ABSTRACT
The term ‘Frankfurt School’ came into use in West Germany to refer to the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and their associates at the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923 and re-established in Frankfurt in 1951. Before returning to settle in Frankfurt, Adorno and Horkheimer had already written a good deal in the 1940s on the European tragedy. Adorno was otherwise relatively uninterested in neomarxism, and even less sympathetic to post-Freudian revisionism. Habermas, whose doctoral dissertation was on Schelling, wrote a habilitation thesis, published in 1962, which linked the historical development of the public sphere in western Europe and current concerns about the state of post-war democracy. Habermas and other thinkers in the critical theory tradition have been prominent in analyzing contemporary Europe.
