ABSTRACT
Questions associated with the nature of history and historical existence have been of central importance to the ongoing research project associated with the Frankfurt School or so-called Critical Theory. Distinguishing between three crucial phases of the school’s development – the early “interdisciplinary materialism,” the negative philosophy of history put forward by Horkheimer and Adorno, and Habermas’s discourse-theoretic model – the essay explores a) how the school has analyzed history in order to locate emancipatory potentials and b) how it has theorized the very nature of history (including its possible directionality, what it is to exist historically, and how one obtains historically oriented knowledge). In the early phase, members of the Frankfurt School adopted the basic outline of Marx’s materialist conception of history while, in view of political setbacks among progressive groups in the Weimar Republic and beyond, radicalizing and refining the concept of ideology. Increasingly, the Frankfurt School starts harbouring doubts about the progressive nature of history itself, culminating in Horkheimer and Adorno’s publication of the deeply pessimistic Dialectic of Enlightenment, according to which the very essence of progress harbours regressive elements. According to Habermas, this negative view of history depends upon a misguided conception of reason. Introducing a more differentiated account of reason and rationalization, Habermas argues for a progressive view of history in which learning processes play a decisive role. In tracking the history of the Frankfurt School’s account of history and historicity, the essay historicizes their own views, arguing that they can only be properly understood when taking the historical contexts in which they emerged into account.
