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One of the most interesting strands of twentieth-century German philosophy is what has come to be known as the Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers and social scientists whose work revolved around the Institute for Social Research, which was founded at the University of Frankfurt am Main in 1923. The common interest of those scholars was a critical engagement with the philosophies of Kant, Hegel and Marx, but also Nietzsche, Freud and Weber, and an attempt to combine philosophy and social scientific research. The idea of "Critical Theory" that is inextricably linked to the Frankfurt School, a new kind of social critique opposed to dogmatic forms of theory, was first established by Max Horkheimer in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory. The central claim of Critical Theorists is that it is impossible to understand the world and the society one lives in without taking into account the ideological context framing one's thought about that very society. Critical Theorists thereby put themselves into opposition to what they called "dogmatic" or "traditional" social theories, which they accuse of deriving (false) generalizations about the world by imitating the logico-mathematical methods of the natural sciences.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137309228_8

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