CONCEPT
The Frankfurt School
The German tradition of critical social theory — centered on the Institute for Social Research — from which Habermas emerged as Adorno's assistant and which he transformed by recovering the rational potential embedded in everyday communicative practice.
The Frankfurt School was the tradition of critical social theory associated with the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and later exiled to New York during the Nazi period. The first generation — Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, and others — developed a distinctive synthesis of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and German philosophy that diagnosed the pathologies of advanced industrial capitalism with unprecedented rigor. Their central conclusion — that instrumental reason had colonized human life so thoroughly that genuine rationality had become nearly impossible — left the tradition in a state of theoretical despair. Habermas was Adorno's assistant in the 1950s and emerged as the second-generation Frankfurt theorist who recovered hope by locating rational potential in the very structures of everyday language that his predecessors had regarded as already compromised.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The first-generation Frankfurt School produced foundational