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Frankfurt School
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 The
Frankfurt School : Its History, Theories, and Political Significance
by Rolf Wiggerhaus, Michael Robertson (Translator)
From The
Boston Book Review, David Weininger gives the following description
of the Franfurt School:
In the early part of this century, a loose aggregation of
intellectuals known as the "Frankfurt School" produced a body
of work which was haunted by exactly such issues. Most of its names have
by now become familiar to the academic community: Theodor W. Adorno, Max
Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm. While they
engaged a dazzlingly diverse group of intellectual disciplines and
theoretical approaches, the guiding thread of all of their analyses was
the diagnosis of the ruined, pathological world of the early 20th
century. Under the triumphant twin shadows of full-blown industrial
capitalism and National Socialism, the Frankfurt School asked two
familiar questions: How did we get here? and Where does salvation lie?
What was so tremendously original about their collective responses was
that the answers lay not in political activism or in a revolutionary
labor movement, but in such abstruse phenomena as avant-garde art,
psychoanalysis, dialectical philosophy, and a messianic religious faith.
Their studies-which go under the general name of "Critical
Theory"-were among the first which can be properly labeled
interdisciplinary, encompassing insights from so many different areas.
By the time of their mature works-most notably Horkheimer and Adorno's
Dialectic of Enlightenment-the members of the Frankfurt School no longer
referred to their work as philosophy, sociology, aesthetics or
psychology; it was, simply, "Theory."
About Wiggerhaus' book:
"Rolf Wiggershaus's monumental study of the Frankfurt School
provides the best overall view of its entire trajectory.... [The book]
is an absolute must for anyone interested in contemporary social theory
and politics." -- Douglas Kellner "Compulsory reading for
anyone wanting to study or write about the Frankfurt School." -- Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung
This is the definitive study of the history and accomplishments of
the Frankfurt School. It offers elegantly written portraits of the major
figures in the school's history as well as overviews of the various
positions and directions they developed from the founding years just
after World War I until the death of Theodor Adorno in 1969. The book is
based on documentary and biographical materials that have only recently
become available. As the narrative follows the Institute for Social
Research from Frankfurt am Main to Geneva, New York, and Los Angeles,
and then back to Frankfurt, Wiggershaus continually ties the evolution
of the school to the changing intellectual and political contexts in
which it operated. He also interweaves these accounts with incisive
summaries of substantive works by Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm,
Kirchheimer, Lowenthal, Marcuse, Neumann, Pollock, and Habermas. The
book is self-contained and can serve as a general introduction to
critical theory, but it also has a wealth of new material to offer those
who are familiar with this tradition but would like to learn more about
its history and context. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.
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 The
Dialectical Imagination : A History of the Frankfurt School and
the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950
(Weimar and Now ; 10) by
Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer,
Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal.
The impact of the
Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural
thought of the twentieth century has been profound. The
Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental
cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in
Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a
substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects
on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School.
"An important book, full of new material
and measured in its judgments, which will do a great deal, not
only to make possible the assimilation of the work of the
Frankfurt School by the intellectual public but also to clarify
the issues to which their work gives rise." -- Fredric
Jameson, author of Marxism
and Form
Martin Jay is Professor of History, University
of California, Berkeley. Among his books are Downcast
Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought and, as co-editor, The
Weimar Sourcebook, both published by the University of
California Press.
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Crasis.com
aims to combine the best textual and visual resources with the best online
resources in Critical Theory, Cultural Theory, Literary Theory, Feminist
Theory, Ecocriticism, Post-Feminist Theory, Gender Theory, Music Theory,
Queer Theory, Postmodernism, and related subjects.
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Excerpt:
The Frankfurt School was an academic community composed of, among
others: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter
Benjamin. While they engaged a dazzlingly diverse group of
intellectual disciplines and theoretical approaches, the guiding thread
of all of their analyses was the diagnosis of the ruined, pathological
world of the early 20th century. Under the shadows of full-blown
industrial capitalism and National Socialism, the Frankfurt School asked
two familiar questions: How did we get here? and Where does salvation
lie? What was so tremendously original about their collective responses
was that the answers lay not in political activism or in a revolutionary
labor movement, but in such abstruse phenomena as avant-garde art,
psychoanalysis, dialectical philosophy, and a messianic religious faith.
Their studies-which go under the general name of "Critical
Theory"-were among the first which can be properly labeled
interdisciplinary, encompassing insights from so many different areas.
By the time of their mature works-most notably Horkheimer and Adorno's
Dialectic of Enlightenment-the members of the Frankfurt School no longer
referred to their work as philosophy, sociology, aesthetics or
psychology; it was, simply, "Theory"...
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Excerpt:
Picture if you will a smoke filled room in a 19th century Men’s
only club. The room is the site of an extended conversation. There is a
primary conversation where a group of very old men present the questions
and set the tone of the discussions. Everyone in the room is in some
manner reacting to the old men’s ideas. The truly profound,
innovative, or outlandish assert their own observations, and attempt to
enter into dialogue with the old men. People come in and out of the
room. Some gather around their favorite speaker, and some are drawn to
particular groups because of shared interest in a particular subject.
The room is the whole of Western philosophy. The old men are
classical philosophers such as Socrates and Plato. The profound,
innovative and outlandish, are the more modern thinkers such as Hegel
and Marx.
Finally, the members of the Frankfurt school fit the category of those
gathered ‘round their favorite speaker. The Frankfurt school is not a
place, but a school of thought, a group of similar theories that focus
on the same topic. The thought of the Frankfurt school is a dialogue,
that resulted after Karl Marx added his proverbial "two cents"
to the ongoing conversation of philosophy.
Site Includes:
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Essay by Douglas Kellner
Excerpt:
Erich Fromm is one of the few members of the Frankfurt School who
seriously engaged himself with theorizing the problems of gender and the
differences between men and women. In certain ways, Fromm anticipated
later attempts to produce a feminist Marxism and poststructuralist
analyses of the socially constructed nature of gender. Yet Fromm's
gender analysis was highly uneven and even contradictory, pointing to
the difficulties in the subject matter and perhaps the difficulty in
overcoming dominant male perspectives in analyzing the highly charged
and conflicted issues of gender and sexuality. In this paper, I shall
accordingly sort out the various analyses of gender in Fromm's work and
shall point to both his anticipations of contemporary feminist
perspectives and the moments of sexism and essentialism in his texts...
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