the early writings of the Institute, including his inaugural address, was enabling rather than constraining, gave direction without determining every detail. In a nutshell, the first and founding generation of the Frankfurt School attempted to actualize Marx’s critique of capitalism. This project not only involved the need to account for capitalism’s continued existence, but also for the rise of fascist as well as state-capitalist systems of totalitarian domination. Marx’s critique thus needed to be expanded to explain the susceptibility of the masses, including the working class, to nationalist propaganda, the fascist cult of leadership, or the
The Institute began a new era with Horkheimer and with his new journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research), launched in 1932, as its public face. An important collaborator from the beginning of the Institute’s Journal for Social Research was philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno. The first issue of the Institute’s Zeitschrift für Socialforschung included contributions by Erich Fromm and Leo Löwenthal. Löwenthal had initial discussions with philosopher and political theorist Herbert Marcuse in Frankfurt in 1932, which led to his admission to the Institute in 1933. Thus Horkheimer’s assistants at the Institute included Fromm, Pollock, Löwenthal, Adorno, and Marcuse. Looser connections were also established to scholars who at a later time would become more closely tied to the Institute, including political theorist Franz Neumann and political and legal theorist Otto Kirchheimer (1905–65). By the beginning of 1933, the Institute and its members offered competence in a number of scholarly areas, with Marcuse and Horkheimer representative of the Institute’s strength in philosophy, Fromm and Löwenthal covering psychology, Pollock, Karl August Wittfogel, and Grossman showing expertise in economy and economic history, Marcuse and Löwenthal in aesthetics and literature, and Grossman in statistics. From the winter semester of 1930–31 onwards, psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm was listed as a member of the Institute’s teaching staff, alongside Horkheimer, Grossman, and Pollock. When Hitler became Chancellor in January that year, Horkheimer was ready with plans for a move from Germany. Pollock and Wittfogel were safe in Switzerland at the time, and the Institute’s other members were soon able to leave Germany as well. Horkheimer had pondered the idea of relocating the Institute to another location in Europe, and branches had
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already been established in Switzerland, Holland, and France. Horkheimer soon realized the only feasible alternative for relocation of the Institute would be to the United States. The Institute was offered an office building in New York City, and was given a contract that loosely tied them to Columbia University there. Therefore the Institute relocated to the United States in 1934, with their new home at Columbia University, where it would eventually stayed until 1950, at which time it was relocated back to the University of Frankfurt in Germany. After the initial relocation to the United States, the Institute’s work slowly resumed there by the summer of 1934. By the autumn of that same year, nearly all of the Institute’s scholars were reunited in the United States. However, Adorno stayed a bit longer in Germany and did not join the Institute in the United States until 1938. When the Institute first relocated to New York in 1934, Adorno went to Oxford University in England, where he unsuccessfully studied philosophy under the British analytic philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900–76). During its first years in the United States, the Institute worked on projects that had been initiated in Germany. Among the most important of these was an empirical social psychology project in which material had been collected before the Institute’s relocation. The result of this project was published as Studien über Autorität und Familie. It represented the first, but unfortunately also the last, large-scale empirical study of the Institute displaying the original aims and scientific visions of Horkheimer’s group of scholars. A forerunner to the study was almost completed by Fromm but never published. This fact, coupled with other internal difficulties of the Institute, led to the Institute’s parting ways with Fromm in 1939. Fromm’s importance at the Institute had been on the increase since the early 1930s. His social-philosophical interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis, paired with Horkheimer’s high regards for social-psychological explanations was integral for the Studien. Since the beginning of Horkheimer’s reign, psychoanalysis had been a central method in the dialectical materialism of the Frankfurt School. In addition to Fromm’s psychoanalysis and social psychology, Otto Kirchheimer pursed a path-breaking study in criminology while a member of the Institute in the 1930s. His coauthored study in criminology was titled Punishment and Social Structure (1939). The study became known as an early example of scholarship in the field of critical criminology. Fromm eventually decided to stay permanently in the United States, becoming a major name in social psychology and psychoanalysis. Marcuse and Löwenthal also decided to stay in the United States after the Institute had relocated back to Frankfurt in 1950 with Marcuse, who taught at UC San Diego, becoming a major figure of the American New Left in the 1960s, and Löwenthal assuming a sociology professorship at UC Berkeley.
The Philosophical Turn and the Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno coauthored Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944 during their stay in Los Angeles, California. Horkheimer and Adorno lived in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, among a group of notable émigré intellectuals and artists who had fled Europe in the rise of National Socialism, including Thomas Mann (1875–1955),
Bertold Brecht (1898–1956), and Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). Dialectic of Enlightenment became the most well known of the works in social philosophy from the Frankfurt School. While it certainly was, in some way, an immediate continuation of the problems discussed by earlier essays from the 1941 issue of the Institute’s Zeitschrift, it was nevertheless also a complete redefinition of the project. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, a broad theoretical framework develops the decline, or rather the complete reversal, of Enlightenment reason. It is true, there was also a more specialized discussion of phenomena such as the ‘Culture Industry’ and anti-Semitism, and so a certain connection to the meta-theoretical framework and thus a continuation of the interdisciplinary vision from the earlier versions of the Institute’s critical theory was still present. The Dialectic of Enlightenment was, in fact, a philosophical work, but the critical methodologies employed by Horkheimer and Adorno throughout the book ultimately made it multidisciplinary, and therefore still a valid example of the Institute’s critical theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment was an exemplar of the Institute’s project of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research to the extent that it entailed the discussion of philosophy, myth, enlightenment, morality (including the work of philosopher Marquis de Sade), antiSemitism, and the Culture Industry. However, the overall context of these discussions was now a pessimistic account of the history of enlightened reason. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is ultimately a philosophical text that reconstructs, in the methodology of philosophy of history, how reason turned into its opposite. In such fashion, Critical Theory of this magnitude has become a negative philosophy of history.
Adorno’s Rise and the Frankfurt School’s Rise to Public Prominence Adorno had continued to pursue multidisciplinary research in the United States after the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment. His Philosophy of New Music was published in 1949, and he also focused on the sociology of music in that time period. He collaborated with Daniel J. Levinson, Max Horkheimer, and Else Frenkel-Brunswik in the writing of The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Adorno had collaborated with sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–76) in the Princeton Radio Research Project in New Jersey, as well as with Hanns Eisler (1898–1962) in Composing for the Films (1947). The Princeton Radio Research Project was made possible by funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1937, and the Institute for Social Research also had a hand in it. Horkheimer suggested to Lazarsfeld that he bring in Adorno to work on the project. When Adorno first moved from London to New York in 1938, he spent half of his time working for the Institute for Social Research and the other half working for the Princeton Radio Research Project. His stay at the Radio Research Project ended in 1941. Eventually, Adorno emerged as a leading member of the Institute, and such a fact had consequences for the further development of critical theory at the Frankfurt School. Adorno’s full entrance into the inner circle of the Institute meant that Horkheimer turned his attention to him and his enormous working capacity. In Adorno, Horkheimer saw a possibility to realize the project which he was dreaming of,
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which was a project on dialectical philosophy. Marcuse up to this point had been the natural partner for Horkheimer in philosophical concerns, but when Adorno fully entered into the theoretical work of the Institute, he, rather than Marcuse, became Horkheimer’s chief ally. The idea behind the critique of positivistic science, which was strongly influenced by Adorno, was introduced in the articles of the 1937 issue of the Zeitschrift. It was in the years following those articles that Horkheimer’s close collaboration with Adorno developed. Such phase of critical theory at the Frankfurt School was a continuation of the arguments from its preceding phase, but took on a form which transcended the arena of science and was extended to a total critique of civilized reason. Horkheimer wrote Eclipse of Reason (1947) and Critique of Instrumental Reason (1967) on his own after collaborating with Adorno in the writing of Dialectic of Enlightenment. By 1950, Horkheimer had reestablished the Institute in Frankfurt. By that time, Adorno and Horkheimer were the Institute’s two undisputed leaders in critical theory. In the course of time, Horkheimer’s productivity declined while Adorno had his most productive years in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1955, without giving up his influence, Horkheimer decided to share his directorship of the Institute with Adorno in a cooperative directorship. Adorno was highly visible and vocal as a public intellectual in Europe, engaging in the positivist dispute in German sociology and a critical dialogue with philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94). In addition, he wrote a polemic of the existentialism of philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), and wrote Negative Dialectics in 1966, where he both continued his critique of Heidegger and extended Dialectic of Enlightenment’s critical theory. His Aesthetic Theory was posthumously published in 1970. In the postwar Germany after 1945, in the context of the return of ‘the Frankfurt School’ to Frankfurt itself, Adorno rose to become the public face of the Institute, which in turn rose to public prominence.
History of the Frankfurt School II: From 1970 to the Present The New Beginning with Habermas However, despite the comprehensiveness of the first program of ‘critical social theory,’ the initial founding paradigm – centered around the combination of Marx and Freud via an explanation of current forms of capitalist power – also entailed major problems. It is largely to the credit of one major social theorist, Jürgen Habermas, to establish his work as well as person as a new turning table, as a discursive and organizational medium in which these problems could be redefined and addressed. Habermas thereby managed to preserve the spirit of critical theory by advancing it through entirely new conceptual and methodological means. Habermas ascent to the leadership position of the so-called second generation of the Frankfurt School is prepared through his early influential work in the 1960s. Here, Habermas, a generation younger than the founders, established himself as an equal member of the now increasingly recognized ‘Frankfurt School’ by basically two practices. First, Habermas made himself a name in a set of important debates. He comes to Adorno’s aid in the famous
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positivism debate with Popper, coining influential terms like the one about Popper’s positivistically reduced concept of reason. Similarly, he engages in well-known debates with the most established figures of postwar Germany in philosophy and social theory, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and his philosophical hermeneutics, and Niklas Luhmann (1927–98) and his social systems theory. In these debates Habermas establishes himself as an apt critique of gaps and issues in both paradigms. Second, Habermas is able to present his own epistemological version of critical theory as based in human species-specific ‘knowledge interests.’ By suggesting that the natural sciences are grounded in the need and interest to dominate nature, the humanities are grounded in the need and interest for cultural and historical self-understanding, and the social sciences are grounded in the need and interest for emancipation from unjust social orders, Habermas situates critical social theory as a legitimate human endeavor next to other established scientific projects. Yet the second generation of the Frankfurt School is borne only when Habermas abandons his own early theory for the sake of a ‘paradigm change of critical social theory,’ which leads to the ‘theory of communicative action.’ In a well orchestrated and not modest self-installation as the savior of critical theory via its complete conceptual overhaul, Habermas engages in a new beginning, triggered by the widely diagnosed problems of his earlier conception, which among other issues conflates the epistemological-transcendental critique of grounds of knowledge with a social-normative critique of society. In fact, the issue of the lack of an adequate conceptualization of the normativity of social criticism becomes the hallmark of the second generation and Habermas’ lasting contribution to critical theory.
The Theoretical Core of Communicative Reason Habermas comes to define the second generation of the Frankfurt School. He renews this tradition of social critique, of critical social theory by breaking with its conceptual framework. Instead of the Hegel–Marxian dialectic of enlightenment, in which ‘reason’ – which once meant to liberate and emancipate the subject from its objective determinants – becomes transformed into its opposite, reason for Habermas is now reconstructed as a linguistically mediated potential of a historically evolving human society. This potential for a rationalization of our linguistic practices can be unleashed in two diametrically opposed ways: either as the instrumental thinking that permeates functional systems like the capitalist economy and modern administrative power, or as the intersubjective orientation at communicative processes in which all agents are respected as equal, valuable, and knowledgeable contributors. Habermas now grounds the emancipatory potential of modernity – as he prefers to designate his indebtedness to the legacy of the Enlightenment – in the in-built presupposition of the validity of speech in social communication. This allows one to see that the reflexive distanciation from tradition is defined by a dialectic that does not turn reason per se into its dominating opposite. It rather defines rationalization as enabling two different processes, either as functional or as communicative reason. The modernization and rationalization of society since the Renaissance now
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enables a liberation from tradition that can lead either to functionalist thought or to communicative action. For Habermas, this dialectic defines an open, contested, and challenging choice for modern societies. Instead of being doomed by a dialectic of Enlightenment according to which reason turned into its opposite, we are now called to actively participate in the reconstruction of the full scope of reason so as to avoid succumbing to functionalism and other objectifying and anticommunicative forms of power. Habermas’ communicative turn in critical theory proved to be successful as the new conceptual face of critical theory. Four reasons largely account for this success. First, the theory of communicative action can justify its own critical normative orientation. Horkheimer and Adorno’s position had left unclear how a totally dominated agency can still rebel and revolt, and how a completely destroyed enlightenment can still speak of enlightenment values like autonomy, truth, and equality. Second, Habermas’ theory represents an unparalleled achievement of theoretical synthesis. The over 1000 pages of the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (German 1981, English 1983/87) integrate the major sociological classics, argumentation theory, critical theory, and speech act theory to a new conception of validity-based communicative action. Third, Habermas’ theoretical product appears at a time when the globalization of theory production takes off. Habermas’ theory draws as much on American as on German sources, including Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), and Talcott Parsons (1902–79), and generally speaks to the new cosmopolitan class of social and cultural theorists who emphasize language, discourse, and a politics of recognition in the public sphere, the latter being one of Habermas’ central concepts and research topics. Fourth, Habermas has been supported by several influential scholars, such as Albrecht Wellmer, Karl-Otto Apel, and Thomas McCarthy. Besides those, the second generation also includes thinkers like the Adorno’s student Alfred Schmidt (1931–2012). Wellmer and Schmidt, along with others, some who would in later certain readings of the school find themselves regarded as members of the third generation at the Institute, contributed to an increasing academic as well as public recognition of the Frankfurt School as one of the most important German philosophical movements of the twentieth century.
Establishing the Communicative Paradigm and the Historization of the Frankfurt School The brief conceptual sketch allows us to see how Habermas could indeed establish his communicative proposal at the center of a renewed critical theory. Yet as Bertolt Brecht rhetorically asked the historian who wrote that Caesar crossed the Alps: “Did he not at least have a cook with him?” we should note that Habermas did not do this on his own. Indeed, Habermas is an authorial center of discourse, as the actual author of the most influential books on the communicative turn; he is also the organizational center as the director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Research in Starnberg, which he codirected from 1969 to 1983; and he becomes, after the deaths of most the old guard in the late 1960s to mid-1970s, the increasingly famous living representative of the Frankfurt
School. Yet on every account, the communicative turn is the work of many colleagues and contributors; it is impossible to conceive without such context and support. Theoretically, the transcendental pragmatics of philosopher Karl-Otto Apel (1922–present) gave essential insights, as did the analytic rigor and pragmatist acumen of American philosopher Thomas McCarthy (1940–present). Institutionally, the Starnberg Institute gave Habermas the resources to assemble some of the world’s most relevant philosophers and social scientists in a uniquely productive interdisciplinary atmosphere. And finally, Habermas was a public persona who drew attention to his rather academically articulated theory. His important public standing emerged from his constant historico-political interventions which related him, at times antagonistically, to the student revolt of 1968 and the new democratic Germany; also important for Habermas’ reputation were his at-times heated engagements with some of the most prominent poststructuralists and postmodernists, which include his highly visible critique of post-structuralism, especially with regard to Michel Foucault (1926–84) and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). With the death of Adorno in 1969, the withdrawal of Horkheimer to Switzerland around that time, Habermas’ move to Starnberg in 1969, and with Marcuse and Löwenthal faraway in sunny California, the actual Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt became a rather modest center for social-empirical research. Under the able but unassuming directorship of Ludwig von Friedeburg (1924–2010), also minister of culture for the state of Hesse, solid social research projects were carried out. When the real action had moved elsewhere, the Institute for Social Research became an historical site of the imaginary entity of the Frankfurt School. What set in during the 1970s, besides the Habermasian paradigm shift and renewal, was the historization of the Frankfurt School as one of the most important twentieth-century movements in German philosophy and social theory. Rather marginalized as it was before the Second World War, and still long after, the Frankfurt School now became an object of historical desire, a piece in the mosaic of a new Germany that desperately searched for a new identity beyond Hitler. Works by Helmut Dubiel, the Californian Martin Jay, and the path-breaking volume by Rolf Wiggershaus defined this historical turn. Despite the dangers that were associated with such a historization, this move brought the first generation of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, etc., back into academic and public consciousness. It enables up until today to see critical theory as what it really is a complex and diversified project in which a multiplicity of approaches and methodologies come to bear to analyze the dialectic of human freedom and equality against the real backdrop of social power and domination. Habermas returns to the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universitat in Frankfurt in 1983. The move comes after turning down offers from the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University and is well calculated: while Habermas does not formally assume the directorship of the still existing Institute for Social Research, he inhabits the University Philosophicum right next to it. The return of the master reinvigorates the historical awareness of the Frankfurt School, albeit Habermas aims to build his reputation as the undisputed king of critical theory by three essential and independently pursued projects. First, he writes The Philosophical Discourse of
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Modernity, a book of questionable value as it is written in a largely polemical tone similar to Georg Lukacs’ equally onesided Destruction of Reason. Habermas blames the Nietzsche/ Heidegger turn in contemporary French philosophy for the flaws to be found in Foucault, Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), and the like. Second and much more constructive is his work on a ‘discourse ethics’ which achieves a strong worldwide reception. Finally, and of perhaps the most sustaining influence, is his work on a new ‘Rechtsphilosophie,’ a ‘philosophy of right,’ culminating in Facticity and Norms, where he develops a democratic-theoretical account of the complex intertwinement of morality and law. Habermas also leads during this decade the famed Monday Colloquium where many of the best German and international, young and established, critical theorists presented and discussed their work in progress. The years from the mid-1980s to the mid1990s, when Habermas retired from his Frankfurt post to teach on occasion at Northwestern, New York University, and elsewhere, define the coming of age of critical theory and its ascent to one of the world’s most known traditions on social theory.
The Third Generation: Recognition, Feminism, Justice The sustained productivity of the Frankfurt School can be measured by the fact that a third generation of influential and prolific authors is currently carving out new intellectual space for critical theory. While critical theory has justly become a term with much wider application than the initial Frankfurt School tradition, representatives that directly draw from it nevertheless exist and include social theorists such as Axel Honneth. Honneth is unique since with him, for the first time since the demise of Adorno in 1969, a major social philosopher both represents the philosophical heritage and organizationally heads the actual Institute for Social Research. Honneth succeeded Habermas on his chair for social philosophy in Frankfurt, and shortly afterward also assumed the directorship of the Institute. Honneth’s increasingly influential theory of recognition builds on insights from the early Hegel and G.H. Mead in order to construct a threefold understanding of recognition: love or emotional recognition, respect or moral recognition, and esteem or sociocultural recognition represent for Honneth, three anthropologically deep-seated needs the fulfillment of which agents require to fully develop as autonomous selves; conditions that withhold such fulfillment can be understood to fuel social struggles for recognition. Emotional recognition builds self-confidence, moral recognition selfrespect, and cultural recognition self-esteem – all three of which together define an ethically acceptable and good life for which agents fight if the conditions for their realization are withheld from them. The communicative recognition that Habermas grounded in argument-based validity claims thus receives a deeper and more social-philosophical and socialhistorical basis. Honneth advances a truly critical-theoretical approach, as such a perspective – since the early Frankfurt School – has always consisted in combining a normative orientation toward more justice and freedom with an analysis of the social-historical and empirical grounds that would enable its realization practically. As Institute director as much as social philosopher, Honneth searches for constant dialogue and expansion with related critical-theoretical approaches. This
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led to a much noted exchange with Nancy Fraser in Redistribution or Recognition? in which the focus on moral and cultural recognition is challenged by the continued structural need for economic justice. Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib represent third generation critical theorists who in a distinctively feminist vein approach issues of identity, power, gender roles and justice, as well as globalization and cosmopolitanism – besides also internationalizing critical theory in person. Closely affiliated with Axel Honneth, and important because of his work on G.H. Mead, Hans Joas may also be seen to make an important contribution. All these thinkers represent potent voices in an increasingly transnational theory discussion over the right approach to the social-political challenges from a normatively informed view. There are in fact different strands or readings of who else belongs to the third generation, both in Germany and internationally, and some in sociology and social and political theory more than philosophy. Joas is at times read into the tradition of the third generation in social theory. With the increasing internationalization of critical theory and with a look at theoretical developments of both Habermas’ discourse ethics and Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition, Nancy Fraser’s and Seyla Benhabib’s work has become a constitutive part of a third generation’s critical theory. Claus Offe and Oskar Negt are in certain readings, especially but not only in Germany, also regarded as third generational. Offe’s monographs first started to appear in 1965. Since then, he has engaged contemporary conceptions of the welfare state and its implicit contradictions, and has characterized late capitalism as disorganized. Negt, who trained under Adorno and then went on to serve as an assistant to Habermas, has further developed Habermas’ notion of the public sphere and has embarked on a theory of history in his more philosophical writings. Honneth and with him Joas, Offe and Negt, and Fraser and Benhabib are among the most prominent contributors of the third generation of a school the influence of which is, however, much more widespread and sustained than the mentioning of these names could capture. Noteworthy are also recent attempts to transgress and cross-over between different paradigms of critical theory, which includes building bridges between the Frankfurt School in all its versions and British Cultural Studies, French Post-Structuralism, and contemporary social theory in all of its different forms. Besides the original Institute of Social Research, which continues to exist under its current director Axel Honneth, several important venues of exchange and research grounded in the Frankfurt School critical theory have sprung up in recent decades: The American Critical Theory Roundtable, the Prague Conference of the Social Sciences, and the Frankfurt University Research Cluster Normative Orders. Critical social theory, as conceived by its original founders, did care little about discursive boundaries or school designations; its aims has been to advance critical reflexivity with regard to the most pressing and least understood currents of our contemporary and continuously unjust social orders. Its motto was and is the critique of the social status quo by any theoretical means necessary, with the aim to be able to conceive its practical overcoming. Unfortunately, due to the continued pervasive influence of power, oppression, and ignorance, critical social theory and the project of
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the Frankfurt School has lost nothing of its urgency in today’s world.
See also: Benhabib, Seyla (1950–); Critical Theory; Democracy: Normative Theory; Foucault, Michel (1926–84); Fromm, Erich (1900–80); Habermas, Jürgen (1929–); Hebb, Donald Olding (1904–1985); Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804); Law and Morality: A Continental European Perspective; Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix (1901–76); Luhmann, Niklas (1927–98); Marx, Karl (1818–83); Mead, George Herbert (1863–1931); Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900).
Bibliography Abromeit, John, 2011. Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Benhabib, Seyla, 1992. Situation the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Routledge, New York. Benjamin, Walter, 1968. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (Harry Zohn, Trans.). In: Arendt, Hannah (Ed.), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Schocken Books, New York, pp. 217–251. Bottomore, Tom, 1984. The Frankfurt School. Ellis Harwood Limited, Chichester. Dubiel, Helmut, 1985. Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Fraser, Nancy, 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Habermas, Jürgen, 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action (Thomas McCarthy, Trans.). In: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, vol. 1. Beacon Press, Boston. Habermas, Jürgen, 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action (Thomas McCarthy, Trans.). In: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, vol. 2. Beacon Press, Boston. Held, David, 1980. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Honneth, Axel, 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Joel Anderson, Trans.). Polity Press, Cambridge. Honneth, Axel, Fraser, Nancy, 2004. Redistribution or Recognition? A Politicalphilosophical Exchange. Verso, London and New York. Horkheimer, Max, Adorno, Theodor W., 2002 (Edmund Jephcott, Trans.). In: Schmid Noerr, Gunzelin (Ed.), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Jay, Martin, 1996. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Marcus, Judith, Tar, Zoltán (Eds.), 1984. Foundations of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ; London. Marcuse, Hebert, 1991. One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Beacon Press, Boston. Tar, Zoltán, 1977. The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Wiley, New York. Wheatland, Thomas, 2009. The Frankfurt School in Exile. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Wiggershaus, Rolf, 1994. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Michael Robertson, Trans.). The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Abstract The Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, is an interdisciplinary research center associated with the University of Frankfurt in Germany and responsible for the founding and various trajectories of Critical Theory in the contemporary humanities and social sciences. Three generations of critical theorists have emerged from the Institute. The first generation was most prominently represented in the twentieth century by Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Leo Löwenthal, and also for some time Erich Fromm. The so-called ‘second generation’ of the Institute is centrally represented by Jürgen Habermas, whose work has functioned as the focal point of a wide range of critical theorists. The third generation of the Frankfurt School is represented by Axel Honneth who emerged as a new center, with different strands or readings of who else belongs to the third generation, some in Germany, some internationally, and some more in sociology and social and political theory than philosophy.
Introduction The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), an academic institution of the University of Frankfurt in Germany opened in 1924 and commonly referred to as the Frankfurt School, comprises a group of scholars who promote a critical theory of society, or simply critical theory, and approach its study from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives. The critical theorists who made up the first generation of the Frankfurt School include social philosopher Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), philosopher and political theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), social psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900–80), philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69), social scientist and philosopher Friedrich Pollock (1894–1970), sociologist Leo Löwenthal (1900–93), as well as political and legal theorist Otto Kirchheimer (1905–65) and political theorist Franz Neumann (1900–54). These scholars shared a common Jewish ancestry and a Marxist political and scholarly orientation. Cultural theorist and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a loose affiliate of the Institute in its first generation, as were cultural critic and sociologist Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1996) and philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977). Other lesser known full-members of the Institute in its first generation included historian Karl August Wittfogel (1896–1988) and economist and historian Henryk Grossman (1881–1950). The so-called second generation of the Frankfurt School is most prominently represented by philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (1929–present), whose work, however, has been flanked and aided by Albrecht Wellmer (1933–present) and Claus Offe (1940–present). The third generation is represented by the social philosopher Axel Honneth (1949–present) at the center, the latter of whom is currently director of the Institute. There exist different strands or readings of who else belongs to the third generation, some in Germany, some internationally, some more in sociology and social theory. Marking the internationalizing of Critical Theory, social philosophers Nancy Fraser (1947–present) and Seyla Benhabib (1950–present) are in some readings considered
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representatives of the third generation of the Frankfurt School. Other readings regard the work of political theorist Claus Offe and philosopher and social theorist Oskar Negt (1934– present) as representative of the third generation, while others also consider the work of social theorist Hans Joas (1948–present) as representative of this generation. The Institute was founded on an endowment made possible by Felix Weil (1898–1975), an Argentinean-born German Marxist scholar and son of a millionaire businessman. Philosopher Carl Grünberg (1861–1940) was the Institute’s first director. In October 1930, Max Horkheimer succeeded Grünberg as the Institute’s director. In 1934, the Institute relocated to the United States, finding a home at Columbia University in New York City, where it stayed until 1950, at which time it was then moved back to the University of Frankfurt in Germany.
History of the Frankfurt School I: From 1923 to 1969 Historical Background and Institutional Beginnings The Institute for Social Research opened in 1924, founded on money given from Felix Weil, an Argentinean-born German Marxist scholar and son of a millionaire businessman. Sociologist Kurt Albert Gerlach (1886–1922), a left-wing socialist professor, was an important figure throughout the creation process, despite dying before the Institute’s founding. Weil intended to found an Institute that served first and foremost for the study and broadening of scientific Marxism. Weil, with Gerlach’s assistance, created an institute connected to the University of Frankfurt but independent from it in that is was directly answerable to the Prussian Ministry of Culture. Weil and his father financed the building and equipment of the Institute, paid it a yearly grant of 120 000 marks, and offered the lower floor to the university’s Faculty of Economics and Social Science, in addition to later on funding the professorial chair which the Institute’s director held in that faculty. Authorization from the ministry for the foundation of an Institute for Social Research as an academic institution of the University of Frankfurt which will also serve the University for
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teaching purposes’ came through at the beginning of 1923. Construction began in March of that year. Marxist philosopher Carl Grünberg became the Institute’s first director in 1924. In Grünberg, Weil had found a director of the new Institute who was both a full Marxist and a recognized scholar. The Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences in Frankfurt agreed to Grünberg as director at once and voted unanimously at the beginning of January 1923 to nominate him to the ministry for appointment to the professorial chair funded by the Institute for Social Research. On Sunday, 22 June 1924, at 11 a.m., the academic ceremony celebrating the opening of the Institute for Social Research was held in the hall of the University of Frankfurt. Grünberg’s first two assistants were social scientist and philosopher Friedrich Pollock and economist and historian Henryk Grossman. Pollock had taken his doctorate in Economics at the University of Frankfurt in 1923, and had temporarily been director of the Institute until Grünberg arrived. Grünberg offered him a position as a research associate at the Institute, and he accepted it immediately. Grossman joined the Institute in 1926 at Grünberg’s invitation, also as a research associate. Another of the Institute’s very first assistants was Rose Wittfogel, who was a librarian. In 1925, her husband, historian Karl August Wittfogel, became a full-time research associate of the Institute. Sociologist Leo Löwenthal started receiving a scholarship from the Institute in 1926.
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(equally disabling) complacency with the existing order of injustice via consumerism and the culture industry. The approach, as we saw, was to combine Marx’s analysis of economic macrostructures with a Freudian social psychology such that the lack of revolutionary agency could be explained: Capitalism, so their argument, undermines the familial structures necessary for autonomous agency, and thereby opens the door for cultural-political formations such as fascism and consumerism. Here the subject identifies with surrogate pleasures, its own inability to change anything, or the submission under a strong leader who falsely represents one’s own fake powers. The subtlety and comprehensiveness with which this research program was played out in all possible domains of social and cultural experience still today looks for an equal. From Horkheimer’s, Adorno’s and Marcuse’s critique of ideology in philosophy; Adorno’s, Löwenthal’s and Benjamin’s analysis of music, literature, and film; Pollock’s and Kirchheimer’s analysis of the economy and the state; as well as numerous other studies; the reconstruction of how economic and political powers shape agents such that the normative overcoming of an unjust social order remains impossible still today defines a practically unmatched standard for the fusion of empirical social research and philosophical conceptualization.
The Historical Unfolding of a Collaborative Social Theory The Turn toward a ‘Critical Theory of Society’ The decisive turn for the Institute for Social research came when Max Horkheimer assumed the position of its second director. In January 1928, Grünberg had to stop work and resign as director of the Institute due to a stroke. There was an interim period when Pollock served as acting director. In October 1930, Pollock (who had been Weil’s executive agent since 1925), representing the board of the Institute of Social Research, and social philosopher Max Horkheimer, who had been appointed 2 months before by the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt to Professor of Social Philosophy, signed a contract making Horkheimer the Institute’s new director. On 24 January 1931, Horkheimer gave his inaugural lecture on taking up the Chair of Social Philosophy and the directorship of the Institute for Social Research. Horkheimer launched a new research program which intended to overcome the crisis of Marxism by fusing social philosophy and empirical social science. Horkheimer proved a highly integrative and formidable research organizer, who understood to be highly influential less by fully defined ideas and theories and more by suggesting the broad outlines within which inter- and multidisciplinary work of original scholars could unfold. The perspective which he developed in the early writings of the Institute, including his inaugural address, was enabling rather than constraining, gave direction without determining every detail. In a nutshell, the first and founding generation of the Frankfurt School attempted to actualize Marx’s critique of capitalism. This project not only involved the need to account for capitalism’s continued existence, but also for the rise of fascist as well as state-capitalist systems of totalitarian domination. Marx’s critique thus needed to be expanded to explain the susceptibility of the masses, including the working class, to nationalist propaganda, the fascist cult of leadership, or the
The Institute began a new era with Horkheimer and with his new journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research), launched in 1932, as its public face. An important collaborator from the beginning of the Institute’s Journal for Social Research was philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno. The first issue of the Institute’s Zeitschrift für Socialforschung included contributions by Erich Fromm and Leo Löwenthal. Löwenthal had initial discussions with philosopher and political theorist Herbert Marcuse in Frankfurt in 1932, which led to his admission to the Institute in 1933. Thus Horkheimer’s assistants at the Institute included Fromm, Pollock, Löwenthal, Adorno, and Marcuse. Looser connections were also established to scholars who at a later time would become more closely tied to the Institute, including political theorist Franz Neumann and political and legal theorist Otto Kirchheimer (1905–65). By the beginning of 1933, the Institute and its members offered competence in a number of scholarly areas, with Marcuse and Horkheimer representative of the Institute’s strength in philosophy, Fromm and Löwenthal covering psychology, Pollock, Karl August Wittfogel, and Grossman showing expertise in economy and economic history, Marcuse and Löwenthal in aesthetics and literature, and Grossman in statistics. From the winter semester of 1930–31 onwards, psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm was listed as a member of the Institute’s teaching staff, alongside Horkheimer, Grossman, and Pollock. When Hitler became Chancellor in January that year, Horkheimer was ready with plans for a move from Germany. Pollock and Wittfogel were safe in Switzerland at the time, and the Institute’s other members were soon able to leave Germany as well. Horkheimer had pondered the idea of relocating the Institute to another location in Europe, and branches had
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already been established in Switzerland, Holland, and France. Horkheimer soon realized the only feasible alternative for relocation of the Institute would be to the United States. The Institute was offered an office building in New York City, and was given a contract that loosely tied them to Columbia University there. Therefore the Institute relocated to the United States in 1934, with their new home at Columbia University, where it would eventually stayed until 1950, at which time it was relocated back to the University of Frankfurt in Germany. After the initial relocation to the United States, the Institute’s work slowly resumed there by the summer of 1934. By the autumn of that same year, nearly all of the Institute’s scholars were reunited in the United States. However, Adorno stayed a bit longer in Germany and did not join the Institute in the United States until 1938. When the Institute first relocated to New York in 1934, Adorno went to Oxford University in England, where he unsuccessfully studied philosophy under the British analytic philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900–76). During its first years in the United States, the Institute worked on projects that had been initiated in Germany. Among the most important of these was an empirical social psychology project in which material had been collected before the Institute’s relocation. The result of this project was published as Studien über Autorität und Familie. It represented the first, but unfortunately also the last, large-scale empirical study of the Institute displaying the original aims and scientific visions of Horkheimer’s group of scholars. A forerunner to the study was almost completed by Fromm but never published. This fact, coupled with other internal difficulties of the Institute, led to the Institute’s parting ways with Fromm in 1939. Fromm’s importance at the Institute had been on the increase since the early 1930s. His social-philosophical interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis, paired with Horkheimer’s high regards for social-psychological explanations was integral for the Studien. Since the beginning of Horkheimer’s reign, psychoanalysis had been a central method in the dialectical materialism of the Frankfurt School. In addition to Fromm’s psychoanalysis and social psychology, Otto Kirchheimer pursed a path-breaking study in criminology while a member of the Institute in the 1930s. His coauthored study in criminology was titled Punishment and Social Structure (1939). The study became known as an early example of scholarship in the field of critical criminology. Fromm eventually decided to stay permanently in the United States, becoming a major name in social psychology and psychoanalysis. Marcuse and Löwenthal also decided to stay in the United States after the Institute had relocated back to Frankfurt in 1950 with Marcuse, who taught at UC San Diego, becoming a major figure of the American New Left in the 1960s, and Löwenthal assuming a sociology professorship at UC Berkeley.
The Philosophical Turn and the Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno coauthored Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944 during their stay in Los Angeles, California. Horkheimer and Adorno lived in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, among a group of notable émigré intellectuals and artists who had fled Europe in the rise of National Socialism, including Thomas Mann (1875–1955),
Bertold Brecht (1898–1956), and Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). Dialectic of Enlightenment became the most well known of the works in social philosophy from the Frankfurt School. While it certainly was, in some way, an immediate continuation of the problems discussed by earlier essays from the 1941 issue of the Institute’s Zeitschrift, it was nevertheless also a complete redefinition of the project. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, a broad theoretical framework develops the decline, or rather the complete reversal, of Enlightenment reason. It is true, there was also a more specialized discussion of phenomena such as the ‘Culture Industry’ and anti-Semitism, and so a certain connection to the meta-theoretical framework and thus a continuation of the interdisciplinary vision from the earlier versions of the Institute’s critical theory was still present. The Dialectic of Enlightenment was, in fact, a philosophical work, but the critical methodologies employed by Horkheimer and Adorno throughout the book ultimately made it multidisciplinary, and therefore still a valid example of the Institute’s critical theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment was an exemplar of the Institute’s project of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research to the extent that it entailed the discussion of philosophy, myth, enlightenment, morality (including the work of philosopher Marquis de Sade), antiSemitism, and the Culture Industry. However, the overall context of these discussions was now a pessimistic account of the history of enlightened reason. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is ultimately a philosophical text that reconstructs, in the methodology of philosophy of history, how reason turned into its opposite. In such fashion, Critical Theory of this magnitude has become a negative philosophy of history.
Adorno’s Rise and the Frankfurt School’s Rise to Public Prominence Adorno had continued to pursue multidisciplinary research in the United States after the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment. His Philosophy of New Music was published in 1949, and he also focused on the sociology of music in that time period. He collaborated with Daniel J. Levinson, Max Horkheimer, and Else Frenkel-Brunswik in the writing of The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Adorno had collaborated with sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–76) in the Princeton Radio Research Project in New Jersey, as well as with Hanns Eisler (1898–1962) in Composing for the Films (1947). The Princeton Radio Research Project was made possible by funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1937, and the Institute for Social Research also had a hand in it. Horkheimer suggested to Lazarsfeld that he bring in Adorno to work on the project. When Adorno first moved from London to New York in 1938, he spent half of his time working for the Institute for Social Research and the other half working for the Princeton Radio Research Project. His stay at the Radio Research Project ended in 1941. Eventually, Adorno emerged as a leading member of the Institute, and such a fact had consequences for the further development of critical theory at the Frankfurt School. Adorno’s full entrance into the inner circle of the Institute meant that Horkheimer turned his attention to him and his enormous working capacity. In Adorno, Horkheimer saw a possibility to realize the project which he was dreaming of,
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which was a project on dialectical philosophy. Marcuse up to this point had been the natural partner for Horkheimer in philosophical concerns, but when Adorno fully entered into the theoretical work of the Institute, he, rather than Marcuse, became Horkheimer’s chief ally. The idea behind the critique of positivistic science, which was strongly influenced by Adorno, was introduced in the articles of the 1937 issue of the Zeitschrift. It was in the years following those articles that Horkheimer’s close collaboration with Adorno developed. Such phase of critical theory at the Frankfurt School was a continuation of the arguments from its preceding phase, but took on a form which transcended the arena of science and was extended to a total critique of civilized reason. Horkheimer wrote Eclipse of Reason (1947) and Critique of Instrumental Reason (1967) on his own after collaborating with Adorno in the writing of Dialectic of Enlightenment. By 1950, Horkheimer had reestablished the Institute in Frankfurt. By that time, Adorno and Horkheimer were the Institute’s two undisputed leaders in critical theory. In the course of time, Horkheimer’s productivity declined while Adorno had his most productive years in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1955, without giving up his influence, Horkheimer decided to share his directorship of the Institute with Adorno in a cooperative directorship. Adorno was highly visible and vocal as a public intellectual in Europe, engaging in the positivist dispute in German sociology and a critical dialogue with philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94). In addition, he wrote a polemic of the existentialism of philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), and wrote Negative Dialectics in 1966, where he both continued his critique of Heidegger and extended Dialectic of Enlightenment’s critical theory. His Aesthetic Theory was posthumously published in 1970. In the postwar Germany after 1945, in the context of the return of ‘the Frankfurt School’ to Frankfurt itself, Adorno rose to become the public face of the Institute, which in turn rose to public prominence.
History of the Frankfurt School II: From 1970 to the Present The New Beginning with Habermas However, despite the comprehensiveness of the first program of ‘critical social theory,’ the initial founding paradigm – centered around the combination of Marx and Freud via an explanation of current forms of capitalist power – also entailed major problems. It is largely to the credit of one major social theorist, Jürgen Habermas, to establish his work as well as person as a new turning table, as a discursive and organizational medium in which these problems could be redefined and addressed. Habermas thereby managed to preserve the spirit of critical theory by advancing it through entirely new conceptual and methodological means. Habermas ascent to the leadership position of the so-called second generation of the Frankfurt School is prepared through his early influential work in the 1960s. Here, Habermas, a generation younger than the founders, established himself as an equal member of the now increasingly recognized ‘Frankfurt School’ by basically two practices. First, Habermas made himself a name in a set of important debates. He comes to Adorno’s aid in the famous
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positivism debate with Popper, coining influential terms like the one about Popper’s positivistically reduced concept of reason. Similarly, he engages in well-known debates with the most established figures of postwar Germany in philosophy and social theory, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and his philosophical hermeneutics, and Niklas Luhmann (1927–98) and his social systems theory. In these debates Habermas establishes himself as an apt critique of gaps and issues in both paradigms. Second, Habermas is able to present his own epistemological version of critical theory as based in human species-specific ‘knowledge interests.’ By suggesting that the natural sciences are grounded in the need and interest to dominate nature, the humanities are grounded in the need and interest for cultural and historical self-understanding, and the social sciences are grounded in the need and interest for emancipation from unjust social orders, Habermas situates critical social theory as a legitimate human endeavor next to other established scientific projects. Yet the second generation of the Frankfurt School is borne only when Habermas abandons his own early theory for the sake of a ‘paradigm change of critical social theory,’ which leads to the ‘theory of communicative action.’ In a well orchestrated and not modest self-installation as the savior of critical theory via its complete conceptual overhaul, Habermas engages in a new beginning, triggered by the widely diagnosed problems of his earlier conception, which among other issues conflates the epistemological-transcendental critique of grounds of knowledge with a social-normative critique of society. In fact, the issue of the lack of an adequate conceptualization of the normativity of social criticism becomes the hallmark of the second generation and Habermas’ lasting contribution to critical theory.
The Theoretical Core of Communicative Reason Habermas comes to define the second generation of the Frankfurt School. He renews this tradition of social critique, of critical social theory by breaking with its conceptual framework. Instead of the Hegel–Marxian dialectic of enlightenment, in which ‘reason’ – which once meant to liberate and emancipate the subject from its objective determinants – becomes transformed into its opposite, reason for Habermas is now reconstructed as a linguistically mediated potential of a historically evolving human society. This potential for a rationalization of our linguistic practices can be unleashed in two diametrically opposed ways: either as the instrumental thinking that permeates functional systems like the capitalist economy and modern administrative power, or as the intersubjective orientation at communicative processes in which all agents are respected as equal, valuable, and knowledgeable contributors. Habermas now grounds the emancipatory potential of modernity – as he prefers to designate his indebtedness to the legacy of the Enlightenment – in the in-built presupposition of the validity of speech in social communication. This allows one to see that the reflexive distanciation from tradition is defined by a dialectic that does not turn reason per se into its dominating opposite. It rather defines rationalization as enabling two different processes, either as functional or as communicative reason. The modernization and rationalization of society since the Renaissance now
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enables a liberation from tradition that can lead either to functionalist thought or to communicative action. For Habermas, this dialectic defines an open, contested, and challenging choice for modern societies. Instead of being doomed by a dialectic of Enlightenment according to which reason turned into its opposite, we are now called to actively participate in the reconstruction of the full scope of reason so as to avoid succumbing to functionalism and other objectifying and anticommunicative forms of power. Habermas’ communicative turn in critical theory proved to be successful as the new conceptual face of critical theory. Four reasons largely account for this success. First, the theory of communicative action can justify its own critical normative orientation. Horkheimer and Adorno’s position had left unclear how a totally dominated agency can still rebel and revolt, and how a completely destroyed enlightenment can still speak of enlightenment values like autonomy, truth, and equality. Second, Habermas’ theory represents an unparalleled achievement of theoretical synthesis. The over 1000 pages of the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (German 1981, English 1983/87) integrate the major sociological classics, argumentation theory, critical theory, and speech act theory to a new conception of validity-based communicative action. Third, Habermas’ theoretical product appears at a time when the globalization of theory production takes off. Habermas’ theory draws as much on American as on German sources, including Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), and Talcott Parsons (1902–79), and generally speaks to the new cosmopolitan class of social and cultural theorists who emphasize language, discourse, and a politics of recognition in the public sphere, the latter being one of Habermas’ central concepts and research topics. Fourth, Habermas has been supported by several influential scholars, such as Albrecht Wellmer, Karl-Otto Apel, and Thomas McCarthy. Besides those, the second generation also includes thinkers like the Adorno’s student Alfred Schmidt (1931–2012). Wellmer and Schmidt, along with others, some who would in later certain readings of the school find themselves regarded as members of the third generation at the Institute, contributed to an increasing academic as well as public recognition of the Frankfurt School as one of the most important German philosophical movements of the twentieth century.
Establishing the Communicative Paradigm and the Historization of the Frankfurt School The brief conceptual sketch allows us to see how Habermas could indeed establish his communicative proposal at the center of a renewed critical theory. Yet as Bertolt Brecht rhetorically asked the historian who wrote that Caesar crossed the Alps: “Did he not at least have a cook with him?” we should note that Habermas did not do this on his own. Indeed, Habermas is an authorial center of discourse, as the actual author of the most influential books on the communicative turn; he is also the organizational center as the director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Research in Starnberg, which he codirected from 1969 to 1983; and he becomes, after the deaths of most the old guard in the late 1960s to mid-1970s, the increasingly famous living representative of the Frankfurt
School. Yet on every account, the communicative turn is the work of many colleagues and contributors; it is impossible to conceive without such context and support. Theoretically, the transcendental pragmatics of philosopher Karl-Otto Apel (1922–present) gave essential insights, as did the analytic rigor and pragmatist acumen of American philosopher Thomas McCarthy (1940–present). Institutionally, the Starnberg Institute gave Habermas the resources to assemble some of the world’s most relevant philosophers and social scientists in a uniquely productive interdisciplinary atmosphere. And finally, Habermas was a public persona who drew attention to his rather academically articulated theory. His important public standing emerged from his constant historico-political interventions which related him, at times antagonistically, to the student revolt of 1968 and the new democratic Germany; also important for Habermas’ reputation were his at-times heated engagements with some of the most prominent poststructuralists and postmodernists, which include his highly visible critique of post-structuralism, especially with regard to Michel Foucault (1926–84) and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). With the death of Adorno in 1969, the withdrawal of Horkheimer to Switzerland around that time, Habermas’ move to Starnberg in 1969, and with Marcuse and Löwenthal faraway in sunny California, the actual Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt became a rather modest center for social-empirical research. Under the able but unassuming directorship of Ludwig von Friedeburg (1924–2010), also minister of culture for the state of Hesse, solid social research projects were carried out. When the real action had moved elsewhere, the Institute for Social Research became an historical site of the imaginary entity of the Frankfurt School. What set in during the 1970s, besides the Habermasian paradigm shift and renewal, was the historization of the Frankfurt School as one of the most important twentieth-century movements in German philosophy and social theory. Rather marginalized as it was before the Second World War, and still long after, the Frankfurt School now became an object of historical desire, a piece in the mosaic of a new Germany that desperately searched for a new identity beyond Hitler. Works by Helmut Dubiel, the Californian Martin Jay, and the path-breaking volume by Rolf Wiggershaus defined this historical turn. Despite the dangers that were associated with such a historization, this move brought the first generation of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, etc., back into academic and public consciousness. It enables up until today to see critical theory as what it really is a complex and diversified project in which a multiplicity of approaches and methodologies come to bear to analyze the dialectic of human freedom and equality against the real backdrop of social power and domination. Habermas returns to the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universitat in Frankfurt in 1983. The move comes after turning down offers from the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University and is well calculated: while Habermas does not formally assume the directorship of the still existing Institute for Social Research, he inhabits the University Philosophicum right next to it. The return of the master reinvigorates the historical awareness of the Frankfurt School, albeit Habermas aims to build his reputation as the undisputed king of critical theory by three essential and independently pursued projects. First, he writes The Philosophical Discourse of
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Modernity, a book of questionable value as it is written in a largely polemical tone similar to Georg Lukacs’ equally onesided Destruction of Reason. Habermas blames the Nietzsche/ Heidegger turn in contemporary French philosophy for the flaws to be found in Foucault, Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), and the like. Second and much more constructive is his work on a ‘discourse ethics’ which achieves a strong worldwide reception. Finally, and of perhaps the most sustaining influence, is his work on a new ‘Rechtsphilosophie,’ a ‘philosophy of right,’ culminating in Facticity and Norms, where he develops a democratic-theoretical account of the complex intertwinement of morality and law. Habermas also leads during this decade the famed Monday Colloquium where many of the best German and international, young and established, critical theorists presented and discussed their work in progress. The years from the mid-1980s to the mid1990s, when Habermas retired from his Frankfurt post to teach on occasion at Northwestern, New York University, and elsewhere, define the coming of age of critical theory and its ascent to one of the world’s most known traditions on social theory.
The Third Generation: Recognition, Feminism, Justice The sustained productivity of the Frankfurt School can be measured by the fact that a third generation of influential and prolific authors is currently carving out new intellectual space for critical theory. While critical theory has justly become a term with much wider application than the initial Frankfurt School tradition, representatives that directly draw from it nevertheless exist and include social theorists such as Axel Honneth. Honneth is unique since with him, for the first time since the demise of Adorno in 1969, a major social philosopher both represents the philosophical heritage and organizationally heads the actual Institute for Social Research. Honneth succeeded Habermas on his chair for social philosophy in Frankfurt, and shortly afterward also assumed the directorship of the Institute. Honneth’s increasingly influential theory of recognition builds on insights from the early Hegel and G.H. Mead in order to construct a threefold understanding of recognition: love or emotional recognition, respect or moral recognition, and esteem or sociocultural recognition represent for Honneth, three anthropologically deep-seated needs the fulfillment of which agents require to fully develop as autonomous selves; conditions that withhold such fulfillment can be understood to fuel social struggles for recognition. Emotional recognition builds self-confidence, moral recognition selfrespect, and cultural recognition self-esteem – all three of which together define an ethically acceptable and good life for which agents fight if the conditions for their realization are withheld from them. The communicative recognition that Habermas grounded in argument-based validity claims thus receives a deeper and more social-philosophical and socialhistorical basis. Honneth advances a truly critical-theoretical approach, as such a perspective – since the early Frankfurt School – has always consisted in combining a normative orientation toward more justice and freedom with an analysis of the social-historical and empirical grounds that would enable its realization practically. As Institute director as much as social philosopher, Honneth searches for constant dialogue and expansion with related critical-theoretical approaches. This
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led to a much noted exchange with Nancy Fraser in Redistribution or Recognition? in which the focus on moral and cultural recognition is challenged by the continued structural need for economic justice. Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib represent third generation critical theorists who in a distinctively feminist vein approach issues of identity, power, gender roles and justice, as well as globalization and cosmopolitanism – besides also internationalizing critical theory in person. Closely affiliated with Axel Honneth, and important because of his work on G.H. Mead, Hans Joas may also be seen to make an important contribution. All these thinkers represent potent voices in an increasingly transnational theory discussion over the right approach to the social-political challenges from a normatively informed view. There are in fact different strands or readings of who else belongs to the third generation, both in Germany and internationally, and some in sociology and social and political theory more than philosophy. Joas is at times read into the tradition of the third generation in social theory. With the increasing internationalization of critical theory and with a look at theoretical developments of both Habermas’ discourse ethics and Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition, Nancy Fraser’s and Seyla Benhabib’s work has become a constitutive part of a third generation’s critical theory. Claus Offe and Oskar Negt are in certain readings, especially but not only in Germany, also regarded as third generational. Offe’s monographs first started to appear in 1965. Since then, he has engaged contemporary conceptions of the welfare state and its implicit contradictions, and has characterized late capitalism as disorganized. Negt, who trained under Adorno and then went on to serve as an assistant to Habermas, has further developed Habermas’ notion of the public sphere and has embarked on a theory of history in his more philosophical writings. Honneth and with him Joas, Offe and Negt, and Fraser and Benhabib are among the most prominent contributors of the third generation of a school the influence of which is, however, much more widespread and sustained than the mentioning of these names could capture. Noteworthy are also recent attempts to transgress and cross-over between different paradigms of critical theory, which includes building bridges between the Frankfurt School in all its versions and British Cultural Studies, French Post-Structuralism, and contemporary social theory in all of its different forms. Besides the original Institute of Social Research, which continues to exist under its current director Axel Honneth, several important venues of exchange and research grounded in the Frankfurt School critical theory have sprung up in recent decades: The American Critical Theory Roundtable, the Prague Conference of the Social Sciences, and the Frankfurt University Research Cluster Normative Orders. Critical social theory, as conceived by its original founders, did care little about discursive boundaries or school designations; its aims has been to advance critical reflexivity with regard to the most pressing and least understood currents of our contemporary and continuously unjust social orders. Its motto was and is the critique of the social status quo by any theoretical means necessary, with the aim to be able to conceive its practical overcoming. Unfortunately, due to the continued pervasive influence of power, oppression, and ignorance, critical social theory and the project of
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the Frankfurt School has lost nothing of its urgency in today’s world.
See also: Benhabib, Seyla (1950–); Critical Theory; Democracy: Normative Theory; Foucault, Michel (1926–84); Fromm, Erich (1900–80); Habermas, Jürgen (1929–); Hebb, Donald Olding (1904–1985); Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804); Law and Morality: A Continental European Perspective; Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix (1901–76); Luhmann, Niklas (1927–98); Marx, Karl (1818–83); Mead, George Herbert (1863–1931); Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900).
Bibliography Abromeit, John, 2011. Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Benhabib, Seyla, 1992. Situation the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Routledge, New York. Benjamin, Walter, 1968. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (Harry Zohn, Trans.). In: Arendt, Hannah (Ed.), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Schocken Books, New York, pp. 217–251. Bottomore, Tom, 1984. The Frankfurt School. Ellis Harwood Limited, Chichester. Dubiel, Helmut, 1985. Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Fraser, Nancy, 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Habermas, Jürgen, 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action (Thomas McCarthy, Trans.). In: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, vol. 1. Beacon Press, Boston. Habermas, Jürgen, 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action (Thomas McCarthy, Trans.). In: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, vol. 2. Beacon Press, Boston. Held, David, 1980. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Honneth, Axel, 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Joel Anderson, Trans.). Polity Press, Cambridge. Honneth, Axel, Fraser, Nancy, 2004. Redistribution or Recognition? A Politicalphilosophical Exchange. Verso, London and New York. Horkheimer, Max, Adorno, Theodor W., 2002 (Edmund Jephcott, Trans.). In: Schmid Noerr, Gunzelin (Ed.), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Jay, Martin, 1996. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Marcus, Judith, Tar, Zoltán (Eds.), 1984. Foundations of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ; London. Marcuse, Hebert, 1991. One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Beacon Press, Boston. Tar, Zoltán, 1977. The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Wiley, New York. Wheatland, Thomas, 2009. The Frankfurt School in Exile. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Wiggershaus, Rolf, 1994. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Michael Robertson, Trans.). The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.