Generations of the Frankfurt School: The Genesis of Critical Theory and Its Modernity

Abstract

The article presents a retrospective of the formation of the Frankfurt School. Such a view of the school has not yet been formed in Russian-language literature. In it (literature), as a rule, attention is focused on individual figures of the school, without representing their place in the logic of generations. In the 1950s, representatives of the first generation of the Frankfurt School (first of all, M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno) in their criticism of the fascist and totalitarian regimes built the foundation of critical theory, which they used later in the social analysis of Capitalist society. M. Horkheimer identified the key setting of the school as the emancipation of workers from the framework of the economic regime, liberation of the consciousness of the working class from the boundaries set by capitalism. In the 1970s, J. Habermas, within the framework of the theory of communicative action, continued the tradition of social criticism in two semantic directions: in the Leftist one — focusing on social injustices, and in the Kantian one — in the search for grounds for social criticism as such. Later, in the 1990s, A. Honneth focused on the so-called negative intersubjectivity, which is expressed in the struggle of social groups for recognition. In this struggle, he found a truly social dimension of life, which is built on the principles of normativity. In 2018, A. Honneth handed over the post of Director of the Institute of Social Research to S. Lessenich. Despite the fact that today it is difficult to predict what the course of S. Lessenich will be, it remains obvious that through the generations the Frankfurt School has retained the methodological basis for the critical analysis of Capitalist society, starting criticism under totalitarianism and continuing it in the digital age.