The Institut (Institut für Sozialforschung)

A notable intellectual institution (almost certainly the Institut für Sozialforschung, the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research) characterized by its critical—and sometimes politically fraught—approach to cultural theory, including debates over individual-expression art views, political censorship, and treatment of Jewish identity and class analysis. The claims give it a distinct, definable institutional identity.

Claims that use this term

• The Institut rejected individual-expression views of art as historically transcendental
• The Institut censored Benjamin’s text by softening its radical political language.
• The Institut avoided public criticism of the USSR until the Moscow purge trials
• The Institut subordinated Jewish identity and anti-Semitism to social class analysis
• The Institut reversed its early optimism about broken family authority enabling social change
• The Institut rejected Weber’s formal rationality in favor of substantive rationalism