Critical theory of society

The Frankfurt School (Frankfurter Schule) is a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt. Founded in the Weimar Republic (1918–33), during the European interwar period (1918–39), the Frankfurt School comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents who were ill-fitted to the contemporary socio-economic systems (capitalist, fascist, communist) of that time. The Frankfurt theoreticians proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent factionalism and reactionary politics of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of capitalism and Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems, the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realising the social development of a nation.

Although loosely affiliated as intellectuals, the Frankfurt School theoreticians spoke from the perspective of a common paradigm (open-ended, self-critical approach) based upon Marxist and Hegelian premises of idealist philosophy. To fill the omissions of 19th-century classical Marxism, which could not address 20th-century social problems, they sought answers in the philosophies of antipositivist sociology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, etc. The School’s sociologic works derived from syntheses of the thematically pertinent works of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Georg Lukács.

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