Intro to Critical Theory: The Frankfurt School

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course studies the contemporary significance and influence of the group of Marxist scholars who came together in the 1920s to found the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as it came to be known, brought together social theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and anthropology to analyze questions as disparate as popular culture, authoritarianism, philosophical reason, democracy, and modernist art. By pairing the thinkers' general audience texts with contemporary authors influenced by them, we will consider the school's complicated relationship to the social movements of the mid-century, while also exploring the example they set as "public intellectuals" and what light their approach, as thinkers and stylists, can shed on the political and cultural problems of the present.