Frankfurt School theory repudiates renunciation and takes happiness promises literally.

Evidence

As we saw when discussing the nature of the Institut’s materialism, the demand for happiness was a fundamental element in Critical Theory. What Adorno later said of Benjamin might well serve as a description of the Frankfurt School as a whole: “Everything that Benjamin said or wrote sounded as if thought, instead of rejecting the promises of fairy tales and children’s books with its usual disgraceful `maturity,’ took them so literally that real fulfillment itself was now within sight of knowledge. In his philosophical topography, renunciation is totally repudiated.” 41 … In fact, the very separation of culture from material contentment was one of the clues that the Institut saw as betraying orthodox Marxism’s inability to transcend affirmative culture. The dichotomy of substructure and superstructure, however accurate it may have been in describing a certain moment in bourgeois history, ought not be eternalized. In the society of the future, the two spheres would be integrated in a healthy way. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 551

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s published remarks on Benjamin and to the broader materialist-happiness theme flagged earlier in the book.