A post last night from a friend of mine on Twitter prompted me to think about some of the less discussed, but equally important members and associates of the Institute for Social Research, aka the Frankfurt School, that was established in Germany in the 1920s.
The “big names” of the Institute are Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, with their co-written work The Dialectic of Enlightenment the cornerstone of their neo-Marxist theories of twentieth century capitalism and culture.
However, there was an array of other thinkers associated with the school, many of them who have been neglected in the present day, but whose ideas are worth considering.
First is Franz Neuman. He was a friend of Herbert Marcuse and they collaborated extensively in the 1930s on analyses of the nature and structure of the National Socialist state.
In fact, Neuman’s best known and most important book is entitled Behemoth, a sociological analysis of the system of Nazism as it was in power. A unique book, it was written (although subsequently revised) at the height of the Hitlerite regime and still holds force with its lucid and substantial insights. Not only is it a contemporary document of how Nazism worked in practice, it still holds up today.
Next we have Henryk Grossmann. He was a Polish/German economist who wrote what is perhaps the twentieth century’s most important work of Marxist political economy, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System.
Grossmann’s book was an attack on the underconsumptionist theory of Rosa Luxembourg, who, in spite of her brutal death at the hands of German proto-fascist death squads, was still an intellectual leading light in German communism in the 1920s.
He was one of the few economists to predict the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression that followed. Although he was invited to join the Frankfurt School, the Second World War resulted in his political isolation.
The third member of the Institute is one of my favourite thinkers, Erich Fromm.
Fromm was a psychoanalyst who, like Marcuse, sought to reconcile the theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. It was a disagreement over the significance of Freud’s theories that led to the split of Fromm from the Frankfurt School, although he did keep up a life-long correspondence with his former colleague Marcuse.
One of Fromm’s most beautiful - and accessible - books is entitled The Art of Loving, in which he writes movingly about the human capacity to love as an artistic endeavour.
For Fromm, being in love is not a state of affairs one falls into, but it is a condition one has to work at. It is not a trite work of elf-help, but one of the most sophisticated works on human experience I have ever read.
There we have three lesser-known members of the Frankfurt School, whose work needs a broader audience.