Talk:Frankfurt School

Criticism
Can we find a better criticism than that of fucking Buchanan? Osaka Sun (talk) 09:56, 18 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Hopefully - the comments he made say more about him than about the Frankfurt School, but they were all I had in arm's reach at the time. But I think it's legitimate for the article to cover the crazier criticism, since there's a lot of it out there. Balaam (talk) 10:04, 18 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Starting volley: they were a pack of heretical communists who subscribed to just about every form of bullshit the 20th century had to offer. They were not choreographing the 1960s counterculture like Buchanan suggests, but they did provide a lot of the ideological blueprints for the New Left. 18:57, 18 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I could search from structuralist marxist authors as Althusser and Hannecker. Also, there's a number of quotes from themselves, rejecting logic, empiricism, and generally, affirming themselves as "non-scientific" or outright, pseudo-scientific, thought they deliberately withdraw themselves from science (after all, despite Buchanan being a crank, they did had a political agenda, and were extremely vocal about it). After all, they're the for-fathers of Post-modernism and "huurrr Science is elite's political superstructure of dominashuuun!! Semanticzzz". --Tasurinchi (talk) 16:02, 5 February 2013 (UTC
 * Yeah, but we should not use Buchanan as our main source. In fact, he's probably emblematic of all the evils that the Frankfurt School was against. 173.32.30.79 (talk) 05:58, 11 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Literally none of the things you are referring to are accurate. Althusser was not a critical theorist. In fact he had nothing to do with the frankfurt school. Althusser was predominantly a Nietzschean that attempted to conciliate nietzschean relativism and decision-centric morality with some marxist ideas and in that became a great influence of post-modernists like Foucault and Derrida. The critical theorists are not post-modernist. On the contrary they served as a fierce opposition to post-modernism, and they described themselves (most notably Habermas) as the last vestiges of modernism that still believe an objective and scientific understanding of the material world is possible (sic). I don't know where the hell you got that they "reject logic and empiricism" from so I'm going to assume you are improvising. The "forefathers of post-modernism". What drivel. The entire point of the critical theorists is that they *don't* reject meta-narratives like the post-modernists, that's what critical theory is based on. Instead of just describing contemporary social norms they felt that a scientist should also criticise the negative aspects of a society in stark contrast with the cultural relativists that believe a culture can not be evaluated in itself. Hence why they stressed the importance of humanism (humanity being the qualifier of the social relations) while Althusser in distinctly Nietzschean fashion declared himself an anti-humanist. I think a minimum of knowledge on a subject should be ensured before making comments on it that will only cause confusion by expressing the notional salad that apparently reigns supreme in your head.


 * I didn't said Althusser was a member of the Critical School, I said he was structuralist. And he is the father of structuralist marxism, and known to be among the first to add levy-Straussian and Maoists ideas to western marxist studies, and to champion the idea of the epistemological rupture -which is refused by most Critics-.


 * All pomo deny to be pomo, other than Foucault, and him is his late period, structuralists and poststructuralist didn't referred to themselves as posmodernist and hold similar critics against western reductivism. The Frankfort school criticizes the foundations of modern thought, while pretending to return to "illustrated" principles (which is fairly contradictory on itself), sustaining at the same time other forms of critics on moral ground based on rethorical figures, giving rise to several competing trascendentalist political ideologies. One could even argue, that without the meddling of the F.S., Lyotard's world wouldn't have made much sense to his theory.


 * Of course, there's a polysemic hellstorm around the term "posmodernism", but since they are late critics of what was classically understood as modernity (or the phenomenons Durkheim, Weber, Marx, would encompass on "modernity", authors which, disregarding Durkheim, where taken into account), they come after it. There would come to old dispute of wether the end of meta-narratives was brought by the Cartessian Paradigm, Nietzsche, Husserl, or a Lyotard. Still thought, there's been Schools of Thought opposed to all-encompasing narratives for centuries (and there's a fair lot of them on the American tradition). Habermass has conciliatory pretensions, but he's also the most important revisionist of the School, for most others the idea of science is reserved for their own studies, and they worked on the distinction of an all-compasing Traditional Theory and their own Critical one, and theirs' based on idealism, not on empirism (as empirical as literary comparisons can be, at least), Marcuse, just to point one example (thought the previous mention relates inmediatly to Horkheimer), blames the Scientific Method and Empirism for causing the Unidimensional condition, for attaching concepts to operations, and ignoring "trascendence" (as seen in The Unidimensional Man)..


 * Althusser is "a theorical anti-humanist", but still holds true the marxian teleology of History, the way this is brought to reality is more complicated. Still thought, critics against teleologies and moral preaching on scientific ground are old as the Method itself, not a novel feature of the last 30 years, one could argue it just became more obvious on philosophical ground as more and more schools sprung around (and stayed alive) on the period between the 30's to 80's.

--Tasurinchi (talk) 19:16, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

Cultural Marxism
Link dump:   Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 01:44, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

BoN Edit
Dunno much (anything?) about the subject but are these edits even English? Scream!! (talk) 23:29, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
 * A good deal of it is true. Namely, the part that contrary whatever the Frankfurters may tell you, they are a shunned minority within the social sciences. It needs a rewrite urgently, however. And possibly fact-checking. --Raysenn Get the paddles, he's having a cancer! 21:17, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

Antisemitism
Ain't often rant against the Frankfurt School a dog whistle trick among wingnuts for masking Jewish Conspiracy theories?--Arisboch (talk) 11:28, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Conclusion
It is difficult to criticize the Frankfurt school, not because there isn't much there to be critical of, but because before you criticize something, you have to know what the fuck it is. And it seems the point that the author/s of this article are making, is what I've always felt. Which is, there is not way one can form an opinion about a set of theories or a school of thought when those theories/schools have no fixed ideas and change what they believe in about every 5 minutes. I can't even really see what it is about the group that is inherently Marxist. They are anti-west and yet some critical thinkers are borderline utopia.

Some of them are pro-war, some were anti-pacifists. Some, like Marcuse, were sympathetic to the student movement. Some were practically neo-cons. In other words, it's not a school of thought at all. It's a just a school where a bunch of people fleeing the Nazis taught. Beyond that, there seems to be no cohesive manner in which anyone can describe it. This brings us to the point about falsifiability. They probably don't want to put forward a set of ideas that are falsifiable and risk exposing the fact not that they run the world (like loony conspiracy theorists believe) but that their so called ideas are really about nothing. I also think the article makes a false distinction between german idealism and scientific socialism as most of what marx predicted was not borne out, hence he was re-writing his own work within a few years of writing it and then that turned out not to be accurate. So it seems that what Marxists and frankfurters have in common is that they both want to call their non falsifiable theories scientific, when they aren't. With all that said, Habermas is awesome. Burkean (talk) 22:48, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

What a mess
The section "On Academical Ground" is completely incoherent and full of grammatical errors. Reads almost like pomo literature, ironically enough. In desperate need of a rewrite. Fishies (talk) 05:46, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

11-point plan
I have added a section on the rumor of an 11-point plan to subvert western civilization. I have not spent too much time researching it. If somebody want to do more research on this conspiracy theory, feel free to elaborate on it. Were these topics even discussed by the Frankfurt School? 2.110.93.203 (talk) 07:35, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Disruptive editing
There is repeated disruptive editing here. Why are you deleting the section on the 11 point plan? 2.110.93.203 (talk) 16:58, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
 * That's collateral damage to reverting your weird bluenosing about the references to sausage. The part about the 11 point plan seems reasonably missional, though. Hertzy (talk) 17:01, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I thought that RationalWiki was supposed to be a rational wiki? 2.110.93.203 (talk) 17:49, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
 * -- Cosmikdebris (talk) 18:13, 1 July 2018 (UTC)



On Academic Grounds
I challenge anybody here to tell me what it means. This section has needed to be rewritten since 2014 (see above). I have no familiarity with the Frankfurt School, and I don't have enough time to dive deep, so unless somebody else does, I propose it be removed. As it stands, it's not really adding anything except confusion. 𝒮𝑒𝓇𝑒𝓃𝑒  talk  04:10, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I've done my best to interpret what was said, but the section is largely unsourced, so it's hard to figure out what is being said, and it's not clear how much of this is actually coming from external sources. 𝒮𝑒𝓇𝑒𝓃𝑒  talk  15:51, 30 April 2021 (UTC)