THE RISE OF CRITICAL THEORY:

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

PRECURSORS: MARX, WEBER, FREUD
 The FRANKFURT SCHOOL
• An extremely influential school of sociology – part of a wider current of
Marxist thought in Western and Central Europe: WESTERN MARXISM
• Origins: The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research – set up in 1923
• Originally: the study of Marxist theory – concern with the political, social
and economic conditions for social change
• The gradual detachment from Marxist social theory (materialist
determinism) and the emphasis on the cultural manifestations of
capitalism
• Their “critique”: more in the tradition of Kant and Hegel
• Influenced by the theories of Max Weber
• Interest in psychoanalysis – Freud, like Marx, seen as a conceptual
revolutionary – collaboration with The Frankfurt Institute of
Psychoanalysis -- the extension of Freudian explanation from the
individual to history and society
• Their pessimism (“radicals in despair”) reflected the climate of cultural
decline accompanying the rise of Fascism in Europe
Founders: left-wing, upper middle-class German Jewish intellectuals:
THEODOR ADORNO
MAX HORKHEIMER
WALTER BENJAMIN
HERBERT MARCUSE
JURGEN HABERMAS
• The 1930s: the Nazi party's rise to power – the members of the School
were forced to flee to other parts of western Europe and North America.
• In the early 1940s the School was temporarily situated in New York –
returned to Germany in the late 1940s;
• Marcuse stayed on in America after the war – extended the School's
analysis of modern society to post-war American capitalism.
• The Institute was newly founded at the University of Frankfurt in 1951–
in 1955, Adorno and Horkheimer became co-directors
• The appeal of their theories: especially after 1968 – seen as a more
sophisticated form of Marxism
• The development of CRITICAL THEORY – a self-reflective form of
interdisciplinary inquiry into forms of mass communication and culture in
capitalist societies
• The aim: to reveal the social contradictions underlying the emergent capitalist
societies of the time
• The critique of the “scientific and technological rationality” of advanced
industrial societies and the typical ideologies which sustain and strengthen
domination + the analysis and criticism of
• ‘irrational’ beliefs and attitudes in modern society
• Focus on the political economy of the mass media
• “Culture industry” – in capitalist societies, culture: not the realm of freedom and
emancipation, but the locus of ideological manipulation and manufactured
consent
• Max Horkheimer: traditional vs. critical theory: the aim of critical theory is "to
liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”
• A practical, transformative goal: the identification of the mechanisms by which
various systems of domination and dependence entrap human beings and the
emancipation from such systems
Precursors of the Frankfurt
School
Marx, Weber, and Freud
 KARL MARX (1818-1883)
• German philosopher, historian, economist – influenced by socialist
ideas and by Hegelian philosophy
• As a journalist, he propagated socialist revolutionary ideas –
expelled from Germany and France – from 1849 lived in London –
great influence on British socialists
• 1847: The Communist League – upon their request, Marx writes the
Manifesto of the Communist Party (1849), together with FRIEDRICH
ENGELS
• Increasing interest in economic theory – the influence of Adam
Smith and David Ricardo
• 1867: Marx begins writing Das Kapital (Capital. A Critique of
Political Economy) – an exhaustive analysis of “the economic law of
motion of modern society”
• The basic tenet of Marxist philosophy: the material conditions of life determine
conscience.
• “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (The German
Ideology, 1845)
• The economic structure of a society: the forces of production (means of production +
labour power) + the relations of production (social, economic, technological) = the
mode of production
• The social relations between men are bound up with the way in which they produce
their material life.
• The forces and relations of production form the BASE, or the INFRASTRUCTURE of a
certain society
• The particular configuration of the base, at one moment in history, determines the
emergence of particular INSTITUTIONS, whose function is to legitimate the position of
power of the social class which owns the means of production.
• These institutions are closely linked with definite forms of social consciousness
(political, religious, ethical, aesthetic, etc.), which form the IDEOLOGY, whose function
is also to legitimate power.
 INFRASTRUCTURE/BASE of society: the material foundation – the mode of
production (forces+relations of production)
 SUPERSTRUCTURE of society: Institutions + ideology
• Marx and Engels: founders of HISTORICAL-DIALECTIC MATERIALISM as a
theory of the evolution of human society
• This evolution: governed, like nature, by laws independent of men’s will
and conscience.
• Historical progress: the necessary succession of modes of production,
owing to their inherent internal contradictions, which determine
quantitative changes, which, by accumulation, lead to qualitative
changes
• The materialist version of the Hegelian dialectic process – thesis-
antithesis-synthesis.
• Historical evolution: the replacement of an inferior formation with a
superior one
• The succession of social formations will culminate in the overthrowing of
the capitalist mode of production by a socialist revolution, led by the
most progressive social class: the proletariat
• The socialist revolution: a process, not just an event – a transformation
of both the base (the abolition of private ownership of the means of
production), and of the superstructure
• Marxism conceives of society and history in terms of a conflict model,
in which individual roles and identities are shaped by social conflicts
• The motor of history: class struggle
• The proletariat: the class with a vital role in the dialectic progress of
humanity – the agent of revolutionary change
• Its total alienation in capitalist society: strong antithesis to the thesis
of the private property which defines capitalism
• The solution of all contradictions: the advent of the socialist society –
a classless society – and the abolition of private property
• Marx: “Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the
revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary
transition point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the
abolition of all the relationships of production on which they rest, to
the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these
relations of production, to the revolutionising of all the ideas that result
from these social relations.” (The Class Struggles in France, 1848-50)
• WORK/labour: the essence of man, a vital activity through which
man objectifies himself and contemplates himself in a world of his
own creation
• In capitalism, labour is alienated by its transformation into a
COMMODITY, to be bought and sold – i.e. transformed from a
need, the necessary expression of his species-being (his
“humanness”), into the degraded form of a means for the
satisfaction of certain needs
• Alienated labour: a source of unhappiness, of discontent, of bodily
mortification, and spiritual destruction.
• The realm of necessity (the realm of material production, of the
efforts to subdue nature and perpetuate life) vs. the realm of
freedom (beyond alienated work; it will be extended by the
reduction of labour – man will have more time for the development
and fulfillment of his own potentiality as a human being).
• “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is
determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the
very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material
production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his
wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must
do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.
With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of
his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy
these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in
socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their
interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of
being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with
the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to,
and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm
of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is
an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom
forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the
working-day is its basic prerequisite.”
(Marx, Capital, vol. III)
“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the
more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an
ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates.
The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to
the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only
commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and
this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.
This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s
product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the
producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an
object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor.
Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions
this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers;
objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation
as estrangement, as alienation.”
(Marx, “Estranged Labour”, 1844)
• The phenomenon of ALIENATION in capitalism originates in COMMODITY
FETISHISM – the deceptive objectification (a form of “reification” – cf. Georg
Lukacs) of social relations and of the social character of human activities – a
distinguishing feature of the capitalist economy.
• Commodities: any result of human labour – goods or services – offered as a
product for sale on the market; they gain their peculiar nature through market
exchange; their value: not use-value, but EXCHANGE VALUE.
• The labour embodied in these goods becomes valued not for its usefulness, but
for its ability to generate exchange
• “From the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour
assumes a social form” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1). The social character of human
labour emerges only on the market, in the process of commodity exchange.
• In the process of exchange, we equate different products (their values seem to
be “naturally” equal – e.g. “one ton of iron and two ounces of gold”), but also,
without realizing, different kinds of labour that went into the making of those
commodities.
• The value of a commodity “converts every product into a social hieroglyphic” –
the “mysterious”/”mystical character of commodities – “social things whose
qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses”.
• Commodity fetishism /The fetishism of commodities: instead of
perceiving a certain set of relationships among people in an economy,
we see a set of relationships between things.
• The social relationship that creates their equal value disappears from
our consciousness. What is, in fact, a social relation between people
(in capitalism, a relation of exploitation and subordination) assumes
instead "the fantastic form of a relation between things".

In order (…) to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of
religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous
figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both
with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of
commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism
which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are
produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the
production of commodities. (Marx, Capital)
• This obscuring of the real social relationships in the process of
production is the work of ideology
• IDEOLOGY: part of the complex structure of social perception
– it ensures that a certain social situation, a certain
configuration of power in a society appears as “natural” or is
completely obscured
• Ideology creates a FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS (a term actually
used by Georg Lukacs) of the self and of one’s relationship with
history, a sort of veil or filter which screens out or disguises the
“real” social relationships ‒ the subjective consciousness of the
ruling class is taken to be the objective consciousness of the
whole society
• Culture: organized in relation to sets of interests in a society –
dominant interests: the configuration of power
Marx, The German Ideology (1845)
• The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class
which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling
intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at
its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental
production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack
the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are
nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material
relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence
of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the
ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess
among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore,
as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it
is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other
things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the
production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the
ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where
royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and
where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of
powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.”
 Other thinkers on ideology
• ANTONIO GRAMSCI (1891‒1937) ‒ a two-tier model of society: the civil
society and the political society (the State) ‒ hegemony vs. domination
• HEGEMONY: the power exercised by the dominant class by virtue of
consensus and consent ‒ the extension of the values, beliefs and ideals of
the dominant class (i.e. its ideology) at the level of the whole society:
achieved through institutions (universities, state bureaucracies,
corporations, political parties, etc.)
• The innumerable links that are established between these institutions and
the individuals: articulations ‒ points of ideological consensus and consent
‒ they knit the social and cultural life of a society into a tightly woven, stable
fabric
• Direct domination of the state: achieved mainly by its juridical system ‒
expressed directly, by coercion, in times of crisis
• Hegemony: a process, “a complex of experiences, relationships and activities
with specific and changing pressures and limits” (Raymond Williams)
– as lived experience, hegemony has constantly to be defended, renewed,
recreated, and it is continually resisted, challenged, limited.
• Raymond Williams does not define hegemony as false consciousness, or
ideology as manipulation, but as “a sense of reality for most people in a
society” – “not only the conscious system of ideas and beliefs, but the
whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and
dominant meanings and values” (Marxism and Literature, 1977)
• Gramsci: the concept of COUNTER-HEGEMONY‒ forms of resistance
(political or/and cultural) to the all-encompassing hegemonic social net ‒
the significant role played by intellectuals
• Intellectuals: engaged passively or actively in supporting the dominant
system of values and meanings (the dominant ideology), but they are
also the source of counter-hegemonic processes or alternative
hegemonies
• Raymond Williams: “any hegemonic process must be especially alert and
responsive to the alternatives and opposition which question or threaten
its dominance. The reality of cultural process must then always include
the efforts and contributions of those who are in one way or another
outside or at the edge of the terms of the specific hegemony”
• LOUIS ALTHUSSER (1918‒1990) ‒ “Ideology and Ideological
Sate Apparatuses” ‒ ideology: not “false consciousness”, but
the inevitable imaginary ways in which men experience the
real world
• Ideology: the imaginary representations which help us to
make sense of social experience, a conceptual framework
through which men interpret and live the material conditions
in which they find themselves.
– The Ideological State Apparatuses (I.S.A.) – i.e. the media,
the legal, educational, political systems, help sustain the
dominant ideology and to reproduce it, by interpellating
(hailing, greeting) the human subjects through their
specific discourses, thus situating people as SUBJECTS of
ideological discourses.
• RAYMOND WILLIAMS – influential British Marxist critic and cultural analyst –
founder of Cultural Materialism (a literary critical-theoretical approach based
on the legacy of the Frankfurt School) – Culture and Society (1958), The Long
Revolution (1961), Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1975)
– Culture: part of the productive process, not just an element of
superstructure – the materiality of cultural processes
– The interrelatedness of cultural, political, and economic processes – the
institutional forms of culture (e.g. education) contribute to the
“naturalisation” of the given economic and political order
– Cultural practices: the locus of the dynamic intersection of three
ideological phases: dominant, residual, emergent
• Dominant ideologies: embodied in the values of the majority or
emanating from the ruling class – they may incorporate, re-interpret,
and “filter” elements of the past (or actively marginalize them)
• Residual ideologies: derived from earlier stages – reflect a different
social formation – they may remain dominant for some time after the
change in social conditions
• Emergent ideologies: challenge the dominant practices and beliefs –
start at the margins of society and may become dominant (or not)
 MAX WEBER (1864-1920)
• German sociologist, political economist, founder of the study of public
administration
• Sociology: a comprehensive science of social action – his interest: the motives
behind human action – Marx’s theory: a simplified account, disregarding the
complexity of the causal relations between social structures and ideas
• The focus of sociological analysis: on the subjective meanings that attach to
people’s actions within specific socio-historical contexts
 distinction between the nature sciences and the social sciences:
description vs. understanding and interpretation.
Weber identifies four types of social action
a) goal-oriented rational action – goal and means are rationally chosen – e.g. an
engineer who builds a bridge);
b) value-oriented rational action – the goal may not be rational, but is pursued
with rational means – e.g. choosing ascetic self-denial to attain salvation;
c) affective action – goals and means are determined by emotional states rather
than rational considerations – e.g. participation in religious services;
d) traditional action – guided by customary habits of thought – doing something
because that is what has customarily been done
Four corresponding types of LEGITIMATION of a certain social order –
submission to an order may be determined by:
1) Legality – readiness to conform to rational rules, imposed by accepted
procedure)
2) Rational belief in the absolute value of the respective order;
3) Affectual attitudes – e.g. accepting models to imitate;
4) Tradition –belief in the legitimacy of what has always existed
Three types of AUTHORITY – i.e. legitimate forms of domination, i.e. which
the subordinate accept, obey, consider desirable and do not challenge:
 legal-rational
 charismatic
 traditional
• In Weber’s analysis of the issue of power, the emphasis is not on the
dominant, but on the subordinate and their willingness to believe in the
former’s legitimacy
• In modern Western society, behaviour had come to be dominated increasingly by
goal-oriented rationality – the RATIONALISATION of the Western civilisation
• The DISENCHANTMENT of the world: intellectualisation, secularisation –
profound consequences for the political and economic organisation of modern
societies, but also for the spiritual and psychological make-up of the modern self.
• Western man has made CALCULABLE and PREDICTABLE what before had seemed
governed by chance, or by feeling, passion, etc.
• This process of rationalisation of modern societies is accompanied by pervasive
bureaucratisation
• BUREAUCRACY – a set of regulations meant to control activity – it presupposes:
 standardized procedures;
 delimited spheres of duty;
 formal division of power;
 hierarchy
• Bureaucracy: the distinctive mark of the modern era – ensures high EFFICIENCY
in the mobilisation of resources, the centralisation of power, development of
modern technology, calculability of results.
• The efficient application of means to ends
• Disadvantages of bureaucracy: leads to depersonalisation
(compare with Marx’s notion of alienation), and breeds further
rationalisation and bureaucracy
• It generates oligarchy – tremendous power at the top of the
scale – the “iron law”
[The calculability of decision-making] and with it its appropriateness
for capitalism ...[is] the more fully realized the more bureaucracy
"depersonalizes" itself, i.e., the more completely it succeeds in
achieving the exclusion of love, hatred, and every purely personal,
especially irrational and incalculable, feeling from the execution of
official tasks. In the place of the old-type ruler who is moved by
sympathy, favor, grace, and gratitude, modern culture requires for
its sustaining external apparatus the emotionally detached, and
hence rigorously "professional" expert.
Weber’s most famous work: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism (1905) – demonstrates the connection between
the fundamental religious representations of ascetic
Protestantism and the precepts of economic life
• Unlike Marx, Weber concentrates on elements of the
“superstructure”, showing how cultural factors and material
factors enter a relation of mutual determination.
• Weber argues that Puritan ethics and ideas influenced the
development of capitalism.
• Protestant religious doctrines implicitly encouraged a new
type of economic behaviour – “work-and-save” as a religious
duty – the avoidance of acquisitiveness, thriftiness in
consumption – the principle of capitalist accumulation
• The idea of work as CALLING: the earthly, social equivalent for the
believer’s duty to glorify God (omnia in majorem Dei gloriam)
• Calvinism, in particular, and Puritanism in England: the humble
dedication to one’s “calling” is a mark of true faith and the true
Christian way of life
• Profit and wealth are a sign of the grace of God, but wealth must
not be pursued for its own sake – profit must be reinvested, not
spent on idle pleasures
• Paradox: capitalism developed not on the basis of an ethic of greed,
but owing to the ascetic spirit of certain branches of Protestantism,
• Practices related to religious belief: transferred into the s[here of
economic action.
 SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939)
• Medical doctor, neuropsychiatrist, physiologist – founder of psychoanalysis
(psychological theory + therapeutic techniques)
• influential thinker of the early twentieth century
• Complex theory of the human psyche – several overlapping models:
– the economic model – the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure (the
pleasure principle vs. the reality principle)
– the topographic model (the tripartite structure of the psyche into the
conscious, preconscious, and unconscious layers)
– the dynamic/energetic model – the circulation and transformation of the
life-affirming energy: the libido
• Our identities: closely connected with the complex bodily transactions that take
place during our infancy and early childhood.
• This should not be viewed, however, as biological reductionism or as an asocial
model of life – Freud’s theories place strong emphasis on the relation between
individual psychological complexes and the constitution of a certain cultural and
social pattern.
• The central place in Freud’s explanation of the emergence of the
human subject: the Oedipus complex
• The Oedipus complex organizes the structure of relations which gives
us gendered identities and marks the transition from the PLEASURE
PRINCIPLE, dominating our childhood, to the REALITY PRINCIPLE
• The reality principle regulates our adult life and effects our insertion
into an extra-familial pattern (i.e. society) – the transition from Nature
to Culture.
• The insertion into a larger pattern governed by law, morality, social
and religious authority – all connected with the real or symbolical
image of the FATHER –
• Socialisation: made possible only by the REPRESSION of our natural
tendency to pleasure, of the libidinal energy which the infant’s contact
with the maternal body had been producing.
• These energies are to be held in check by containing them in the realm
of the UNCONSCIOUS.
• The UNCONSCIOUS: part of the structure of the human psyche, which
comes into existence owing to the dynamic relation of its three
components, described by Freud in The Ego and the Id (1923): id, ego,
superego.
• The human subject: the EGO – emerges from the Oedipal process – an
agency which opposes and regulates the instinctual drives of the ID (the
unconscious).
• The ego’s function is to mediate between the id and the external world,
to defend the id from external interference and thus avoid unpleasure,
which it does mainly by the tactics of DELAYING GRATIFICATION.
• There is a permanent tension between the id and the ego –
 the id: governed wholly by the pleasure principle – takes no account
of the compatibility between its wishes and the demands of the
external world
 the ego: constantly threatened by the pressure of unacceptable
wishes – it also has to comply with the tyrannical demands of the
superego.
• The SUPEREGO takes shape with the decline of the
Oedipus Complex – it represents the power exercised by
parental and social constraint on the instinctual drives.
• The process of maturation is inconceivable outside the
agency of the superego, which controls our adjustment to
the external world
• The function of the superego: to maintain our “normality”
in a society founded on law, prohibition and authority.
• Maturation, understood as the process of insertion into
the social dimension of life – its high price: the repression
of desire, i.e. of instinctual drives, and the
deferment/delay of gratification – the principles on which
civilisation itself is built.
Civilisation and Its Discontents / Angoasă în civilizaţie (1930)
• Under the pressure of the environment and in order to protect himself from
pain, man reduces his claim to happiness; the pleasure principle is replaced by
the reality principle, whose various mechanisms of avoiding pain give the
individual a higher degree of independence from the environment.
• The building of civilisation: a similar course – its reason: to maximize protection
from pain – in exchange, an important part of man’s libidinal energy is
deflected from the goal of immediate satisfaction – “CIVILISED
RENUNCIATION”
• The libido is displaceable – this makes possible the process of SUBLIMATION,
indispensable for the building of civilisation – the redirection of psychic energy
toward superior activities like scientific work or artistic creation.
• Sublimation might be the very destiny that civilisation imposes to the instincts
• Freud: hostile to “collective illusions” (e.g. religion), to any attempt to correct
the intolerable elements of reality by “chimerical deformations”
• Pessimism about civilisation being capable of ensuring the fulfilment of man’s
ultimate goal, happiness – the impossibility for happiness to be planned or
sought collectively