Institute for Social Research

Institute for Social Research wasthe creation of Felix Weil, who was able to use money from his father'sgrain business to finance the Institut. Weil was a young Marxist who hadwritten his PhD on the practical problems of implementing socialism and waspublished by Karl Korsch.

With the hope of bringingdifferent trends of Marxism together, Weil organised a week-long symposium (the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche)in 1922 attended by Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel, FriedrichPollock and others. The event was so successful that Weil set about erecting abuilding and funding salaries for a permanent institute. Weil negotiated withthe Ministry of Education that the Director of the Institut would be a full professorfrom the state system, so that the Institut would have the status of aUniversity.

Weil himself was an orthodox Marxist, who sawMarxism as scientific; the role of the Institut would be social and historicalresearch mainly on the workers' movement. Indeed, in its early years, theInstitut did fairly orthodox historical research. However, one of Weil'scentral objectives was also cross-disciplinary research, something which the GermanUniversity system made impossible.

Although Georg Lukacs and Karl Korsch bothattended the Arbeitswoche which had included a study of Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy, bothwere too committed to political activity and Party membership to join theInstitut, although Korsch participated in publishing ventures for a number ofyears.

The way Lukacs was obliged to repudiate his History and Class Consciousness,published in 1923 and probably a major inspiration for the work of theFrankfurt School, was an indicator for others that independence from theCommunist Party was necessary for genuine theoretical work.

Friedrich Pollock was one of those who had been involvedwith the Institut from the beginning, and took over the role of Director on thedeath of Carl Grünberg. Pollock was content to concern himself withadministrative matters, but he was also a life-long friend and associate of MaxHorkheimer, who is probably the figure most identified as the leadingrepresentative of the Frankfurt School.

Max Horkheimer [Archive] later himself became Director of theInstitut, and it was Horkheimer who guided the Institut into its innovativeexploration of cultural aspects of the development of capitalism.
See Horkheimer’s opening address on becoming Director.

Karl AugustWittfogel wasa participant from the beginning, but was a Party member and had a moreorthodox, “scientific” view of Marxism. It is Wittfogel who established theclassic Marxist analysis of “Asiatic Despotism.”

Richard Sorge worked at the Instiut, but as itturned out was only there in his role as a Soviet spy.

David Ryazanov [Archive] was assigned to Germany to compilethe writings of Marx and Engels and publish the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe,and worked closely with the Institut.

In 1931/32 a number of psychoanalysts from theFrankfurt Institute of Psychoanalysis and others who were acquainted withmembers of the Institut began to work systematically with the Institut. Theseincluded Franz Borkenau,Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Karl Landauer and Heinrich Meng.

In joining what waspredominantly a “Hegelian-materialist” current of Marxists, these psychologistsgave the development of Marxist theory an entirely new direction, which hasleft its imprint on social theory ever since.

Erich Fromm [Archive]dealt with psychological aspects of social control, delusion and conformity andbecame one of the founders of “socialist humanism”.

Wilhelm Reich developed his own doctrine of sexualliberalism as an antidote to political conformism and social psychosis.

Other young German Communistintellectuals who were associated with the Institut, but after the Nazitakeover, wound up in the United States, were Kurt Lewin andAdolph Löwe.

They all went on to makesignificant contributions to social theory, though only distantly related totheir initial Communist inspirations. Kurt Lewin for instance contributed tothe emergence of group-dynamics and social action theory as specialiseddisciplines. Adolph Lowe made important contributions to the development ofpolitical economy.

Raymond Aron wasa French journalist and sociologist.

Leo Lowenthal [Archive] was one of the early workers at theInstitut whose principal interest was in the sociology of literature.

Later he was joined by theHegelian philosopher Herbert Marcuse [Archive] who was probably the only member ofthe Institut who achieved wide influence among political activists, in the1960s.

When Hitler came to power, theInstitut was closed down, and by various routes, most of the participants inthe Institut regrouped themselves in New York, with a new Institute affiliatedto Columbia University. They continued to publish in German, even though veryfew people would have been reading their work in that language. However, afterthe War, the Institut returned to Frankfurt.

Perhaps two of the most famousfigures who were in the central core of the Institut were Theodor Adorno [Archive] and Walter Benjamin,both renowned for their studies of literature and mass culture which wouldbecome so influential from the 1960s on.

After the Institutre-established itself in Germany after the War, the main figure of the youngergeneration was Jürgen Habermas[Archive] who continued to develop the“critical theory” in the Hegelian tradition of Adorno and Marcuse. Habermas wasinstrumental in the 1960s in developing the theory of “networks,” but in lateryears Habermas has focussed on communicative ethics in the tradition ofImmanuel Kant, and departed not only from the Marxist, but even the Hegeliantradition.

Currently Axel Honneth represents the third generation,continuing the work of Jürgen Habermas, but with a partial return to Hegel,still quite remote from any reading of Karl Marx.

After the isolation andStalinisation of the Soviet Union, and the consequent decline of the CommunistParties in the “West,” the possibilities for the fruitful development ofMarxism as a revolutionary-critical theory in close connection with thepractical-critical activity of the workers movement, became extremelyrestricted.

The current generation ofCritical Theorists, unlike previous generations, is led by women, such as Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib and AgnesHeller:

The intellectuals who foundedthe Frankfurt Institut deliberatively cut out a space for the development ofMarxist theory, inside the “academy” and independently of all kinds ofpolitical party.

The result was a process inwhich Marxism merged with bourgeois ideology. A parallelprocess took place in post-World War Two France, also involving a merging withFreudian ideas. One of the results was undoubtedly an enrichment of bourgeoisideology. In this connection Paul Mattick's Marcuse: One Dimensional Man In Class Society (1972) is worth reading. But also,despite everything, the Frankfurt School makes an important critique oforthodox Marxism, and their work should be taken seriously.