ABSTRACT
The claim that the Dialectical Imagination is a history of the Frankfurt School and of the Institute for Social Research from 1923 to 1950 is, however, ill-founded. The introductory chapter deals with the first phase of the institute’s history so briefly and superficially as to amount to no more than a background sketch which sets the scene for the second phase. The history of the original institute remains to be written. The Dialectical Imagination falls short of being a work of history inasmuch as it fails to exhibit the connections among the phenomena it deals with which alone constitute the dynamics of the development it recounts. It exhibits neither the dynamics of the historical evolution of the world with which the institute was concerned nor the dynamics of the intellectual venture in which it was engaged.
