The Frankfurt School—Adorno and Horkheimer

Abstract

The Frankfurt School emerges from a confluence of three major traditions in German Political Thought, namely Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Like the Frankfurt School, all three thinkers believe that reality is usually in some way fundamentally misunderstood, and we must look “behind” the phenomena of society in order to understand what is “really” going on. To use the phrase of Paul Ricœur, they are “masters of suspicion,” and what they offer is something the Frankfurt School sought to make its own—a tradition and technique of critique. At the heart of the allegory of the cave lies a huge suspicion about our ontological and existential delusions, so there is good reason for arguing that the archetypal “master of suspicion” is Plato himself.