The Institute’s return to Frankfurt transformed it from isolated enclave to mainstream intellectual force.
Evidence
After the return to Frankfurt, however, all this had changed. One of the purposes motivating the decision had been the effect the Institut might have on a new generation of German students. This meant a much greater participation in the normal academic life of the university community in which it was located. Instead of developing in relative isolation, the Frankfurt School was now one of the major currents of German sociological and philosophical thought. Instead of being ignored, its theoretical work was the source of an intense dispute, whose magnitude, as previously mentioned, rivaled the Methodensireit (methodological dispute) that had split German social thought half a century earlier. Without the linguistic barrier that precluded the widespread dissemination of the Institut’s ideas, their stimulus was felt as never before. Even that most conservative of social sciences, the discipline of history, was influenced by Critical Theory. Against the spare intellectual landscape of postwar Germany, the Frankfurt School stood out even more strikingly than it might have if conditions had been similar to those prevailing in Weimar. In short, after 1950 the Frankfurt School’s institutional embodiment served as a positive mediator between the ideas of its members and the society at large. In the place of insularity, it provided a platform for the propagation of Critical Theory as it developed in its new context. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 872
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: German students’ warm reception confirmed the Institute’s decision to return — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 848; The Frankfurt School’s institutional forms shifted across three distinct eras and three geographic sites — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 21; The same academics who persecuted the Institute now invited it to return — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1710