The Frankfurt School in Exile [Hardcover]

Thomas Wheatland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 2009

Members of the Frankfurt School have had an enormous effect on Western thought, beginning soon after Max Horkheimer became the director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main, in 1930. Also known as the Horkheimer Circle, the group included such eminent intellectuals as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and Friedrich Pollock. Fleeing Nazi oppression, Horkheimer moved the Institute and many of its affiliated scholars to Columbia University in 1934, where it remained until 1950.

Until now, the conventional portrayal of the Institute has held that its members found refuge by relocating to Columbia but that they had little contact with, or impact on, American intellectual life. With insight and clarity, Thomas Wheatland demonstrates that the standard account is wrong. Based on deep archival research in Germany and in the United States, and on interviews conducted with luminaries such as Daniel Bell, Bernadine Dohrn, Peter Gay, Todd Gitlin, Nathan Glazer, Tom Hayden, Robert Merton, and others, Wheatland skillfully traces the profound connections between the Horkheimer Circle’s members and the intellectual life of the era. Reassessing the group’s involvement with the American New Left in the 1960s, he argues that Herbert Marcuse’s role was misunderstood in shaping the radical student movement’s agenda. More broadly, he illustrates how the Circle influenced American social thought and made an even more dramatic impression on German postwar sociology.

Although much has been written about the Frankfurt School, this is the first book to closely examine the relationship between its members and their American contemporaries. The Frankfurt School in Exile uncovers an important but neglected dimension of the history of the Frankfurt School and adds immeasurably to our understanding of the contributions made by its émigré intellectuals to postwar intellectual life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

From The Atlantic

Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm—the gang’s all here, just transposed to a new setting and sphere of influence. The famed Institute for Social Research, Wheatland contends, was not merely a pre- and postwar European phenomenon; it was also a direct and profound player in the intellectual life of Depression-era America. After fleeing the Third Reich in 1933, the fathers of Critical Theory—dissident Jewish neo-Marxists whose core philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytical tenets were born of the doomed Weimar Republic—found a haven at Columbia University. There they warily circled counterparts like the New York Intellectuals and gained the patronage of the American Jewish Committee (which led to the landmark Studies in Prejudice and redounded to the benefit of both parties); later they played a prominent role in postwar sociology and engaged in a thorny relationship with the American New Left. Cleverly applying a modified Marxism of his own to his analysis—explaining how the Frankfurt School’s ideology was informed by its own economy, for instance, and why Columbia initially welcomed the eminent émigrés for curiously pragmatic reasons—Wheatland has produced a worthy successor to Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination and Rolf Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School.

Book Description

Members of the Frankfurt School have had an enormous effect on Western thought, beginning soon after Max Horkheimer became the director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main, in 1930. Also known as the Horkheimer Circle, the group included such eminent intellectuals as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and Friedrich Pollock. Fleeing Nazi oppression, Horkheimer moved the Institute and many of its affiliated scholars to Columbia University in 1934, where it remained until 1950.

Until now, the conventional portrayal of the Institute has held that its members found refuge by relocating to Columbia but that they had little contact with, or impact on, American intellectual life. With insight and clarity, Thomas Wheatland demonstrates that the standard account is wrong. Based on deep archival research in Germany and in the United States, and on interviews conducted with luminaries such as Daniel Bell, Bernadine Dohrn, Peter Gay, Todd Gitlin, Nathan Glazer, Tom Hayden, Robert Merton, and others, Wheatland skillfully traces the profound connections between the Horkheimer Circle’s members and the intellectual life of the era. Reassessing the group’s involvement with the American New Left in the 1960s, he argues that Herbert Marcuse’s role was misunderstood in shaping the radical student movement’s agenda. More broadly, he illustrates how the Circle influenced American social thought and made an even more dramatic impression on German postwar sociology.

Although much has been written about the Frankfurt School, this is the first book to closely examine the relationship between its members and their American contemporaries. The Frankfurt School in Exile uncovers an important but neglected dimension of the history of the Frankfurt School and adds immeasurably to our understanding of the contributions made by its émigré intellectuals to postwar intellectual life.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press (April 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816653674
• ISBN-13: 978-0816653676
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,301,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good read, but..., November 20, 2010

By 

Ommadawn - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Frankfurt School in Exile (Hardcover)

This may sound like an odd review, because I want to draw attention more to the physical nature of the printed hardcover version of the book than its content, which I was not able to get too far into for reasons I am about to explain.

This book has a very strong chemical smell to it. I know this smell originates from the printing process and is not unique to my specific copy. My hardcover copy of Adorno's "Critical Models" also has a similar smell (and it still does after so many years of owning it). I tried to de-gas "The Frankfurt School in Exile" but to no avail. It stank my room out especially on warm nights. I know that the smell will not disappear because of previous experience. I think that it's outrageous that Minnesota University Press thinks it's acceptable to print books that have such an obvious strong chemical smell that detracts from the pleasure of reading. Suffice to say, I have a significantly sized academic library, and I usually purchase hardcover texts so this problem is, thankfully, somewhat isolated to specific books printed by specific printing companies using specific materials. I know that Minnesota University Press can do better. I have a hardcover of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's "Public Sphere and Experience" and Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory" both published by Minnesota University Press and the quality of these two books is superb. So what's going on? Cost cutting? The Negt/Kluge and Adorno books were far more expensive than "The Frankfurt School in Exile" so it might have something to do with cost cutting.

As "The Frankfurt School in Exile" is also available as a Kindle version I decided to download the kindle application for my computer and the free sample thinking that this could provide a justified entry into this new form of book reading. I read all that the Kindle "sample" had to offer and I could tell that this book is worth adding to my Frankfurt School library. I can't wait to read it right through, but alas, I'm not that keen on reading it as an eBook as I like to pencil my notes in the text and to flip to the author's endnotes without having to press several buttons. So I now have to wait for the paperback version to come out, hopefully very soon and hopefully printed by a different printing company.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars German social theory meets American scientism, and more, March 7, 2010

By 

Jay C. Smith (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Frankfurt School in Exile (Hardcover)

Toward the end of The Frankfurt School in Exile Thomas Wheatland reflects on the legacy of German proponents of Critical Theory active in the United States in the period of the 1930s through the 1960s, including for at least some of that time Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, Friedrich Pollock, Paul Lazarsfeld, and especially Herbert Marcuse, among others. He observes that in the 1970s and 1980s adherents of the views associated with this group quickly found homes within the American academy, but that they "disappeared from the public intellectual arena." It is tellingly supportive of this conclusion that the reading audience for this book likely will be primarily academic specialists.

The Frankfurt School in Exile is probably best approached as a supplement to the more comprehensive histories by Martin Jay or Rolf Wiggershaus, but persons unfamiliar with those works will not be lost entirely since Wheatland provides sufficient background on both the institutional history and the ideas. He covers the American phase exhaustively, offering several fresh insights.

In 1934 The Institute for Social Research ("The Frankfurt School," then in exile in Geneva and headed by Horkheimer) relocated to the United States and attached to Columbia University. Wheatland uncovers new information on how this affiliation came about, with the alliance seeming to represent a win-win for both parties.

The relationship did not remain entirely congenial, however, since Columbia thought part of what it was getting was an empirical research capacity in sociology. Wheatland describes the vicissitudes of the attitudes of what he calls the "Horkheimer Circle" toward empiricism (versus theory), moving from resistance, to accommodation, then back again to an opposition to positivistic social science. Ultimately, though, Horkheimer, Pollock, and Adorno returned to the University of Frankfurt in 1949 and contributed to the adoption of American research methods in German sociology.

The Institute did not produce all that much in its years at Columbia, and much of what it did put out was in German, including articles for the theoretically oriented Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. In 1939 Horkheimer and Fromm, who was the most well-known of the group in America (at the time), had a falling out over financial and possibly intellectual matters and Fromm moved on.

Wheatland explores the connections between the Horkheimer Circle and the "New York Intellectuals" (the author's capitalization; a sample of who he means includes Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling, James Burnham, Clement Greenberg, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, etc.). He concludes that overall there was only limited meaningful contact, which he attributes to Horkheimer's determination to insulate the Institute from politics. He covers what calls a "narcissism of small differences" dispute between Horkheimer and Sidney Hook (Horkheimer was critical of pragmatism, Hook of dialectical materialism). He also addresses some of the mass culture issues of interest to both groups, and relates a largely unsuccessful overture by Dwight McDonald to ally with the Institute on this subject.

Wheatland's final two chapters are on the relationship between the Frankfurt School, Marcuse in particular, and the New Left in the 1960s. He concludes that Marcuse may have been more influenced by the New Left than the New Left was by him. Based on personal experience I was prepared to resist this conclusion, but in the end I found Wheatland's case convincing.

A portion of the book was published previously as a journal article, and certain of the chapters give the appearance of having been prepared for that purpose. One consequence is that readers must tolerate a bit of repetition, where one wonders whether the author has forgotten that he has told us that before.

It is somewhat frustrating as well that many of the issues that interest the author turn out to lack documentation. I counted numerous apologies for "scarce archival material," "missing transcripts," and so on, hardly the author's fault but not the way one wants to fill up a history book. In some cases Wheatland was able to apply memoirs or oral interviews to help fill the gaps.

All in all, this is a valuable contribution to the history of social thought during a unique period of intersection of differing intellectual traditions.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The well-known history of Critical Theory in an unfamiliar light, December 11, 2009

By 

ROROTOKO (rorotoko dot com) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Frankfurt School in Exile (Hardcover)

"The Frankfurt School in Exile" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Wheatland's book interview ran here as cover feature on December 2, 2009.