Institute factions split between aesthetics-based philosophy of history and ideology critique

Evidence

Through his articles in the ZfS, Benjamin became the point of crystallization in a pattern of relations in which he and Adorno, in a kind of tense solidarity with one another, faced Marcuse and Lowenthal, who were critics of ideology. It was a confrontation between a philosophy of history formed by experiences of modernity in aesthetics on the one hand, and a historical-materialist application of classical idealist conceptions of art, on the other. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 216

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Horkheimer-Neumann and Adorno-Benjamin splits already recorded elsewhere in this book.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mapping of a whole school’s intellectual fault line onto one journal’s contributor list is the kind of structural claim worth returning to.