In Defense of the Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School, a group of theorists who grappled with the defeat of Europe's revolutionary left, are often misunderstood. Critics charge them with obscurantism and elitism. They argued that, on the contrary, it was capitalism that obfuscated reality.
Herbert Marcuse, professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. (Getty Images)
Few thinkers have been as consistently misunderstood as the group of anthropologists, economists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers that came to be known as the Frankfurt School. The grouping refers to the first generation of scholars associated with the Institute for Social Research, a private academy established to counter academic conservatism in 1920s Germany.
The institute sought to ask why Karl Marx’s predicted revolution never took place and distinguished itself from other academic analyses of capitalist society through its conviction that both high and low culture were worthy objects of inquiry. This inquiry was, they argued, supplementary to an economic analysis rather than an alternative to it. Their direct experience of fascism, as German Jews exiled from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, informed their thinking, which provided a materialist explanation of the relationship between capitalist exploitation and racial domination.
An Elitist Critique?
It is, however, hard to overcome the apparent aloofness of Frankfurt School thinkers from our times and from popular culture in general. Its famous first generation (which included Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse) hailed from privileged bourgeois industrialist backgrounds and wrote famously convoluted academic treatises. Critics, not without good reason, charged them with obscurantism, cultural elitism, liberalism, anti-activism, and even deep state collusion.
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