Abstract
This introduction to the collective volume on the archives of Critical Theory, published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Institute for Social Research, aims to highlight the main characteristics of the book, as well as reflect on the endeavor of putting together information, practices, and thoughts that one could find until today only in a scattered fashion. It justifies its reach from the archives of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Jürgen Habermas, and it clarifies that the book is composed of articles by researchers and editors who worked in different literary estates and articles by and interviews with researchers who were or are in charge of some of the archives or who are especially familiar with the material. It also notes that the existence of archives containing the manuscripts, recordings, and other documents of authors like Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, and Herbert Marcuse is known in relatively few circles, even within academia, making their potential for advancing the understanding of these authors’ works and times is even less widely known. This introduction presents the objective of the volume of balancing between different goals, combining information about the content of each archive and the history of its constitution, how different explorations of the archives affected or may yet affect the state of the research, as well as what it means to work in such archives, sometimes relating the own personal experience of the researchers in doing this work. It also makes clear that the overview presented in this volume cannot be comprehensive; the project of reflecting on the archives of Critical Theory in light of the current state of research can only be a work in progress.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Which form is correct, “Institute for Social Research” or “Institute of Social Research”? Both are. The English page of the IfS website refers to the “Institute for Social Research” (https://www.ifs.uni-frankfurt.de/home.html) but during the New York period, Horkheimer’s institute was called “Institute of Social Research.”
- 2.
The Königliches Institut für Seeverkehr und Weltwirtschaft an der Universität Kiel (Royal Institute of Shipping and the World Economy at the University of Kiel), as it was originally called, was founded in 1914 by Bernhard Harms, and the Forschungsinstitut für Sozialwissenschaften (Research Institute for Social Sciences) was founded in 1919 in Cologne and since 2013 has been called Institut für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (Institute for Sociology and Social Psychology). As the Institute for Social Research, the two institutes are still active today.
- 3.
There is an ongoing debate about the right way to write “critical theory”: we leave it to each author of the volume to decide whether or not to use capital letters.
- 4.
In the text published together with “Traditional and Critical Theory,” “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” Horkheimer wrote: “Among those who resort today to Critical Theory there are some who, in full awareness, degrade it as mere rationalization of their momentary endeavors; others cling to concepts that have become strange even in their literality, making them a shallow ideology, which everyone understands because they do not think. From the beginning, however, dialectical thinking designates the most advanced state of knowledge; and only from this can the decision ultimately come” (1980, p. 630). If this seems to justify the inclusion of the Marx-Engels archives in this volume, as founders of Critical Theory in a larger sense, it also raises the question of the Marxist thinkers that were not included. The editors thought that this would be impracticable, since determining affinities between Critical Theory (in strict sense) and specific works and/or strands of Marxism would need a justification of their own. If we take the example, that may be considered as the most obvious one, that of Georg Lukács. If it may be shown that his 1923 book History and Class Consciousness (Lukács 1971) had enormous impact in the debates of the Institute, the same cannot be said of Lukács’s later work.
- 5.
Besides their writings, these authors’ links with psychoanalysis is visible through their support of the Frankfurter Psychoanalytische Institut (Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute), founded in 1929 (and closed 4 years later by the Nazis). One of its founders was Erich Fromm, who was a member of the Institute for Social Research. Later, in 1960, Horkheimer encouraged Alexander Mitscherlich to create the Sigmund-Freud-Institut.
- 6.
According to Wiggershaus, “The term ‘Frankfurt School’ was a label first applied by outsiders in the 1960s, but Adorno in the end used it himself with obvious pride” (Wiggershaus 2007, p. 1). And Wiggershaus states that some of the attributes of a school were present: “an institutional framework” (the IfS), a “charismatic intellectual personality” with its director Max Horkheimer, a “manifesto” (Horkheimer’s inaugural lecture of 1931 on “The Present State of Social Philosophy and the Tasks Facing an Institute of Social Research”), a “new paradigm” (a materialist one, namely, the critical theory of society), and a “journal,” The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal of Social Research). But “most of these characteristics only applied to the first decade of the Institute’s Horkheimer period, the 1930s, and to its New York period in particular” (p. 2).
- 7.
- 8.
Grossmann exemplifies the case of other theorists who could not be included in the volume. There is no well-established archive for Grossmann’s papers.
- 9.
Some of the participants were close to a party or affiliated to one.
- 10.
Schmid Noerr’s entire text presents a precious reconstruction of the fate of the premises and of the documents of the institute from the Nazi period until Horkheimer’s return to Frankfurt after the end of World War II.
- 11.
O’Connor 2004. Although it is also fair to say that some books before it had already pointed to an alternative interpretation of Adorno’s work that did not presuppose a straight line and a mere development in his thought from the Dialectic of Enlightenment on. Examples of this alternative consideration are Eichel (1993); Borio and Danuser (1997); Nobre (1998); and Rebentisch (2003).
- 12.
Philipp Lenhard is also preparing a book about the history of the Institute for Social Research from 1923 to 1973, due to be published in 2024. Let us mention here also the essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer edited by William Scheuerman (Neumann and Kirchheimer 1996) and the complete writings of Otto Kirchheimer edited recently by Hubertus Buchstein (Kirchheimer 2019).
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1971 [2021]. Erziehung zur Mündigkeit. Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker 1959 bis 1969. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 2006. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London and New York: Verso.
———. 2011. Philosophie und Soziologie, ed. Dirk Braunstein. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
———. 2019. Vorträge 1949–1968. Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung V: Vorträge und Gespräche, ed. Michael Schwarz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 2021. Die Frankfurter Seminare. Gesammelte Sitzungsprotokolle 1949–1969. ed. Dirk Braunstein. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Aubert, Isabelle. 2015. Habermas: Une théorie critique de la société. Paris: CNRS Éditions.
Benjamin, Walter. 1955. Schriften. Vols. 1–2, ed. Theodor Adorno, Gretel Adorno, and Friedrich Podszus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 2007. Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, ed. Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, and Erdmut Wizisla. London: Verso.
Borio, Gianmario and Hermann Danuser. (Eds.) 1997. Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musike Darmstadt 1946–1966. Vols. 1-4. Freiburg: Rombach.
Braunstein, Dirk. 2022. Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Adam Baltner. Boston: Brill.
Corchia, Luca. 2017. Vorlass Jürgen Habermas. Korrespondenzen (1954–1994). J. W. Goethe-Universität/Archivzentrum.
Eichel, Christine. 1993. Vom Ermatten der Avantgarde zur Vernetzung der Künste: Perspektiven einer interdisziplinären Ästhetik im Spätwerk Adornos. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Grossmann, H. 1969. Marx, die klassische Nationalökonomie und das Problem der Dynamik. Frankfurt am Main and Vienna: Europäische Verlagsanstalt and Europa.
Horkheimer, Max. 1996, Gesammelte Schriften. Vols. 1–19, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Berlin: Fischer.
Jay, Martin. 1973. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kirchheimer, Otto. 2019. Gesammelte Schriften. Vols. 1–6, ed. Hubertus Buchstein. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Kracauer, Siegfried. 2022. Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda, and Political Communication, ed. John Abromeit, Graeme Gilloch, and Jaeho Kang. New York: Columbia University Press.
Löwenthal Leo and Siegfried Kracauer. 2003. In steter Freundschaft. Briefwechsel 1922–1966, ed. Peter-Erwin Jansen. Lüneburg: Zu Klampen.
Lukács, Georg. 1971 [1923]. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. London: The Merlin Press.
Marcuse, Herbert. 2015. Herbert Marcuse’s 1974 Paris Lectures at Vincennes University: Global Capitalism and Radical Opposition, ed. Peter-Erwin Jansen and Charles Reitz. Kansas City and Frankfurt am Main: CreateSpace.
———. 2017. Transvaluation of Values & Radical Change. Five Lectures 1966–1976, ed. Peter-Erwin Jansen, Sarah Surak, and Charles Reitz. Toronto: York University.
Neumann, Franz L. 1957. The Democratic and the Authoritarian State. Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. and with a preface by Herbert Marcuse. Glencoe: The Free Press.
Neumann, Franz L. and Otto Kirchheimer. 1996. The Rule of Law Under Siege. Selected Essays, ed. William Scheuerman. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nobre, Marcos. 1998. A dialética negativa de Theodor W. Adorno: a ontologia do estado falso. São Paulo: Iluminuras.
O’Connor, Brian. 2004. Adorno’s Negative Dialectic. Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Pollock, Friedrich. 2021. Gesammelte Schriften. Vols. 1–2, ed. Philipp Lenhard. Berlin: ça ira.
———. Forthcoming. Gesammelte Schriften. Vols. 3–6, ed. Philipp Lenhard. Berlin: ça ira.
Rebentisch, Juliane. 2003. Ästhetik der Installation. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Wiggershaus, Rolf. 2007 [1986]. The Frankfurt School. Its History, Theory and Political Significance. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Aubert, I., Nobre, M. (2023). Researching the Archives of Critical Theory. In: Aubert, I., Nobre, M. (eds) The Archives of Critical Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36585-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36585-0_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-36584-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-36585-0
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)