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As George Friedman of Stratfor introduced the Frankfurt School
and the Crisis of Modernity:
The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt
School (1981)
The Frankfurt School was both an institution and a mode of thought.
The Institute of Social Research was founded in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923, and it reached maturity in 1931 when Max Horkheimer became its director. The Institute continued its work in exile in the United States
following Hitler’s rise to power and did not return to Germany until 1950.
During this time, the Institute’s members developed a unique and
powerful critique of modern life. This critique served as a basis for much of the student movement of the 1960s and thus had consequences beyond academe, where the Frankfurt School’s brilliance and erudition
made a lasting and powerful impression.
This book is dedicated to explicating the thought of the Frankfurt School
and to understanding the significance of that thought. I have chosen to study four men who were instrumental in developing the mode of thought known collectively as the Frankfurt School: Walter Benjamin, Theodor W.
Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. My hope in carrying out this study was to learn more about the nature of the modern crisis. I have not been disappointed. The Frankfurt School proved to be among
its supreme explicators.
It is difficult to speak of the crisis of modernity, since it is difficult to
speak of ourselves. To describe modernity’s crisis is even more challenging. Still we all seem to know that there is something seriously wrong with our time and we know as well that not all epochs have felt
such an odd lack of self-confidence. Perhaps we might start by considering the origins of modernity’s lack of self-confidence.
We moderns have felt our greatest pride in our reason and in the
attendant triumphs of our sciences. From the Enlightenment onward we had the firm belief that reason and science were paths to redemption. Now, in our time, we have discovered the darker side of reason. We have
found that along with great triumphs, reason has also brought great brutality. The Frankfurt School set itself the task of defining the relationship between reason and brutality.
Leo Strauss teaches us that modernity began with Machiavelli, who
made the first argument against a transcendent philosophy. In doing so, he also made the argument for reason as an instrument in service to the
interests of humanity. Machiavelli was in part attempting to abolish the estrangement between philosophy and existence, between reason and reality.
Hegel brought Machiavelli’s project to fruition. When he argued that the
real and rational had become one, he claimed that humanity had triumphed over the depredations of reality. Karl Marx affirmed the essence of Hegel’s position, while substituting the proletariat for the
German Civil Service as the solution to the riddle of history. Marx shared Hegel’s confidence that there was such a thing as history, that history possessed a riddle, and that the riddle could be solved.
Modern philosophy, therefore, is marked by a radical self-confidence. It
believes it possible that all things could be as they ought to be. The outward signs of modernity – its technologies, both industrial and social –
are testimonies to this self-confidence. What binds together medicine, civil engineering, city planning, and the disparate other sciences that rule
us today is their confidence that they have a wisdom sufficient and proper to the task of remaking nature in the image of their imaginings.
Modern thought is paradoxical, however. As the sciences it created
triumph, its sensibilities rebel. The question is this: if the real has become rational and the rational real, then what is there left for men to
do? Philosophy, poetry, war, and politics – their greatness was rooted in the tragic opposition between the ideal and real. With that tension abolished, the abysmal question must be faced: is there a place left in
this world for man? Or is man, the great critic of the world and of mankind, to be reduced, with his philosophy and art, to a mere instrument supporting a world at peace with itself?
The triumph of modern reason leaves us, as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
show, with the problem of the function and limits of man in a world in which man’s function as a critic has been abolished and in which limits that were thought to be natural and eternal have been overcome. We
late moderns, who live after the triumph of reason, face the problem of creating – or, more precisely, resurrecting – a critical theory that will tell
us once more about those things that ought to be as well as about administering things as they already are.
In short, the modern sensibility faces a crisis of success. Reason has
given us that which it promised, power over nature. The question that remains, the abysmal question, is what it is that it is now proper to wish for. To be human we must want something, but what are the grounds
upon which we are now to make our choice?
It is perhaps easier to begin with what we would not wish to choose. For
this a single name sufficed for the Frankfurt School: Auschwitz. At Auschwitz the awful problem of modernity made itself evident. If modernity reached its most extreme and self-confident point when Hegel
declared that the real had become rational and the rational real, Auschwitz revealed the emptiness of that claim.
At Auschwitz, the alliance between the peculiarly modern vision of reason
as primarily an instrument of administration and the brutality that sprang from such reason was revealed. Hegel’s own countrymen had demonstrated reason’s potential for evil when it became a tool of rulers
in a world that had banished critical reason. The terrible novelty of Auschwitz was that passionless slaughter became an end in itself. Always before, men had killed as a means to an end or as an end in itself when
they were moved by passion. Only at Auschwitz – that is, only with the Nazis – did the slaughter of innocents become both an end in itself and a
matter of detached, reasoned, and authoritative state policy. The death of children has always been incidental to war. With the Nazis, the death of
children became war’s end, its justification. Thus, Auschwitz is the appropriate symbol for modernity because it combined reason and madness in such a way as to make it impossible to separate them.
Auschwitz was a rational place, but it was not a reasonable one. It was
rational in that it was efficient and sophisticated for its given task. It would not have been practical or even seriously conceivable except for
the technologies of modern science. Furthermore, except for the modern belief that thought and practice can be identical (a belief that is the basis
of technology), the translation of Hitler’s nightmare image into practical reality would have been inconceivable.
 The power of modern reason is that it feels itself honor bound to take everything seriously. This
openness to everything is the result of our peculiar skepticism, in which we are reverent about nothing. The modern feels not only that everything is possible but also that all things possible are practical. The
destruction of the Jews had always been imaginable. With Hitler it became practical. The skepticism of scientific reason sapped our critical reason. Our obligation to take the awful seriously meant that we were
not free simply to condemn. Our social scientists and philosophers felt that there was something terribly wrong at Auschwitz, but their methodologies, their rational procedures, did not allow their
personal revulsion to be turned into scientific principle. Their methods required neutrality. Revulsion was reduced to value judgments. Since moral values were viewed as irrational, and the irrational has no
place in the scientific mode of thought, our social scientists had to be open to the suspicion that there was nothing demonstrably wrong with Auschwitz.
Not only was nothing sacred, but all things had possible merit. Reason
denied itself the right to an a priori revulsion at Auschwitz. Modernity’s reason led us into a fully unreasonable condition in which the common sense of the humane tradition had to be denied. It was this
unreasonable rationality, this modern paradox, that was the great concern of the Frankfurt School.
The project of the Frankfurt School centered on a question that Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer posed for themselves at the beginning of the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), “why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”[1]
For Adorno and Horkheimer, the reason for the descent into barbarism was shrouded in mystery, but the barbarism was not accidental. The fundamental assumption of the Frankfurt School
was that all things had causes and that things human had an order and thus a meaning. The Frankfurt School denied modernity’s complacent certainty of its progressive excellence
but affirmed modernity’s confidence that all things human could be known, or at least sensed, however dark their origins.
This is the paradoxical power of the Frankfurt School. It lay in denying
the superficial in modernity while affirming its essence. Over and over again, the Frankfurt School condemned modernity’s sense of itself without denying its project. The concerns of the Frankfurt School were not
reason as such but the rationality of the twentieth century, not equality but mass society, not the conquest of nature but its rape. This attempt to draw a distinction between a thing and its aura was the essential
problematic of the Frankfurt School. This effort involved the School in an assault on philistinism.
Modern radicalism in the West appears to us a movement of
intellectuals, both within and without the university. These intellectuals have been perpetually bemused at the indifference of the mass to its importunements. No amount of complex theorizing can conceal the fact
that it is the intellectual and not the working class which resonates to the critique of bourgeois life. Workers have no quarrel, in principle, with the
bourgeois. Theirs is a debate between people of the same sort. Wealth and comfort motivate both; the issue between them is the technical one of distribution and, as such, is soluble.
Between bourgeois and intellectual there yawns an abyss, however, for
their debate is between kinds of men. The bourgeois is obsessed with use and ornamentation and cares little for reflection. The intellectual is obsessed with a graceful and reflective ornamentation, which is
appreciated for its useless beauty. The intellectual looks upon the bourgeois with contempt and fear because the dull bourgeois, buttressed by the unassailable standard of usefulness and bolstered by the strength
of an unreflected life, is impregnable. His children, however, are not. Without reflection, the bourgeois trains his children to be ornaments to
his life. As ornaments, the children, are, by their nature, graceful and useless. They become intellectuals, finding personal affirmation in the vivid contempt they feel for their fathers.
Thus, bourgeois and intellectual engage in an ongoing and utterly
unequal struggle. Each triumphs absolutely. In generation after generation of modernity – Voltaire, Flaubert, Marx – the intellectuals absolutely reject the bourgeois. In graceful theory, they lay bare the
emptiness of bourgeois life. Alas, aside from a mild unease or a titillating self-loathing, the bourgeois is unaware of defeat. By nature, they do rather than reflect. Their victory is absolute in their own realm.
They look on the intellectuals now with benign con-tempt, now with a savage fury. The worker, who used to deal with whichever side promised more, now deals with whichever side de-livers the goods. The triumph of
the bourgeoisie is that they deliver.
That they deliver and no more condemns the bourgeois in the eyes of
the intellectual. What the intellectual loathes far more than human suffering is human indifference to it. The philistinism of the bourgeois
sensibility and not bourgeois practice itself is what nauseates intellectuals and drives them to their radicalism.
This repugnance lies at the heart of the Frankfurt School. Their project,
in part, was to teach the children of the bourgeoisie, sent to them to become ornaments to their dull fathers’ lives, to take arms against the
emptiness of those lives. As the true progenitors of the children’s revolt of the 1960s, the Frankfurt School took on as its political project an
attack on bourgeois philistinism. Their loathing was not for poverty but for the affluent society, not for brute suffer-ing but for subliminal dehumanization. Aesthetics and not economics was their political arena.
This is not said to denigrate the Frankfurt School. On the contrary, it is praise for their singular insight into the true rather than mythical functioning of politics in the twentieth century.
The essence of bourgeois hubris is in its assumption that nothing is
beyond the reach of bourgeois reason. The bourgeois thus attempt to administer the very souls of men, molding them to their standards. Without reflecting on what it does, bourgeois reason acts to distort men,
making them less than they could be. To the Frankfurt School, bourgeois unrefiectiveness and bourgeois pride are one, rendering bourgeois life horrible as well as contemptible. Without thought, the bourgeois attacks
the sacred and conquers it for the profane. The Frankfurt School meant to resurrect the sacred, keep it from being sullied by the profane, and arm it to triumph over the profane.
This was their great gamble. That their understanding of the notion
‘bourgeois’ was primarily aesthetic rather than social or economic can be seen in their treatment of orothodox Marxism. Both Social Democracy
and the Soviet model were criticized by the Frankfurt School for failing to liberate man authentically and radically. Their failures had to do not so
much with their concrete political understandings as with the sensibilities they engendered. Both movements elevated the prosaic above the sacred. Both had the idea of consequential effort at their heart. This
notion of consequentiality, the desperate desire to have an impact upon the concrete substance of history, led them to compromise. Both were willing to defeat the bourgeois as men but at the price of allowing the
bourgeoisie to triumph over them in principle. As Blum and Stalin prevailed politically, they succumbed to the bourgeois theory of consequential and unreflected activity. Work as an end in itself,
indifference to the renewed sensibility of being human, and rejection of authentic liberation of the senses as infantile romanticism – these formed the historic compromise between the bourgoisie and its orthodox
socialist opponents. Thus part of the Frankfurt School’s project against the bourgeoisie was to undermine the Old Left. A merely political triumph
was intolerable and, indeed, was a more radical evil as it robbed the opposition of its angry strength. The triumph needed to be an aesthetic one; the bourgeois practice of being unreflectively human had to be
replaced by a humane understanding of humanity itself.
Thus the Frankfurt School must be understood as the most radical and
thoroughgoing instance of the intellectuals’ struggle against the bourgeoisie. Although they appropriated Marxism as the most explicit critique of bourgeois life, almost any antibourgeois aspect of
twentieth-century intellectual thought was apt to be pressed into service. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Spengler were as much part of the artillery of
the Frankfurt School as Marx or Hegel. Even such an extreme bourgeois as Freud was not beyond appropriation, as long as one of his ideas could be turned against his kind. Judaism, the most extreme instance of
antimodernity in the Western tradition, was appropriated as the ground from which to resurrect the sacred in order to undermine the profanity of bourgeois life.
Since the project of the Frankfurt School so largely involved
appropriation rather than creation, we must ask of them the question that Nietzsche made salient concerning all thought: were they philosophers or scholars? This is not a trivial distinction, for how the
question is answered determines in part how seriously the Frankfurt School is to be taken. But it is not an easy question to answer, inasmuch as it is not clear whether philosophy is any longer possible.[2]
I would say that the Frankfurt School was not a philosophic movement
but a scholarly one. Whether or not a new transcendental philosophy was possible, a retroactive act was possible: the realm of the transcendental
could be resurrected. To effect this resurrection, those who had rendered philosophy problematic would first have to be enlisted in the enterprise.
The Frankfurt School recognized that it is necessary to know philosophy in order to become philosophic. Thus a philosophic insight into the nature of
the historical crisis led them to undertake the highest task of scholarship: explication.
Critical Theory, the method of the Frankfurt School, was first concerned
with the explication of the text. But the purpose of explication was not profane; it did not represent a surrender to the preceding and existent
moments but rather was intended to defy them. Its task was nothing less than to comprehend the crisis of modernity from every perspective and to appropriate the soul of modernity, as that soul was congealed in the
philosophic language of the age. Much that was written by the Frankfurt School thus appears distant and unengaged, the work of disinterested scholars. Under the apparently dispassionate exegesis moved a radical
purpose: to comprehend modernity in order to undermine it. Behind the Frankfurt aestheticism lurked true politics, a politics of prin-ciple rather than of mere effectiveness.
We can see, therefore, two separate if related causes that brought the
Frankfurt School to disengage from conventional political life and to engage in a life of scholarship. The first was the recoil of the fastidious
intellectual against the profane activity of bourgeois life. This first motive is important in understanding the social forces that created a class of
men such as the Frankfurt School. The second motive for the entry into scholarship was the desire to resurrect philosophy. Only an act of will,
directed in the only direction that history seemed to have left open to the will, the past, seemed effec-tive. Those of the Frankfurt School became
scholars in order to use the philosophic strength of the past dialectically in order to destroy the past that had destroyed philosophy and, with it,
justice. This second reason explains further the strange alliance that the Frankfurt School forged between such disparate thinkers as Marx and Nietzsche. In part, the perceived commonality was the shared loathing of
bourgeois life, but in greater part the appeal to them came from the desire to appropriate the strength of all who had created the crisis discovered at Auschwitz.
Before turning to examine the nature and the genesis of the thought of
the Frankfurt School, we should address the methodological question raised in a study of this sort: is it legitimate to great a number of men,
each a discrete scholar in his own right, as a collectivity? Were this study intended primarily as a work of intellectual history, this would be a
relatively unimportant question; intellectual history, properly concerned with the flow of ideas, can legitimately deal with groups of people united
institutionally or personally, demonstrating their relationships. The Frankfurt School members’ institutional and personal affinities would be,
to the intellectual historian, prima facie justification for treating them as a group. Since intellectual history is primarily concerned not with the idea
itself but with the genesis, relationship, and impact of the idea, any violence done to the idea itself, while discomforting, is not fatal to the study. The idea is secondary to the event of the idea.
This book, however, does not intend to be intellectual history.[3] It is
concerned primarily with the ideas of the Frankfurt School and with their moment in intellectual history primarily as the ideas themselves are revealed and clarified. This book is intended as a
systematic treatment of the thought of the Frankfurt School. Melding discrete elements into one intellectual event would here be il-legitimate if the idea itself were damaged; although
manipulation of an idea – its abstracted deformation – might serve to clarify its external relationships, manipulation would clearly not aid in understanding the idea itself. Thus a defense
must be made of a work entitled “The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School,” as opposed to one called “The Political Philosophies of Marcuse, Adorno, et al.”
This defense is doubly important because this book will continually
assume mutual support and mutual responsibility among the various figures of the School. It will use the position of one thinker to clarify the position of another and, more dangerously, hold one thinker (at times
and with great caution) responsible for the thoughts of another. A defense of collectivity, then, is crucial and must preface this book.
The first ground of justification is also the simplest. Those associated
with the Frankfurt School shared long-term memberships in a formal institution as well as lifelong friendships. Each of those discussed, with the exception of Walter Benjamin, had a formal relationship with the
Institute, sharing its declared commonality of purpose. By itself, however, this relationship is not enough to justify treating them as a whole.
The avowed purpose of the Frankfurt Institute made it different from
other institutions. It was not merely a refuge for scholars. Rather, it was a systematic project of scholars from diverse disciplines united by the
intention of creating an authentically critical theory. The Frankfurt School comprised a core of men involved in a systematic effort to formulate a
theoretical exegesis of the sociocultural crisis of the contemporary world and to prepare the theoretical ground for practical activity.
The Frankfurt Institute saw its project as a shared and collaborative one.
Aside from a number of studies around which the School organized itself and which gave them a formal collaborative unity, there was collaboration on the formulation of the tenets of Critical Theory. For example, the
opening statements concerning Critical Theory were written jointly in two successive articles by Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. Even more significantly, Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno together wrote the seminal
work of the School, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which sets forth the problematic that served as the basis of the School’s enterprises. Finally,
Walter Benjamin was closely linked to the Institute al-though he never formally joined it; he published a number of articles in the Zeitschrift and
selected Adorno to serve as his literary executor, along with Gershom Scholem.
More important than either institutional or obvious links such as the joint
authorship of books was the open and continual interchange of ideas. Horkheimer’s cultural criticism showed up consistently in Marcuse’s work;
Benjamin’s analysis of the structure of art in mass society was replicated by Adorno; Marcuse’s Freudianism was later reflected in both Adorno and
Horkheimer. The examples are numerous and are explicated later in this book. What is important here is that the School shared a sense of joint scholarship, engaged in joint projects, and consistently transferred
insights and ideas to the point that considering any member alone would do graver damage to the integrity of this book than treating the members as a whole.
Clearly, each served distinct functions; also, at certain points, they
disagreed, although more usually there was disagreement on degree or emphasis rather than on any substantive element. Differences are dealt with as necessary. But what is of first significance in a study of the
Frankfurt School is not their disagreements but their profound unities. These scholars were craftsmen engaged in an enormous and workmanlike project; they and their work must be treated as a whole
because the parts derive their greatest meaning from the whole.
A more important issue than commonality might be selecting whom to
include and whom to exclude. The chief figures included are Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Excluded are Karl Mannheim, Karl Wittfogel, and Erich Fromm. An
argument could be made for the exclusion of some of the first group (particularly Benjamin) and the inclusion of some from the second group (particularly Fromm). I have, however, reasons for my selection.
An exegesis of the texts of political theory (as opposed to a work of
primarily intellectual history, such as that of Martin Jay) requires some limit. Careful treatment of the work of all of the members associated at
one time or another would result in a bulk that would make a systematic treatment of the Frankfurt School impossible. Some associates had to be included and some excluded lest violence be done to all their work.
The problem was to select those with the greatest bearing on the
political philosophy of the School over the longest time. Wittfogel and Mannheim, therefore, are not included for two reasons. First, these men dealt with political things, sometimes on a highly abstract level, but
neither their intention nor method was philosophic. They were almost exclusively sociological in method and descriptive in intent. Each of them (and others like them) did address the general question of Critical
Theory; each was influenced by and in turn influenced the founders of Critical Theory; but each in the end was peripheral to the formulation of the general critique of modern society. Neither was fundamentally
involved in the search for a historical solution to that society. Second, the relationships of Wittfogel and Mannheim to the Institute were shorter
than those of people selected for intense study. Wittfogel formally broke with the school (he ultimately became a witness for Joseph McCarthy) and Mannheim also left, although in a less dramatic way. Like others not
treated here, they were peripheral to the school’s main work.
Fromm was one of those who ultimately drifted away from the group and
so is excluded here. The causes of his break were complex. The immediate occasion was a disagreement concerning a theory of Freud on patriarchy, that Fromm included in his patriarchical/matriarchical dichotomy.[4] In the end, the Frankfurt School lumped Fromm with
the neo-Freudian revisionists.[5] The true reason for the split,
however, is best described by Jay: “From his writings alone, it seems evident that Fromm’s sensibility was less ironic than that of the other members of the inner circle, his approach to life less
colored by the aesthetic nuances shared by both Horkheimer and Adorno.[6]” Quite simply, Fromm’s work was too leaden and unsubtle to be truly appreciated by or included in the work of the
Frankfurt School. His treatment of Marx was too cavalier and his handling of Freud too unimaginative to serve in the synthetic creation of a Freudian Marxism, one that would go beyond
popular appeal to achieve scholarly propriety.
Those included in this study had both a lifelong relationship with one
another and an overriding concern with the formulation of a political philosophy (to the extent that such a thing was possible to them at that time). Horkheimer was the second head of the Frankfurt Institute. As
such, he defined its goals and wrote its manifesto: “Traditional and Critical Theory.” Adorno’s intimate relationship with Horkheimer is demonstrated by their coauthorship of the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Marcuse was associated with all of them throughout his life. Moreover, his work in synthesizing Marx and Freud, along with his popularized critiques
of modern society (which took their bearing from the work of the others), demands that he be included.
The most problematic inclusion is that of Benjamin. As I have noted, he
never had a formal relationship with the Frankfurt Institute, nor did he ever formally embrace Critical Theory. I include him because certain elements of his thought had a profound impact on the formulations and
developments of the Frankfurt School and, in particular, on Adorno. Benjamin’s Marxism and effective cultural criticism affected the aesthetic sensibilities of the group. His turn to cultural criticism as a primary
enterprise while he maintained the stance of a committed Marxist strongly influenced the cultural focus of Adorno and Horkheimer. Benjamin was central in elevating the importance of the cultural realm in
Critical Theory. Moreover, his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” gave the Frankfurt School a metaphysical dimension that complemented their thought. Also, his sheer brilliance demands that he be discussed here.
His friendship with Adorno and acquaintance with Marcuse and Horkheimer reinforce this decision. What makes his inclusion imperative, however, despite his formal distance from the School, is the manner in
which the School subtly absorbed both the specifics and the flavor of his teachings. To the Frankfurt School, Benjamin’s metaphysical sensibility
was the buttress of their vision of the problems and possibilities of the world.
Indeed, Benjamin’s sensibilities provide the ground for a study of the
Frankfurt School. Benjamin concluded his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” with the following:
We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The
Torah and the prayers instruct them to remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to soothsayers for
enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.[7]
Marx, in a way, had been a soothsayer. For those who consulted him,
the historical had turned into magic. When history turned against man, in an age of which Auschwitz was the towering symbol, Marx remained magical and his historical magic, black. His students became impotent
against Auschwitz, for history was their totem and Auschwitz was irretrievably historical. Only in a turning backward, in a nostalgia for things that had been properly lost and in a reverence for the past’s
suffering, which had been righteously annihilated, could the magic be stripped away. With the resurrection of mankind’s autonomy, the formula
(magical only in format, coldly rational in ritual) could be found for the invocation of the Messiah, who might, even without human aid, still come in any fragment of time.
This was the sensibility that informed the project of the Frankfurt School.
Marx had become totemic. He had imbued theory with an inhuman magic. This inhuman certainty about the esoteric gave Marxism a terrifying self-confidence, which led to brutal catastrophe. All looked to
the future, ignoring the dead and the dying. The Frankfurt School resurrected nostalgia. It longed for the delicate aesthetic sensibilities of
times well rid of. Its task was to create a paradoxical time in which those sensibilities could flourish and yet be bearable. Thus, it searched for a means to force the coming of the Messiah.
We study the Frankfurt School’s thought, therefore, because those
associated with it resurrected an inkling of the Messianic promise and power. And we study them because they craved the Messianic from the bitterest roots of historical despair. Beyond their other synthetic
accomplishments, beyond their critique of inhuman times, the Frankfurt School must be studied as the response of humans to the inhuman and as the search for the divine within both.
[1] Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xi. Full
citation for this and other works is given in the Bibliography. The dates in the text are those of the original German publications.
[2] The distinction between philosophy and scholarship was one that the Frankfurt School clearly recognized. See
Horkheimer’s Postscript to Critical Theory. That philosophy was higher than scholarship is evident elsewhere in Horkheimer; see for example Eclipse of Reason, p. 162.
[3] Two such histories already exist and are together quite enough. One is Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination; the other
is Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics.
[4] Jay, Dialectical Imagination, p. 101.
[5] See Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 238 – 43.
[6] Jay, Dialectical Imagination, p. 101.
[7] Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 264.
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