Also influential in these issues were Nietzsche, Heidegger, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Derrida and Lacan.

* Frankfurt School –

* The Frankfurt School

In philosophy, the term critical theory describes the neo-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, developed in Europe in the 1930s, that engaged the works of intellectuals such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.

Critical theory was established as a school of thought by five Frankfurt School theoreticians: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas.

Critical theory was first defined by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of sociology in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory: Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it.

Jean Baudrillard has also been described as a critical theorist to the extent that he was an unconventional and critical sociologist ; this appropriation is similarly casual, holding little or no relation to the Frankfurt School.

Habermas and the Frankfurt School.

Herbert Marcuse (; July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979 ) was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Although he never returned to Germany to live, he remained one of the major theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, along with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno ( among others ).

In the post-war period, Marcuse was the most explicitly political and left-wing member of the Frankfurt School, continuing to identify himself as a Marxist, a socialist, and a Hegelian.

He had spoken at the Frankfurt Römerberggespräche, and was on his way to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg, on invitation from second-generation Frankfurt School theorist Jürgen Habermas.

Category: Frankfurt School

Weber's analysis of modernity and rationalisation significantly influenced the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School.

Herbert Marcuse, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, is celebrated as the " Father of the New Left ".< ref name = kellner12 > Douglas Kellner.

* Otto Stern School for Integrated Doctoral Education, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Out of the Frankfurt School, thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas combined Marxian and Freudian perspectives.

His early work was heavily influenced by the Frankfurt School.

One of the principal thinkers within the Frankfurt School, and generally important in efforts to fuse the thought of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.

He heavily influenced 20th century political philosophy both within the Frankfurt School and among others as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, and Giorgio Agamben.

William S. Lind and Patrick Buchanan have characterized PC as a technique originated by the Frankfurt School, through what Buchanan describes as " Cultural Marxism ".

Like Susan Sontag, Jameson served to introduce a wide audience of American readers to key figures of the 20th Century Continental European intellectual Left, particularly those associated with the Frankfurt School, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism.

He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the work of Freud, Marx and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society.

Yet the foundations for what would come to be known as " The Frankfurt School " were soon laid: Horkheimer resumed his chair in social philosophy and the Institute for Social Research, rebuilt, became a lightning rod for critical thought.

Adorno, along with the other major Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, argued that advanced capitalism had managed to contain or liquidate the forces that would bring about its collapse and that the revolutionary moment, when it would have been possible to transform it into socialism, had passed.

Contemporary social theorists associated with the Frankfurt School have remained largely critical of Heidegger's works and influence.

Although green anarchism develops themes present in the political action of the Luddites and the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, when primitivism emerged it was influenced more directly by the works of theorists such as the Frankfurt School Marxists Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse ; anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Richard Borshay Lee ; and others such as Lewis Mumford, Jean Baudrillard and Gary Snyder.

Although sometimes only loosely affiliated, Frankfurt School theorists spoke with a common paradigm in mind, thus sharing the same assumptions and being preoccupied with similar questions.

It should be noted that the term " Frankfurt School " arose informally to describe the thinkers affiliated or merely associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research ; it is not the title of any specific position or institution per se, and few of these theorists used the term themselves.

The philosophical tradition now referred to as the " Frankfurt School " is perhaps particularly associated with Max Horkheimer ( philosopher, sociologist and social psychologist ), who took over as the institute's director in 1930 and recruited many of the school's most talented theorists, including Theodor W. Adorno ( philosopher, sociologist, musicologist ), Erich Fromm ( psychoanalyst ), and Herbert Marcuse ( philosopher ).

Which " theorists " may be included in what is now called the " Frankfurt School " will likely vary among different scholars.

Later theorists with roots in Frankfurt School critical theory include:

Whereas both Marxist-Leninist and Social-Democratic orthodox thinkers viewed Marxism as a new kind of positive science, Frankfurt School theorists, such as Horkheimer, rather based their work on the epistemological base of Karl Marx's work, which presented itself as critique, as in Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.

The methodology on which Frankfurt School theorists grounded this critique came to be what had before been established by Hegel and Marx, namely the dialectical method.

For their part, Frankfurt School theorists quickly came to realize that a dialectical method could only be adopted if it could be applied to itself — that is to say, if they adopted a self-correcting method — a dialectical method that would enable them to correct previous false dialectical interpretations.

Indeed, the material tensions and class struggles of which Marx spoke were no longer seen by Frankfurt School theorists as having the same revolutionary potential within contemporary Western societies — an observation which indicated that Marx's dialectical interpretations and predictions were either incomplete or incorrect.

Frankfurt School theorists would correct this by claiming that when action fails, then the theory guiding it must be reviewed.

The intellectual influences on and theoretical focus of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists can be summarized as follows:

Social theorists of the Frankfurt School in Weimar Germany like Theodor Adorno had also observed the new phenomenon of mass culture and commented on its new manipulative power, when the rise of the Nazis drove them out of the country around 1930 ( many of them became connected with the Institute for Social Research in the United States ).

Diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be the theory of culture industry developed by Frankfurt School critical theorists such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse.

Western Marxists have varied in terms of political commitment: Lukács, Gramsci and Althusser were all members of Soviet-aligned parties ; Karl Korsch was heavily critical of Soviet Marxism, advocating council communism and later becoming increasingly interested in anarchism ; the theorists of The Frankfurt School tended towards political quietism, although Herbert Marcuse became known as the ' father of the New Left '; Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Lefebvre were, at different periods, supporters of the Communist Party of France, but all would later become disillusioned with it ; Ernst Bloch lived in and supported the Soviet Union, but lost faith in it towards the end of his life.

Birmingham School theorists such as Stuart Hall emphasized the reciprocity in how cultural texts, even mass-produced products are used, questioning the valorized division between " producers " and " consumers " that was evident in cultural theory such as that of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School.

For instance, theorists of Frankfurt School have claimed that the diffusion of mass cultural products has obscured class differences in capitalist societies.