Frankfurt School of Sociological Thought

The Frankfurt School is the name now given to the scholars involved with the Institute of Social Research, founded at the University of Frankfurt in Germany in 1923. The school developed critical theory, which strove to reclaim Marx's theories from the misinterpretations of orthodox Marxism. It also incorporated Freudian analysis into Marxist thought, insisted on the primacy of culture in social analysis, and grounded its theory in materialism and action. Members of the school were known for writing on the culture industry, the totalitarian personality, political economy, and aesthetic theory. While some theorists in modern cultural studies think the Frankfurt School is outdated, many sociologists and neo-Marxists find critical theory a useful starting point for deconstruction of society and culture.

Keywords Benjamin, Walter; Critical Theory; Culture Industry; Dialectic; Economic Determinism; Marxist Analysis; Positivism; Totalitarianism

Sociological Theory > The Frankfurt School of Sociological Thought

The Frankfurt School

Overview

The Frankfurt School is the name now given to both the theories and group of scholars connected to the Institute of Social Research, affiliated with the University of Frankfurt in Germany and Columbia University in New York. Known for the development of critical theory, the study of totalitarianism and mass culture, an interdisciplinary approach to subject matter and methods, and the integration of Freudian theories into neo-Marxist analysis, the Frankfurt School has influenced psychology, sociological theory, and cultural studies. Recent adaptations have applied the theories to new communications technologies and the modern crisis of legitimation.

Chronology

The Frankfurt School is the name given to the theorists and theories associated with the Institute of Social Research which was founded by Felix Weil on February 3, 1923 at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. Weil and his circle of friends found the structure of contemporaneous German university departments too constraining for the social analysis they wished to conduct. They developed the idea of creating a semi-autonomous research institute and persuaded Weil's father Hermann, a wealthy merchant, to support the project. Some of the thinkers associated with the Institute were Friedrich Pollock, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, and Walter Benjamin, as well as Jürgen Habermas, Erich Fromm, and Georg Lukacs, among others (Jay, 1973). They were sociologists, economists, psychologists, political scientists and philosophers with common interests in Marxism and the critique of culture. Horkheimer, Habermas, Adorno, and Marcuse are frequently seen as the core figures of the school (Held, 1980).

To understand the perceived need for the Institute, it is necessary to understand the political situation of the time. Germany, defeated in the First World War, was under the control of the unstable and often threatened Social Democratic government that came to be known as the Weimar Republic. The government was weakened by the onerous terms of the Versailles Treaty, afflicted with runaway inflation, and under attack from within by parties from both the extreme left and the extreme right.

German universities enforced rigid specialization and a long period of apprenticeship, and their disciplinary boundaries were far too structured for a group of scholars with such interdisciplinary interests. They also were not welcoming to the study of radical political theories, given the political instability of the times. The scholars who created the Institute were interested in revitalizing Marxist theory, yet highly suspicious of Marxism as it was interpreted under the Soviet regime. As they conducted academic research that was seen as radical (although few of them were actually involved with politics), to achieve their goals they needed the autonomy of a new space for research. Thus the Institute was born.

The first director was Carl Grunberg, who previously taught law and political science, and who steered the Institute into a traditional interpretation of Marxism. Max Horkheimer took over as director in 1931 after Grunberg's health failed, and he began to steer the Institute's focus away from orthodox Marxist analysis. Under his leadership the interdisciplinary interests of the members flourished, and insights from across the academy — in art, literature, music, psychology, and philosophy - entered as subjects of critique.

Nazis came to power in Germany in January of 1933. As Marxist theorists, many of whom were ethnically Jewish, the members of the Institute were obvious targets of the new regime. Nazis closed down the Institute and seized its library. (Luckily, the Institute had already removed its endowment from German banks the year before.) As its members left Germany quickly, the Institute moved to Geneva, also setting up small branches in London and Paris. Their residence in Geneva was short-lived, however, as Switzerland seemed a bit close to the expanding Nazi regime. When Nicholas Butler, president of Columbia University in New York, encouraged the Institute to move to his campus, the members accepted his offer quickly. In 1934, Marcuse, Löwenthal, Pollock, and Wittfogel moved to Columbia University; Fromm had already relocated to the United States and joined them. Despite the move to New York, the Institute did not become Americanized and continued to publish its work in German. This combined with its organization's independence from university departments and its isolation relative to the Columbia campus meant it never entered the mainstream of American sociology, even while it was located in the United States.

The Institute returned to Frankfurt in 1949 after the University of Frankfurt, trying to regain some of its prewar prominence, made compelling offers to get it back. Horkheimer and Adorno, homesick for German, were happy to return. When it returned to Frankfurt, the Institute left some members behind in the United States: Marcuse and Fromm, who were already distanced from it intellectually, remained in the United States, as did Löwenthal, who had married an American. Horkheimer retired in 1959 and Adorno (who was involved with member of the Institute for years before officially becoming a member in 1938 and co-director in 1955) took over the Institute.

Critical Theory

The Frankfurt school was composed of many theorists from many disciplines, so the work that came out of the school was broad in scope. Many members of the school were trained in philosophy and influenced by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kant and Hegel. They shared an interest in Marx, but differed on many points of interpretation. There are unifying threads to their body of work: a desire to update Marxism, an interest in culture, an interest in interdisciplinary analysis, and a reluctance to codify their own output into a monolithic system (Jay, 1973).

The Frankfurt School created critical theory. As the name suggests, critical theory began as a critique of other schools of thought. Its aims are many: to bring materialist analysis into social analysis, to connect theory to action, to revive Marx's ideas, which had been reified and misinterpreted, and to analyze society and culture as a totality, rather than analyzing aspects in isolation. It is rooted in a critique of the trajectory taken by Marxist analysis after Marx's death, a critique aimed at improving Marxist analysis, not rejecting it. The main attack on Marxist thought dealt with what some saw as its economic determinism; the theorists of the Frankfurt School placed emphasis on culture as a driving force in society.

The Frankfurt School's theorists were also unified by their critique of the positivism of social sciences. Positivism is the idea that social sciences should use the methods of the "hard sciences" to analyze society. This drew fire from the critical theorists (and many others) for several reasons. First, the subject matter of the social sciences is quite different from that of the hard sciences. Humans attach meaning to their actions and exercise free will, which means that their subjective states are also open to study. This also means that absolute laws explaining and predicting human behavior will be almost impossible to generate.

Critical theory rejected the value-free orientation created by an emphasis on positivism. Members of the Frankfurt School believed that the social sciences, especially sociology, should advocate for social justice and actively criticize society's flaws; critical theory thus has a moral tone and considers the ethics of cultural and social forms. Despite their emphasis on action, the theorists tended to avoid political involvement.

Political Economy

Marx grounded his analysis of society in its material base; that is, he believed that the economy of a society-the manner in which people produced their livelihoods, their modes of production, methods of distribution, private or public ownership of goods and so on-was the base on which all other aspects of a society rested. The base determined a superstructure consisting of politics, religion, family structure, cultural norms and values, and all the other institutions that meet society's needs. Marx's work rests on his historical analysis of class struggle, looking at economic structures throughout history, understanding how they shaped societies, and analyzing how contradictions in each system eventually led to its undoing. While members of the Frankfurt School based their analyses in Marx's theories, they had to account for the fact that his predictions about the fate of capitalism and communism were at the minimum incomplete; some were wrong.

Like many other professed Marxists who were dismayed that Russia's revolution did not follow true Marxist ideology, the members of the Frankfurt School were initially ambivalent about Russia's revolution its development of a communist state. Russia, still an agrarian society barely past feudalism, was not at a stage of development where a true Marxist revolution could take place, so the experiment was on shaky economic footing from the beginning. The doubts that the Frankfurt School had about the outcome of the revolution faded as the brutality of the Stalinist regime became apparent. The Soviet experiment was not the socialism predicted by Marx; it was a dictatorship. This called the practical application of Marx's dreams of socialism into question.

At the same time that a communist revolution was not going as predicted, capitalism also assumed new forms. The emergence of fascism in capitalist states such as Germany and Italy led to a debate about whether such a development was covered by Marx's writings on capitalism. Marcuse theorized that fascism represented a new version of monopoly and was therefore predicted loosely by Marx while Horkheimer and Adorno believed that capitalism under fascism was not predicted in Marx, but was a new development needing theorizing (Held, 1980).

The Culture Industry, Aesthetics & the Impact of Technology

While the Frankfurt school reexamined what Marx said about particular economic systems, they also elevated other social institutions to greater importance in their theories. The greatest change they made to Marx's work was the increased importance they placed on the analysis of culture. Marx saw the economy as a cause and culture as a result; in contrast, critical theorists saw culture as a driving force in society. They were interested in analyzing how cultural products were now made by industry, creating a new commodified mass culture. They investigated how the ideas of capitalism were transmitted through commodities, how cultural products carried ideologies, and how culture supported the capitalist state.

Before arriving at their critique of the process of cultural production, they first wrote about aesthetics. For example, Horkheimer and Löwenthal analyzed literature, Marcuse wrote about art and Adorno analyzed music. Benjamin wrote many works on high culture and aesthetic theory. The approaches taken by the Frankfurt School varied from content analysis to broader structural theory. Unlike traditional Marxists, they argued that art was autonomous, not merely a reactive superstructure resting on an economic base.

The Frankfurt School aimed harsh criticism at modern society's control of the individual through cultural means. Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer were among those that saw in mass culture a new and insidious means of controlling the populace. They analyzed the culture industry and attacked its lack of authenticity and its tendency to soothe through entertainment. The culture industry produced knowledge-or what was taken to be true-for the masses; this stimulated their interested in the sociology of knowledge (Ritzer, 1988).

Adorno and Horkheimer believed that the culture industry prepared people to acquiesce to the demands of capitalist society. Since access to the productive forces that created the products of mass culture meant access to wealth and the means of production, the ideas transmitted by mass culture would be the ideas of the ruling class. Technology exacerbated the tendency previously described by Marx for the ruling ideas of an era to be the ideas of the ruling class. Mass production destroyed the spontaneity of cultural products, which were designed under this system to appeal to the lowest common dominator. Cultural products were produced for profit alone, not for any particular artistic purposes, not for the sake of their content. Variety was effectively killed. Instead of style, the culture industry produced a parody of style. The culture industry was itself dependent on the industries that produced its technology, and became a mouthpiece for the interests of industry. It stimulated needs, but only gave the illusion of fulfilling them; ultimately it taught obedience and frustration (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1972; Bettig, 2002).

Benjamin (who was only peripherally involved with the Frankfurt School, but influential on their ideas) also considered the impact that technology had on art, but took a different approach. Whereas Adorno and Horkheimer analyzed the impact of the industry on creativity, Benjamin questioned the impact of the mechanical reproduction of art on the art forms themselves. Before mechanical reproduction, he argued, art had an aura, a quality of being unique in a time and place. Mechanical reproduction destroyed this aura by democratizing art, making it more available to the masses. Technology also created new forms of art, such as the cinema, which restructured the idea of creativity. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, he pointed out that art and cultural products were now created merely to be units of exchange - they were no longer valued for their "use value" as art. While this process changed art aesthetically — with results about which he was ambivalent-it did bring the ability to create and to reproduce oneself to the masses. He thought this was a positive change, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer's unilateral condemnation of the culture industry.

Totalitarianism, the Personality, & Freudianism

While the theorists of the Frankfurt School often disagreed on their interpretation of Freud, they shared an interest in incorporating his theories into their expansion of Marxist theory. As part of their goal of moving Marxist theory away from an overly deterministic interpretation, they reinvestigated Marx's writings about human nature, and found grounds there to introduce Freud. For example, in Marx's concept of man, Fromm worked to rescue Marx's concept of human nature from what he considered to be an overly economically deterministic interpretation; he shows a Freudian influence in his reading of Marx (1961).

Since the Institute had moved to escape Nazis it is not surprising that many of its theorists spent time analyzing the modern tendency toward totalitarianism. Freud again proved useful. In Escape from freedom, Fromm explored why modern societies, freed from so any of the constraints of the past, so often embrace the excessive control of totalitarianism. Freedom under modern capitalism brought benefits and created new problems, he argued - while it eliminated constraints, it also left humans more isolated, alienated, and fearful. This fear made the control found under totalitarianism seem attractive (1969). By identifying freedom as both a social and a psychological dilemma, Fromm analyzed the reaction to freedom through a lens that was at once Marxist and Freudian.

As a group, the Institute studied the link between personality and prejudice. Adorno wrote a book called The Authoritarian Personality describing the results of these studies (1950). He created scales to measure individuals' levels of ethnocentrism and anti-Semitism, and found these were highly correlated with a fear of difference, love of conformity, submission to authority, and unusually high interest in the sexuality of others. The insecurity and rigid thinking of this personality type made it confront uncertainty with a desire for authoritarian control.

Applications

While the theories of the Frankfurt School were seen as out of date by practitioners of cultural studies, they are still relevant, largely because of their early insistence on connecting studies of culture, technology, and the material base of society (i.e. linking capitalism with the culture industry and the technologies that support and disseminate its ideology) and their questioning of legitimation (Kellner, 2002; Nealon & Irr, 2002).

The late twentieth-century consolidation of media conglomerates made Adorno and Horkheimer's warnings about the coercive impact of the culture industry seem prescient. They did underestimate the extent to which the culture industry would become wealthy and powerful in its own right, seeing it more as a tool of other capitalist industries. Although they have been criticized for what some see as an overly deterministic approach that denies the ability of individuals to resist the culture industry and exercise artistic creativity, the ability of industry to co-opt rebellious movements - punk rock, straight-edge, reggae, extreme sports, and so on - seems to support their viewpoint (Bettig, 2002). Finally, the school is a living thing, with theorists who continue to expand on the initial insights of critical theory, and many sociologists who use the critique of society as a starting point. For example, Habermas's idea of the salon has been adapted into analysis of the internet as public sphere of communication, albeit not always a rational one (Dean, 2001).

Viewpoints

Criticisms of the Frankfurt School

Some critics claimed that the Frankfurt School did not ground its analyses of events in the complex social and historical contexts from which they emerged. Others said that their theories are not practical and have no real-life application (Held, 1980). Another criticism was that in its attempt to correct for the economic determinism of neo-Marxism, the school swung too far in the opposite direction and neglected the economy in its analysis. Traditional Marxists thought the move away from economic determinism weakened the critique of capitalism. Members of the school were also criticized for so obviously enjoying the benefits of a high standard of living while attacking the capitalist system that provided it.

Many criticisms of the school seem to be founded in overstatements of the actual theoretical positions taken by its members. It is interesting to note that the members of the Frankfurt School have also been known for criticizing each other's theories. The initial years under Grunberg were more traditional, while an interdisciplinary cultural bent flourished under Horkheimer and Adorno. Habermas, initially trained at the school, took critical theory in a new direction, believing that the structures and ideologies that support and justify capitalism were weakening, which would cause a crisis of legitimation in the system; Adorno and Horkheimer did not approve of his new focus and arguments (Held, 1980).

Terms & Concepts

Authoritarian Personality: A personality type that scores high on measures of anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, and submission to authority. Scales to measure this were developed by T. Adorno.

Critical Theory: The theory developed by the Frankfurt School, it involved a critique of Marxist theory, especially its economic determinism and neglect of culture.

Culture Industry: Refers to both the capitalist production of mass culture and the products of such production.

Dialectic: The idea that the contradictions in an existing ideology or system will create an antithesis, which will lead to positive change to resolve these tension.

Economic Determinism: A form of analysis that claims that analysis of a society should begin with its economy and material conditions.

Marxist Analysis: Derived from the writings of Karl Marx, Marxist analysis tends toward economic determinism and believes that social change occurs through a dialectical process.

Positivism: A belief that social sciences should use the same type of empirical analysis as the physical sciences, instead of more subjective approaches.

Totalitarianism: Form of government in which the government assumes complete control over all aspects of the lives of its citizens.

Bibliography

Adorno, T., Frenkel-Brunswick, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper & Row.

Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. (1972). Dialectic of enlightenment (J. Cumming, Trans.). New York: Herder and Herder.

Benjamin, W. (1969). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.). New York: Schocken Books.

Berry, D., ed. (2012). Revisiting the Frankfurt School: Essays on culture, media, and theory. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Bettig, R. V. (2002). The Frankfurt School and the political economy of communications. In J. T. Nealon and C. Irr (Eds.) Rethinking the Frankfurt School (pp. 81–94). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Fromm, E. (1961). Marx's concept of man. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.

Fromm, E. (1969). Escape from freedom. New York: Avon Books.

Held, D. (1980). Introduction to critical theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dean, J. (2001). Civil society in the information age. In P. U. Hohendahl & J. Fisher (Eds.), Critical theory (pp. 154–174). New York: Berghahn Books.

Jay, M. (1973). The dialectical imagination. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Kellner, D. (2002). The Frankfurt School and British cultural studies: the missed articulation. In J. T. Nealon and C. Irr (Eds.), Rethinking the Frankfurt School (pp. 31–58). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Nealon, J. T., & Irr, C. (2002). Introduction: Rethinking the Frankfurt School. In J. T. Nealon and C. Irr (Eds.) Rethinking the Frankfurt School (pp. 1–7). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Ritzer, G. (1988). Sociological Theory (2nd ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Suggested Reading

Abromeit, J. (2013). Anti-Semitism and critical social theory: The Frankfurt School in American exile. Theory, Culture & Society, 30, 140–151. Retrieved October 23, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=85169536

Bronner, S. E. (1994). Of critical theory and its theorists. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Dahms, H. F. (2011). The early Frankfurt School critique of capitalism: Critical theory between Pollock's "state capitalism" and the critique of instrumental reason. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 28, 3–44. Retrieved October 23, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=62653918

Rasmussen, D. M. (Ed.). (1996). The handbook of critical theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Wolin, R. (2006). The Frankfurt School revisited. New York: Routledge.