This Frankfurt School business

[Franz Fanonipants]

Is the stuff from the Frankfurt School thinkers basically third positionism? I am curious.

When I was younger I thought the Frankfurt School offered a thoughtful critique of Western Society and the "excesses of Soviet Communism." Obviously the latter bit has gone by the wayside. But I'm curious like, were those guys (& Arendt) reactionaries?

(try not to answer down tendency lines for extra points)

[Sasha]

I really like Adorno e.a. haven't read much arendt..
And no they where not corperatist so no way 3th positionist in the sense most people understand it.
And no not reactionary in other ways either.

[eyeheartlenin]

Just for my own information, from listening to a lecture by a university professor on a different topic, I learned (I think this is correct) that Frankfurt School people recognized the distinction of basis and superstructure. Please forgive my ignorance (and space-iness -- I just spent a bunch of hours translating a political article), but if that is true, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, then it sounds an awful lot like the Soviet Marxism I read about as an undergraduate. Any info will be gratefully received.

[svenne]

Hannah Arendt is a pretty strange figure; while not exactly fond of socialism, she still insists that a pretty egalitarian society is a basis for the democratic and non-alienated society she wants to find. She also builds a totally own system in contrast to the Marxian; everything is thought of as labour, work and action. Labour being the basis, the thing which keeps us alive; work is the construction of the human world; action is the lifes we live - at least in short. Anyway, Arendt took some pretty reactionary positions (i seem to remember that she had no problem when white school didn't want any students from minoritys, in the US) , and her critique of Marx is, well, bad, as she hasn't understood him at all. She may be close to the Frankfurt Schools positions in some questions (alienation, maybe. There's an ok text about Marx' and Arendts position on alienation somewhere on the net), but i really feel she should be excluded from the thread, as she isn't even close to being a marxist, ever.

While i haven't really read that much of the Frankfurt School, i'm wondering what you mean with it? Well, what thinkers and so on. Just curious :)

[Elsa]

I've read Dialectics of Enlightenment (by Horkheimer and Adorno). It's written in interesting style, but I've read it more as a literary work than political or even philosophical. Some quotations could be useful in discussions with pseudo-intellectuals. On the other hand, the whole concept of "Enlightenment" tracing back to Ulysses seems pointless, as it discards any rational thought. This may be a dead end; but the whole thing is pleasant to read and some remarks in the chapter about pop-culture are still relevant (also thoughts on the anti-semitism or generally the psychology of a person in capitalist world). Philosophically the most interesting part may be the short fragments at the end.

[blake 3:17]

Arendt? I don't understand what the big deal is. She is widely admired, but her thinking seems like a bunch of mishmash.

Adorno has his moments, and as Elsa wrote above the fragments do tend to be the most interesting. His cultural elitism is just tiring.

The most interesting thinker associated with the Frankfurt School is Walter Benjamin. Most of his writing was non-academic, though often read as if it were. The single best piece of his is his essay on Surrealism. There has been a lot of writing on him, a lot of not very good. For a Marxist take I'd recommend writings by Terry Eagleton and Michael Lowy. Susan Buck-Morss has done great great work too, it tends towards a closer read so isn't quite as accessible.


Nancy Love's book on Marx and Nietzsche covers some of the same territory and is pretty readable.

[Mass Grave Aesthetics]

Hanna Ardent is not a part of the Frankfurt school. She was never associated with it!
It´s kind of hard to evaluate the frankfurt school as a whole, it´s better to judge each theorist or even each work on it´s own IMO. My knowlegde is nowhere near extensive on it, but they certainly were not as homogenous as theorists as some seem to imply.
The Frankfurt school theorists were certainly no orthodox marxists or revolutionary communists. They called themselves a school of critical theory and that is precisely what they were. They took insights from marxism and elaborated on them, but it´s not accurate to label them as marxists. A lot of their works are very interesting and useful, especially some of their analysis on mass culture and post-WWII capitalism in the west. Their critical theory should be evaluated for what it is. I would certainly not label it as reactionary, far from it, but it is not revolutionary in content.

[thethinveil]

Hanna Ardent is not a part of the Frankfurt school. She was never associated with it!


That was bothering me about the conversation above. Thanks or the correction.

[Astarte]

That was bothering me about the conversation above. Thanks or the correction.

People often use the term "Frankfurt School" more loosely than to just mean the original core of the group and often time also include in this group those of the same time period heavily influenced by Frankfurt thinkers or later Critical Theorists and Neo-Marxists who's thought has also been deeply influenced by the precedents the Frankfurt School set. In the case of Ardent, her connection with the Frankfurt Schools comes from her association with Walter Benjamin in particular.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

Personally, I've always seen Arendt as a liberal, and the Frankfurt School as Marxish liberals. To discuss the FS, their methodology was certainly derived from the worst excesses of Marxist philosophical style, but their embrace of Freud and their overall (historically understandable) disbelief in the possibility of socialist revolution coming to fruition puts them in a bizarre camp: a serious mishmash of Marxist and liberal ideas. It's sad that they set the standard for academic Marxism.