Post-war Horkheimer and Adorno taught philosophy, not Critical Theory

Evidence

But what it was that they sensed there remained without a name. There was no Critical Theory, no Frankfurt School. … The joint seminars given by Horkheimer and Adorno, a pale shadow of the impressive collaborative teaching carried out during the heyday of Frankfurt University towards the end of the Weimar Republic, were also philosophical, and centred mainly on Kant and Hegel. The books by Horkheimer and Adorno that were available in German, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Philosophy of Modern Music and Minima Moraliawhich, in the situation of the Federal Republic, were cut off from the tradition they stood in, and were not incorporated productively into the authors’ current activitiescould hardly be seen as contributions to the revision and extension of a critical theory of society. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1917

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader Critical Theory synthesis: the postwar institutional revival was philological and Kantian rather than a continuation of the 1930s program.