The Frankfurt School: summary

•         Frankfurt school is not a place

•         It is a school of thought

•         It is a group of similar theories that focus on the same topic

•         The scholars that made up the Frankfurt school were all directly, or indirectly associated with a place called the Institute of Social Research

•         The nickname of the thinkers, originates in the location of the institute, Frankfurt Germany

•         The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx

•         Prominent theorists within this school of thought are: Max Horkheimer,T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm

•         Each of these philosophers believed, and shared Karl Marx’s theory of Historical Materialism

•         Each member of the Frankfurt school adjusted Marxism with his additions, or "fix“.

•         Then, they used the "fixed" Marxist theory as a measure modern society needed to meet

•         These ideas came to be known as "Critical Theory"

Note: Remember Marxist Theory

•         Developed by Karl Marx in the 19th century. 

•         Argues that hierarchical class system is at the root of all social problems and must be ended by a revolution of the workers.

•         Dominant classes directly control the means of production (labor, factories and land), which is called the base of society.

•         Rulling classes also control the culture, which is called the superstructure of society. Therefore, the dominant ideology of a society is the ideology of rulling class.

•         Base: the means of production

•         Superstructure: a society’s culture

•         Ideology: ideas present in a culture that mislead average people and encourage them to act against their own interests

The Neo-Marxist Approach: Frankfurt School

•         The Marxist approach to the media studies developed in parallel with the functionalist approach. It is best characterized by the work of the Frankfurt School founded in 1923.

•         The school was concerned with developing a revolutionary, philosophical variant of Western Marxism, opposed to capitalism in the west and Stalinism in the East, which came to be called critical theory.

•         In 1930s when Hitler came to power, the Institute was forced to leave Germanyfor New York.

•         In 1953 it was re-established in Frankfurt.

•         Adorno and Horkheimer developed a Marxist sociological approach to media studies. They saw the media as a cultural industry that maintained power relations and served to lessen the ‘resistance standards’ of cultural aesthetics by popularizing certain types of culture.

•         They produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination.

•         They generated one of the first ,modes of a critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 and 1995) 

•         Frankfurt school developed a critical and transdisciplinary approach to cultural studies and communications studies, combining political economy, textual analysis, and analysis of social and ideological effects

The contribution of the Frankfurt School

•         Frankfurt school made historical materialism a centerpiece in social theory

•         It forced Marxist ideology to broaden its scope

•         While Marx said, "This is historical materialism, and this is what it does”

•         The Frankfurt School said, "This is historical materialism; this is what’s right with it, this is what’s wrong with it, and this is how it works” 

•         The Frankfurt school also had it’s own effects on philosophy as a whole

•         It affected philosophy by preserving the notion of meta-analysis of society through its economic, political, and social systems

•         It introduced the notion of social philosophy and made theory part of everyday practice by "mixing" philosophical problems, and empirical problems 

See: One Dimensional man / Herbert Marcuse