The thinkers of Frankfurt School were responding largely to the failure of the German Revolution and the rise of Fascism. These were social phenomena that were non-existent to the objective social world of Marx’s critique. Unlike the First International—created by Marx, Engels and Bakunin—the Second International was overwhelmingly Marxist. And yet the SPD being at the time the largest political party in Germany, was the instrument of the defeat of the worker’s movement.
The revolutionary masses had a subjective character that Rosa Luxemburg identified as spontaneity. In Kant’s critical philosophy, spontaneity was the mind's free-activity to self determine its judgement of objects. It was the foundation of autonomy. Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm and Marcuse believed that it was this capacity for spontaneity that was in jeopardy in the new epoch of society. They became even more convinced when in North America and Western Europe, no new workers movements developed a revolutionary character.
Critical theory was then developed to understand this social catastrophe. Starting with Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Fromm, the Frankfurt School felt the need to supplement Marx’s political and social-economic writing with a critique of authority. Starting from the family and developing up through the whole of society and the state; bourgeois society in decadence began the self-cannibalization of its great contributions to mankind.
The Frankfurt School of critical theory has been dismissed as the hotel abyss, dialectics without materialism, academic Marxism, and so on. We find that the majority of these accusations come from a very shallow reading of critical theory, if any.
June 17th – Introduction to Critical Theory
Horkheimer, Traditional and Critical Theory (1937)
June 24th – History I:
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1942)
Menand, Meaning in History
Baudelaire, Fusées
Preuss, On Nietzsche
Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1840 edition)
Horkheimer, The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom (1931)
July 1st – History II:
Lukacs, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat (1923): Chapters 1.The Phenomenon of Reification, 2. Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought
July 8th – History III:
Lukacs, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat (1923): Chapter 3. The Standpoint of the Proletariat
Bryan Smyth, Spontaneity in Rosa Luxemburg
Herbert Marcuse, A Note On Dialectics (1960)
July 15th – Self I:
Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense (1873)
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)
Eric Fromm, Individual and Social Origins of Neurosis (1944)
Adorno, Minima Moralia: # 37. This side of the pleasure principle —39. Ego is Id —40. Always think of it, never speak of it.
July 22nd – Self II:
Adorno,
Metaphysics Concepts and Problems: Lecture 14. The Liquidation of the Self
July 29th – Family:
Horkheimer, Authority and the Family Chapter 3 p.97-124 (1936)
Adorno, Minima Moralia: # 10. Divided-united –11. With all my worldly goods. –12. Inter pares. – 111. Philemon and Baucis.
August 5th – State:
Horkheimer, The Authoritarian State (1936)
Frederick Pollock, State Capitalism Its Possibilities and Limitations (1941)
OPTIONAL: Moishe Postone, Time Labour and Social Domination. Chapter 3: Critical Theory and the Limits of Traditional Marxism
August 12th – Imperialism:
Marcel Stoetzler, Critical Theory and the Critique of Anti-Imperialism
Adorno, Minima Moralia: #67. Unmeasure for unmeasure – 73. Deviation –
Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence (1921)
August 19th – Exploitation:
Moishe Postone, Necessity, Labor, and Time: A Reinterpretation of the Marxian Critique of Capitalism
August 26th – Resignation:
Adorno, Resignation (1969)
Moishe Postone, History and Helplessness (2006)
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