The Frankfurt School writings – Selected works by Karl Mannheim. Recently I have listened to the excellent podcast Philosophize This! by Stephen West over at philosophizethis.org. His impressive podcast has a seven episodes long introduction to the Frankfurt School, highly recommended. The Frankfurt School was a critical philosophical group of thinkers centered around the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt from 1918. The institute moved from Frankfurt to Geneva in 1933, and then to New York City, in 1935, where the Frankfurt School joined Columbia University. Among the members of the movement, we find philosophers and theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Löwenthal, Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt, Axel Honneth Siegfried Kracauer and Otto Kirchheimer.
The next step forward for philosophy
Their main concerns were on political, economic and social theory and the school’s works derived often from syntheses of the thematically pertinent works of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm, Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber. There are many great introductions to the Frankfurt School out there, try Wikipedia and if you have more time Philosophize This!. If you are really into it, start reading. Here I present a fine selection of one of the earliest participants of the Frankfurter School, the philosopher, and sociologist Karl Mannheim.
Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction – Studies in Modern Social Structure
Ideology and Utopia – An Introduction to Sociology of Knowledge
Dictatorship and Political Police – The Technique of Control by Fear
