Frankfurt School

by

John D. Abromeit

• LAST REVIEWED: 19 November 2020
• LAST MODIFIED: 28 November 2016
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0189

Introduction

Although it has gained widespread currency, the “Frankfurt School” is a somewhat misleading term that refers primarily to a group of scholars and intellectuals who worked with the Institute for Social Research under the directorship of Max Horkheimer. Founded with private funds in 1923, the Institute was based in Frankfurt, Germany, and affiliated with the J. W. Goethe University. Originally dedicated to research on the history of the European labor movement, when Horkheimer became the director of the Institute in 1931 the emphasis of its research shifted to interdisciplinary studies of contemporary society. Horkheimer did continue the original, non-dogmatic Marxist orientation of the Institute, but his new interdisciplinary model of materialist Critical Theory also drew upon psychoanalysis and advanced empirical social research methods. With the triumph of National Socialism in 1933, the Institute was forced to relocate to New York City, where it was loosely affiliated with the Columbia University Sociology Department. The Institute continued to publish its journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research) through 1941, and it continued to carry out empirical research projects throughout its period of exile in the United States, which came to end in 1949–1950 when the Institute was reestablished in Frankfurt. Horkheimer continued to serve as the director of the Institute until 1959, when Theodor W. Adorno took over the position, which he held until his death in 1969. The collective and individual work of the scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research had a tremendous impact on 20th-century intellectual life in a wide variety of areas, including philosophy, sociology, psychology, social psychology, sociology of literature, musicology, aesthetics, history, political and legal theory, cultural studies, economics, communication, and media studies. The influence of the Institute also extended beyond the academy, most notably perhaps in the impact of its writings on the protest movements of the 1960s in Western Europe and the United States. The purpose of the following bibliography is to provide the newcomer with an overview of the most important primary works of the central figures of the Frankfurt School, as well as a small sampling of the voluminous secondary literature. Primary and secondary works have been chosen based mainly on their significance, but a number of works have also been selected because they provide ideal points of entry for those unfamiliar with Critical Theory or any of its individual practitioners. The question of which individual theorists should be included in the “Frankfurt School” is open to debate. The emphasis here will be on the so-called “first generation” of scholars who were directly affiliated with the Institute under Horkheimer’s direction. These include core members, such as Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Friedrich Pollock, and Erich Fromm, as well as more peripheral members, such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer. The one indisputed member of the “second generation” of the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, has also been included, in large part because of the substantial impact of his work and his direct ties to the first generation of Critical Theorists. I cannot address here the legitimate questions of whether or not the concept of multiple generations of the “Frankfurt School” overemphasizes continuities and effaces significant breaks that occurred between Habermas and the “first generation,” or whether Axel Honneth—the current director of the Institute for Social Research—and other theorists represent a “third generation” of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Due to space limitations, this bibliography will also include only works written in or translated into English.

General Works on the History of the Frankfurt School

Those seeking a broad overview of the history of the Frankfurt School should begin with Jay 1973 and Wiggershaus 1994. Jay 1973 was the first comprehensive study and it remains the best introduction, although it does not cover the period after 1950. Wiggershaus 1994 extends into the 1950s and 1960s. Those seeking an introductory conceptual and/or thematic introduction to Critical Theory, should consult Held 1980, Kellner 1989, and Bronner 2011. The latter is the briefest and most accessible.

• Bronner, Steven Eric. 2011. Critical theory: A very short introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

  DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780199730070.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Written by one of the foremost scholars of Critical Theory and Western Marxism, this is probably the best place to begin for anyone who knows nothing about the Frankfurt School. Bronner succeeds in portraying clearly and succinctly the most important ideas of Critical Theory as well as the historical, social, political, and biographical force fields out of which it emerged. He also reflects astutely on how the tradition should be rethought in order to remain relevant today.

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• Held, David. 1980. Introduction to critical theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

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  This study provides a generally reliable thematic overview of the most important theoretical concerns of the central figures of the Frankfurt School—with a particular emphasis on Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas—from the 1920s until the 1970s. Held attempts to refute some of the common criticisms of the Critical Theorists, such as, they abandoned Marx, fell back into an idealist position, were too distant from working-class politics, and focused too much on questions of aesthetics and cultural criticism.

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• Jay, Martin. 1973. The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Reseach, 1923–1950. Boston: Little, Brown.

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  Based on extensive interviews with original members of the Institute, this was the first comprehensive scholarly study of the history of the Frankfurt School and remains the standard introductory work. Jay provides a balanced and richly detailed overview of the origins and development of the Institute for Social Research through 1950. He discusses its collective empirical projects, as well as the writings of its principal protagonists on a wide variety of subjects, including fascism, culture, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history. He also introduces the reader to a broad cast of supporting characters who worked with the Institute from the early 1920s until 1950.

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• Kellner, Douglas. 1989. Critical Theory, Marxism and modernity. Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press.

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  Kellner provides a clear, introductory overview of the main ideas and debates that shaped the Frankfurt School from the 1920s to the 1980s. He also attempts to move beyond a purely intellectual historical or philosophical approach, by examining how it is still relevant to critical social theory and radical politics. The latter discussion of Critical Theory and its relationship to postmodernism are dated, but the earlier historical sections of the book are still helpful.

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• Wiggershaus, Rolf. 1994. The Frankfurt School: Its history, theories and political significance. Translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

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  The first half of this study covers much of the same ground as Martin Jay, although Wiggershaus does provide more detail in certain places by drawing on published and archival materials that had become available between 1973 and 1985. The second half represents the first comprehensive history of the Institute for Social Research after its reestablishment in Frankfurt in 1950. Like Jay, Wiggershaus discusses both collective Institute research projects as well as the main works of its members, but he demonstrates a certain partiality for Adorno’s aesthetics and cultural criticism over Horkheimer and the Institute’s empirical work.

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Studies of Particular Aspects of the History of the Frankfurt School

In addition to the general introductory studies mentioned under General Works on the History of the Frankfurt School, there are a number of noteworthy works that address specific aspects of Critical Theory as a coherent school of thought. Abromeit 2011, Dubiel 1985, Benhabib 1986, and Buck-Morss 1977 address the emergence of Critical Theory in the 1920s and 1930s from different perspectives. Wheatland 2009 focuses on the Critical Theorists’ exile in the United States during and after the reign of National Socialism in Germany. Jacobs 2015 discusses the role of Judaism in the formation and development of Critical Theory.

• Abromeit, John. 2011. Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School. Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

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  This study is the most comprehensive intellectual biography of Max Horkheimer’s life and, especially, his thought through 1941. It also reconstructs and argues for the contemporary relevance of the model of “early Critical Theory” developed by Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, which guided the work of the Institute for Social Research during its heyday in the 1930s. Abromeit also examines in detail the evolution of Horkheimer and Adorno’s personal and theoretical relationship in the 1930s.

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• Benhabib, Seyla. 1986. Critique, norm and utopia: A study of the foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

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  Benhabib argues that the Hegelian-Marxist tradition and its unbroken legacy among the “first generation” of Critical Theorists remained trapped with a monolithic, and potentially totalitarian, “philosophy of the subject” and a misguided theory of human action based on self-objectivation through work. Through a genealogical reconstruction and critique of such theories in the work of Hegel, Marx, Lukács, Horkheimer, and Adorno, she sets the stage for Habermas’s positive alternative: a pluralistic theory of communicative action. She does criticize Habermas for his abandonment of the utopian motive of Critical Theory.

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• Buck-Morss, Susan. 1977. The origin of negative dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: Free Press.

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  Although dated in some ways—such as her underestimation of Adorno’s theoretical debts to Hegel—this study is still the best examination of the crucial ways in which Adorno’s negative dialectics were shaped through a close encounter with the person and writings of Walter Benjamin from the late 1920s and 1930s. Buck-Morss describes with impressive conceptual rigor Adorno’s appropriation and reworking of Benjamin’s ideas, but also his criticisms of them.

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• Dubiel, Helmut. 1985. Theory and politics: Studies in the development of Critical Theory. Translated by Benjamin Gregg. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

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  Although criticized by Herbert Marcuse when it first appeared, this study remains useful as a description of the ways in which the development of Critical Theory was shaped by historical events between 1930 and 1945. Dubiel argues that the rise of Stalinism and fascism led to steady retreat from the sphere of politics and finally to a “re-philosophization” of Critical Theory.

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• Jacobs, Jack. 2015. The Frankfurt School, Jewish lives and Antisemitism. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

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  Based on extensive new archival research, Jacobs’s study examines the history of the Frankfurt School from the perspective of the Jewish backgrounds of its members. By examining their differing responses to the Judaism of their parents’ generation, their increasing focus on anti-Semitism during the exile years in the United States, and their attitudes toward Israel in the post–World War II period, Jacobs provides an informative overview of the diverse ways in which the Critical Theorists engaged with their Jewish heritage and the ominous threats faced by Jews in the 20th century.

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• Rush, Fred, ed. 2004. The Cambridge companion to Critical Theory. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

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  This collection of essays by established Frankfurt School scholars—such as Joel Whitebook, Raymond Guess, Jay Bernstein, Moishe Postone, Hauke Brunkhorst, Beatrice Hannsen, and Axel Honneth—focuses on key themes and debates that have shaped the development of Critical Theory. These include Benjamin and Adorno’s debate about the effects of technology on artistic production and reception; the Institute’s internal debate about Friedrich Pollock’s concept of “state capitalism”; and several essays on Habermas’s criticisms of the “first generation” of the Frankfurt School.

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• Wheatland, Thomas. 2009. The Frankfurt School in exile. Minneapolis and London: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

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  Wheatland’s study is the richest examination of the history of the Institute during its exile in the United States and the relationships of its members with American intellectuals and scholars in New York and elsewhere. Based on extensive original archival research and interviews, Wheatland calls into question the common perception that the Institute remained isolated from American intellectual life during its exile.

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Collective Empirical Studies of the Institute for Social Research

Even before Max Horkheimer became director of the Institute for Social Research in 1931, he had initiated a large-scale empirical research project on the political and social attitudes of German blue- and white-collar workers in Weimar Germany. Empirical social research was, in other words, essential to Horkheimer’s vision of Critical Theory and remained so until as long as he and Adorno were directing the Institute. Fromm 1984 and Horkheimer 1936 were the first two major empirical research projects of the Institute. Horkheimer and Flowerman 1949–1950 was carried out in the United States in the 1940s in collaboration with American scholars and with the financial support of the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee. It consists of the following five volumes: Adorno, et al. 1950; Bettelheim and Janowitz 1950; Lowenthal and Guterman 1949; Ackerman and Jahoda 1950; and Massing 1949. Adorno 2010 and Pollock and Adorno 2011 is an English translation of the first major empirical project the Institute conducted after being reestablished in Frankfurt in 1950. Worrell 2009 is the only full-length study in any language of the large-scale study of anti-Semitism among American workers that the Institute conduced in the early 1940s, but never published.

• Ackerman, Nathan W., and Marie Jahoda. 1950. Anti-Semitism and emotional disorder: A psychoanalytic interpretation. Vol. 3. Studies in Prejudice. New York: Harper.

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  Relying upon psychoanalysis—and eschewing sociological methods and hypotheses—even more than The Authoritarian Personality and Dynamics in Prejudice, Ackerman and Jahoda draw upon forty detailed case studies to explore the relationship between prejudice and psychological disorders. The limited number of case studies, which were provided by psychoanalysts and social workers mainly in the New York City area, permitted only cautious and provisional generalizations.

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• Adorno, Theodor. 2010. Guilt and defense: On the legacies of National Socialism in postwar Germany. Edited and translated by Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

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  This volume—the companion to Pollock and Adorno 2011—focuses on the qualitative results of Group Experiment, which were summarized by Adorno in a lengthy essay with the title “Guilt and Defense.” The volume also includes two additional, shorter essays by Adorno and an essay by a critic, which document the consequences and repercussions of Group Experiment, as well as a helpful introduction by the editors, which places the study in its historical context.

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• Adorno, Theodor, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanord. 1950. The authoritarian personality. Vol. 1. Studies in Prejudice. New York: Harper.

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  The largest volume of the Studies in Prejudice series used psychoanalytic techniques to uncover the subjective origins and characteristics of prejudiced and potentially authoritarian personality types. Based on a combination of numerous questionnaires and fewer in-depth interviews among white, middle-class Americans, Adorno and his collaborators described the typical traits of individuals with a high and low potential for authoritarianism. The study resulted in a scale based on categories such as “conventionalism,” authoritarian submission and aggression,” “stereotypy,” “cynicism,” and “projectivity,” which could be used to assess conscious and unconscious authoritarian tendencies.

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• Bettelheim, Bruno, and Morris Janowitz. 1950. Dynamics of prejudice: A psychological and sociological study of veterans. Vol. 2. Studies in Prejudice. New York: Harper.

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  Partially motivated by the historical experience (for example, in Germany after World War I) that returning soldiers demonstrated unusually strong authoritarian tendencies, Bettelheim, Janowitz, and their assistants conducted in-depth interviews with a group of 150 white, lower- and lower-middle class World War II army veterans in the Chicago area. The psychoanalytically informed study sought to determine the social and psychological conditions that facilitated the manifestation of prejudice, especially against blacks and Jews.

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• Fromm, Erich. 1984. The working class in Weimar Germany: A psychological and sociological study. Edited by Wolfgang Bonss. Translated by Barbara Weinberger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

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  An English translation of the first collective empirical research project of the Institute, after Horkheimer became its director in 1930. The study, which was conceptualized by Horkheimer and Fromm, was the Institute’s first attempt to use psychoanalytic methods to study a contemporary social problem: the susceptibility of German blue- and white-collar workers to authoritarian ideology.

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• Horkheimer, Max, ed. 1936. Studien über Autorität und Familie. Paris: Felix Alcan.

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  (Studies on authority and family). The Studien was the second major collective empirical research project of the Institute. It analyzed the effects of changing social conditions in advanced capitalist countries (mainly Europe, but also the United States) on the structure of the family and the effect of changing patterns of familial socialization on individuals’ susceptibility to authoritarian ideology. The bulk of the volume consists in summaries of the empirical findings, but three substantial and important theoretical texts by Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Fromm also appear in the introduction. Horkheimer and Marcuse’s texts are the only parts of the study that have been translated into English.

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• Horkheimer, Max, and Samuel H. Flowerman, eds. 1949–1950. Studies in prejudice. New York: Harper.

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  This massive five-volume study was the most ambitious empirical research project carried out by the Institute during its American exile. Core members of the Institute, such as Horkheimer, Adorno, and Leo Lowenthal collaborated with American sociologists and social psychologists from the University of California and other institutions to analyze the origins of prejudice and authoritarianism from a variety of different perspectives.

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• Lowenthal, Leo, and Norbert Guterman. 1949. Prophets of deceit: A study of the techniques of the American agitator. Vol. 5. Studies in Prejudice. New York: Harper.

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  Although intended as a handbook for practical political and educational purposes, this study relied on a sophisticated combination of psychoanalysis and content analysis to interpret the political literature and speeches of a wide variety of authoritarian and proto-fascist agitators in the United States. Lowenthal and Guterman identified many of the most common themes used by the agitators to draw them into their “movements.” They also sought to identify the social conditions and psychological mechanisms that explained the appeal of such agitation.

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• Massing, Paul W. 1949. Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany. Vol. 4. Studies in Prejudice. New York: Harper.

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  Written by Paul Massing, a former member of the German Communist Party and associate of the Institute since 1941, this study seeks to identify the ways in which the political anti-Semitism of Imperial Germany—which reached its high point in the 1880s and 1890s and then declined again after the turn of the century—anticipated and prepared the way for National Socialism. It was the only volume of the Studies in Prejudice series that utilized a traditional historical methodology.

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• Pollock, Friedrich, and Theodor Adorno. 2011. Group experiment and other writings. Edited and translated by Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

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  Group Experiment was the first large-scale empirical research project carried out by Institute after it was reestablished in Frankfurt in 1950. Drawing once again on the innovative psychoanalytic techniques they had developed and been refined in the 1930s and 1940s, Pollock, Adorno, and their assistants conducted extensive interviews with 137 different groups of eight to sixteen persons to determine Germans’ attitudes about a wide variety of topics relating to the recent Nazi past and the Allied occupation. This volume focuses on the methodology and empirical results of the study. Includes an introduction by the editors.

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• Worrell, Mark. 2009. Dialectic of solidarity: Labor, Antisemitism, and the Frankfurt School. Chicago: Haymarket.

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  This is the only full-length monograph in any language of the Institute’s empirical study of anti-Semitism among American workers during World War II, which was never published and remains largely unknown. The study was based on interviews with over nine hundred mainly industrial workers in a number of different large American cities. Worrell contextualizes the study historically, provides a competent overview of its methodology and results, and provides insightful theoretical reflections of his own.

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Max Horkheimer

The director of the Institute for Social Research from 1931 until 1958, Max Horkheimer (b. 1895–d. 1973) was a historian of modern Western philosophy by training. He was particularly interested in the ways in which Western philosophy expressed and—in some cases—protested against the development of bourgeois society and capitalism in the modern period. He also had deep and abiding interests in social psychology and empirical social research. Horkheimer 1985–1996 is the standard edition of his writings in German. Horkheimer 1982 and Horkheimer 1993 provide English translations of his most important essays from the 1930s—the period of his greatest productivity. Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 and Horkheimer 1974 represent Horkheimer’s most important published works in the 1940s. Horkheimer 1978 and Horkheimer 1996 present a sampling of his essays and notes from the post–World War II period. Jacobsen and Jacobsen 2007 is the only collection of Horkheimer’s correspondence available in English.

• Horkheimer, Max. 1974. Eclipse of reason. New York: Continuum.

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  Based on public lectures Horkheimer gave at Columbia University in 1944, the five essays explore in more accessible form some of the main themes of Dialectic of Enlightenment, such as the domination of nature and the transformation of reason to a handmaiden of social domination. The essays also elaborate upon Horkheimer’s critique of contemporary philosophical schools, such as neo-Thomism and pragmatism, and his distinction between “subjective” and “objective” reason.

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• Horkheimer, Max. 1978. Dawn and decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969. Translated by Michael Shaw. NewYork: Seabury.

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  An incomplete and inadequate translation of the collection of aphorisms Horkheimer published under the pseudonym of Heinrich Regius in 1934. Written between 1926 and 1931, these aphorisms provide important insights into Horkheimer’s intellectual development—and the origins of Critical Theory as a whole—that one cannot find in his academic and/or published writings from this time. The volume also includes the most extensive collection in English of Horkheimer’s unpublished aphorisms from the postwar period.

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• Horkheimer, Max. 1982. Critical Theory: Selected essays. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell et al. New York: Continuum.

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  Translations of some of Horkheimer’s most important essays from the most productive period of his work (1933–1941), including his lengthy preface to the Studies on Authority and Family and his seminal essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.”

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• Horkheimer, Max. 1985–1996. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Frankfurt: Fischer.

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  Superbly edited by Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, this is the standard edition of Horkheimer’s writings in German. Its nineteen volumes contain all of Horkheimer’s published writings; many substantial and significant unpublished writings, lectures, and notes; and four volumes of correspondence that span the breadth of his life.

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• Horkheimer, Max. 1993. Between philosophy and social science: Selected early writings. Translated by G. F. Hunter, M. S. Kramer, and J. Torpey. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT.

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  This volume complements the previous one, insofar as it includes translations most of the other key essays that Horkheimer wrote in the 1930s, including the brief but important inaugural address he delivered shortly after becoming director of the Institute in 1930, as well as the substantial essay “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Epoch,” which provided the historical and theoretical foundations for much of the Institute’s empirical research in the 1930s and 1940s.

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• Horkheimer, Max. 1996. Critique of instrumental reason: Lectures and essays since the end of World War II. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell, et al. New York: Continuum.

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  Translation of a German volume published in 1967 that contains nine essays by the later, more conservative Horkheimer from the period 1957 to 1966. They address a wide variety topics, including the history of German Jews, Schopenhauer’s contemporary relevance, and the future of marriage.

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• Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

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  The best English translation of the major collaborative theoretical work that Horkheimer and Adorno completed in 1944. Presented in the anti-systematic form of three essays, two excursuses, and a series of notes and sketches at the end, the work sets itself the ambitious task of exploring the fundamental flaws that exist in the concept of Western rationality as whole, and the ways in which these flaws have contributed to the recrudescence of barbarism at the supposed height of Western civilization.

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• Jacobsen, Manfred R., and Evelyn M. Jacobsen, eds. 2007. Max Horkheimer: A life in letters. Lincoln: Univerity of Nebraska Press.

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  The only volume available in English dedicated exclusively to Horkheimer’s correspondence, it presents letters from 1918 to 1973 that shed much light on Horkheimer’s personal and theoretical relationships with key figures at the Institute as well as his views on contemporary historical and political events. The letters were selected from the much more extensive four volumes of correspondence published in the Gesammelte Schriften edition of Horkhiemer’s work (Horkheimer 1985–1996).

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Friedrich Pollock

Friedrich Pollock (b. 1894–d. 1970) met Horkheimer in Stuttgart when they were both in their early teens. They quickly became inseparable and their friendship remained one of the cornerstones of the Institute throughout its long history. In 1923 Pollock completed a Ph.D. in economics at the J. W. Goethe University in Frankfurt with a dissertation on Marx’s theory of money. He, Horkheimer, and their friend Felix Weil were the driving forces behind the establishment of the Institute for Social Research that same year. In the Institute’s intellectual division of labor, Pollock served as the chief economic theorist. He also assumed primary responsibility for administering the Institute’s endowment. Although not as theoretically prolific as his colleagues at the Institute, he played a central role in Institute discussions and research projects into the 1960s. Pollock 1929 was a pioneering study of the attempts of the Soviet Union to establish a planned economy in the 1920s. Pollock 1941 outlines the foundations of his “state capitalism” thesis, which heavily influenced Horkheimer and Adorno’s thinking in the 1940s and provided an alternative to Franz Neumann’s Behemoth in internal debates at the Institute about the ongoing relevance of Marx’s critique of political economy. Pollock 1957 is a prescient and overlooked study of automation and its effects on society.

• Pollock, Friedrich. 1929. Die Planwirtschaflichen Versuche in der Sowjetunion, 1917–1927. Leipzig: C.L. Hirschfeld.

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  (Experiments in economic planning in the Soviet Union, 1917–1927). Although this early study by Pollock has not been translated into English, it is worth making an exception to include it here, since it was one of the first books to be sponsored and published by the Institute. Upon invitation from David Ryazanov, director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, Pollock traveled to the Soviet Union to study how successful its attempt had been to transition from a market to a planned economy.

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• Pollock, Friedrich. 1941. “State capitalism: Its possibilities and limitations.” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9:200–225.

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  Edited by Max Horkheimer. Companion essay, “Is National Socialism a New Order” (Vol. 9, pp. 440–455). In these two essays Pollock presented his theory of “state capitalism,” which initiated an important internal debate at the Institute and had a substantial impact on its subsequent theoretical and practical development. He argued that the new forms of state-directed economies that emerged in the Soviet Union, fascist Germany, Western Europe, and the United States in the 1930s represented a new primacy of the political over the economic sphere, which rendered key aspects of Marx’s critique of liberal political economy obsolete.

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• Pollock, Friedrich. 1957. Automation: A study of its economic and social consequences. Translated by W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner. New York: Prager.

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  Pollock’s study focuses on recent social and economic tendencies in the United States, where automation was by far most advanced in the 1950s. He rejects the belief commonly held then (and now) that technological innovation and automation will lead automatically to social progress. Stressing the more likely outcome of mass unemployment and of increasing concentration of economic and political power, Pollock calls for more planning and democracy to avert the dangerous social and economic consequences of unregulated automation.

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Theodor Adorno

Although he met Horkheimer in Frankfurt already in the mid-1920s, Theodor Adorno (b. 1903–d. 1969) did not become an official member of the Institute for Social Research until 1938, when he relocated from Oxford to New York City and quickly replaced Fromm and Marcuse as Horkheimer’s primary theoretical interlocutor. Adorno’s first essays in the Journal of the Institute for Social Research (Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung) were on music, although in later issues he would publish on philosophy, sociology, and cultural criticism. In the 1940s Adorno guided the writing of The Authoritarian Personality—the most substantial of the Institute’s five-volume empirical research project, Studies in Prejudice. In the postwar period, Adorno came into his own as one of West Germany’s leading scholars and critical intellectuals, publishing numerous essays and books on subjects that reflected his own remarkable diversity of interests: music, literature, aesthetics, philosophy, cultural criticism, education, sociology, social psychology and empirical social research. Adorno 1970–1986 is the standard edition of Adorno’s writings in German. Translations of Adorno’s writings into English vary greatly in quality, due to the high demands they place on translators. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Robert Hullot-Kentor are generally recognized as the best English translators of Adorno’s writings. Adorno 1973 and Adorno 1997 represent his two most substantial, mature works in philosophy and aesthetics, respectively. Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 and Adorno 1974 represent two crucial and characteristic philosophical works from the middle phase of Adorno’s life. Adorno 1989 provides a glimpse into the early phase of Adorno’s thought, when the influence of Walter Benjamin on his work was at its height. Adorno 1998 is an ably translated and helpfully annotated collection of essays, which provides an accessible entry point into Adorno’s thought. Adorno 2006 and Adorno 1991–1992 provide a sampling of his writings on music and literature. Adorno 2000 provides an accessible entry point to his critical social theory.

• Adorno, Theodor W. 1970–1986. Gesammelte Schriften. 20 vols. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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  The standard edition of Adorno’s writings in German.

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• Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum.

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  Adorno’s philosophical magnum opus takes as its point of departure the question of how and why philosophy should be practiced at a time when the possibility of its realization in a reconciled human society—as prophesied by the early Marx—has seemingly failed. Adorno develops the basic categories of his negative dialectics through discussions of Heideggerian ontology, Kant’s concept of practical reason, Hegel’s philosophy of history, and the collapse of Western civilization into barbarism represented by Auschwitz.

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• Adorno, Theodor W. 1974. Minima moralia: Reflections from damaged life. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. London and New York: Verso.

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  Dedicated to Horkheimer, this collection of aphorisms that Adorno wrote between 1944 and 1947 is one of the more accessible entry points into his work. Inverting Hegel’s dictum that the truth can be found only in the totality, and drawing methodological inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s emphasis on the epistemological primacy of the concrete particular, Adorno seeks to shed light indirectly on the false social totality by reflecting on a wide variety of social, cultural, political, and intellectual tendencies of the time.

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• Adorno, Theodor W. 1989. Kierkegaard: Construction of the aesthetic. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

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  Based on a second dissertation Adorno wrote around 1930 to secure a teaching position in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, this study attempts a devastating critique of Kierkegaard and the Kierkegaard renaissance in Germany in the 1920s. Inspired philosophically by Hegel, methodologically and theologically by Benjamin, Adorno unveils the hidden social and historical content of Kierkegaard’s philosophy by focusing on the unintentional expressions of truth found in the names, metaphors, and images found in his writings.

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• Adorno, Theodor W. 1991–1992. Notes on literature. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

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  This two-volume, ably translated collection contains Adorno’s most important essays on literature, thereby providing insight into another facet of his intellectual activities. As always, Adorno’s writing explodes traditional disciplinary boundaries; accordingly, these essays transcend literary criticism and provide insight into the theoretical assumptions that guide his work as a whole. The essays on Kafka and Beckett are particularly important for an understanding of Adorno’s larger defense of aesthetic modernism.

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• Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

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  Unfinished at the time of his death in 1969, this superb English translation of Adorno’s magnum opus on aesthetics is based on a German text composed of drafts he wrote between 1961 and 1969. Eschewing any narrow disciplinary approaches to art, Adorno argues that the truth content and critical and utopian potential of autonomous art can be unlocked only through philosophically informed interpretation, which reflects upon the relationship of the work of art to history and society.

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• Adorno, Theodor W. 1998. Critical models: Interventions and catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

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  A combination of two collections of essays that were published separately in the original German, this ably translated and skillfully edited volume provides a good sampling of Adorno’s more accessible essays on a wide variety of topics, from philosophy, education, mass media, ideology critique, and coming to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust.

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• Adorno, Theodor W. 2000. Introduction to sociology. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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  Based on a series of lectures he gave at the J. W. Goethe University in Frankfurt in the 1960s, this volume provides a relatively accessible entry point into Adorno’s social thought and his relationship to the discipline of sociology and the tradition of social theory more broadly construed.

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• Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. Philosophy of new music. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

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  The single most representative and influential of Adorno’s works on the sociology of music, this translation supplants the older one in terms of technical rigor and clarity. The book consists of two long essays—the first on Arnold Schoenberg and the second on Igor Stravinsky—in which Adorno attempts to demonstrate how these two men’s music embody and—in Schoenberg’s case—resist the powerful social and historical forces toward regression and catastrophe at work in 20th-century capitalist societies.

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• Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

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  The best English translation of the major collaborative theoretical work that Horkheimer and Adorno completed in 1944. Presented in the anti-systematic form of three essays, two excursuses, and a series of notes and sketches at the end, the work sets itself the ambitious task of exploring the fundamental flaws that exist in the concept of Western rationality as whole, and the ways in which these flaws have contributed to the recrudescence of barbarism at the supposed height of Western civilization.

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Walter Benjamin

Although never a member of the inner core of the Institute, Walter Benjamin (b. 1892–d. 1940) had a significant impact on the development of Critical Theory, through his profound influence on Adorno, which was readily apparent in Adorno’s early study of Kierkegaard, but also in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Thus, while Benjamin’s version of Critical Theory can stand on its own—and has attracted more scholarly attention than any of the core members of the Institute—one cannot leave him out of any general treatment of the Frankfurt School. His primary interests lay in the areas of literature, popular culture, aesthetics, epistemology, technology, architecture, Marxism, theology, and the philosophy of history. Benjamin 1998 and Benjamin 1979 capture two sides of Benjamin’s early writings: the former scholarly, historical, and esoteric, the latter aphoristic, contemporary, and more accessible. Benjamin 1969 and Benjamin 1978 provide a sample in English translation of many of his most influential essays. Benjamin 1999 is an English translation of his idiosyncratic and unfinished magnum opus, which centers on the history of Paris in the 19th century.

• Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken.

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  A popular sampling of some of Benjamin’s best-known essays in English translation, including “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” It also contains a lengthy and informative—albeit somewhat tendentious—introduction by Benjamin’s friend and erstwhile cousin-in-law, Hannah Arendt.

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• Benjamin, Walter. 1972–1989. Gesammelte Schriften. 7 vols. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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  The standard edition of Benjamin’s writings in German.

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• Benjamin, Walter. 1978. Reflections: Essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken.

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  Another popular and widely ranging collection of Benjamin’s writings, which does not overlap with the previous one. This volume contains influential essays, such as “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” “The Author as Producer,” and “Critique of Violence.” It also contains Benjamin’s early theological reflections on language as well as “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” an exposé from 1935, in which he provided a sampling of some of the main themes he would explore in the Arcades Project.

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• Benjamin, Walter. 1979. One-way street and other writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: New Left.

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  Whereas Benjamin outlines a theory of allegory in the previous study, here he puts it into practice, attempting in a collage of aphorisms, jokes, and dreams—many of which were previously published in daily newspapers—to find traces of redemption in the concrete ephemera and the fragmented experience of modern urban life.

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• Benjamin, Walter. 1996–2003. Selected writings. Edited by Michael Bullock, Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings, and Gary Smith. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

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  English translations of selected writings from the German Gesammelte Schriften edition of Benjamin’s writings. This edition is more appropriate for advanced scholars of Benjamin’s work.

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• Benjamin, Walter. 1998. The origin of German tragic drama. Translated by John Osborne. London and New York: Verso.

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  This was Benjamin’s Habilitationsschrift, or second dissertation, which was rejected in 1925 by the philosophy department of the University of Frankfurt, thereby cutting short his hopes for an academic career. Through a discussion of the largely forgotten genre of German tragic drama, its historical grounding in the epoch of the Baroque and Counter-Reformation, and its differences from classical tragedy, Benjamin develops a concept of allegory, which informs many of his subsequent reflections on aesthetics and the philosophy of history.

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• Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard Univ. Press.

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  Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus consists of thirty-six “convolutes” that explore a wide variety of themes relating to the 19th-century social and cultural history of France, especially Paris. The convolutes consist of aphoristic observations and quotations (with and without commentary) on each theme. Benjamin intentionally leaves the task of synthesizing the material in the convolutes to the reader. His overall aim is to awaken his readers from the spell of capitalist ideology and to create a new, non-triumphalist understanding of history.

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Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse (b. 1898–d. 1979) came to the Institute in 1934 after finishing a second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) on Hegel under the direction of Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg. When the National Socialists came to power and Heidegger joined the party after being made Rector of the University, Marcuse’s prospects for an academic career in Germany abruptly ended. Marcuse flourished in his role as the “house philosopher” (as Habermas once called him) at the Institute in the 1930s, publishing a number of substantial essays and many book reviews in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. When the Institute was pared down and the publication of its journal discontinued in 1941, Marcuse accepted a position (along with Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and a number of other left-leaning émigrés from Germany) doing intelligence work on National Socialist Germany for the US State Department. After the war Marcuse held research and teaching positions at several different US universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Brandeis, and the University of California, San Diego. Through his active support of the protest movements of the 1960s, Marcuse did much to introduce Critical Theory to a broader audience in both the United States and Europe. In addition to philosophy, Marcuse was interested in aesthetics, psychoanalysis, technology, and emancipatory social movements of all kinds. Marcuse 1987 and Wolin and Abromeit 2005 document Marcuse’s early writings, during the period when he was working with Martin Heidegger. Marcuse 1968 and Marcuse 1941 represent his writings during the period when he worked most closely with Horkheimer and the Institute for Social Research. Marcuse 1955 is a critical engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis from the standpoint of philosophy and Marxian social theory. Written during the Cold War, Marcuse 1958 and Marcuse 1964 criticize the Soviet Union and Western capitalist societies, respectively, as dual embodiments of a repressive technological rationality. Marcuse 1969 and Marcuse 1972 document his initial high hopes and subsequent disappointment with the protest movements of the 1960s. Marcuse 1978 represents a return near the end of his life to his early and abiding interest in aesthetics.

• Marcuse, Herbert. 1941. Reason and revolution: Hegel and the rise of social theory. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

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  Marcuse’s first book in English had two main aims: to provide an accessible history of one of the main lineages of the Institute’s Critical Theory, and to dispel the myth then widespread in the English-speaking world that Hegel’s philosophy was a direct predecessor of European authoritarianism and fascism. After sketching the development of Hegel’s philosophy and its relationship to Marx’s critical social theory, Marcuse demonstrated how Hegel and Marx’s “negative” approach was suppressed by various affirmative, positivist tendencies in philosophy and social theory in the mid- to late 20th century.

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• Marcuse, Herbert. 1955. Eros and civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon.

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  Seeking to reveal a “hidden trend in psychoanalysis,” Marcuse took issue with Freud’s argument in Civilization and Its Discontents that advanced societies presupposed a constantly high level of instinctual repression, which could never be overcome. Marcuse argued that the development of the forces of production in modern capitalism had made much of this repression unnecessary. The real possibility of eliminating such “surplus repression” would create a new, post-capitalist civilization, which had been anticipated by the utopian tendencies in Western philosophy, art, and mythology.

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• Marcuse, Herbert. 1958. Soviet Marxism: A critical analysis. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

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  The study combines an immanent critique of Soviet communism, which compares its practices to the principles of Marxist theory, with a more philosophical analysis and critique of its official political and ethical tenets. Extricating himself from the polarized views of the early Cold War, Marcuse argues that a similar logic of technological rationality, based on the subordination of emancipation to rapid “modernization” of the means of production, underlie the development of both Soviet and Western societies.

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• Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-dimensional Man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston: Beacon.

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  This work gained Marcuse widespread recognition as one of the foremost theorists of the global protest movements of the 1960s. Using examples from the spheres of politics, art, language, philosophy, entertainment, science, and technology, he analyzes the ways in which oppositional tendencies in advanced industrial societies are co-opted and neutralized. He presents a scathing indictment of Western “affluent societies” in which critical consciousness had been almost completely eliminated by militarism, consumerism, and culture industry.

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• Marcuse, Herbert. 1968. Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon.

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  This volume contains eight of Marcuse’s essays, including reliable translations the most important essays he wrote for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (the journal of the Institute of Social Research) in the 1930s; a critical appraisal of Max Weber’s theory of rationalization that had a big impact on Jürgen Habermas; and a lively exchange with the unorthodox, psychoanalytically oriented classicist Norman O. Brown over the latter’s poetic, mystical work, Love’s Body.

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• Marcuse, Herbert. 1969. An essay on liberation. Boston: Beacon.

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  Dedicated to the students and workers who participated in May 1968 revolts in Paris, Marcuse’s lengthy essay picks up where Eros and Civilization had left off, with a continued exploration of the depth psychological barriers to social emancipation and the possibility of transformed character structures—what Marcuse calls a “new sensibility”—in a post-capitalist society. Pointing to the surrealists and Charles Fourier, Marcuse argues that scientific socialism needs to move in a more utopian direction.

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• Marcuse, Herbert. 1972. Counterrevolution and revolt. Boston: Beacon.

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  Returning to the more pessimistic tone he had briefly abandoned in An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse explores the political and deep psychological foundations of the vicious backlash against the protest movements of the 1960s—symbolized by Nixon’s re-election by the “silent majority” in 1972—which would usher in a new era of neoliberal and right-wing populist politics in the United States and Western Europe. He also explores here the promise of the “new social movements” of the 1970s, including environmentalism and second-wave feminism.

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• Marcuse, Herbert. 1978. The aesthetic dimension: Toward a critique of Marxist aesthetics. Boston: Beacon.

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  Returning to his earliest concerns with art as the placeholder of a transcendent, utopian, “second” dimension of reality, which could serve as a regulative ideal for efforts to overcome the depredations of modern capitalism, Marcuse argues that art can fulfill this critical function only if it maintains its autonomy and is not subordinated to political imperatives, including those of Marxist theory.

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• Marcuse, Herbert. 1987. Hegel’s ontology and the theory of historicity. Translated by Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

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  This is a solid English translation of the second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) that Marcuse wrote under the direction of Martin Heidegger in the early 1930s. Taking his inspiration from Heidegger and Dilthey, Marcuse provides a vitalist interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, which focuses on the philosophical concept of “life” in Hegel’s early works. Marcuse argues that the affirmative tendencies in Hegel’s philosophy overwhelmed the critical tendencies when the concept of life was suppressed by an emphasis on cognition in Hegel’s later works.

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• Marcuse, Herbert. 1998–2014. Collected papers. Edited by Douglas Kellner. 6 vols. London and New York: Routledge.

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  This edition of Marcuse’s writings focuses on unpublished essays, lectures, notes, and letters, although some previously published materials also appear in it. It is, thus, more appropriate for advanced Marcuse scholars.

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• Wolin, Richard, and John Abromeit, eds. 2005. Herbert Marcuse: Heideggerian Marxism. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press.

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  A collection of original or new translations of the most important essays Marcuse wrote during his period of study with Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg (1928–1933). The first essays document Marcuse’s attempt to restore active, subjective dimensions of Marxist theory with concepts from Heidegger’s Being and Time. The last essays document the waning of Marcuse’s enthusiasm for Heidegger that came with his discovery of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

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Erich Fromm

Max Horkheimer invited Erich Fromm (b. 1900–d. 1980) to join the Institute for Social Research in the late 1920s because he had a PhD in sociology from the University of Heidelberg and—more importantly for Horkheimer—he was also a trained psychoanalyst. Horkheimer was interested in integrating psychoanalytic concepts and methods into his Critical Theory and he hoped Fromm could play an integral role in this process. During the early 1930s Horkheimer and Fromm worked well together on a synthesis of historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and empirical social research, which would inform much of the Institute’s subsequent work. But by the late 1930s Fromm had begun to abandon certain presuppositions of psychoanalysis—drive theory, in particular—which Horkheimer (and, later, Adorno and Marcuse) deemed essential to Critical Theory. Thus, in this section I have decided to discuss only those works by Fromm that were wholly or partially written during his tenure with the Institute in the 1930s. For a full bibliography of Fromm’s works in English, see Fromm 2016. Fromm 2004 represents Fromm’s first attempt to apply his new Freudian-Marxist method to a historical problem: the origins and transformation of Christianity. Fromm 1970 and Anderson and Quinney 2000 provide a sampling of Fromm’s pioneering essays from the 1930s. Fromm 1941 is what many scholars consider Fromm’s most important and enduring work.

• Anderson, Kevin, and Richard Quinney, eds. 2000. Erich Fromm and critical criminology: Beyond the punitive society. Translated by Heinze D. Osterle and Kevin Anderson. Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press.

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  This volume contains the two most important essays Fromm wrote in the 1930s on the social-psychology of crime and punishment in modern capitalist societies, thus providing insight into another facet of Fromm’s work with the Institute for Social Research during this time. It also contains an introductory overview of Fromm’s life and work by a leading Fromm scholar, Rainer Funk, as well as several other essays by scholars that contextualize and assess the continuing relevance of Fromm’s approach to crime and punishment. Annotated by the translators.

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• Fromm, Erich. 1941. Escape from freedom. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

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  Indebted to his important theoretical work with Institute for Social Research in the 1930s, but also demonstrating the new, unorthodox interpretation of psychoanalysis he adopted after his break with the Institute, Fromm’s study explores the vicissitudes of freedom in modern societies. Through historical and social-psychological analyses, he examines the ways in which individuals cope with their emancipation from bonds of tradition: negatively through various escape mechanisms, or positively through self-affirmation and spontaneous engagement with the world.

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• Fromm, Erich. 1970. The crisis of psychoanalysis: Essays on Freud, Marx, and Social psychology. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

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  This collection contains translations of several of the essays that Fromm wrote while working for the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s. These include “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology,” in which he outlines his path-breaking efforts to synthesize Marx and Freud, and two essays on Briffault and Bachofen’s theories of maternal law, on which Fromm draws critically to support his historicization of psychoanalysis and critique of dominant bourgeois character structures.

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• Fromm, Erich. 2004. The dogma of Christ and other essays on religion, psychology and culture. London and New York: Routledge.

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  First published in 1930, the lengthy title essay of this volume represents a milestone in the history of Critical Theory insofar as it was the first time that the synthesis of Marx and Freud, pioneered by the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s, was applied to a concrete historical object: the history of Christianity. Methodologically the essay anticipates and illuminates Horkheimer’s later work on the history and social psychology of the modern bourgeoisie.

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• Fromm, Erich. 2016. Erich Fromm online

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  At this site one can find a full listing of both Fromm’s writings in English as well as translations into English of his early writings in German.

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Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer

Franz Neumann (b. 1900–d. 1954) and Otto Kirchheimer (b. 1905–d. 1965) were both German-Jewish, socialist-oriented legal theorists, who studied with leading experts on constitutional law in the 1920s, including Hermann Heller and Carl Schmitt. Both were involved with the Weimar Social Democratic Party, although Neumann was moderate and politically active—working with unions and worker education programs—while Kirchheimer focused his energies on a radical critique of Weimar liberal democracy closer to an orthodox Leninist position. After the National Socialists came to power, Neumann fled to London and Kirchheimer to Paris, where he became a research associate of the Institute’s branch office there. Neumann and Kirchheimer were both offered part-time positions as legal experts at the Institute’s main office in New York in 1936–1937 and both accepted. Both wrote several essays and numerous book reviews on topics in legal and political theory for the Zeitschrift and both participated actively in Institute discussions during the following years. With the serious reduction in operations at the Institute in 1941, both were forced to look for work elsewhere and both were eventually hired—along with Marcuse—to do intelligence work on National Socialist Germany for the Office of Strategic Studies, a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. They departed from the Institute without ever being integrated into its inner circle, because of theoretical differences that separated them from Horkheimer and Adorno, such as their relative indifference to psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, the role both played at the Institute with their writings, and in internal discussions that shaped the development of Critical Theory (even if only negatively), was significant enough to warrant inclusion here. Neumann 1942 is his famous and influential study of historical emergence and social composition of National Socialism. Neumann 1957 and Scheuerman 1996 are collections of his most important essays on legal and political theory. Kirchheimer and Rusche 1939 provides a relatively orthodox Marxist theory of the relationship between law, punishment, and social domination. His most substantial mature work, Kirchheimer 1961 is a historical study of the instrumentalization of law for political ends. Kirchheimer 1961 and Scheuerman 1996 provide a sampling of Kirchheimer’s essays on legal and political theory over the entire course of his life. Scheuerman 1994 is an reliable, scholarly introduction to Neumann and Kirchheimer’s thought.

• Kirchheimer, Otto. 1961. Political justice: The use of legal procedure for political ends. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

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  Kirchheimer’s most substantial mature work is a far-ranging analysis of the ways in which courts and the legal system more generally have been used in modern times as an instrument by those holding political power to suppress their enemies. Drawing on a wide number of specific case studies from both constitutional and authoritarian regimes—mainly from 19th- and 20th-century Western Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union—he compares the mechanisms at work in the political instrumentalization of law in these different contexts.

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• Kirchheimer, Otto. 1969. Politics, law and social change: Selected essays. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

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  This is the most complete collection of Kirchheimer’s essays in English. It includes several key essays he wrote in the late 1920s and 1930s before he became associated with the Institute for Social Research, but only one of the three essays he published in the Institute’s journal: “The Legal Order of National Socialism.” Most of the remaining essays—several of which analyze the new political and legal order in postwar Western Europe—were published in American academic journals between 1940 and 1966.

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• Kirchheimer, Otto, and George Rusche. 1939. Punishment and social structure. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

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  The first study sponsored by the Institute that was published in English, Kirchheimer and Rusche analyze the ways in which forms of punishment of criminals have been largely determined by the relations of production existing in different societies and different historical periods. Although more traditionally Marxist in orientation than most of the Institute’s work, their arguments that punishment and even cruelty are always socially determined, does evince important affinities to Horkheimer’s work from this time.

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• Neumann, Franz. 1942. Behemoth: The structure and practice of National Socialism. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

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  Drawing on the broad knowledge of German society he gained as a labor lawyer in Weimar, a member of the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s, and a researcher for the American Office of Strategic Studies during the war, Neumann argues that National Socialism is best understood as a disorganized struggle between different power blocks—most importantly, the Nazi Party, the military, big industry, and the state bureaucracy. Neumann’s empirically rich study influenced a whole generation of scholarship on National Socialism.

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• Neumann, Franz. 1957. The democratic and the authoritarian state: Essays in political and legal theory. Edited by Herbert Marcuse. New York: Free Press.

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  Edited and introduced by Neumann’s friend and colleague, Herbert Marcuse, this valuable collection brings together eleven of the most important essays and lectures on political and legal theory that Neumann composed from the late 1930s until his untimely death in 1954.

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• Scheuerman, William. 1994. Between the norm and the exception: The Frankfurt School and the rule of law. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

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  This chronologically structured study provides a good introductory overview of the evolution of the political and legal theories of Neumann and Kirchheimer from the 1920s through the postwar period. Scheuerman also provides a rich discussion of both men’s complex and changing theoretical relationship to the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the “crown jurist of Nazi Germany.”

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• Scheuerman, William E. 1996. The rule of law under siege: Selected essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

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  This collection of nine essays on political, legal, and constitutional theory by Neumann and Kirchheimer—ably edited and introduced by one of the leading scholars of their work—is divided chronologically and thematically into three sections: responses to conservative revolutionary critiques of the Weimar Republic by Carl Schmitt and others; critical analyses of the destruction of the rule of law under National Socialism; and postwar reflections on democratic theory.

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Leo Lowenthal

Like Adorno and Fromm, Leo Lowenthal (b. 1900–d. 1993) was born and raised in an upper-middle-class, assimilated Jewish family in Frankfurt and he became friends with both of his future institute colleagues already in his teens. He was also friends with Felix Weil, who provided the funds necessary to found the Institute in 1923. Introduced to Horkheimer and Pollock by Weil, Lowenthal became a part-time associate of the Institute in 1926 and was promoted to full membership in 1930. In the 1930s he published a number of essays in the Institute’s journal on the sociology of European literature. He also served as the chief copy editor of the journal. In the 1940s he worked for the Office of War Information in Washington, DC, but also participated actively in the Institute’s empirical research projects during and after the war. Unlike Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock, but like Fromm and Marcuse, Lowenthal chose to remain in the United States after the war. In 1949 he was hired by the US State Department to develop a research department to evaluate the effects of “Voice of America” broadcasts abroad. In 1956 he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as a professor of sociology until his retirement in 1968. Even after retiring, Lowenthal continued to offer—well into the 1980s—a sociology seminar that was a highlight of the department’s intellectual life and provided an important bridge to the Institute’s earlier work. Lowenthal 1984 and Lowenthal 1986 collect his most important essays on literature from the 1920s to the 1960s. A coauthored contribution to the Institute’s Studies in Prejudice series, Lowenthal 1987 is a—still highly relevant—psychoanalytically informed content analysis of the speeches and pamphlets of right-wing populist agitators in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Jay 1987 is a very readable collection of autobiographical reflections, which shed much light not only on Lowenthal’s life, but also the history of the Frankfurt School as a whole.

• Jay, Martin, ed. 1987. An unmastered past: The autobiographical reflections of Leo Lowenthal. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

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  This is a collection of essays, interviews, and autobiographical reflections by Lowenthal, edited and introduced by his friend, former colleague and veteran Frankfurt School scholar, Martin Jay. Of particular value here are Lowenthal’s autobiographical reflections, which cover his entire long life and provide fascinating insights into the culture and politics of Weimar Germany, the history of the Institute for Social Research, and the predicaments facing European émigré scholars and intellectuals in the United States.

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• Lowenthal, Leo. 1984. Literature and mass culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

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  In contrast to his Literature and the Image of Man, which addresses literature as a form of art, the essays collected in this volume document Lowenthal’s lifelong study of literature as a form of commodity production, which can provide important insights into powerful social and social-psychological tendencies among the masses. Written between the 1930s and 1960s, they highlight Lowenthal’s important contributions to the study of popular culture and communications.

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• Lowenthal, Leo. 1986. Literature and the image of man. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

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  This volume brings together a collection of Lowenthal’s essays on the history of the modern European drama and novel from the 16th to the early 20th century, with a second, more focused collection of essays on the history of the German novel in the 19th century. Together, these essays—most of which were written in the 1930s and 1940s—offer an excellent overview of Lowenthal’s sociological interpretation of modern European literature in terms of the emergence, consolidation, and authoritarian transformation of bourgeois society.

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• Lowenthal, Leo. 1987. False prophets: Studies on authoritarianism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

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  The title of this volume alludes to Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman’s contribution to the Studies in Prejudice series (discussed in Collective Empirical Studies of the Institute for Social Research), which is reprinted here. The volume also contains an essay Lowenthal first published in 1946 on the social-psychological causes and consequences of terror in modern societies; an excerpt from the Institute’s never published study of anti-Semitism among American workers during World War II; and Lowenthal’s previously unpublished contribution to the introduction of the Institute’s Studies on Authority and Family from the mid-1930s.

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• Lowenthal, Leo. 1989. Critical Theory and Frankfurt theorists. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

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  This somewhat eclectic volume contains a number of Lowenthal’s essays from the 1920s on German-Jewish scholars and intellectuals, including Heinrich Heine and Sigmund Freud; a number of lectures from the period 1978–1983 on—among other things—Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Goethe; a fairly substantial selection of his correspondences with Horkheimer and Adorno from the 1934 to 1954; and two conversations from 1979—the first on scholarly biography and the second on the reception of Critical Theory.

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Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is included here as the only undisputed member of the “second generation” of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, due to his direct personal ties with the members of the “first generation,” the substantial impact of his writings in a wide variety of fields, and his imposing stature as a public intellectual within and beyond Europe. Habermas’s first serious contact with Critical Theory came in 1956, when he attended two lectures on Freud that Herbert Marcuse delivered in Frankfurt. That same year Habermas became Adorno’s assistant in the Philosophy Department of the J. W. Goethe University—a position he held until 1959. After finishing a second dissertation at the University of Marburg under the direction of Wolfgang Abendroth and receiving a teaching position at the University of Heidelberg, Habermas returned to Frankurt in 1964 to take over Horkheimer’s professorship in philosophy and sociology. Habermas would participate actively in a number of different institute research projects and discussions in the late 1960s. In 1971 he accepted a position as the co-director of the Max Planck Institut in Starnberg, Germany, where during the following ten years he completed work on his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984). In 1982 he returned to Frankfurt and reassumed his professorship of philosophy and sociology until his retirement in 1995. Habermas 1989 offers a glimpse of his work when his thinking was closest to the model of early Critical Theory developed by Horkheimer in the 1930s, before Habermas took a linguistic, pragmatic, proceduralist and normative turn. Habermas 1971 and Habermas 1975 are his most representative philosophical and sociopolitical works from the middle phase of his career. Habermas 1970 documents his engagement with and critical response to the New Left and the protest movements in Germany in the late 1960s. Habermas 1984 and Habermas 1987b are the two volumes of his ambitious magnum opus of modern, philosophically informed social theory. Habermas 1987a documents his rather polemical engagement with French postmodern and post-structuralist thought (and its German precursors) in the 1980s. Habermas 1996 is his mature magnum opus on political theory. Habermas 2003 draws on his discourse ethics to stake out a position in the debates about biotechnology and genetic intervention.

• Habermas, Jürgen. 1970. Toward a rational society: Student protest, science and politics. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon.

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  This collection contains Habermas’s essays on the student protest movements of the 1960s as well as a number of more theoretical essays on the practical and ideological roles played by science and technology in modern capitalist societies, including a widely discussed critical response to Herbert Marcuse’s theory of technological rationality.

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• Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. Knowledge and human interests. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon.

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  Although Habermas would later criticize and abandon the theoretical framework he develops here as remaining within the dominant Western philosophical paradigm of consciousness philosophy, this was his first major philosophical work and provides important insights into his critique of positivism, his understanding of the relationship between theory and practice, and his interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis (and its implications for social theory).

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• Habermas, Jürgen. 1975. Legitimation crisis. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon.

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  Although dated by the elaboration of many of its arguments in The Theory of Communicative Action in the early 1980s and in other writings since then, this study still provides valuable insight into the foundations of Habermas’s critical social theory in a relatively accessible form. Perhaps more than anywhere else in his writings, Habermas’s continuities and breaks with the Marxist tradition are spelled out here, particularly in his expansion of the concept of crisis from the economic to the political and sociocultural spheres.

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• Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The theory of communicative action. Vol. 1, Reason and the rationalization of society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon.

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  The first volume of Habermas’s magnum opus is based on a critique of Max Weber’s theory of Occidental rationality and societal rationalization. In contrast to Georg Lukács and Horkheimer and Adorno, whose criticisms of Weber’s reduction of substantial reason to means-ends rationality he largely shares, Habermas seeks to develop a positive theory of communicative reason—based on the validity claims inherent in language use—that can provide a normative basis for a critical theory of society.

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• Habermas, Jürgen. 1987a. The philosophical discourse of modernity: Twelve lectures. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

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  Based on a series of lectures he gave at the university in Frankfurt in 1983–1984, this study marks Habermas’s first serious engagement with French post-structrualism and some of its intellectual predecessors in Germany (Nietzsche and Heidegger). Habermas accuses Foucault, Derrida, and others of the “performative contradiction” of criticizing reason, while at the same relying upon its inherent discursive norms.

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• Habermas, Jürgen. 1987b. The theory of communicative action. Vol. 2, Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon.

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  In the second volume of his magnum opus, Habermas reformulates Marx’s theory of reification in terms of the colonization of communicatively formed structures of the lifeworld by the abstract and non-linguistically mediated imperatives of the system, which include both the market and the state. Building upon the model introduced in the first volume of modernity as the differentiation of value spheres, Habermas reinterprets social domination in terms of the illegitimate incursion of one sphere into the realm of another.

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• Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of Bourgeois society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

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  Originally published in 1962, Habermas’s first major study examines the development of a critical public sphere that accompanied the rise of bourgeois society in Great Britain, France, and Germany during the 17th and 18th centuries. He also attempts to demonstrate how the function of the public sphere was transformed over the course of the 19th century from rational debate to passive consumption of politics and culture as result of the consolidation and conservative transformation of bourgeois society.

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• Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

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  Written between 1985 and 1991, Habermas’s magnum opus on political and legal theory examines the philosophical foundations of modern democracy and attempts to reformulate classical Enlightenment political principles in a manner appropriate to highly differentiated modern societies. Proceeding through a synthesis of the two dominant political traditions of modern Western societies, liberal democracy and civic republicanism, he argues that the central concepts of both—individual rights and popular sovereignty, respectively—are mutually dependent and equally necessary.

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• Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. The future of human nature. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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  An excursion into debates about biotechnology and genetic intervention, Habermas seems to reverse some of his earlier arguments here that instrumental reason is the only way in which humans can interact with nature and to move closer to a “mindfulness of nature in the subject” that characterized much of the earlier Critical Theorists’ writing. He argues, in particular, that unborn human fetuses must be considered as future members of communicative communities and thus have certain rights that parents may not violate.

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