Frankfurt School
Also known as The Frankfurt School
school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory
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The Frankfurt School was a group of neo-Marxist thinkers who developed interdisciplinary approaches to analyzing society, culture, and power across the 20th century. It matters because their ideas significantly influenced how scholars across many fields—including sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies—examine and critique modern society.
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The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical theory. It is associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded on February 3, 1923, at the University of Frankfurt am Main (today known as Goethe University Frankfurt). Formed during the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was composed of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the socio-economic systems of the 1930s: namely, capitalism, fascism, and communism. Significant figures associated with the school include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas.
The Frankfurt theorists proposed that existing social theory was unable to explain the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics, such as Nazism, in 20th-century liberal capitalist societies. Also critical of Marxism–Leninism as a philosophically inflexible system of social organization, the School's critical-theory research sought alternative paths to social development.