Frankfurt School a group of philosophers, cultural critics, and social scientists associated with the Institute for Social Research, which was founded in Frankfurt in 1929. Its prominent members included, among others, the philosophers Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, as well as the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900–80) and the literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892– 1940). Habermas is the leading representative of its second generation. The Frankfurt School is less known for particular theories or doctrines than for its program of a ‘critical theory of society.’ Critical theory represents a sophisticated effort to continue Marx’s transformation of moral philosophy into social and political critique, while rejecting orthodox Marxism as a dogma. Critical theory is primarily a way of doing philosophy, integrating the normative aspects of philosophical reflection with the explanatory achievements of the social sciences. The ultimate goal of its program is to link theory and practice, to provide insight, and to empower subjects to change their oppressive circumstances and achieve human emancipation, a rational society that satisfies human needs and powers. The first generation of the Frankfurt School went through three phases of development. The first, lasting from the beginning of the Institute until the end of the 1930s, can be called ‘interdisciplinary historical materialism’ and is best represented in Horkheimer’s programmatic writings. Horkheimer argued that a revised version of historical materialism could organize the results of social research and give it a critical perspective. The second, ‘critical theory’ phase saw the abandonment of Marxism for a more generalized notion of critique. However, with the near-victory of the Nazis in the early 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno entered the third phase of the School, ‘the critique of instrumental reason.’ In their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1941) as well as in Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964), the process of instrumentally dominating nature leads to dehumanization and the domination of human beings. In their writings after World War II, Adorno and Horkheimer became increasingly pessimistic, seeing around them a ‘totally administered society’ and a manipulated, commodity culture. Horkheimer’s most important essays are from the first phase and focus on the relation of philosophy and social science. Besides providing a clear definition and program for critical social science, he proposes that the normative orientation of philosophy should be combined with the empirical research in the social sciences. This metaphilosophical orientation distinguishes a ‘critical,’ as opposed to ‘traditional,’ theory. For example, such a program demands rethinking the relation of epistemology to the sociology of science. A critical theory seeks to show how the norm of truth is historical and practical, without falling into the skepticism or relativism of traditional sociologies of knowledge such as Mannheim’s. Adorno’s major writings belong primarily to the second and third phases of the development of the Frankfurt School. As the possibilities for criticism appeared to him increasingly narrow, Adorno sought to discover them in aesthetic experience and the mimetic relation to nature. Adorno’s approach was motivated by his view that modern society is a ‘false totality.’ His diagnosis of the causes traced this trend back to the spread of a one-sided, instrumental reason, based on the domination of nature and other human beings. For this reason, he sought a noninstrumental and non-dominating relation to nature and to others, and found it in diverse and fragmentary experiences. Primarily, it is art that preserves this possibility in contemporary society, since in art there is a possibility of mimesis, or the ‘non-identical’ relation to the object. Adorno’s influential attempt to avoid ‘the logic of identity’ gives his posthumous Aesthetic Theory (1970) and other later works a paradoxical character.
It was in reaction to the third phase that the second generation of the Frankfurt School recast the idea of a critical theory. Habermas argued for a new emphasis on normative foundations as well as a return to an interdisciplinary research program in the social sciences. After first developing such a foundation in a theory of cognitive interests (technical, practical, and emancipatory), Habermas turned to a theory of the unavoidable presuppositions of communicative action and an ethics of discourse. The potential for emancipatory change lies in communicative, or discursive, rationality and practices that embody it, such as the democratic public sphere. Habermas’s analysis of communication seeks to provide norms for non-dominating relations to others and a broader notion of reason.
See also ADORNO, CONTINENTAL PHILOSO- PHY , CRITICAL THEORY , MARXISM , PHILOSO – PHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES , PRAXIS , WEBE. J.Bo.