Page 105 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

FRANKFURT SCHOOL

See also: Code, Metaphor, Text/textualanalysis

Further reading: Atkinson (1984); Bennett (1979); Leech (1966)

FRANKFURT SCHOOL

The principal members of the Frankfurt School encompassed
philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, economics, psychology and
political science in their expertise. Max Horkheimer, Theodore W.
Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert
Marcuse, Franz Neumann and Friedrich Pollock are considered to be
the major contributors, with Ju ¨rgen Habermas identified as the
School’s leading second-generation thinker.
The Institute of Social Research was established in Frankfurt in
1923. The historical importance of this time set the scene for the
theoretical direction that the Institute (labelled the Frankfurt School in
the 1960s) would take. Lenin was to die a year after the group’s
formation, signifying the advent of Stalinism in Russia and what was
to become a centralist and tyrannical turn in the Russian Revolution.
The Social Democratic Party in Germany, whilst maintaining Marxist
rhetoric, pitted itself against more revolutionary socialist groups. By
1930, the deterministic Marxist belief that socialism was an inevitable
progression from capitalism appeared less certain as fascism swept
through Germany, Italy and Spain. As Held writes, the rise of Hitler
signified ‘the end of an era and, for all those committed to the struggle
against capitalism, a desperate irony’ (Held, 1980: 19).
‘Critical theory’, the umbrella title for the Frankfurt School’s
contribution to cultural studies, emerged out of the theoretical
tradition of Marxism and the critical philosophy of Kant. Although
critical theory does not present a singular theory or worldview, the
school was united in its position that fascism was the result of a crisis in
capitalism. This departure from Marxism lay in the belief that
capitalism had developed strategies for avoiding crisis and the
possibility of demise through proletariat revolution. The working
class, which was to serve as the agents of revolution for Marx, was seen
by the critical theorists to be caught up in what they saw as capitalism’s
tendency towards conformity. Technology, mass production techni-
ques, the commodification of artwork and new class configurations
were limiting the opportunities for a disruption of the existing social
order. The culture industries – or ‘distraction factories’ as Kracauer
called them – were central to the massification of ideas and the

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