In an era when the promises of modernity seem increasingly exhausted, when technological progress collides with deepening inequality and political disillusionment, the thought of the Frankfurt School retains a haunting resonance. Emerging from the debris of the First World War and the failed revolutions of Europe, this remarkable constellation of thinkers—Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, and later Habermas and Honneth—dared to ask not merely why emancipation had faltered, but whether reason itself had betrayed its liberating promise.
At its core, the Frankfurt School represents a bold, unsparing attempt to think against the current. It offers neither a blueprint for utopia nor an easy moralism, but rather a set of intellectual tools: a commitment to radical critique, a refusal to accept the world "as it is," and a relentless effort to uncover the hidden mechanisms of domination beneath the surface of everyday life. Their Critical Theory is not a theory of critique, but critique as theory — a ceaseless interrogation of reason, culture, power, and the human condition.
This course invites you into a conversation with these thinkers at their most urgent and most challenging. It does not seek to canonize them or to present a nostalgic portrait of a "golden age" of thought. Rather, we will grapple with their tensions, contradictions, and unfinished projects — the debates over instrumental reason and mass culture, the analysis of fascism and authoritarianism, the utopian hopes glimpsed in art and memory, the contested inheritance of Marx, Freud, and German idealism.
Course Outline
We begin with the foundations: the historical moment of the Frankfurt School’s emergence, its break with orthodox Marxism, and its initial faith in a critical alliance between philosophy and the social sciences. We then engage deeply with their central concepts—reason, history, culture, repression—and their profound diagnosis of the "administered world" of late capitalism. A third section explores transformations and internal critiques, especially through the work of Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas. Finally, we turn our gaze to the present: how might Critical Theory confront the crises of neoliberal globalization, the climate emergency, and the resurgence of populist authoritarianism?
Throughout, the spirit of the course is not one of passive learning but of active thinking. Each session will invite you to view familiar institutions—media, education, democracy, even reason itself—through the critical lens the Frankfurt School sharpened. The questions they posed remain ours: How can freedom survive in societies that instrumentalize everything, even thought? What resources for resistance and hope can still be found in culture, in memory, in fractured moments of non-identity? Can enlightenment be rescued from itself—or has it irrevocably collapsed into domination?
Following the Legacy of the Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School never intended to be a dogma; it remains, in Adorno's phrase, a "melancholy science"—and perhaps also a stubborn, unfinished wager on the possibility that thinking might yet be an act of freedom.
Welcome to the conversation.
Origins of the Frankfurt School: Thought Amid Ruins
Key Figures in the Early Frankfurt School
Enlightenment, Marxism, and the Question of Praxis
Western Marxism, the Failure of Revolution, and the Critique of Ideology
Gramsci, Lukács, and Early Influences
Horkheimer's Shift from Traditional to Critical Theory
Adorno and Horkheimer on the Dialectic of Reason and Myth
Adorno and Horkheimer on Instrumental Rationality and Domination
Frankfurt School's Critique of the Culture Industry and Commodified Culture
Authoritarian Personality and the Psychological Roots of Mass Submission
Walter Benjamin on Messianism and the Philosophy of History
Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetic Dimension of Politics
Adorno on Nonidentity, Suffering, and the Refusal of Reconciliation
Adorno, the Culture Industry and Art as Resistance
Herbert Marcuse: The One-Dimensional Man, Domination, and the Politics of Refusal
Habermas on Communicative Rationality vs. Instrumental Reason
