ABSTRACT
This anthology provides the reader with an overview, as well as samplings, of the contributions that the Frankfurt School made to the study and critique of religion. The Frankfurt School was not the original name of the school, nor was it a school per se. Rather, this intellectual institution and school of thought began in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and was affiliated with the Goethe University in the city of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The director of the Institute was also to be appointed to the university faculty. During the early 1920s, the Institute for Social Research was affiliated with the MarxEngels Institute in Moscow, and contributed to the publication of the up to then unknown Marx manuscripts. With the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933, the Institute went into exile, first in Switzerland, where an affiliated office had been established, and then in 1934 to New York. During World War II, the Institute set up offices in a building next to Columbia University, where it proceeded to engage in empirical research on “prejudice” and “anti-Semitism.” In 1951 the Institute for Social Research returned to Frankfurt. Fredrick Pollack, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno returned to conduct research under the auspices of the Institute, to teach at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and to have a very active public intellectual life in Germany, while most of the other members remained in the United States, notably Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer. These are the most elemental historical facts, but they hardly begin to tell us anything about the profound and epochal mark that the Institute for Social Research has left on the intellectual landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.1 In this introduc-
tion I will give a general characterization of what the Institute accomplished intellectually and of what it contributed specifically to the study of religion.
