ABSTRACT
The denomination “Frankfurt School” was not chosen by the members, but has been applied to them by others. The Marxist critique is thus conceived as a negation of economic concepts, above all of the concept of just or equal exchange, which the Frankfurt School regards as the key concept of bourgeois economics, just as exchange is the central principle of the bourgeois economy. In the early 1930s, the position on the natural sciences adopted by the Frankfurt School, and particularly by Max Horkheimer, was much the same as that outlined in Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness. As history unfolds, the essence is more and more revealed. This ideological conception acquired great political importance when the Frankfurt School turned to the analysis of fascism. Apart from culture in general, a crucial element in fascism, according to the Frankfurt School, was the psychology of the individual citizen which made fascist oppression possible, the so-called authoritarian personality.
