School
Frankfurt School
Overview
The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical theory. It is associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded on February 3, 1923, at the University of Frankfurt am Main (today known as Goethe University Frankfurt). Formed during the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was composed of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the socio-economic systems of the 1930s: namely, capitalism, fascism, and communism. Significant figures associated with the school include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas.
The Frankfurt theorists proposed that existing social theory was unable to explain the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics, such as Nazism, in 20th-century liberal capitalist societies. Also critical of Marxism–Leninism as a philosophically inflexible system of social organization, the School's critical-theory research sought alternative paths to social development.
What unites the disparate members of the School is a shared commitment to the project of human emancipation, theoretically pursued by an attempted synthesis of the Marxist tradition, psychoanalysis, and empirical sociological research.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus and Zeno are to be reckoned as belonging to this school. Xenophanes may be regarded as the founder of it; Parmenides is supposed to have been his pupil, and Melissus, and especially Zeno, are called the pupils of Parmenides. In fact, they are to be taken together as forming the Eleatic school; later on it lost the name, being then called Sophistic, and its locality was transferred to…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Frankfurt School is; the author is tied to Frankfurt School in the knowledge graph.
The Critical theory starts originally from the distinction of elements presented in the analysis of experience, viz. the matter of sense, and its universal relations. Taking into account Hume's criticism on this distinction as given in the preceding section, viz. that sensation does not explicitly apprehend more than an individual or more than a mere event, it insists at the same time on the _fact_ that universality…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Frankfurt School is; the author is tied to Frankfurt School in the knowledge graph.
These our philosophic ideas have had an incubation period of about twenty years since they were first given to the world in Marx's "Misere de la Philosophie" and the Communist Manifesto until they obtained a wider and wider influence through the publication of "Capital" and now find recognition and support far beyond the limits of Europe in all lands where a proletariat exists together with progressive scientific…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
States what Frankfurt School is.
Philosophers who discussed Frankfurt School
- Georg Simmel
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Georg Henrik von Wright
- John Rawls
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Jürgen Habermas
- Karl Popper
- Karl Mannheim
- Karl-Otto Apel
- Max Weber
- Max Horkheimer
- Walter Benjamin
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe
- Franz Rosenzweig
- Axel Honneth
- Jean-François Lyotard
- Theodor W. Adorno
- Dwight Macdonald
- Martin Heidegger
- Herbert Marcuse
- Erich Fromm
- Rudolf Otto
- Allan Bloom
- Hannah Arendt
Related ideas
- Fascism
- Feminism
- One-Dimensional Man
- Productive forces
- Neo-Kantianism
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Historicism
- Private property
- Cato Institute
- Idealism
- Reactionary
- Jürgen Habermas
- Scientism
- Dialectic of Enlightenment
- Geist
- Environmentalism
- Sociology
- Anti-intellectualism
- Marxism
- Materialism
- Max Horkheimer
- Wilhelm Reich
- Marxism–Leninism
- Nazi Germany
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.