The Frankfurt School

Excerpt from Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction by Anthony Elliott; p.19

One influential contribution to thinking about the societal consequences of advanced capitalism, and especially tracking the contours of the cultural and consumer industries that people must now navigate, is that of the Frankfurt School.  Central to the parameters of Frankfurt School social theory is Theodor Adorno's vision of the 'administered society' and Herbert Marcuse's thesis of 'one-dimensional society' in which individuals suffer from 'surplus-repression'.  The work of Adorno and Marcuse is incorrigibly interdisciplinary (involving certain traditions of classical social theory, and especially Freudian psychoanalysis), purveying a view of society that may be unrecognizable to many contemporary men an women who inhabit the fast-paced, consumer-oriented societies of today.  yet as two of the most important german intellectuals of the twentieth century, their writings--and indeed the work of the Frankfurt School as a whole--are of profound importance for engaging not only with recent world history, but with the impacts of large-scale societal processes upon individuals and their private worlds.

 

The Frankfurt School, as it came to be called, was formed in the decade prior to the Nazi reign of terror in Germany, and not surprisingly many of its leading theorist's conducted numerous studies seeking to grasp the wave of political irrationalism and totalitarianism sweeping Western Europe.  In a daring theoretical move, the School brought Freudian categories to bear upon the sociological analysis of everyday life, in order to fathom the myriad ways that political power imprints itself upon the internal world of human subjects and, more specifically, to critically examine the obscene, meaningless kind of evil that Hitler had actually unleashed.  Of the School's attempts to fathom the psychopathologies of fascism, the writings of Adorno, Marcuse, and Fromm particularly stand out; each of these authors, in quite different ways, drew upon Freudian categories to figure out the core dynamics and pathologies of post-liberal rationality, culture, and politics, and also to trace the sociological deadlocks of modernity itself.  The result was a dramatic underscoring of both the political dimensions of psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic elements of public political life.

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