ABSTRACT
The Frankfurt School story has three different sociopolitical contexts in which the intellectual work of the school underwent changes; in addition, historical events even forced the school to change its geographic setting. The uninitiated or those who would first encounter the Frankfurt heritage through this collection may be slightly taken aback by the references at one time to the Institute for Social Research, and then to the Frankfurt School or Critical Theory. The complaint may seem justified that they should be told what the “Frankfurt School is all about.” Dissatisfied with a “court history” that relied mainly on the account and materials retrospectively given by institute members, Ulrika Migdal published the result of her longstanding and painstaking research of that genesis and philosophy. Today we can no longer speak of negligible impact nor inaccessibility as a major problem since the most important works of the Frankfurt theorists are available in English translation.
