Frankfurt School

The members of the Institute of Social Research, set up at Frankfurt University, Germany, in 1923 as the first Marxist research centre. With the rise of Hitler, many of its members went to the USA and set up the institute at Columbia University, New York. In 1969 the institute was dissolved.

In the 1930s, under its second director Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), a group that included Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and T W Adorno attempted to update Marxism and create a coherent and viable social theory. Drawing on a variety of disciplines as well as the writings of Marx and Freud, they produced works such as Authority and the Family 1936 and developed a Marxist perspective known as critical theory. After World War II the institute returned to Frankfurt, although Marcuse and some others remained in the USA. The German and US branches diverged in the 1950s, and the institute was dissolved after Adorno's death, although Jürgen Habermas and others have since attempted to revive its theory and research programme.