The Frankfurt School was an institute founded in 1923 in Germany by Marxist intellectuals to develop Marxist theory independently of political parties. It became influential in developing critical theory. In 1933, the Nazis forced it to close and relocate to Columbia University in the US. Key members included Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, and Marcuse. The school is known for developing critical analyses of culture, ideology, authoritarianism and advancing emancipatory social science.

2.  “Frankfurt School”, or Institute for Social Research,
set up by a group of Marxist intellectuals in
Germany in 1923, affiliated to the University of
Frankfurt and independently of the Communist
Party, which has been influential in the
development of Marxist theory.
 The founding of the Institute marked the beginning
of a current of “Marxism” divorced from the
organized working class and Communist Parties,
which over the decades merged with bourgeois
ideology.
 In 1933, Nazis forced it to close and move to the
US, where it found hospitality at Columbia
University.

3. Max Horkheimer
Friedrick Pollock
Theodor Adorno
Erich Fromm
Herbert Marcuse
Franz Neuman
Leo Lowenthal
Henryk Grossman
Arkadij Gurlarland
Walter Benjamin

4. Jürgen Habermas

5. Axel Honneth

6. Action orientation and critique of society
Platform to change society for the better
Uses psychoanalysis
Subjectivity

7.  They refuse the point “Knowledge would be simply a mirror of
the reality”.
 “The facts which our sense present to us are socially
preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the
object perceived and through the historical character of the
perceiving organ” – Horkheimer
 Critical Theory characterizes itself as a method which does not
“fetishize” knowledge, considering it rather functional to
ideology critique and social emancipation. In the light of such
finalities, knowledge becomes social criticism, and the latter
translates itself into social action, that is, into the
transformation of reality.
 It was directed against dogmatic, reductionist and economistic
forms of Marxism

8.  The school has developed an account of the
"culture industry" to call attention to the
industrialization and commercialization of
culture under capitalist relations of
production.
 During the 1930s, the Frankfurt school
developed a critical approach to cultural and
communications studies, combining political
economy, textual analysis, and analysis of
social and ideological effects.
 They coined the term "culture industry" to
signify the process of the industrialization of
mass-produced culture and the commercial
imperatives that drove the system.

9.  Marxism sought to understand Capitalism mainly in
terms of its tendency towards structural
or objective crisis, the tendency of the rate of profit
to fall, the contradiction between the forces and
relations of production, etc.
 The Frankfurt School comes into its own as by
placing greater emphasis on forms of subjective
crisis generated by capitalist social relations, the
rise of authoritarian personality structures, a crisis
of memory, experience and, ultimately, agency. It
sought to understand such a subjective crisis in
psychoanalytical terms.

10. To bring emancipation from ideological
blinders
To bring awareness to the conditions of our
own knowledge of the world
The social world can be understood as a
social world. The social world lacks the
"given" character of the natural world and
must be seen as our construction.
The guiding concern of Frankfurt School is
with emancipation through reflective social
science, focused on the experience of the
working class in particular.

11.  Stand in the center of leisure activity;
 Are important agents of socialization;
 Are mediators of political reality;
 Should be seen as major institutions of
contemporary societies with a variety of
economic, political, cultural and social effects.
 an instrument for control and domination

12.  Cultural industries are a form of the integration of
the working class into capitalist societies.
 Culture industries and consumer society are
stabilizing contemporary capitalism and accordingly
sought new strategies for political change, agencies
of political transformation, and models for political
emancipation that could serve as norms of social
critique and goals for political struggle
 The system of cultural production dominated by
film, radio broadcasting, newspapers, and
magazines, was controlled by advertising and
commercial imperatives, and served to create
subservience to the system of consumer capitalism.

13.  Major force of production
 Formative mode of social organization and
control
 Entire "mode of organizing and perpetuating
social relationships
 Manifestation of prevalent thought and
behavior patterns
 Instrument for control and domination

14. Habermas looked to the ideal of free
interpersonal interaction as it was found in
ordinary life and, specifically, in linguistic
communication, to serve as the key source
of emancipatory impulses.

15.  Typical themes:
 A conception of history and society based on
the struggle for recognition by social groups
 A contextualization of normative foundations
in the deep structures of subjective
experience
 Greater attention to the "Other of reason"

16.  An early criticism, argues that Frankfurt School critical
theory is nothing more than a form of "bourgeois
idealism" devoid of any actual relation to political
practice, and is hence totally isolated from the reality of
any ongoing revolutionary movement.
 Philosopher Karl Popper equally believed that the
school did not live up to Marx's promise of a better
future:
- “Marx's own condemnation of our society makes
sense. For Marx's theory contains the promise of a
better future. But the theory becomes vacuous and
irresponsible if this promise is withdrawn, as it is by
Adorno and Horkheimer

17. Thank you for
attention! 