#frankfurtschool — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #frankfurtschool, aggregated by home.social.
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"#GabrielRockhill’s polemic against #WesternMarxism seeks to condemn a set of postwar left-wing intellectuals such as #HerbertMarcuse. Heavy on innuendo but light on evidence, the result is more like a show trial than a serious political indictment."
#RussellJacoby's withering review of #WhoPaidThePipersOfWesternMarxism
https://jacobin.com/2026/04/review-rockhill-western-marxism-cold-war/
#Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #NewLeft #snitchjacketing #hacks #campism #Rockhill #books @bookstodon -
Nancy Fraser on Habermas
'My ties to Habermas were multi-layered. He was an inspiration and a role model; a mentor and an antagonist; a figure who showed me early on how to practise ‘critique with an emancipatory intent’ but from whom I eventually had to distance myself'
#frankfurtSchool #habermas #philosophy #nancyFraser #marxism #criticalTheory #literature #bookstodon
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Nancy Fraser on Habermas
'My ties to Habermas were multi-layered. He was an inspiration and a role model; a mentor and an antagonist; a figure who showed me early on how to practise ‘critique with an emancipatory intent’ but from whom I eventually had to distance myself'
#frankfurtSchool #habermas #philosophy #nancyFraser #marxism #criticalTheory #literature #bookstodon
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Nancy Fraser on Habermas
'My ties to Habermas were multi-layered. He was an inspiration and a role model; a mentor and an antagonist; a figure who showed me early on how to practise ‘critique with an emancipatory intent’ but from whom I eventually had to distance myself'
#frankfurtSchool #habermas #philosophy #nancyFraser #marxism #criticalTheory #literature #bookstodon
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Nancy Fraser on Habermas
'My ties to Habermas were multi-layered. He was an inspiration and a role model; a mentor and an antagonist; a figure who showed me early on how to practise ‘critique with an emancipatory intent’ but from whom I eventually had to distance myself'
#frankfurtSchool #habermas #philosophy #nancyFraser #marxism #criticalTheory #literature #bookstodon
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Nancy Fraser on Habermas
'My ties to Habermas were multi-layered. He was an inspiration and a role model; a mentor and an antagonist; a figure who showed me early on how to practise ‘critique with an emancipatory intent’ but from whom I eventually had to distance myself'
#frankfurtSchool #habermas #philosophy #nancyFraser #marxism #criticalTheory #literature #bookstodon
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R.i.P. Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas was a German philosopher and sociologist. For decades he was one of the world's most influential intellectuals as a representative of the Frankfurt School.#German #philosopher #Habermas #JurgenHabermas #frankfurtokulu #frankfurtschool #entellectual #portraitdrawing #portrait #firuzkutal
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R.i.P. Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas was a German philosopher and sociologist. For decades he was one of the world's most influential intellectuals as a representative of the Frankfurt School.#German #philosopher #Habermas #JurgenHabermas #frankfurtokulu #frankfurtschool #entellectual #portraitdrawing #portrait #firuzkutal
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R.i.P. Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas was a German philosopher and sociologist. For decades he was one of the world's most influential intellectuals as a representative of the Frankfurt School.#German #philosopher #Habermas #JurgenHabermas #frankfurtokulu #frankfurtschool #entellectual #portraitdrawing #portrait #firuzkutal
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R.i.P. Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas was a German philosopher and sociologist. For decades he was one of the world's most influential intellectuals as a representative of the Frankfurt School.#German #philosopher #Habermas #JurgenHabermas #frankfurtokulu #frankfurtschool #entellectual #portraitdrawing #portrait #firuzkutal
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R.i.P. Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas was a German philosopher and sociologist. For decades he was one of the world's most influential intellectuals as a representative of the Frankfurt School.#German #philosopher #Habermas #JurgenHabermas #frankfurtokulu #frankfurtschool #entellectual #portraitdrawing #portrait #firuzkutal
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According to the (pseudoscientific) "California F-Scale" (Adorno, Frankfurt School, 1947), I am a "liberal airhead."
That should probably go in my bio. 😆🤣https://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm
#FrankfurtSchool
#CaliforniaFScale
#PersonalityTests
#TheodorAdorno
#philosophy
#fascism
#authoritarianism
#liberalism -
1/6
Ever feel like the more "rational" our world gets, the more nonsensical it feels? In 1944, while the world was on fire, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer dropped a philosophical pipe bomb: Dialectic of Enlightenment.
They didn't just want to critique the Nazis; they wanted to know why humanity was "sinking into a new kind of barbarism" instead of becoming truly free. #CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #Philosophy -
"Bourgeois economists are incapable of confronting the falsity of their understanding of competition: For the bourgeoisie, the fall of serfdom and mercantilism seemed to have abolished class distinctions, producing what they understand as the natural order of competition among free individuals. This order is supposed to be the correct way for human society to be organized, the realization of our innate propensity to truck and barter. In this vision of bourgeois society, every subject is both producer and consumer; there is no class. Anything that disrupts this picture is an intrusion of the non-economic into the sphere of the economic. To the extent that they are willing to acknowledge it, monopolization compels the bourgeoisie to admit that the unequal distribution of power continues to exist under their rule. Rather than accepting the falsity of their understanding of competition, however, the bourgeoisie understands monopolization solely as a regression to a prior mode of direct class rule. They admit that competition, as they understand it, no longer exists, but they believe that it once did, and that what exists today is no longer genuine competition.
Against this, Horkheimer understands pre-monopoly capitalism as characterized both by competition that reached all members of the population and by the unresolved problem of power. Whether by “birth or deceit, brutality or shrewdness, expertness in engineering machinery or human relations, by marriage or adulation,” there have always been groups that have managed the competitive processes within capitalism. Racketization is a reversion to more direct forms of domination, but these forms were always present, hidden behind the apparently rational market system, and this “was already clear to everyone except for the professors in the times of so-called liberalism.”"
https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/Competition/
#FrankfurtSchool #RacketTheory #CriticalTheory #PoliticalEconomy #Monopolies #Competition #Horkheimer #Capitalism
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"Bourgeois economists are incapable of confronting the falsity of their understanding of competition: For the bourgeoisie, the fall of serfdom and mercantilism seemed to have abolished class distinctions, producing what they understand as the natural order of competition among free individuals. This order is supposed to be the correct way for human society to be organized, the realization of our innate propensity to truck and barter. In this vision of bourgeois society, every subject is both producer and consumer; there is no class. Anything that disrupts this picture is an intrusion of the non-economic into the sphere of the economic. To the extent that they are willing to acknowledge it, monopolization compels the bourgeoisie to admit that the unequal distribution of power continues to exist under their rule. Rather than accepting the falsity of their understanding of competition, however, the bourgeoisie understands monopolization solely as a regression to a prior mode of direct class rule. They admit that competition, as they understand it, no longer exists, but they believe that it once did, and that what exists today is no longer genuine competition.
Against this, Horkheimer understands pre-monopoly capitalism as characterized both by competition that reached all members of the population and by the unresolved problem of power. Whether by “birth or deceit, brutality or shrewdness, expertness in engineering machinery or human relations, by marriage or adulation,” there have always been groups that have managed the competitive processes within capitalism. Racketization is a reversion to more direct forms of domination, but these forms were always present, hidden behind the apparently rational market system, and this “was already clear to everyone except for the professors in the times of so-called liberalism.”"
https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/Competition/
#FrankfurtSchool #RacketTheory #CriticalTheory #PoliticalEconomy #Monopolies #Competition #Horkheimer #Capitalism
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"Sourced from the Max-Horkheimer-Archiv (MHA), both fragments—“On The Relation Between Critical Intellectuals, the Proletariat, and the Communist Party” and “The Curse of Writing Today”—are located under the subheading “Miscellaneous Manuscripts (1946),”1 filed alongside three (of the four surviving) typescripts from Horkheimer’s “Conversations with Theodor W. Adorno,” recorded during the first two weeks of October 1946, about the planned sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment. These Diskussionsprotokolle were first published posthumously in Volume 12 of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften under the title: “Rettung der Aufklärung. Diskussionen über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik.”2 In addition to these discussions, the last two fragments under the same subheading were also selected for publication in the same volume of Horkheimer’s GS: “Towards a Critique of the American Social Sciences” and “The Fate of Revolutionary Movements,” each of which is also dated “October 1946.”3 One possible motive for the omission of the fragments below from Horkheimer’s GS is difficulty in determining authorship. Despite a number of indications to the contrary in the text of the fragments themselves, the archivists (tentatively) attribute them to Adorno alone—a problematic approach the archivists seem to have adopted for several other unpublished fragments from the archive with indeterminate authorship as well.4 In terms of content, there are two grounds for rejecting this attribution."
https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/HA_Fragments_1946/
#CriticalTheory #Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #Adorno #Horkheimer
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Another great discussion w/ #RossWolfe about his trilogy of essays critiquing the late neo-Stalinist philosopher & historian #DomenicoLosurdo, w/ particular focus on #Losurdo's attacks on #WesternMarxism in his eponymously titled book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9QM64C1glw
(the trilogy is here:
https://newintermag.com/against-losurdo/
https://newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/
https://newintermag.com/revisionism-revisited/)#Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #socialism #politicalTheory #historyOfMarxism #Stalinism #campism #philosophy #books #bookstodon @bookstodon
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Fascinating trilogy of essays by Brooklyn Rail's #RossWolfe critiquing the late neo-Stalinist philosopher & historian #DomenicoLosurdo, w/ particular focus on #Losurdo's attacks on #WesternMarxism in his eponymously titled book.
https://newintermag.com/against-losurdo/
https://newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/
https://newintermag.com/revisionism-revisited/Also a great pod discussion of the series w/ Ross: https://www.patreon.com/posts/138384057
#Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #politicalTheory #historyOfMarxism #Stalinism #campism #philosophy #books @bookstodon
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"In his afterword, Gordon acts as an intellectual tour guide for readers who may be unfamiliar with Adorno’s oeuvre. Throughout the lecture, Adorno refers to a range of concepts and arguments from his other texts without fully explaining or clarifying them – Gordon graciously fills in the gaps. With a delicate touch, he also reflects on how we might read this text amid Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. While Adorno was willing to enlist police authority to stamp out antisemitism, Gordon points out that Germany’s strict anti-antisemitism laws have repressed legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies. To pick an ironic example, the translator of Fighting Antisemitism Today belongs to a pro-Palestinian Jewish activist group that had its bank account frozen after being accused of antisemitism by a state-funded research institute. Instead of trying to pin down the seemingly ever-shifting line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Gordon counsels us to hold true to the universalist ethos of Adorno’s lecture: ‘the concluding injunction that such a thing must never happen again expresses an ethical requirement that applies to all peoples and states without exception’ (67). It offers, for Gordon, the only valid standard for judging Israel’s actions in Gaza today. It is a reminder that the very impulses that motivate antisemitism are also present in Islamophobia and racism.
We are, once more, living through the resurgence of militant and excessive nationalisms, where ingroups around the world seek to deprive some Other of personhood and pity. It is up to us to stand against it and to stand firm. As Adorno warns in this lecture, ‘the worst thing is to relent’"
#CriticalTheory #Adorno #FrankfurtSchool #Antisemitism #Germany
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"The texts collected here belong to the materials on ‘racket theory’ composed by members of the Institute for Social Research between 1941 and 1944. More specifically, they were mostly (probably) written by Max Horkheimer, albeit with considerable input from Theodor W. Adorno and occasional feedback from others.
(...)
The history of the ‘racket theory’ corpus is difficult to reconstruct. We have found it helpful to divide our subsequent analysis of the racket theory project into three major sections, which are not exclusive in terms of content. Our narrative starts with the earliest use of the term in Max Horkheimer’s essay “The End of Reason” (1942). After this, we turn to analyzing the stream of texts which were explicitly composed for or about publication(s), mostly written between spring 1942 and fall 1943. Then we treat the topic of reflexivity and the specific character of the racket theory project that flows from its particular form of reflexivity. Finally, we briefly discuss some particularities of the core racket theory texts before concluding. Translations from additional German sources are our own."https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/RacketIntro/
#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #RacketTheory #StateCapitalism
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"The texts collected here belong to the materials on ‘racket theory’ composed by members of the Institute for Social Research between 1941 and 1944. More specifically, they were mostly (probably) written by Max Horkheimer, albeit with considerable input from Theodor W. Adorno and occasional feedback from others.
(...)
The history of the ‘racket theory’ corpus is difficult to reconstruct. We have found it helpful to divide our subsequent analysis of the racket theory project into three major sections, which are not exclusive in terms of content. Our narrative starts with the earliest use of the term in Max Horkheimer’s essay “The End of Reason” (1942). After this, we turn to analyzing the stream of texts which were explicitly composed for or about publication(s), mostly written between spring 1942 and fall 1943. Then we treat the topic of reflexivity and the specific character of the racket theory project that flows from its particular form of reflexivity. Finally, we briefly discuss some particularities of the core racket theory texts before concluding. Translations from additional German sources are our own."https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/RacketIntro/
#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #RacketTheory #StateCapitalism
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🧵 1/2
I've just finished reading Herbert Marcuse's "The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics".
Marcuse makes a powerful case for the the autonomy of art, as neither an escapist refuge nor a simple tool or superstructural reflection of social forces, but as a radical emancipatory force in its own right.
Even though proponents of the orthodox Marxist aesthetics he criticizes must be as rare as hen's teeth today, his argument, mutatis mutandis, can still be read with profit today by all on the left.
I read it in hard copy, but it's short enough to read online as a PDF:
http://www.marginalutility.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/aesthetic-dimension-_-marcuse.pdf
The work was originally published in German under the title "Die Permanenz
der Kunst: Wider eine bestimmte Marxistische Aesthetik" in 1977.In that same year....
#Philosophy #Aesthetics #Marcuse #FrankfurtSchool #CriticalTheory #Marxism #PhilosophyOfArt #LiteraryTheory
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Good Stuff ->
Critical Marxist Theory: Political Autonomy and the Radicalising Project of Modernity
Lukas Meisner
(Springer Nature, 08/06/2025 - 409 páginas)
"This book argues why Critical Theory – as first developed in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung – must be updated to help us tackling today’s capitalist polycrisis, from economic via political to ecological crises. Yet, following the dissolution of the Institute for Social Research in New York, and the latest with the death of Adorno in 1969 and the death of Marcuse almost exactly ten years later, there has been a ‘domestication’ of the main strands of the Frankfurt School. To understand and overcome this domestication, the book traces, with the means of philosophy and sociology, its two affirmative steps in a liberal and in a postmodern turn. As an alternative to both, it defends Habermas’ project of modernity, yet only by disentangling it – in Marxian fashion – from the capitalist process of modernisation. This disentanglement is at the same time a political radicalisation. It is necessary because the cultural-political ideal(s) of the project of modernity – from human autonomy via rational society to qualitative individuality – can only be realised beyond the framework of capitalism. As their conceptual concentrate, the book proposes political autonomy as a key concept confined neither by Kantian or liberal approaches nor by autonomist or operaist traditions. Rather, it draws on thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Martin Hägglund to rephrase Marxist concepts such as social freedom, democratic socialism, and the end of prehistory. In this way, political autonomy is developed both as a legit criterion for justified critique and as the philosophical foundation and emancipatory goal of a pluralist yet transcapitalist Critical Marxist Theory."
https://books.google.pt/books?id=0R9kEQAAQBAJ
#CriticalTheory #Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #Modernity #Capitalism #PoliticalAutonomy #Marcuse #Philosophy #Sociology
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"Desde su recepción por la Nueva Izquierda anglófona en la década de 1970, la Teoría Crítica de Horkheimer y Adorno ha sido criticada por marxistas y habermasianos por abandonar la economía política. Luego, tras la crisis financiera de 2008, teóricos contemporáneos de la Escuela de Fráncfort, como Nancy Fraser, han desarrollado críticas al capitalismo, mientras que marxistas como William Clare Roberts, han reconstruido la teoría crítica de la dominación abstracta e impersonal de Marx.
Retomando estos debates teóricos, en la conferencia “Una teoría crítica de la dominación social”, Chris O’kane nos ofrece una interpretación de una rama particular de la teoría crítica que se originó en el pensamiento de Horkheimer. De esta rama se puede derivar un programa de investigación distinto de la crítica de la economía política, entendida como una teoría crítica de la dominación social, y opuesta al marxismo tradicional y a la teoría crítica habermasiana."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR22IB5AyeQ
#CriticalTheory #Marxism #SocialDomination #FrankfurtSchool #Marx #Horkheimer #Adorno #PoliticalEconomy
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🧵 1/5
A few weeks ago, I picked up Theodor Adorno's "Minima Moralia", started it, but was then distracted, and so put it aside.Being distracted from Adorno is easily explicable, as I don't think even his admirers would describe him as an easy read.
Nevertheless, I have struggled through some Adorno before, so I went back to "Minima Moralia" more recently and read the collected essays and aphorisms from cover to cover.
I am aware, of course, that were Adorno to be alive today, he would point to my beliefs and preoccupations as evidence of the "damaged life" he describes and deplores. For critical theorists, my reformist social democracy, my belief in the possibility of a science of society, and the joy I take in Richard Strauss, Jean Sibelius, and Kpop are all signs of a pitiful enslavement to a naive positivism and the kitsch culture of capitalism.
Nevertheless, I found "Minima Moralia" rewarding, if at times frustrating, reading. I read the Verso edition; I have heard criticisms of older translations of Adorno, of which this is one, it having been first published in 1974 by New Left Books. In this thread, I'm going to link to a newer translation by Dennis Redmond.
Overall, Adorno puts forward a number of arguments about culture, intellectuals, and commodification under capitalism. For many years from the mid seventies onwards, he was regarded a grouchy elitist whose high modernist cultural critique could, in the light of Birmingham School cultural studies, be seen as at best guilty of a simplistic, uninformed by Gramsci, and demobilisingly moralistic approach to popular culture and at worst of a marxisant high toryism.
These criticisms are not without foundation. Reading "Minima Moralia" can be at times the trying experience of being subjected to page upon page of western marxist curmudgeonry.
Yet some of thoughts on the culture of capitalism struck me as meriting my renewed consideration, even though....
#TheodorAdorno #MinimaMoralia #CriticalTheory #CulturalCritique #CulturalStudies #Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #Adorno #Philosophy #SocialTheory
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Richard Wolff interview of Stanley Aronowitz
Labor unions and the Democratic Party have not provided (and will not provide) effective resistance to the forces from the right. Stanley Aronowitz explains why this is so and what needs to be be done about it.
Wolff and Aronowitz talk about the state of labor, unions and the left (from the May 31, 2013 edition of Wolff's "Economic Update" radio program)
#Marx #CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #StanleyAronowitz #Sociology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3Jf086mz0w -
Society Distracted by Off-Camera Spectacle
Hashtags: #CriticalTheory #Neoliberalism #FrankfurtSchool #Journalism #Spectacle #FakeNews #Situationists #Authentic #Photography
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👉 Tyrus Miller's book Georg Lukács and Critical Theory is available open access via: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-georg-lukacs-and-critical-theory.html
@bookstodon #GeorgLukács #TheodorAdorno #CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #Marxism #Aesthetics #Utopia #Art
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@Stoori Recognising the fascistic tendency or potential of communications modes and media formats is actually precisely what I'm encouraging here.
It's not that "all memes are fascist".
But you'll find that very nearly all fascists uses memes.
I'm reminded of the parallel with a famous observation of John Stuart Mill on stupidity and conservatives:
I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/23qdkr/john_stuart_mill_i_did_not_mean_that/
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1866/may/31/committee-adjourned-debate#column_1592
My view (supported by the work of Arendt, Paxton, Eco, MacDonald, and others) is that fascism is a behavioural mode, not an ideologial one, one that tends to be highly emotive, low-information, and reactionary. It probably emerges in times of high social and political stress.
Knowing that, and being aware of the risks and signs is valuable.
Yes, fascism wears ideological trappings, but those serve its behaviours and not the other way 'round. The specific ideologies claimed are fluid and flexible and inconsistent both internally and over time.
See the commentary on this post:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6wuenu/is_politics_truly_ideological_or_is_this_a_20th/#fascism #ideology #HannaArendt #FrankfurtSchool #Memes #MemeticWarfare #RobertPaxton #UmbertoEco #DwightMacDonald #MarshallMcLuhan #AdamCurtis #CenturyOfTheSelf #NoamChomsky