Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School took shape during the 1930s around Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research. Its first generation, among them Max Horkheimer, Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin, reworked Marxism by combining it with ideas from Freud, Max Weber and Nietzsche, and used this “critical theory” to analyse authoritarianism, capitalism and mass culture. Jürgen Habermas became the leading figure of the second generation.

It is less a school than a loose tradition, held together by continuing debate over how its methods and earlier texts should be understood and developed. What its members share is the aim of combining normative argument with empirical social analysis, to criticise society and help transform it.