The Frankfurt School and its main theorists

Abstract

The text discusses the Frankfurt School and its main theorists. It presents the current as a break with traditional philosophy and as the proposal of a new philosophical order, termed social philosophy, set against a background of sociology, economics and politics and finding its matrix in Max Horkheimer's Critical Theory. It reconstructs the trajectory of the Institute for Social Research, from Grünberg's directorship to Horkheimer's appointment in 1931, when the annex of the University of Frankfurt acquired the features of a school, through exile and the return to Germany in 1950, and situates the group's dialogue with Hegel, Kant, Marx, Freud, Weber and Lukács. It surveys the life and work of figures such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Erich Fromm, lists collaborators of the Institute and its journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, and mentions Jürgen Habermas as a reference later than the founding constellation. It holds that the Frankfurt School designates at once the creation of an institute, a scientific project, a theoretical attitude and a current of thought at once continuous and diverse.