Talk:Frankfurt School/Archive 19

I've updated the "Critique of Western Civilization" heading.
Not only has there been a shift in academia - which Wikipedia seeks to reflect - away from the term "Western Civilization" (also see the fairly recent shift in naming policy on Wikipedia from Western Civilization to Western Culture), but the work mentioned as defining their "Critique on Western Civilization" - "Enlightenment as mass deception" - actually focuses on the Culture Industry and how it might damage the high arts, humanism and expressionism that's been found IN Western Civilization. Their claim was modern mass media (as "mechanically reproduced" posed a risk to the traditional, expressive, crafted, humanist and more avant garde forms of art. The previous wording was unsourced, so I've updated it to a better understanding of their Marxian ethos. RecardedByzantian (talk) 03:28, 5 June 2023 (UTC)


 * The Verso Books quotation from Minima Moralia has no references to Western Civilization, and the term is never used within that work. RecardedByzantian (talk) 04:05, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Either capitalism or the culture Industry is narrower than the Frankfurt School's total project. They included both of those, along with fascism and Stalinism, as types of domination that they considered consequences of Enlightenment philosophy. Sennalen (talk) 13:53, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

There are few minor grammar and spelling mistakes in this article, I can't edit them due to the article being locked for me. Examples are not putting a "." after the "S" in "U.S." and no "of" in the line "the validity their views". These mistakes make the article seem unpolished and all that. Sapient-Primum (talk) 00:15, 11 June 2023 (UTC)


 * I'm neither an administrator nor principal for this page, but both "mistakes" by another user have been fixed. Bustamove1 (talk) 06:48, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Neo or post-Marxist
I believe that the Frankfurt school is neo- and post- Marxist. See:     Andre🚐 18:10, 10 August 2023 (UTC)


 * What you believe is not in and of itself relevant to what this article should contain, espeically in the lead sentence. Please note the following:
 * nothing, and especially no label, should appear in the lead section that is not well-sourced in the subsequent sections of the article;
 * labels or other terms presented in wikivoice (without attribution) should represent statements on which HQRS generally agree, not controversial opinions;
 * I don't see off-hand how any of the sources you just presented support "post-Marxist", and neo-Marxist isn't one of the more common ways the Frankfurt School is designated, as far as I know.
 * If these sources represent a broad strand of scholarship, the approach that follows policy would be to propose well-supported text for the article body showing that this is a general view; at the moment the list looks like an arbitrary selection of sources generated by a keyword search. Newimpartial (talk) 18:22, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I know my personal beliefs aren't relevant, but this is based on my understanding of an academic idea which I didn't think was particularly controversial (though I suppose that was naive of me), namely, that the Frankfurt school was "neo-Marxist" or "post-Marxist" thought. But let's discuss the inclusion in the body first. It is certainly not orthodox Marxist thought, so I object to the addition of the unqualified term Marxist in the lead which was recent. Starting with the first source, - this is recent, but I assume it is obvious how this supports my assertion. Do you disagree? Andre🚐 18:29, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I disagree. I don't even think that article uses "post-Marxist" in the same sense as the literature cited in the article, Post-Marxism.
 * However, I agree that the recent and unqualified introduction of "Marxist" into the lead sentence is not justified, so I have reverted that addition.
 * No, the Frankfurt School is not "orthodox" Marxism (the Marxism of Kautsky). Nor is it "Marxist-Leninism" (the Marxism of Lenin, and/or Stalin, and/or Trotsky, etc., depending on the tendency). But that doesn't necessarily make it "post-" or "neo-"Marxism, either, and the occasional random peer-reviewed article doesn't change that. Newimpartial (talk) 19:10, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you for reverting that. But wouldn't you agree that it "has been described as post- or neo- Marxist" in the sources above? Maybe not suitable for the lead, but the body. It doesn't need to be the same "sense" as the article Post-Marxism. Isn't that where you are editorializing just as you just admonished me for doing? If the sources have described it as neo- or post-Marxian, isn't that worthy of a mention somewhere? If not, what is the rationale? Because "inconsistent with another article" is not a valid one. Andre🚐 19:18, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * To answer your question, the Frankfurt School has indeed been described as Marxist, neo-Marxist and post-Marxist. It had also been described as a conspiracy to subvert Western culture, and as an objectively counter-revolutionary monument to Western empire in the form of the Enlightenment.
 * Deciding which of these views to represent in the article, and to what extent, is a WEIGHT issue. One thing we shouid not do, however, is to use a term in this article in a way that doesn't fit with the usual meaning of the term. Newimpartial (talk) 20:16, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

2nd and 3rd gen FS
I removed the below from the lead because the article does not currently cover this material. It would be nice, however, if at some point it did, and so I preserve it here.

Beginning in the 1960s, the critical-theory work of the Institute for Social Research came to be guided by Jürgen Habermas's work in communicative rationality and linguistic intersubjectivity. More recently, a "third generation" critical theorists, Nikolas Kompridis, Raymond Geuss, and Axel Honneth have opposed Habermas's propositions, claiming he undermines the original social-change objective of critical theory.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 01:18, 11 December 2023 (UTC)


 * And here is some criticism of Habermas to be integrated into any eventual treatment of his work.
 * Communicative action
 * Jürgen Habermas's "reformulation of critical theory" has been accused by philosopher Nikolas Kompridis as solving "too well, the dilemmas of the philosophy of the subject and the problem of modernity's self-reassurance", while creating a self-understanding of critical theory that is too close to liberal theories of justice and the normative order of society. He contended that, while "this has produced an important contemporary variant of liberal theories of justice, different enough to be a challenge to liberal theory, but not enough to preserve sufficient continuity with critical theory's past, it severely weakened the identity of critical theory and inadvertently initiated its premature dissolution."
 * Similarly, in 2022, historian Samuel Moyn described Habermas' ideas as "retreating from the Frankfurt School's radicalism." Habermas, according to Moyn, was guilty of "abandoning the most promising aspects of the Frankfurt school." Moyn found "some use" in Habermas’ "mid-career social theory", although that had "shown its limits...in the end he becomes a kind of neo-Kantian liberal." For Moyn, Habermas was complicit "in a betrayal of left theory", a "betrayal" that occurred despite twilight efforts to sustain "left theory" by philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In 2010, Moyn had argued that, in the decade prior to publication of Habermas' The Theory of Communicative Action and well before the Habermas–Rawls debate, an "internationalism revolving around individual rights surged, and it did so because it was defined as a pure alternative in an age of ideological betrayal and political collapse. It was then that the phrase 'human rights' entered common parlance in the English language. And it is from that recent moment that human rights have come to define the present day." Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 01:56, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Jürgen Habermas's "reformulation of critical theory" has been accused by philosopher Nikolas Kompridis as solving "too well, the dilemmas of the philosophy of the subject and the problem of modernity's self-reassurance", while creating a self-understanding of critical theory that is too close to liberal theories of justice and the normative order of society. He contended that, while "this has produced an important contemporary variant of liberal theories of justice, different enough to be a challenge to liberal theory, but not enough to preserve sufficient continuity with critical theory's past, it severely weakened the identity of critical theory and inadvertently initiated its premature dissolution."
 * Similarly, in 2022, historian Samuel Moyn described Habermas' ideas as "retreating from the Frankfurt School's radicalism." Habermas, according to Moyn, was guilty of "abandoning the most promising aspects of the Frankfurt school." Moyn found "some use" in Habermas’ "mid-career social theory", although that had "shown its limits...in the end he becomes a kind of neo-Kantian liberal." For Moyn, Habermas was complicit "in a betrayal of left theory", a "betrayal" that occurred despite twilight efforts to sustain "left theory" by philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In 2010, Moyn had argued that, in the decade prior to publication of Habermas' The Theory of Communicative Action and well before the Habermas–Rawls debate, an "internationalism revolving around individual rights surged, and it did so because it was defined as a pure alternative in an age of ideological betrayal and political collapse. It was then that the phrase 'human rights' entered common parlance in the English language. And it is from that recent moment that human rights have come to define the present day." Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 01:56, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

a note on recent edits
Yesterday I made a series of primarily subtractive edits to the article in order to make it more accessible and ultimately useful to readers. Although I did not dig too deeply into the history of the article or its talk archives, one does not have to go back very far to see that this was once the site of political dispute about the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, which is now its own article. My assumption is that much of what I removed was added by one side or the other in the context of that dispute, which had the effect of making the article, from the lead on down, sometimes disproportionate in its coverage and otherwise difficult to follow. I hope that the article in its current state will better serve readers who want to learn what the Frankfurt School is, as well as editors who would like to further expand our coverage.

What I have done is basically just clean-up. In the process, however, I noticed a few topics that would benefit from additional coverage. I'll share the three I would add if I were to do a proper overhaul of the article:


 * 1) The Hegelian-Marxist influence is adequately covered under the heading of Dialectical Method. The psychoanalytic and sociological dimensions of FS thought, however, are not discussed as directly. I would make some kind of an influences section with subsections for each.
 * 2) The FS is united in the objective of human emancipation. There is, however, considerable disagreement among its theorists as to what this actually means. Indeed, some individual theorists (looking at you, Adorno) arguably do not have a coherent account at all. The article would benefit from an explicit discussion of this disagreement and confusion under its own heading.
 * 3) When people refer simply to the FS, they generally mean to refer (at least primarily) to the 1st Gen, which is all the present article covers. It would be nice to have at least a short section at the end, however, describing the basic ideas and defining disagreements of the 2nd and 3rd Gens.

I'm following the article, but please tag me if you have any questions or concerns about the recent changes.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 17:00, 11 December 2023 (UTC)


 * You posted a response to my comment in the lede section, so I responded there. Any future responses will be posted here. Bustamove1 (talk) 19:29, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry, this page has become a little bit of a mess. If you posted anything in response to my 1:01 pm, Today (UTC−6) response to your removed comment, I don't see it. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 20:00, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry, done. Bustamove1 (talk) 20:14, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Oh wait, now I do. Nevermind. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 20:14, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
 * To clarify for prospective users: there was limited engagement with the second and third "generations" of the Frankfurt School in deleted content, including lists of members organized by "generation." The proposal here, I believe, is to critically reintegrate that content and elaborate on it within a separate section, hopefully for a more nuanced and summative assessment. I would add that Thomas Wheatland's concluding chapters on The Frankfurt School in Exile (2009) would be helpful for North American contexts (Wheatland equated the positivism dispute with Popper---criticism above). Bustamove1 (talk) 22:04, 10 January 2024 (UTC)