ABSTRACT

By the time the Institute returned to Frankfurt in 1950 the principal ideas of ‘critical theory’ had been clearly set out in a number of major writings, and the ‘Frankfurt School’ began to exert an important influence upon German social thought. Its influence later spread throughout much of Europe-especially after 1956, with the emergence of the ‘New Left’—and also in the United States where many of the Institute’s members (in particular Marcuse) had remained. This was the period of the Frankfurt School’s greatest intellectual and political influence, which reached its peak in the late 1960s with the rapid growth of a radical student movement, though it was Marcuse rather than Horkheimer (who had by then retired to Switzerland) or Adorno (who had become considerably less radical during his exile in North America and in the changed circumstances of postwar Germany) who then appeared as the leading representative of a new form of Marxist critical thought.