Frankfurt School
Thinking existing society with a view to emancipating those it dominates, beginning with distrust of reason reduced to an instrument.
1923 – …
The name given to the group formed around the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923, which came to direct in 1930. In 1937 he set out its programme under the name : a social philosophy nourished by , by and by 's sociology, asking why the expected revolution had given way to fascism. In exile in the United States, Horkheimer and wrote (1944, 1947) in California. , who stayed in America, published (1964), read by the protest movements of 1968. A second generation, with , broke with the founders' pessimism: it refounded critique on and deliberative democracy, reconstructing Marx's legacy rather than taking it over. carries it on with a theory of , in which social conflicts arise from disrespect.
A theory of society that merely describes what is ratifies it: critical thinking analyses existing society with a view to the emancipation of those it speaks about.
Reason reduced to calculating means cannot judge ends; to take the method of the sciences for the whole of rationality is to surrender to the facts.
Justification
contrasts two kinds of theory. "Traditional" theory, the model of the sciences since , believes it can stand outside the society it studies. knows it is part of that society and takes sides: it analyses existing society, its contradictions and its possibilities, with a view to a rational organization of common life. In , this aim gives itself no programme: it works through the of what is and through the possibilities art still holds; in , it becomes a defence of discussion free from domination.
Horkheimer, Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) · Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966) · Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981)
2 more
Justification
The founders' shared thesis targets the reduction of reason to , not rationality as such. The Enlightenment, which sought to free human beings from fear through knowledge, turned knowledge into an instrument for dominating nature, and then human beings. A reason that only calculates means cannot say whether an end is good. Hence the opposition to positivism, culminating in the "positivist dispute" in Tübingen (1961), where confronted , who nonetheless rejected the positivist label. shifts the thesis: science is legitimate in its own order, the mistake is to take it for the only model of knowledge.
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), "The Concept of Enlightenment" · Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947) · Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (German ed. 1969)
Justification
According to , the facts the scientist perceives are already "preformed" by social practice. Knowledge does not thereby become arbitrary: it remains answerable to the facts, but it is mediated by history and by the interests that guide it. turns this into a doctrine of three knowledge-constitutive interests (technical, practical, emancipatory), which does not relativize truth but distinguishes its domains.
Horkheimer, Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) · Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (1968)
Justification
For , technology is not neutral: advanced industrial society absorbs its opponents by satisfying needs it produces itself, and the technical apparatus becomes the vehicle of a faceless domination. replies that technology, the rationality of instrumental action, is not the problem; the danger lies in its extension to the spheres of interaction.
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964) · Habermas, Technology and Science as "Ideology" (1968)
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↑ Influences received
- ReinterpretsMarxismThe Frankfurt School starts from Marx's critique of political economy but moves away from his historical schema: with no revolutionary subject, critique turns to culture, personality and reason itself, and rejects the…Read
- ReinterpretsMax WeberThe rationalization Weber described as the fate of the West becomes, in Horkheimer and Adorno, instrumental reason: no longer a fact to be recorded but a domination to be criticized.Read
- SynthesizesSigmund FreudFrom the 1930s the Frankfurt Institute combined psychoanalysis with social critique to understand why the masses consent to their domination.Read