Page 26 - Cultural Theory

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••• Cultural Analysis in Marxist Humanism •••

intellectual centre of gravity at the Institute began to shift from Austro-Marxism
to Marxist humanism. The new director, Max Horkheimer, initiated this change
of direction. He recruited Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Franz Neumann to
the Institute, and worked closely with Theodor Adorno, then a member of the
Philosophy Department. Others associated with the Institute in this period included
Leo Löwenthal and Walter Benjamin, both of whom were working on literary theory.
Horkheimer’s ideas were firmly rooted in Austro-Marxism, but his association with
Adorno led him to take a greater interest in cultural issues. Adorno’s principal inter-
ests were in aesthetic theory and the analysis of music, and he had furthered his stud-
ies of musical theory and practice in Vienna, where he studied under Schönberg’s
pupil, Alban Berg. Adorno wrote a number of philosophical pieces while in Vienna,
but on his return to Frankfurt in 1926 he applied himself to completing a habilita-
tion thesis on the irrational and the unconscious in Freud’s Introductory Lectures
(Freud, 1915–17). 10 Influenced by Horkheimer, Adorno began to draw on Marxist
ideas, seeing irrationalism as an ideological expression of bourgeois thought that
took its most extreme form in fascism. His use of Marxism did not impress his exam-
iners, however, and he did not secure an academic position. He began to spend more
time in Berlin, where both he and Horkheimer were members of an intellectual cir-
cle that included Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and many of the artistic avant garde.
The intellectual focus for the circle’s discussions at this time was Lukács’s History and
Class Consciousness, and Ernst Bloch provided a direct link back to Simmel’s discus-
sion group that had stimulated Lukács’s explorations into cultural forms. Adorno
worked with Benjamin on a reconsideration of Kantian ideas, and in 1931, when his
philosophical expertise could no longer be denied, he joined the Philosophy
Department – but not the Institute – at Frankfurt.
A prominent member of the Institute from 1930 to 1939 was Erich Fromm, who
had studied for his doctorate under Alfred Weber in the 1920s and had then moved
into psychoanalysis. Fromm sought to integrate psychoanalysis with Marxism, He
became the leading researcher in the newly established Psychoanalytical Institute at
Frankfurt, where he began work on a number of general psychoanalytic studies (pub-
lished after he left the Institute) and collaborated with the Institute of Social Research
on a study of German workers (Fromm, 1939). Another member in the 1930s,
Herbert Marcuse, used Lukács’s ideas in his aesthetic theory, but he broadened the
base of his philosophy when he became a teaching assistant to Heidegger. He had
also begun to study Hegel, and when Marx’s early manuscripts appeared in the year
before he joined the Institute, Marcuse saw them as providing the key for his own
work (Marcuse, 1941).
Following the Nazi consolidation of power, state control over intellectual life grew,
and many Jewish intellectuals were forced out of the universities and into exile. Karl
Mannheim, Norbert Elias, and Hans Gerth of the Sociology Department left
Frankfurt for Britain and the United States. The Institute of Social Research – its staff
both Jewish and Marxist – was closed down and its property seized. Members of the
Institute moved to Switzerland in 1933 and its intellectual activities were then trans-
ferred to Columbia University in New York and, a little later, to California. It was

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