c06.
qxd 3/19/09 8:56 AM Page 1253
International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, ed. Immanuel Ness, Blackwell Publishing, 2009, pp. 1253–1257
Frankfurt School
(Jewish émigrés)
Christina Gerhardt
The Institute of Social Research – more com-
monly known as the Frankfurt School (a term
that was first applied in the 1960s) and, in
Germany, as Kritische Theorie (critical theory) –
was founded in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923.
It sought to bring together a wide variety
of disciplines – spanning sociology and philo-
sophy, psychology and history, economics and
aesthetics, and literary and music criticism –
within a critical Marxist framework. The most
central and best-known members of the Frank-
furt School’s first generation included Theodor
W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer,
Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and Friedrich
Pollock.
Loosely affiliated with the University of
Frankfurt, which had itself been established
relatively recently in 1914, the institute was
founded with private funding by Felix J. Weil,
whose father had amassed a fortune as a grain
merchant. Together with Kurt Albert Gerlach
and Pollock, Weil drew up the plans for the
institute. All three were committed to formulat-
ing a critical approach to society and culture
that linked these disciplines to a Marxist analysis.
In fact, they had initially intended to name the
new research center the Institute for Marxism.
All three were conversant with Marxism and
shared a commitment to many of its principles:
earlier in 1923, Weil had organized the First
Marxist Work Week, which had inspired the
Frankfurt School (Jewish émigrés) 1253
idea of establishing the institute; Gerlach had
previously been a professor of economy at
the Technische Hochschule in Aachen; and
Pollock had written his dissertation on Marx’s
labor theory of value.
Gerlach was to serve as the first director of
the institute, but after his sudden death in 1922,
Pollock served briefly as interim director until
Carl Grünberg assumed the permanent position
from 1922 until 1928, when he stepped down for
medical reasons. Pollock again served as interim
director until Horkheimer assumed directorship
of the institute in 1930.
Although not typically remembered for its
Weimar years, the early Frankfurt School had
vital ties to political and social movements.
The early institute dedicated itself primarily
to studying the history of European workers’
movements outside the context of political parties,
be it the Communist Party (KPD), which was
going through upheavals and transitions after
the October Revolution, or the Socialist Party
(SPD), which was going through various trans-
itions subsequent to the Spartacus Uprising
and the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg. In addition, when Grünberg took
over as director, he brought to the institute
his work on labor movements in the form of a
journal he had begun editing in 1910. Entitled
the Archive for the History of Socialism and the
Workers’ Movement, but commonly known as the
Grünberg Archiv, the journal sought to assemble
a history of the labor movement. Lastly, the
early institute helped to forward copies of the
unpublished manuscripts of Marx and Engels to
the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow for inclu-
sion in their collected works, the famous MEGA
(Marx-Engels Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe).
While several of its early members – Wittfogel,
Borkenau, and Gumperz – were involved with
the Communist Party, the institute was officially
unaligned with any political party, which its
relationship with the University of Frankfurt
would not have allowed. Instead, it drew on
a Marxist framework and contributed to the
history of labor without an explicit political
affiliation.
Undoubtedly, this separation of Marxist ana-
lysis from party allegiances was both beneficial
and detrimental. It allowed for an analysis that
did not have to adhere to positions dictated by
the party line. Yet it also resulted in critiques
of the Frankfurt School as disconnected from
c06.qxd 3/19/09 8:56 AM Page 1254
International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, ed. Immanuel Ness, Blackwell Publishing, 2009, pp. 1253–1257
1254 Frankfurt School (Jewish émigrés)
concrete political struggles and organizing efforts.
These critiques were to reappear during the late
1960s student movement.
The institute’s focus and approach shifted
somewhat when Horkheimer became director
in 1930. It moved away from a concentration on
the history of the European workers’ movement,
which Grünberg had underscored, to a broader
exploration of Marxist analysis. Horkheimer
sought to develop a critical theory of contem-
porary society, bringing a Marxist framework
together with an array of disciplines including,
naming only a few, psychoanalysis through the
work of Fromm and Marcuse, literature and
music through the studies of Lowenthal and
Adorno, philosophy and sociology. Horkheimer’s
methodology was laid out in his inaugural address,
“The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and
the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research.”
In it, he argued for an analysis “of the connec-
tion between the economic life of society, the
psychical development of individuals, and the
changes in the realm of culture in the narrower
sense (to which belong not only the so-called
intellectual elements, such as science, art, and
religion, but also law, customs, fashion, public
opinion, sports, leisure activities, lifestyle, etc.).”
In March 1933 the Nazis closed the institute
for “tendencies hostile to the state” and weeks
later revoked Horkheimer’s venia legendi, his
right to teach in Germany. The institute relocated
first to Geneva and in May 1934 Horkheimer
secured offices for the institute in New York
City and an affiliation with Columbia University.
Publication of the institute’s journal moved to
Paris. The institute remained in the US in exile,
first in New York and then in Los Angeles,
until it was reconstituted in Frankfurt, officially
reopening its doors on November 14, 1951.
This move from Germany to the United
States marked a shift in the research priorities
of the institute. Drawing on a combination of
Hegelian, Marxist, and Freudian analyses of the
family, Studies on Authority and Family (1936), for
example, no longer focused exclusively on the
working class but rather on the structure of the
family in various classes in times of economic
crisis. Additionally, the work brought a Freudian
analysis to the fore. The volume included both
introductory theoretical essays – written by
Horkheimer, Fromm, and Marcuse – and data.
In this way it marked the first instantiation
of the theoretically informed empirical studies
that Horkheimer had called for in his inaugural
speech of 1931.
The second volume to reflect such an approach,
again combining sociological and psychological
studies, was The Authoritarian Personality (1950),
for which research was conducted between 1944
and 1950 in US exile. Adorno and Lowenthal
were principal contributors to this latter volume,
which examines various forms of prejudice,
including anti-Semitism, a topic that had been
conspicuously absent from previous studies.
This volume and the Studies on Authority and
Family represented the main collaborative works
of the institute.
Of its central members, Pollock (1894–1970)
and Horkheimer played pivotal roles in the
institute from its beginning until their deaths.
Their close friendship began in 1911 and lasted
until Pollock died in 1970. Pollock studied
sociology, philosophy, and economics, finish-
ing his PhD in economics at the University of
Frankfurt in 1923. In 1927 he participated in the
tenth anniversary of the October Revolution in
the Soviet Union, research that ultimately led to
his habilitation entitled “Attempts at Planned
Economy in the Soviet Union 1917–1927.”
Pollock, like Horkheimer, fled to New York – via
London, Geneva, and Paris – after the Nazis
assumed power in 1933. Tending mostly to the
institute’s administrative matters, Pollock none-
theless occasionally published articles in the
institute’s journal. He returned to Frankfurt in
1950 to reestablish the institute with Horkheimer
and Adorno. In addition to his work with the
institute, he was also professor of economics and
of sociology at the University of Frankfurt until
his retirement in 1958. Pollock and Horkheimer
moved to Montagnola, Tessin in 1959, where
Pollock died.
Horkheimer (1895–1973) studied philosophy
and psychology, finishing his PhD in philosophy
at the University of Frankfurt in 1922 with a
dissertation on Kant. In 1925 he completed
his habilitation, writing on Kant’s Critique of
Judgment. His work would show an abiding
interest in critiquing Kantian metaphysics. In
his 1932 essay “Materialism and Metaphysics,”
for example, Horkheimer defines materialism as
explicitly anti-metaphysical. In 1930 he assumed
a chair in social philosophy at the University of
Frankfurt and directorship of the institute. Two
years later he founded the institute’s journal,
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, which appeared
c06.qxd 3/19/09 8:56 AM Page 1255
International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, ed. Immanuel Ness, Blackwell Publishing, 2009, pp. 1253–1257
annually until 1939. In light of the institute’s
American exile, the journal was renamed Studies
in Philosophy and Social Science in 1940 and
appeared in English, though its publication was
discontinued after a year. In 1940 Horkheimer
moved to California for health reasons, joined
by his younger colleague Adorno. Here, they
wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment – first published
in 1947 – a meditation on the relation between
myth and reason that examines and critiques
the potentially barbaric consequences of idealist
thinking (the historical reference point is German
fascism). Touching on a broad array of dis-
ciplines and texts, the volume weaves together
Marxian materialism, Freudian psychoanalysis,
and a Weberian critique of rationalization and
disenchantment in its analysis of the “culture
industry,” anti-Semitism, and “instrumental
reason.” Horkheimer lays out related arguments
about the dialectic of idealism in his Eclipse
of Reason, written in 1941 and first published
in 1947.
Horkheimer was also interested in the relation-
ship between authoritarianism and changing fam-
ilial structures, and their political consequences.
The institute explored these topics, collaborating
on the previously mentioned volume Studies on
Authority and Family: Horkheimer, Fromm,
and Marcuse wrote the introductory essays to
the volume, while other scholars gathered and
evaluated empirical studies for the project.
Horkheimer’s 1942 essay “The Authoritarian
State” revisits some of its arguments.
Adorno (1903–69) began his intellectual career
in Frankfurt, studying philosophy and psycho-
logy. He met Horkheimer in 1922, when both
attended a seminar on Edmund Husserl taught
by Hans Cornelius, who served as dissertation
adviser to both students. Adorno completed
his PhD in 1924, writing his dissertation on
Husserl’s phenomenology. Subsequently, Adorno
moved to Vienna, where he lived from 1925 to
1928, in order to study music with Alban Berg.
Music played a central role in his life from an early
age: his mother was an accomplished singer and
her sister, who lived in the household, was a well-
regarded pianist. Adorno returned to Frankfurt
and to philosophy in 1928, completing his hab-
ilitation on Kierkegaard in 1931. During the
1930s Adorno worked on Kierkegaard’s aesthetics
and Husserl’s phenomenology while also writing
articles on the sociology of music. After the
institute was shut down and most of its mem-
Frankfurt School (Jewish émigrés) 1255
bers went into exile, Adorno studied at Merton
College, Oxford from 1934 to 1937. He officially
joined the institute there when he emigrated
from England in 1938. In 1940 he would follow
Horkheimer to California, where their collaborat-
ive work on Dialectic of Enlightenment would begin.
Adorno’s writings encompass a broad array
of disciplines, spanning music and literary criti-
cism, philosophy and sociology, psychology and
aesthetics. He published book-length studies
on Alban Berg, Gustav Mahler, and Richard
Wagner, as well as on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard. In addition to
articles on music and philosophy, his collections
include essays about the writings of Franz
Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett; the
poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich Heine,
and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff; and aspects
of popular and mass culture including astrology,
television, radio, and jazz. The multidisciplinary
approach Adorno takes in these essays expresses
his belief that the concerns of one medium
inform those of another.
Most of Adorno’s major works were published
after he returned to Germany in 1950 to recon-
stitute the institute with Horkheimer and Pollock.
These publications include Minima Moralia,
Notes to Literature (1974), Prisms (1977), and
Critical Models (1977). Additionally, he published
the co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947),
Negative Dialectics (1966), and Aesthetic Theory
(1970).
Lowenthal (1900–93) joined the institute in
the late 1920s. He studied literature, history,
philosophy, and sociology at the University of
Frankfurt, finishing his PhD in philosophy in
1923 and becoming involved with the institute in
a limited manner in 1926 and full time in 1930.
In 1933 he immigrated to Geneva where the
institute had an office until it was reestablished
in New York City, to which he moved along with
Horkheimer, Pollock, Fromm, and Marcuse in
1934. Together with Adorno, Lowenthal brought
a shift towards aesthetic concerns to the institute.
He also served as the managing editor of the insti-
tute’s journal, although final editorial decisions
were left to Horkheimer. Additionally, according
to Martin Jay (1973: 33), “Only Lowenthal and
Fromm . . . ever evinced any real interest in
Jewish theological issues.” Unlike Horkheimer,
Pollock, and Adorno, Lowenthal remained in the
United States, joining the Department of Socio-
logy at the University of California at Berkeley
c06.qxd 3/19/09 8:56 AM Page 1256
International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, ed. Immanuel Ness, Blackwell Publishing, 2009, pp. 1253–1257
1256 Frankfurt School (Jewish émigrés)
in 1956, where he taught until his retirement
in 1968.
Fromm (1900–80) was brought into the insti-
tute in the early 1930s. He had studied sociology
at the University of Heidelberg, finishing his
PhD in 1922. Subsequently, he trained to become
a psychoanalyst and opened his own practice
before he joined the institute in 1930. Fromm’s
writings and research brought Freudian psy-
choanalysis together with Marxist critiques that
were to have a lasting impact on Frankfurt
School writings (cf. Horkheimer and Adorno’s
Dialectic of Enlightenment). In 1934 he immigrated
to the United States, joining the group in New
York City. Here, he encountered the writings
and work of Karen Horney. In the early 1930s,
Fromm was Horkheimer’s most important inter-
locutor – a role that Adorno would assume in the
late 1930s. During their time in New York City,
relations between him, Horkheimer, and other
members of the institute became increasingly
strained, a tension due in part to Fromm’s
increasingly critical stance toward Sigmund
Freud. Consequently, Fromm split from the
institute in 1939, though his efforts to combine
psychoanalysis with political analyses would
leave its mark on the later work of the Frankfurt
School.
Marcuse (1898–1979) joined the Frankfurt
School in 1932. He had been involved in the
Social Democratic Party in Berlin before study-
ing philosophy at the University of Freiburg,
finishing his PhD in 1922 with a dissertation
on the Deutsche Künstlerroman (“German artist’s
novel”). Subsequently, he returned to Berlin
and worked in publishing before returning to
Freiburg, studying with Edmund Husserl and
Martin Heidegger, and finishing his habilitation
with the latter on “Hegel’s Ontology and the
Foundation of a Theory of Historicity.” Marcuse
joined the institute shortly before its move to
New York. Aside from his interest in philosophy,
he brought a Freudian framework to his ana-
lyses and to those of the Frankfurt School.
Despite diverging opinions and approaches, unlike
Fromm, Marcuse never split from the Frankfurt
School, although he did remain in the United
States. His earlier writings, such as Reason and
Revolution (1941) and Eros and Civilization (1955),
brought together a critique of Karl Marx and
Hegel, and of Marx and Freud, respectively.
And although neither was officially ever a
member of the Frankfurt School, it should be
mentioned that Walter Benjamin and Siegfried
Kracauer are often associated with it. Some of
the institute’s members, especially Adorno and
Horkheimer, held their work in high esteem.
Adorno admired Benjamin’s work and tried to use
his influence on Horkheimer to bring Benjamin
into the institute. Yet although Benjamin did
receive a modest amount of funding from it
in the late 1930s and published articles in its
journal, he was never officially welcomed into
the group.
The institute was reestablished in 1951 in
Frankfurt when Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock
returned to Germany, while Lowenthal, Marcuse,
and others stayed in the United States. Key
figures of the Frankfurt School’s second and
third generations include Detlev Claussen, Jürgen
Habermas, Axel Honneth, Oskar Negt, Alfred
Schmidt, and Albrecht Wellmer.
In the late 1960s Marcuse’s writings – of
the Frankfurt School members – had the most
influence on the New Left and the student
movement in the United States, Germany, and
elsewhere. The members of the institute, who had
returned to Frankfurt, too, supported student
movements, especially – and contrary to pop-
ular belief – Adorno. In the summer of 1967,
after the police’s killing on June 2 of the student
Benno Ohnesorg, who had been participating in
a protest against Riza Shah Palavi of Iran’s visit
to Berlin, Adorno prefaced a guest lecture at
the Free University in Berlin with an expression
of solidarity with the students, criticizing the
police brutality and demanding a legal inquiry into
the shooting. He condemned the 1968 shoot-
ing of SDS leader Rudi Dutschke. And when
students occupied the main building of the
Department of Sociology, he supported their
basic concerns but questioned their tactics and
methods, not only in this action but more
broadly as he had done throughout the late
1960s. Yet when the students occupied the
institute in 1969 he immediately called the
police to clear them from the building. The event
marked a significant rupture with the student
protest movement.
Marcuse’s writings greatly resonated with
student activists, who found their concerns
addressed in works such as One-Dimensional
Man (1964), An Essay on Liberation (1969),
which was written in the wake of the May 1968
worker strikes and student demonstrations in
France, and Counter-Revolution and Revolt
c06.qxd 3/19/09 8:56 AM Page 1257

International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, ed. Immanuel Ness, Blackwell Publishing, 2009, pp. 1253–1257

Freedom Rides 1257

(1972). In sum, the Frankfurt School con-

tributed both to social movements and to their
study from its founding, through the 1960s, and
to today.

SEE ALSO: Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940); Davis,

Angela (b. 1944); Fromm, Erich (1900–1980); Hegel,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831); Lukács, Georg
(1885–1971); Marcuse, Herbert (1898–1979); Marx,
Karl (1818–1883); Marxism

References and Suggested Readings

Arato, A. & Gebhardt, E. (Eds.) (1982) The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum.
Benhabib, S. (1986) Critique, Norm, and Utopia:
A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Buck-Morss, S. (1977) The Origin of Negative Dialectics:
Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the
Frankfurt School. New York: Free Press.
Jameson, F. (1971) Marxism and Form: Twentieth-
Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Jameson, F. (1990) Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The
Persistence of the Dialectics. London: Verso.
Jay, M. (1973) The Dialectical Imagination: A History
of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social
Research, 1923–1950. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Jay, M. (1984) Marxism and Totality: The Adventures
of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Wiggershaus, R. (1994) The Frankfurt School: Its
History, Theories, and Political Significance. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.