Frankfurt School And Critical Theory

The Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt in 1923, and its intellectual descendants, who fused Marxist political economy with psychoanalysis, aesthetics and philosophy to analyze mass culture, authoritarianism and the domination of instrumental reason over emancipatory thought. This group gathers the Frankfurt School's core first generation theorists and the later critical theorists, working through the Institute's second and third generations, who kept extending its program of a theory that is at once explanatory and oriented toward human emancipation.