4 - The Frankfurt School

Summary

Although strongly influenced by Lukacs's critique of commodity reification and advocacy of the principle of totality, and highly sympathetic to the rediscovery of the radical humanism of the young Marx, the historical materialism of the “Frankfurt School” developed along entirely different lines to Hegelian Marxism. The research programme led by figures such as Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor Adorno (1903–69), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) and Erich Fromm (1900–80) is called the Frankfurt School because it originated at the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University in the 1920s and 1930s. The first Marxist research institute to be attached to a university department outside the Soviet Union, the Institute for Social Research was eventually relocated to New York in 1934 because of the Nazi dictatorship. Its leading members understood Lukács's breakthrough to mandate an interdisciplinary research programme that employed a materialist version of the dialectical method. Their aim was to integrate specialized inquiry into political economy, culture and ideology, psychology, and philosophy into an open-ended and ongoing intellectual totalization, in order to update historical materialism. Sharply critical, however, of Lukács's proletarian “identical subject-object of history” and his reduction of materialist knowledge to an action programme for revolutionary politics, the major thinkers of the Frankfurt School sought to pose fundamental questions about revolutionary experiences and contemporary capitalism without making historical materialism into a left-wing Hegelianism.