The Frankfurt School’s forties work offered no practical program for social change.

Evidence

As a result, programmatic advice for methods to change society was not very evident in any of the Frankfurt School’s work in the forties. (Not that it had been before, but at least the call to praxis was a frequent element in the Institut’s earlier work.) Reconciliation with nature was the obvious goal, but what this meant precisely was never fully spelled out. What it clearly did not mean, of course, was the submission of man to hypostatized natural forces. The Frankfurt School did not wish to revive Engels’s crude dialectic of nature. Nor did its members want to succumb to the right-wing version of the apotheosis of nature, which Lowenthal had so devastatingly unmasked in his essay on Knut Hamsun. And finally, they sought to distinguish themselves from those all-too-frequent critiques of the Enlightenment running through German intellectual history, which were often little more than a nostalgic yearning for an idealized “state of nature.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 802

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘reconciliation with nature’ as goal echoes the earlier chapter’s discussion; the rejection of right-wing nature apotheosis ties to Lowenthal’s Hamsun essay.