The Historical Moment of the Frankfurt School: Crisis and Disillusionment
The Frankfurt School was not born in a lecture hall or a political party, but in a moment of profound historical disillusionment. In the aftermath of the First World War, Europe found itself staring into the abyss: liberalism seemed exhausted, socialism betrayed, and reason itself implicated in new forms of domination. Amid the ruins of this broken century, a group of thinkers in Germany sought not merely to repair the old certainties, but to reimagine the very foundations of critique.
The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt, became the institutional cradle of what would later be called the Frankfurt School. Its early vision, shaped by Felix Weil, Friedrich Pollock, and Max Horkheimer, was to create a new kind of intellectual space: independent from political parties, unconstrained by academic orthodoxies, and animated by an interdisciplinary spirit. Here, Marxism would be freed from dogma and revitalized through dialogue with philosophy, sociology, economics, and psychoanalysis.
A New Kind of Critical Theory
The Revolution of 1918–19 had failed; the working class had not risen as the prophets had predicted. Weimar Germany, fragile and embattled, exposed the limits of traditional Marxist categories. In response, early members like Carl Grünberg and later Horkheimer recognized that capitalism’s survival was not merely an economic fact, but a cultural, psychological, and political achievement. If society had grown immune to the call of revolution, then critical theory had to penetrate deeper: into the structures of authority, the machinery of mass culture, the very formation of subjectivity.
From the outset, the Frankfurt School distinguished itself by a peculiar stance toward theory and practice. Unlike traditional Marxist movements that insisted on immediate revolutionary action, the Institute pursued an immanent critique of society—one that refused to separate knowledge from self-reflection, but also resisted easy slogans. This created a persistent tension: how to remain faithful to the spirit of emancipation without succumbing to naïve voluntarism or cynical resignation.
Exile and the Deepening of Critique
The rise of Nazism in 1933 forced the Institute into exile, first to Geneva and then to New York, where it affiliated with Columbia University. It was during these years of displacement that the School’s most enduring works were born: Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, and Fromm’s analyses of authoritarianism. Exile intensified their questions. How had modern civilization, armed with science and reason, descended into barbarism? How could culture, once the bearer of autonomy and hope, become a tool of domination?
The trauma of exile, the confrontation with fascism, and the recognition of mass culture’s ability to pacify dissent sharpened their critical edge. Their work revealed that the Enlightenment's dream of progress had become entangled with new forms of myth, authority, and irrationality.
The Birth of a Historical Critique of Reason
The founding paradox of the Frankfurt School thus became clear: modernity, which had promised liberation through reason and progress, had turned into new forms of domination. The task of Critical Theory was not to abandon the ideals of the Enlightenment, but to subject them to a relentless, dialectical self-critique. It would trace the pathologies of reason while preserving the fragile hope that reason might yet be redeemed.
In this sense, the Frankfurt School remains deeply historical—not merely because it arose from a specific moment of crisis, but because it teaches us that theory itself must be historical. There are no eternal categories, no final triumphs. Critique must move with history, and thinking must learn from its own failures. As Max Horkheimer once put it, "The longing for the wholly other is the only promise left to thought."
A Legacy of Thought Against the Current
The origins of the Frankfurt School are therefore not merely an episode in intellectual history. They are a provocation—a reminder that thought worthy of the name must emerge not from certainties, but from the wreckage of certainties. It must remain, stubbornly and courageously, an act of resistance.
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