The Institute saw community sentimentality as erasing subjectivity under ideological consensus.

Evidence

Finally, the Frankfurt School was distinguished from the mandarins by the refusal of its members to seek immediate panaceas to the contradictions of modern society. Instead of sentimentalizing community and “peoplehood,” the Institut sought to expose the dangers inherent in such premature reconciliations. Both the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (popular community) and the “one-dimensional society” of postwar America meant the elimination of subjectivity in the name of an illegitimate and ideological consensus. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 882

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘one-dimensional society’ anticipates Marcuse’s later book and connects to early Institute contempt for mass consensus.