Notes on the Frankfurt School by John Smithin
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Notes on the Frankfurt School
For the ‘Philosophy Café’ –January 25, 2025
‘Social’ Justice?
API Associate Ted Kennedy is going to lead a discussion about the philosophy of the Frankfurt School at the Philosophy Café in January 2025. These are some notes to provide background.
In the Coping with Reality series, last Fall/Winter, Ronen Grunberg and I (John Smithin) started to discuss a rather different idea of the concept of ‘justice’ to what has usually been thought of as ‘fair’ - namely Social Justice.Here the emphasis is squarely on the adjective rather than the traditional meaning of the noun. Justice is supposed to apply mainly to social groupings based on such things (in alphabetical order) as age, class, ethnicity, gender, national origin, physical disability, sexual orientation, religious affiliation - or some other collective attribute. There is much less attention paid to the contribution of each individual to the society. There are very many similar ideas which have gained currency in the last half-century, and more, with labels such as Political Correctness, Intersectionality, Wokeness, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and so forth.
The question we were asking was - how did things get to be this way? Why are these sorts of ideas so popular (at least in some quarters)?
In North America, this is to a large extent the legacy of the so-called ‘Cultural Marxism’ of the Frankfurt School. The next slide illustrates with pictures of two very famous figures associated with the School from California in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis. Marcuse was Davis’s PhD supervisor and mentor at the University of California, San Diego.
The Legacy of the Frankfurt School
After WW1, the emphasis in Marxist intellectual circles in Europe shifted away from ‘Classical Marxism’ (with ideas about the class struggle, ‘workers of the world unite’, etc.), to dealing primarily with social and cultural questions.
The workers did not unite in WW1 - they joined up enthusiastically to fight for their own nations (they were ‘anti-globalist’ in modern terms).
The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia (which actually took place in November according to the Gregorian Calendar) did not conform to the Classical Marxist blueprint at all. With (again) modern hindsight I now think it was more akin to the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ of our own times - facilitated by foreign nations and financing.
In any event, the Marxists needed to find a new victim class, or classes, (e.g., racial minorities, women, gay people, and so on) - whomever they could find.
Two important early thinkers were Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) in Italy, and György Lukács (1885–1971) in Hungary.
Piero Sraffra (1898-1983), a close associate of Gramsci, moved to Cambridge University in the 1920s at the invitation of Keynes.
How These Ideas Came to America?
In 1923 the neo-Marxist Institute for Social Research was founded at Goethe University, Frankfurt .When Hitler’s ‘National Socialist German Workers Party’ (the NAZIS) came to power in Germany in the 1930s, prominent members of the Frankfurt School, most if not all of whom were Jewish, scholars such as Adorno, Fromm, Horkheimer and Marcuse, were exiled to the USA.
There (in the USA) they were well received. There was a sympathetic hearing in New York (e.g., at Columbia University), also in Washington DC - in government service, and in Southern California via Hollywood and the Universities. This is how the ideas came to America.
The role of Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), who remained in the United States after WW2 when his colleagues returned to Germany and eventually retired as a Professor at the University of California at San Diego, was particularly important in shaping opinion on the left in America.
There was a direct influence from the Frankfurt School on the ‘New Left’ in the USA in the 1960s, and forward to many of the political trends and issues of the present day.
In Germany/Europe an influential later member of the School is Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929).