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Critical theory (the Frankfurt School)
1923 onward· School or movement· Politics, society & justice
Well documentedSolid records, texts or physical evidence.
German Marxist thinkers at Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research who built 'critical theory' to diagnose modern society's hidden forms of domination.
See it on the Philosophy map →The idea
Idea: social theory should not just describe society but expose domination and help free people. The Institute, founded in 1923 and led by Max Horkheimer from 1930, mixed Marx, Freud and empirical research. Exiled by the Nazis to the United States, Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), arguing that the 'culture industry' of film and radio breeds conformity. Herbert Marcuse inspired the 1960s New Left; Jürgen Habermas later championed reasoned public debate. Main objection: critics call it elitist and pessimistic.
Why it matters
It gave the humanities and social sciences the habit of 'critique', asking whose interests a culture or institution serves; media studies and sociology still use it.
Where it comes from
The Institute's journal (1932–41), books by Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas, and Martin Jay's history The Dialectical Imagination (1973) document it.
Still debated
Whether critical theory is still Marxist, and whether its attack on the 'culture industry' was insight or snobbery toward popular culture, are still argued.
Connections (2)
▸Karl Marx inspired Critical theory (the Frankfurt School)Well documented
The connection
Marx argued that capitalism alienates workers and that ruling ideas serve ruling-class interests. The Frankfurt School kept this method of critique but asked why the predicted workers' revolution never came in the West. Their answer blended Marx with Freud: mass culture and psychology kept people content within the system.
When and how
The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923, funded by Felix Weil; Horkheimer's 1937 essay 'Traditional and Critical Theory' named the approach.
How we know
Its members described themselves as working in the Marxist tradition and wrote extensively on Marx's ideas.
Debates and open questions
Orthodox Marxists accused them of trading politics for cultural pessimism; György Lukács mocked them as living in the 'Grand Hotel Abyss'.
▸Critical theory (the Frankfurt School) critiqued the "dialectic" of The EnlightenmentWell documented
The connection
Horkheimer and Adorno argued that Enlightenment reason, meant to free humanity from myth and domination, became a new form of domination: 'instrumental reason' that treats nature and people as things to calculate and control. That is the 'dialectic': progress produces its opposite, seen in bureaucracy, mass culture and ultimately fascism and the Holocaust.
When and how
Written in exile in California during World War II; circulated as Philosophical Fragments in 1944 and published in Amsterdam in 1947 as Dialectic of Enlightenment.
How we know
The preface states the thesis directly: 'Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.'
Debates and open questions
Habermas, their own student, argued they gave up too much on reason; whether the Enlightenment shares blame for modern catastrophes remains sharply debated.