Frankfurt School
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For the group of European finance ministers, see Frankfurt Group.
The Frankfurt School was a Marxist approach to philosophy and social criticism that originated in 1923 at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany. The institute was intended to be a German Marx-Engels-Institute (Moscov), but it changed somewhat under its second director, Max Horkheimer. The most famous members and associated writers of the Frankfurt School were Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas. The Frankfurt school of thought, also called critical theory, was the intellectual inspiration behind the German New Left. Later, in the Unites States, it served as one foundation of postmodernism.