Chris O’Kane over at the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas:
The 100th anniversary of the founding of the Institute for Social Research (ISR) has led to a multitude of celebrations and reflections on Frankfurt School Critical Theory by prominent Critical Theorists at Critical Theory conferences and in Critical Theory Journals in the Anglophone world. In what follows, I focus on William Scheuerman’s and Samuel Moyn’s recently published short commentaries criticizing contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory for not focusing on the political economic dimensions of contemporary capitalism.
Scheuerman’s and Moyn’s criticisms are largely right when it comes to what is defined as Frankfurt School Critical Theory in the Anglophone world today (what Scheuerman rightly calls “Habermasian Critical Theory”). Yet, in what follows, I show that Scheuerman’s and Moyn’s comments are not accurate for Anglophone work that should be considered Frankfurt School Critical Theory.
In the space that permits, I first provide an outline of Scheuerman’s and Moyn’s criticisms of contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory. I then contextualize the emergence of the predominant understanding of the development of Frankfurt School Critical Theory into Habermasian Critical Theory in the Anglophone world alongside the development and marginalization of two subterranean lines of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, that drew on and developed what they saw as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s relationship to Marxism and political economy.
I then provide an overview of recent work in political economy that has drawn on and expanded these subterranean understandings of the Frankfurt School in the areas that Moyn and Scheuerman indicate contemporary critical theory should take up. I conclude with a plea that these contributions be taken seriously as Frankfurt School Critical Theory, lest it be eclipsed.
More here.
William Scheuerman’s original piece can be found here:
Commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Institute for Social Research—the Frankfurt School—have taken place around the world this year, many of them at prestigious universities and featuring illustrious contemporary representatives. Yet those events have overlooked a crucial and still relevant conjuncture in the Institute’s intellectual history. That oversight points to some unfortunate lacunae within recent Frankfurt-oriented critical theory.
By 1941 the Institute’s resident political economist, Friedrich Pollock, had embraced the idea that a qualitatively new model of state capitalism had crystallized. Pollock had spent much of the previous decade studying real-world experiments in state planning and major structural shifts within capitalism.
And Sam Moyn’s piece here (access required).