Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:
Art is long, life is short. Most of us only manage to not do a few things in our limited span on Earth. But the Frankfurt School managed to not invent so many movements – to not be involved in so many of the crucial ideological shifts of the past century – that they caught my attention. Who were these people? What other aspects of our culture might we be unable to say they were involved in? For answers, I turned to the classic history of the group, Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination.
The basics are simple enough: the School was founded in Frankfurt in 1923. It attracted great philosophers like Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. When the Nazis took power in the early 1930s, the mostly-Jewish Frankfurters fled to America, where friendly locals helped them continue their work in affiliation with Columbia University. Mid-century Americans were suckers for sophisticated European intellectuals, and when the rise of fascism and World War II started dominating headlines, the German-Jewish Frankfurters were natural experts to help Americans process the situation. By the end of the war, they were firmly established as thought leaders.
More here.
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