Frankfurt School (Critical Theory)
from 1923
Reason that only calculates how to get things becomes a tool of domination, and a culture industry can sell people their own compliance.
- Active
- from 1923
- Where
- Frankfurt, then New York, then Frankfurt again
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
Instrumental reason — reason concerned only with efficient means — cannot evaluate ends, and a society organised entirely around it produces domination while calling it progress.
What it held
The Institute for Social Research was founded to explain why the revolution had not happened. The answer it developed is that domination had become subtler: not only economic but cultural and psychological, working through what people take for granted and even enjoy.
The culture industry argument is the most famous and the most misread. Adorno and Horkheimer are not complaining that popular music is bad art. Their claim is structural: entertainment produced industrially teaches the pleasure of getting what you already expected, and trains people for a life in which nothing genuinely new is demanded of them.
The Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in California during the war, argues something harder — that Enlightenment reason contains its own reversal. Reason liberating people from myth becomes a new myth, and the domination of nature becomes the domination of people, because the same instrumental attitude is applied.
Benjamin belongs at the edge and is the most original of them. Habermas, in the second generation, refused the pessimism and argued that reason has a communicative form as well as an instrumental one, and that this is where a normative standard can be found.
How it argued
Immanent critique — holding a society to the standards it professes — combined with empirical social research, psychoanalysis and cultural criticism.
What it was arguing against
Orthodox Marxism's economic determinism, positivism's separation of fact from value, and the assumption that technological progress is progress.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the critique leaves any ground to stand on. Habermas thought not and rebuilt the foundations; Adorno regarded the demand for foundations as itself suspect.
Common misconceptions
That critical theory is cultural elitism. Adorno wrote extensively on jazz and film because he took mass culture seriously as a social force, and his objection is to its form of production rather than to its audience.
How it began
A grain merchant's son endowed an institute in 1923. Ten years later its members were mostly Jewish Marxists in Nazi Germany, and it moved to Columbia University.
What became of it
Living, into a third generation, and the source of most of what is now called critical theory in the humanities.
Lasting influence
Cultural studies, media theory, and the analysis of ideology across the humanities. Habermas on the public sphere has shaped political theory and law.
Why it still matters
The argument that entertainment can be a mechanism of consent is more testable now than when it was made, and the questions it raises about algorithmic media are close to unavoidable.
Put another way
A machine that runs beautifully and cannot say what it is for.
Where to start
Benjamin's essay. Short, extraordinary, and it shows the method without the pessimism.
The surprising bit
Adorno and Horkheimer wrote their bleakest book on the failure of Enlightenment while living in Los Angeles, a few streets from Thomas Mann and Schoenberg, in a colony of German exiles by the Pacific.
In their own words
Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear.
There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Connections
- Answers
- Classical Marxism, Hegelianism, Nietzscheanism
- Opposed by
- Vienna Circle, Classical Marxism
The verdict
The most searching critique of modern society produced from inside it, by people who had just watched it fail.