Abstract

The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research has been revived in America as an inspiration for critical thought at the very moment when it has died in Europe as an institution. A successful reanimation of the ideas of the Frankfurt School will thus have to concern itself with the problem of acquiring a mode of thought, not with an exercise in academic nostalgia for heroic positions once taken, lively debates once held, trans-Atlantic migrations once made. One cannot revive the Frankfurt School as a museum, one can only renew its criticisms against the new forms its old opponents have taken. Many of us have attempted to do this in the last decade, at first often without knowing that our objections against our teachers had been voiced before, by individuals whose books we only slowly came to know.