ABSTRACT
The ceremony that opened the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, on 22 June 1924 marked the official beginning of Frankfurt School critical theory (although it should be understood that the term ‘critical theory’ now refers to a very broad worldview in the study of International Relations (IR)). The principal members of the School have included the founders of the Institute – Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) – Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), the major ‘New Left’ theorist of the 1960s; Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929), the foremost critical theorist of recent times; and Axel Honneth (b. 1949). Their writings have developed an approach to society that is faithful to the spirit but not to the letter of Marxism. Marx and Engels used the ‘paradigm of production’ to analyze particular social systems and to comprehend human history. This paradigm maintained that the forces of production (technology) and the relations of production (class relations) provide the key to understanding political systems and historical change. In particular, class conflict was thought to have been the greatest influence on how societies have developed. Marx and Engels argued that the struggle between the bourgeoisie (the class that owns
the means of production) and the proletariat (the class that has to sell its labor-power in order to survive) is the central dynamic of capitalist societies. They believed that class conflict would destroy capitalism and lead to a socialist system in which the forces of production would be used to benefit the whole of society rather than to maximize profit for the bourgeoisie. They also had a vision of global political progress in which the whole of humanity would come to be freely associated in a socialist world order. Crucially, Marx and Engels thought the purpose of social inquiry was to promote the emancipation of the exploited proletariat and other oppressed groups. This commitment to emancipatory social science is also defended by the Frankfurt School. Its members have sought to preserve this conception of social inquiry while breaking with the fatal limitations of the paradigm of production. It was plain to Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1930s that the stress on the centrality of production and class conflict could not explain violent nationalism in the Fascist societies, the rise of totalitarian states and the outbreak of total war. Their writings displayed increasing pessimism about the prospects for emancipation. To them, the promise of emancipation that had united the members of the Enlightenment (such as Kant) with their successors (such as Marx and Engels) seemed impossible to realize in the modern era in which society is increasingly dominated by pressures to administer the social world more efficiently and more economically.
