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Contemporary Cultural Theory

stressed the School’s and Marx’s indebtedness to the entire
critical tradition in German idealist philosophy—especially Kant
and Hegel—and to ‘philosophy as such’ (p. 245). We might add
that they also owed much to Weber, the ‘founding father’ of
German sociology, and to Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.
It is to these three key precursors—Marx, Weber and Freud—that
we turn initially. Thereafter, we will proceed to accounts both of
the Frankfurt School itself and of the wider ‘critical’ tradition
inspired by these selfsame sources.

MARX, WEBER AND FREUD

Karl Marx (1818–83) was the co-founder, with Frederick Engels
(1820–95), of what they termed ‘historical materialism’, but has
since come to be known as ‘Marxism’. A committed socialist
excluded by political repression from the academic career to
which he had originally aspired, Marx sought to fashion a self-
consciously progressive social theory that would be of political
value to the infant labour movement. His own academic training
in Hegelian philosophy profoundly affected the shape of this
theory. What emerged was a synthesis between German
Hegelianism and British utilitarian political economy, in which
a culturalist antithesis between culture and civilisation was
combined with a utilitarian sense of the power of material
interest, and incorporated into an overall Hegelian understand-
ing of history as process. Marx’s use of the culture/civilisation
trope is at its most apparent in the theory of ‘alienation’ outlined
in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. These Manu-
scripts were organised around a conceptual dichotomy between
actually existing alienated labour, where labour power is trans-
formed into a commodity and the worker reduced to a mere
thing, and the ideal of a non-alienated labour represented in the
notion of ‘species-being’ (Marx, 1975, pp. 327–30). By the latter
Marx meant simply the humanness of humanity, constituted in
his view by our capacity for conscious, collective, creative produc-
tion (p. 328). Insofar as it was present in reality, unalienated labour
was best exemplified by art and intellectual culture: ‘Animals

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