Photograph taken in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Horkheimer is front left, Adorno front right, and Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Frankfurt School
Study of the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxist philosophy which now controls Western intellectualism, politics, and culture. It was by design; it was created by an internationalist intelligentsia to eradicate Western values, social systems, and European racial groups in a pre-emptive attempt to spark global, communist (think liberal) revolution.
The video below explains why we have all become so critical of each other to such an extent that we can no longer get along; stranded hapless in a partisan world, inable to form cohesion & make lasting bonds to create meaningful and effectual historical change.
Critical Theory was a precursor to Cultural Nihilism and Critical Race Theory (otherwise know as White Privilege) and later Critical Religious Theory.
Members of the Frankfurt School
This Jewish cabal of rootless migrants picked up Karl Marx's failures and engineered cultural nihilism into society, we became so critical of each other that nobody could form cohesion, instilling narratives of apathy such as: “nothing is good enough” and “nothing is ever going to get better”; They centred their attack on our pubescence instilling teenage angst to lay dormant our otherwise fertile “teenage” youth. They did these things, so our homogenous kindred spirit would never have realized or embraced with a sense of validity, be worth enough to validate and be shared among our people.
“To eradicate independent subversive cohesion the CIA & Frankfurt school influenced music, as the primary vector for their destructive Marxist lexicon. Theodor W. Adorno composed music we attribute to Beatles and other bands of that era, for example the Stones “paint it black” was about Frankfurt school member's distaste for western Californian culture.
These brainwashers picture above are masters at conditioning and invoking outrage, to turn all your those who have were entrusted with your inherent worth against you. The aim is to socially condition all your lineage to view you as worthless, to enable them to not only forsake you but to withhold and pass your worth onto somebody else. See Rastafarianism and Karl Marx's Concept of Alienation; and such manipulations past onto them will have you ostracized until you are completely disinherited. They will even crucify you for telling the truth about how evil they are as they plunder your hereafter into grievous and inconsolable disparity.
“The Revolution won’t happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism”.
Max Horkheimer, Frankfurt School.
Key works by members of the Frankfurt School include but are not limited to:
Traditional and Critical Theory, Max Horkheimer
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (download: PDF)
Critique of Instrumental Reason, Max Horkheimer
The Authoritarian Personality, Theodor W. Adorno
Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno
Culture Industry Reconsidered, Theodor W. Adorno
One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse (download: PDF)
The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, Herbert Marcuse
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin
Structural Transformation and the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas
Towards a Rational Society, Jürgen Habermas
The aim is to decimate you unrecognizable as they push your recognition, your inherent worth through the beast of burden until you become the next beast of burden and so on. Can you see why awareness will renounce this cycle of horrific abuse but keep perpetuating it, as victims of the F Scale? F means Fascist, meaning anybody who has the power to rise against them who become aware would not want to void their chance of regenerative redemption.
[after learning of his] “classroom antics, I have come to wonder – along with many another veteran of World War II – if Hitler wasn’t right after all.”.
California author Chet Schwarzkopf - letter to Herbert Marcuse.
But we can probably assume they will continue until everything becomes inconsolably unrecognizable unto their true sense of self (castigating Atman with the most lengthy disparities they can interlope)? In a few years, you probably won't be able to conceptualize anything I have just written, so why will you care or those around you care?
Susan Sontag November 18, 1974.
“The white race is the cancer of human history”.
Susan Sontag (alias of Susan Rosenblatt) Partisan Review, 1967. Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse lived with Sontag and Rieff for a year while working on his 1955 book Eros and Civilization.Transnational Anti-Colonialism. The “Second International Congress against Colonialism and Imperialism”, (from left to right) John W. Ford (USA), Willi Münzenberg (Germany), and Garan Tiemoko Kuoyaté (French Sudan, now Mali). Source: Adolf Ehrt, Der Weltbolschewismus, Anti-Komintern, Berlin (1936).
“We must organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink”.
Willi Münzenberg, Frankfurt School
The brainwashing forefathers of ruin profiled above should be made victims of their own decimating endeavours.
The praxis school was a Marxist humanist philosophical movement, whose members became influenced by Western Marxism. It originated in Zagreb and Belgrade in the SFR Yugoslavia, during the 1960s. Prominent figures among the school's founders include Gajo Petrović and Milan Kangrga of Zagreb and Mihailo Marković of Belgrade. From 1964 to 1974 they published the Marxist journal praxis, which was renowned as one of the leading international journals in Marxist theory. The group also organized the widely popular Korčula Summer School on the island of Korčula.
The first public appearance of the entire editorial board of Praxis (Student Centre, Zagreb, end of 1964). From left to right: Rudi Supek, behind him (obscured from view), Branko Bošnjak, Gajo Petrović (editor-in-chief), Danilo Pejović (editor-in-chief), Predrag Vranicki, Milan Kangrga, Danko Grlić; far right (with back turned): the director of the Student Centre, M. Heremić, next to him, Antun Žvan.
Due to the tumultuous sociopolitical conditions in the 1960s, the affirmation of 'authentic' Marxist theory and praxis, and its humanist and dialectical aspects in particular, was an urgent task for philosophers working across the SFRY. There was a need to respond to the kind of modified Marxism-Leninism enforced by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (see Titoism). To vocalize and therefore begin to satisfy this need, the program of praxis school defined in French in the first issue of the International edition of praxis: A quoi bon praxis. Predrag Vranicki (“On the problem of Practice”) and Danko Grlić (“Practice and Dogma”) expanded this program in English in the same issue (praxis, 1965, 1, pounds. 41–48 and pp. 49–58).
The praxis philosophers considered Leninism and Stalinism to be apologetic due to their ad hoc nature. Leninist and Stalinist theories considered to be unfaithful to the Marxist theory, as they were adjusted according to the needs of the party elite and intolerant of ideological criticism. The defining features of the school were: 1) emphasis on the writings of the young Marx; and 2) call for freedom of speech in both East and West, based upon Marx's insistence on ruthless social critique. As Erich Fromm has argued in his preface to Marković's work From Affluence to praxis, the theory of the praxis theoreticians was to “return to the real Marx as against the Marx equally distorted by right wing social democrats and Stalinists”.
“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”.
Another defining feature of the praxis theory is the incorporation of existential philosophy into the praxis brand of Marxist social critique, spearheaded by Rudi Supek. Organizing Korčula Summer School and publishing the international edition of praxis were ways to promote open inquiry in accordance with these postulates. Erich Fromm's collection of articles from 1965 entitled Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium has been of much help in promoting the praxis school. As many as six members of the praxis school have published articles in this collection: Marković, Petrović, Danilo Pejović, Veljko Korać, Rudi Supek and Predrag Vranicki.
The praxis journal is published by a group of praxis theoreticians, mainly from the departments of Sociology and Philosophy at Zagreb University and the Philosophy department at Belgrade University. The first issue of the Yugoslav edition published on 1 September 1964 and was published until 1974. As for the foreign edition, it was published between 1965 and 1973.
praxis helped to reinvigorate the destructive potential of Marxism. It drew inspiration from the works of Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Lucien Goldmann. The texts in the magazine featured articles by writers from both the East and the West. praxis editors had a strong tendency to publish articles that went against the Leninist theory and praxis promoted and enforced by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia.
Korčula Summer School was a meeting place for philosophers and social critics from the entire world. Some prominent attendees included:
Ernst Bloch, Eugen Fink, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Henri Lefebvre, Richard J. Bernstein, Lucien Goldmann and Shlomo Avineri, to name a few.
Other notable participants included A. J. Ayer, Norman Birnbaum and Lucien Goldmann. Another peculiarity is that one of the attendants was from the Vatican, Father Gustav Wetter, which testifies to the fact that Korčula Summer School was not merely a Marxist symposium—the attendees held interests ranging from phenomenology to theology.
“Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.”.
The New School is a leftist institute in Greenwich Village New York, founded by John Dewey in 1919, as part of Columbia University of the Colonna Family of Roman Emperors (a powerful in medieval and Renaissance Rome, supplying one pope Martin V (last pope to date to take on the pontifical name "Martin" elected pope, at the age of 48, at the Council of Constance on St. Martin's Day, 11 November 1417.) and many other church and political leaders). The New School had ties to the Frankfurt School.
During WW2 Henry Murray (who later worked with Ted Kaczynski at Harvard) made a report on Adolf Hitler for OSS director William Donavan, in collaboration with The New School and Ernst Hanfstaengl (friend of William Hearst, Roosevelt family, Walter Lippman). The New School uses "To the Living Spirit" as its motto. In 1937, Thomas Mann remarked that a plaque bearing the inscription "be the Living Spirit" had been torn down by the NSDAP from a building at the University of Heidelberg. He suggested that the University in Exile adopt that inscription as its motto, to indicate that the 'living spirit,' mortally threatened in Europe, would have a home in this country. Alvin Johnson adopted that idea, and the motto continues to guide the division in its present-day endeavors.
The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science was founded in 1933 as the University in Exile for scholars who had been dismissed from teaching positions by the Italian fascists under Mussolini or had to flee Hitler's NSDAP Germany. The school was co-founded by was founded by Alvin Johnson, Charles Beard (New Deal socialism of Roosevelt, married to feminist Mary Ritter), James Harvey Robinson (New History, revionist), Horace Kallen (Zionist, Harvard, friend of Woodrow Wilson) and John Dewey. Zionist Harold Laski was one of the first lecturers.
Alumni of New School include:
Notable scholars associated with the University in Exile include psychologists Erich Fromm, Max Wertheimer and Aron Gurwitsch, political theorists Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, and philosopher Hans Jonas. The list of New School people below includes notable students, alumni, faculty, administrators and trustees of the New School. Approximately 53,000 living New School alumni reside in more than 112 countries.
Abraham Foxman American lawyer and activist. National director of the Anti-Defamation League from 1987 to 2015.
Ai Weiwei Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian, provocateur agent and activist. Chinese nation's most vocal political commentators.
Alex Honneth Director of the Frankfurt School and Professor of philosophy at Columbia University.
Alexey Brodovitch Russian-born American photographer, designer and instructor, famous for his art direction of fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar. Teacher of Richard Avedon.
Alexander Goldenweiser Russian-born U.S. anthropologist and sociologist. Studied anthropology under Franz Boas, and earned his AB degree from Columbia University.
Alexander Wang (fashion industry, clothes for Michelle Obama and Ivanka Trump)
André Breton (wrote the Surrealist Manifesto, based on Freud's theories of the subconscious)
Ani DiFranco Artist / Activist (Righteous Babe Foundation).
Anne Meara (Hollywood actress, mother of Ben Stiller, played in The Boys From Brazil, written by Ira Levin of Rosemary's Baby)
Ben Gazzaro (Actors Studio, Hollywood actor, collaborator with John Cassavetes)
Bertrand Russell (Russell family, Earls of Tavistock, LSE of Fabian Society, Congress for Cultural Freedom)
Betty Friedan Author of Feminine Mystique, often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism.
Bill Donahue Founder and president of the Catholic League (United States) since 1993, with co-founder and Jesuit Virgil Blum.
Bill Evans American jazz pianist and composer. Founding member of Southeastern Louisiana University's Delta Omega chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia. Performed in Greenwich Village clubs.
Bradford Shellhammer American entrepreneur and designer who co-founded the e-commerce companies Fab and Bezar. Also founding editor of Queerty.
Bradley Cooper (Jesuit, Hollywood actor, movie with Lady Gaga)
Chris Hughes (Facebook, The New Republic) - American entrepreneur who co-founded and served as spokesman for the online social directory and networking site Facebook.
Christopher Hitchins (New Atheism, Four Horsemen with Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Bennett, The Nation)
Donna Karan American fashion designer and creator of the Donna Karan New York and DKNY clothing labels.
Edward Hopper American realist painter and printmaker. (surrealism art scene, artists colony of Huntington Hartford)
Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of FDR who introduces New Deal Socialism in US, while Adolf Hitler introduces National Socialism in Germany)
Elsie Parsons American anthropologist (student of Franz Boas), sociologist, folklorist, and feminist who studied Native American tribes. Friend of Theodore Roosevelt.
Erich Fromm Frankfurt School and Columbia University, Fromm is credited as one of the founders of socialist humanism.
Eugene O'Neill American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. Plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism. (S&B, Jesuit university Fordham)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt III American economist and academic. great-grandson of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and through his mother Eleanor Roosevelt related to du Pont family.
Hage Geingob Jesuit, Prime Minister of Namibia from 1990 to 2002 and 2012 to 2015. President of the ruling Socialist / Marxist–Leninist SWAPO Party.
Hannah Arendt (NY Intellectuals) - German jewish OSS/CIA agent and Zionist. She is a descendant of Max Arendt, politician in Königsberg.
Harold Laski British Jewish MI6 agent, Zionist affiliated with the Frankfurt School and the Fabian Society. Professor, London School of Economics and chairman of British Labour Party.
Harry Belafonte RCA, Anti-Apartheid and Civil Rights Movement, confidant of Martin Luther King (MLK), Joe Biden, Center for American Progress. Bailed MLK out of Birmingham City Jail.
Heinrich Blücher Communist Party of Germany German poet, Marxist philosopher and second husband of Hannah Arendt. Coined the term "the anti-political principle".
Horace Kallen Zionist, SPR, ACLU). German-American Zionist, worked for American Civil Liberties Union. Coined term cultural pluralism.
Jack Kerouac American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
Jacques Derrida Jesuit, associated with post-structuralism, postmodern philosophy and examined limits of phenomenology.
Jacob Dylan (son of Bob Dylan, one semester) - Rose to fame as the lead singer and primary songwriter for the rock band the Wallflowers.
James Baldwin (Actors Studio, gay agenda, The Nation, Civil Rights Movement, book with Margaret Mead)
Jason Bateman American actor, director and producer known for his roles of Michael Bluth in the Fox/Netflix sitcom Arrested Development.
Jasper Johns American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art.
Jesse Eisenberg Hollywood actor, starred in Woody Allen films: To Rome with Love, Café Society, and Now You See Me.
Joel Schumacher (Hollywood director, Batman franchise, The Wiz)
Corliss Lamont Marxist and supporter of Joseph Stalin, and a friend of Julian Huxley (United Nations). Director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
John Cage (Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, scene of Andy Warhol and Nico). Connected to the Beatles through John Lennons wife Yoko Ono.
John Dewey Professor, University of Chicago (of John Rockefeller), Co-founded The New School. Wrote: The School and Society. President of the American Psychological Association.
John Henrik Clarke African-American historian, professor, and pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s. Prominent during the Black Power movement in the 1960s.
John Keynes Influential economist of the 20th century, produced writings that are basis for school of thought (Keynesian economics). Member of Other Club (political dining society) with Winston Churchill.
Jonah Hill American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. Directed the music videos: Vampire Weekend song "Sunflower" from their 2019 album Father of the Bride and Danny Brown song "Ain't it Funny" from his 2016 album Atrocity Exhibition.
Judith Butler American philosopher and gender theorist, influenced political philosophy, ethics, and fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory.
Jurgen Habermas Frankfurt School. German social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. Addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.
Karen Horney German psychoanalyst (neo-Freudian), relationship with Erich Fromm. Credited with founding feminist psychology in response to Freud's theory of penis envy.
Lee Strassberg American theatre director, actor and acting teacher. Co-founded, with theatre directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931. Actors Studio with Elia Kazan ACCF.
Lenore Kandel Friend of Jack Kerouac, Human Be-In with Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, in Kenneth Anger's movie Invocation of My Demon Brother with Anton Lavey, Mick Jagger and Bobby Beausoleil, follower of Charles Manson.
Leo Steinberg American theatre director, actor and acting teacher. From his base in New York, Strasberg trained several generations of theatre and film notables. (NY art critic, The New Yorker, the art scene).
Leo Strauss (German Zionist movement with Hannah Arendt, friend of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt).
Kevin Smith American filmmaker, actor, comedian, comic book writer and author. Smith has mostly made horror films, including Red State. Co-founder of 'The Wayne Foundation'.
Marc Jacobs American fashion designer. Gay agenda, Fashion industry. Time 100" list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Margaret Mead American cultural anthropologist (Tavistock). Author and speaker in the mass media during 1960s and 1970s.
Mario Puzo (Hollywood screenwriter, The Godfather with Marlon Brando, glorification of Colonna controlled mafia).
Mark Ruffalo American actor and producer known for playing Bruce Banner / Hulk since 2012 in the superhero franchise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Marlon Brando Considered one of the most influential actors of the 20th century, known for his role in the Godfather.
Max Wertheimer Austro-Hungarian psychologist, co-founder of Gestalt psychology, authored Productive Thinking. (fellow student of Kurt Lewin)
Maya Wiley (council of NY major Bill de Blasio, NAACP, NBC, Open Society Foundations of George Soros).
Natali Germanotta American fashion designer and stylist. Founded the fashion label Topo Studio. Co-founded Born This Way Foundation with her elder sister, singer Lady Gaga.
Norman Rockwell American painter and illustrator. Painted the Four Freedoms series. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Civil rights, poverty, and space exploration.
Paul Dano American actor and partner of Zoe Kazan. Dano appeared in Steve McQueen's period drama biopic 12 Years a Slave. Role in several episodes of The Sopranos (season 4).
Paul Rand American art director and graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs. (IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and NeXT)
Piet Mondrian Dutch painter and art theoretician, regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Vontributor to De Stijl art movement and group.
Pippin Parker American playwright and theatre director. Dean of The New School for Drama. Parker is active in the Writers Guild of America, East.
Reggie Workman American avant-garde jazz and hard bop double bassist, recognized for his work with both John Coltrane and Art Blakey.
Richard Avedon (friend of James Baldwin, photographer for HarperBazaar of Hearst of underage girls Natassja Kinski and Brooke Shields).
Richard Bernstein American artist associated with pop art and the circle of Andy Warhol. Pragmatism, classmate of Susan Sontag). Civil Rights Movement.
Rob Zombie American singer, songwriter, filmmaker, and voice actor. Founding member of heavy metal band White Zombie.
Robert Glasper American pianist, record producer, songwriter, and musical arranger. Played keyboards on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. (also collaboration with Kanye West)
Robert Lowell Asian-American poet. Lowell was also a signer of the anti-war manifesto "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" circulated by members of the radical intellectual collective RESIST.
Rod Steiger American actor, associated with the art of method acting. Noted for his portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters. Starred as Marlon Brando's mobster brother Charley in On the Waterfront (1954).
Ruth Benedict American anthropologist and folklorist. President of the American Anthropological Association. Graduate studies at Columbia University in 1921, where she studied under Franz Boas. (partner of Margaret Mead)
Ruth Westheimer German-American sex therapist, talk show host as DR Ruth, author, professor, Holocaust storyteller. joined Haganah Jewish Zionist underground paramilitary organization (later, the Israel Defense Forces) in Jerusalem.
Shep Gordon American talent manager, Hollywood film agent, and producer. Manager of Alice Cooper, Debbie Harry, Pink Floyd. Serves on the board of the Tibet Fund with the Dalai Lama.
Shimon Peres Israeli politician who served as the eighth prime minister of Israel from 1984 to 1986 and from 1995 to 1996 and as the ninth president of Israel from 2007 to 2014. (Jesuit, Le Cercle)
Shelley Winters American actress whose career spanned seven decades. Actors Studio, Stanley Kubrick's pedophilia movie Lolita and The Diary of Anne Frank.
Shigeko Kubuta Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist. (art scene with Yoko Ono). key member and influence on Fluxus.
Sidney Hook American Communist philosopher of pragmatism known for philosophy of history, education, political theory, and ethics. Student of John Dewey at Columbia University. (CCF, CFW, ACCF)
Slavoj Zizek Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and Marxism and political theory.
Stacy Farber Canadian actress. Known for Degrassi: The Next Generation with Drake, Dark Oracle, King of Sorrow, Cult, Chicago Justice, UnREAL.
Sufjan Stevens American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. Known to explore themes of love, religion, outer space, and grief.
Tennessee Wiliams American playwright and screenwriter. With contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, considered among three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.
Tony Curtis (Hollywood actor, The Beatles Sgt Pepper cover with Crowley, married to Janet Leigh who played in John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate)
Vanessa Wruble American entrepreneur, journalist, and activist. In 2017, Wruble co-founded and served as Head of Campaign Operations of the 2017 Women's March and founded March On where she is executive director.
Walter Matthau American actor, comedian and film director. Attended New School with German director Erwin Piscator. Advisory board of the National Student Film Institute.
W.H. Auden British-American poet. Gay agenda, worked with Igor Stravinsky. Lecturer at The New School for Social Research and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
Wilhem Reich Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. Credited as the father of the free love sexual revolution.
Will Wright American video game designer and co-founder of the former game development company Maxis, and then part of Electronic Arts (EA). Original designer for computer game The Sims.
William F Buckley Jr American public intellectual, conservative author and political commentator. Worked two years in the CIA. Member of the Knights of Malta. Founded magazine National Review.
Woody Allen American film director, writer, actor, pedophile and comedian. Contributor to The Realist of Paul Krassner, Greenwich Village scene of the 70's, Studio 54 scene.
Ellen Johnson American activist for the civil rights of atheists and for the separation of church and state in the United States. President of the organization American Atheists from 1995 to 2008.
Janine Jackson Program director of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and the host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin—a weekly program of media criticism airing on more than 150 stations around the country.
Abraham Maslow American psychologist known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. Ranked tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was born July 19, 1898, in Berlin, to Carl Marcuse and Gertrud Kreslawsky. His family was Jewish. He completed his PhD thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1922 on the German Künstlerroman after which he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing.
Herbert Marcuse
He returned to Freiburg in 1928 to study with Edmund Husserl and write a habilitation with Martin Heidegger, which was published in 1932 as Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (Hegels Ontologie und die Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit). This study was written in the context of the Hegel renaissance that was taking place in Europe with an emphasis on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's ontology of life and history, idealist theory of spirit and dialectic.
With his academic career blocked by the rise of the Third Reich, in 1933 Marcuse joined the Institute for Social Research, popularly known as the Frankfurt School. He went almost at once into exile with them, first briefly in Geneva, then in the United States. Unlike some others, Marcuse did not return to Germany after the war. When he visited Frankfurt in 1956, the young Jürgen Habermas was surprised that he was a key member of the Institute.
After emigrating from Germany in 1933, Marcuse immigrated to the United States in 1934, where he became a citizen in 1940. Although he never returned to Germany to live, he remained one of the major theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, along with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (among others). In 1940 he published Reason and Revolution, a dialectical work studying G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx. While a member of the Frankfurt School (also known as the Institute of Social Research), Marcuse developed a model for critical social theory, created a theory of the new stage of state and monopoly capitalism, described the relationships between philosophy, social theory, and cultural criticism, and provided an analysis and critique of German fascism. Marcuse worked closely with critical theorists while at the institute.
During World War II, Marcuse first worked for the US Office of War Information (OWI) on anti-National Socialist propaganda projects. In 1943, he transferred to the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Directed by the Harvard historian William L. Langer, the Research and Analysis Branch was in fact the biggest American research institution in the first half of the twentieth century. At its zenith between 1943 and 1945, it comprised over twelve hundred employees, four hundred of whom were stationed abroad. In many respects, it was the site where post–World War II American social science was born, with protégés of some of the most esteemed American university professors, as well as a large contingent of European intellectual émigrés, in its ranks.
These men comprised the "theoretical brain trust" of the American war machine, which, according to its founder, William J. Donovan, would function as a "final clearinghouse" for the secret services—that is, as a structure that, although not engaged in determining war strategy or tactics, would be able to assemble, organize, analyze, and filter the immense flow of military information directed toward Washington, thanks to the unique capacity of the specialists on hand to interpret the relevant sources.
In March 1943, Marcuse joined his fellow Frankfurt School scholar Franz Neumann in R & A's Central European Section as senior analyst and rapidly established himself as "the leading analyst on Germany. After the dissolution of the OSS in 1945, Marcuse was employed by the US Department of State as head of the Central European section, becoming an intelligence analyst of Nazism. A compilation of Marcuse's reports was published in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort. In 1952, Marcuse began a teaching career as a political theorist, first at Columbia University, then at Harvard University. Marcuse worked at Brandeis University from 1958 to 1965, then at the University of California San Diego from 1965 to 1970. It was during his time at Brandeis University that he wrote his most famous work, One-Dimensional Man (1964). Marcuse was a friend and collaborator of the political sociologist Barrington Moore Jr. and of the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, and also a friend of the Columbia University sociology professor C. Wright Mills, one of the founders of the New Left movement. In his "Introduction" to One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse wrote, "I should like to emphasize the vital importance of the work of C. Wright Mills."
In the post-war period, Marcuse rejected the theory of class struggle and the Marxist concern with labor, instead claiming, according to Leszek Kołakowski, that since "all questions of material existence have been solved, moral commands and prohibitions are no longer relevant." He regarded the realization of man's erotic nature as the true liberation of humanity, which inspired the utopias of Jerry Rubin and others. Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and Sigmund Freud, Eros and Civilization, and his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns of the student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests and his essay "Repressive Tolerance" (1965), Marcuse soon became known in the media as "Father of the New Left."
Contending that the students of the sixties were not waiting for the publication of his work to act, Marcuse brushed the media's branding of him as "Father of the New Left" aside lightly, saying "It would have been better to call me not the father, but the grandfather, of the New Left." His work heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. He had many speaking engagements in the US and Western Bloc in the late 1960s and 1970s. He became a close friend and inspirer of the French philosopher André Gorz.
Herbert Marcuse appealed to students of the New Left through his emphasis on the power of critical thought and his vision of total human emancipation and a non-repressive civilization. He supported students he felt were subject to the pressures of a commodifying system, and has been regarded as an inspirational intellectual leader. He is also considered among the most influential of the Frankfurt School critical theorists on American culture, due to his studies on student and counter-cultural movements on the 1960s. The legacy of the 1960s, of which Marcuse was a vital part, lives on, and the great refusal is still practiced by oppositional groups and individuals who refuse to conform to the existing systems of oppression and domination.
Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno (alias: Theodor Adorno-Wiesengrund) was born as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund in Frankfurt am Main on September 11, 1903, the only child of Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1946) and Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana (1865–1952). His mother, a devout Catholic from Corsica, was once a professional singer, while his father, an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export business.
Theodor Adorno
Adorno's intellectual nonconformist was also shaped by the repugnance he felt towards the nationalism which swept through the Reich during the First World War. Along with future collaborators Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Bloch, Adorno was profoundly disillusioned by the ease with which Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders—among them Max Weber, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, as well as his friend Siegfried Kracauer—came out supporting the war. The younger generation's distrust for traditional knowledge arose from the way in which this tradition had discredited itself.
As the NSDAP became the largest party in the Reichstag, Horkheimer's 1932 observation proved typical for his milieu: "Only one thing is certain", he wrote, "the irrationality of society has reached a point where only the gloomiest predictions have any plausibility." In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked; in March, as the swastika was run up the flagpole of town hall, the Frankfurt criminal police searched the institute's offices. Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July and his application for membership in the Reich Chamber of Literature denied because membership was limited to "persons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of character and blood. As a non-Aryan," he was informed, "you are unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation." Soon afterwards, Adorno was forced into 15 years of exile.
After the possibility of transferring his habilitation to the University of Vienna came to nothing, Adorno considered relocating to Britain upon his father's suggestion. With the help of the Academic Assistance Council, Adorno registered as an advanced student at Merton College, Oxford, in June 1934. Under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, Adorno worked on a dialectical critique of Husserl's epistemology. By this time, the Institute for Social Research had relocated to New York City and begun making overtures to Adorno. After months of strained relations, Horkheimer and Adorno re-established their essential theoretical alliance during meetings in Paris.
In 1935 Adorno was in intense correspondence with Walter Benjamin about the latter's Arcades Project. After receiving an invitation from Horkheimer to visit the Institute in New York, Adorno sailed for New York on June 9, 1937, and stayed for two weeks. While he was in New York, Horkheimer's essays "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" and "Traditional and Critical Theory," which would soon become instructive for the Institute's self-understanding, were the subject of intense discussion.
Soon after his return to Europe, Gretel moved to Britain, where she and Adorno were married on September 8, 1937; a little over a month later, Horkheimer telegrammed from New York with news of a position Adorno could take with the Princeton Radio Project, then under the directorship of the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. Although he was expected to embed the Project's research within a wider theoretical context, it soon became apparent that the Project was primarily concerned with data collection to be used by administrators for establishing whether groups of listeners could be targeted by broadcasts specifically aimed at them. Expected to make use of devices with which listeners could press a button to indicate whether they liked or disliked a particular piece of music, Adorno bristled with distaste and astonishment: "I reflected that culture was simply the condition that precluded a mentality that tried to measure it.
Thus, Adorno suggested using individual interviews to determine listener reactions and, only three months after meeting Lazarsfeld, completed a 160-page memorandum on the Project's topic, "Music in Radio." Adorno was primarily interested in how the musical material was affected by its distribution through the medium of radio, and thought it imperative to understand how music was affected by its becoming part of daily life. "The meaning of a Beethoven symphony," he wrote, "heard while the listener is walking around or lying in bed, is very likely to differ from its effect in a concert-hall where people sit as if they were in church."
In essays published by the Institute's Zeitschrift, Adorno dealt with the atrophy of musical culture that had become instrumental in accelerating tendencies—toward conformism, trivialization and standardization—already present in the larger culture. Unsurprisingly, Adorno's studies found little resonance among members of the project. At the end of 1939, when Lazarsfeld submitted a second application for funding, the musical section of the study was left out. Yet during the two years during which he worked on the Project, Adorno was prolific, publishing "The Radio Symphony", "A Social Critique of Radio Music", and "On Popular Music", texts that, along with the draft memorandum and other unpublished writings, are found in Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation, Current of Music. In light of this situation, Horkheimer soon found a permanent post for Adorno at the Institute.
In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Mann called "German California", [29] setting up house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German émigrés that included Bertolt Brecht and Schoenberg. Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music that Adorno felt, while writing it, was a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades elaborating. The two sets about completing their joint work, which transformed from a book on dialectical logic to a rewriting of the history of rationality and the Enlightenment. First published in a small mimeographed edition in May 1944 as Philosophical Fragments, the text waited another three years before achieving book form when it was published with its definitive title, Dialectic of Enlightenment, by the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag.
Throughout the fifties and sixties, Adorno became a public figure, not simply through his books and essays, but also through his appearances in radio and newspapers. In talks, interviews and round-table discussions broadcast on Hessen Radio, South-West Radio and Radio Bremen, Adorno discussed topics as diverse as "The Administered World" (September 1950), "What is the Meaning of 'Working Through the Past?"' (February 1960) to "The Teaching Profession and its Taboos" (August 1965). Additionally, he frequently wrote for Frankfurter Allgemeine, Frankfurter Rundschau and the weekly Die Zeit.
Like most theorists of the Frankfurt School, Adorno was influenced by the works of Hegel, Marx and Freud. Their major theories fascinated many left-wing intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century. Lorenz Jäger speaks critically of Adorno's "Achilles' heel" in his political biography: that Adorno placed "almost unlimited trust in finished teachings, in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the teachings of the Second Viennese School."
Adorno's work in the years before his death was shaped by the idea of "negative dialectics", set out especially in his book of that title. A key notion in the work of the Frankfurt School since Dialectic of Enlightenment had been the idea of thought becoming an instrument of domination that subsumes all objects under the control of the (dominant) subject, especially through the notion of identity, i.e. of identifying as real in nature and society only that which harmonized or fit with dominant concepts, and regarding as unreal or non-existent everything that did not.[citation needed] Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt to articulate a non-dominating thought that would recognize its limitations and accept the non-identity and reality of that which could not be subsumed under the subject's concepts. Indeed, Adorno sought to ground the critical bite of his sociological work in his critique of identity, which he took to be a reification in thought of the commodity form or exchange relation which always presumes a false identity between different things. The potential to criticize arises from the gap between the concept and the object, which can never go into the former without remainder. This gap, this non-identity in identity, was the secret to a critique of both material life and conceptual reflection.
Max Horkheimer
On February 14, 1895, Horkheimer was born the only son of Moritz and Babetta Horkheimer. Horkheimer was born into a conservative, wealthy Orthodox Jewish family. In the spring of 1919 Horkheimer enrolled at Munich University. While living in Munich, he was mistaken for the revolutionary playwright Ernst Toller and arrested and imprisoned. After being released, Horkheimer moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he studied philosophy and psychology under the respectable Hans Cornelius. There, he met Theodor Adorno, several years his junior, with whom he would strike a lasting friendship and a collaborative relationship.
Max Horkheimer
In 1926 Horkheimer was an "unsalaried lecturer in Frankfurt." Shortly after, in 1930, he was promoted to professor of philosophy at Frankfurt University. In the same year, when the Institute for Social Research's (now known as Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) directorship became vacant, after the departure of Carl Grünberg, Horkheimer was elected to the position "by means of an endowment from a wealthy businessman". The Institute had had its beginnings in a Marxist study group started by Felix Weil, a one-time student of political science at Frankfurt who used his inheritance to fund the group as a way to support his leftist academic aims. Pollock and Horkheimer were partners with Weil in the early activities of the Institute.
Horkheimer worked to make the Institute a purely academic enterprise. As director, he changed Frankfurt from an orthodox Marxist school to a heterodox school for critical social research . The following year publication of the Institute's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung began, with Horkheimer as its editor. Horkheimer intellectually reoriented the Institute, proposing a programme of collective research aimed at specific social groups (specifically the working class) that would highlight the problem of the relationship of history and reason. The Institute focused on integrating the views of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. The Frankfurt School attempted this by systematically hitching together the different conceptual structures of historical materialism and psychoanalysis.
During the time between Horkheimer's being named Professor of Social Philosophy and director of the Institute in 1930, the NSDAP became the second largest party in the Reichstag. In the midst of the violence surrounding the NSDAP rise, Horkheimer and his associates began to prepare for the possibility of moving the Institute out of Germany. Horkheimer's venia legendi was revoked by the new NSDAP government because of the Marxian nature of the Institute's ideas as well as its prominent Jewish association. When Hitler was named the Chancellor in 1933, the Institute was thus forced to close its location in Germany.
In 1940, Horkheimer received American citizenship and moved to the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles, California, where his collaboration with Adorno would yield the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In 1942, Horkheimer assumed the directorship of the Scientific Division of the American Jewish Committee. In this capacity, he helped launch and organize a series of five Studies in Prejudice, which were published in 1949 and 1950. The most important of these was the pioneering study in social psychology entitled The Authoritarian Personality, itself a methodologically advanced reworking of some of the themes treated in a collective project produced by the Institute in its first years of exile, Studies in Authority and Family.
In the years that followed, Horkheimer did not publish much, although he continued to edit Studies in Philosophy and Social Science as a continuation of the Zeitschrift. In 1949, he returned to Frankfurt where the Institute for Social Research reopened in 1950. Between 1951 and 1953 Horkheimer was rector of the University of Frankfurt. In 1953, Horkheimer stepped down from director of the Institute and took on a smaller role in the Institute, while Adorno became director. Horkheimer and Adorno were seen as the fathers of the Institute.
Horkheimer's work is marked by a concern to show the relation between affect (especially suffering) and concepts (understood as action-guiding expressions of reason). In that, he responded critically to what he saw as the one-sidedness of both neo-Kantianism (with its focus on concepts) and Lebensphilosophie (with its focus on expression and world-disclosure). Horkheimer focused on the connections between social structures, networks/subcultures and individual realities and concluded that we are affected and shaped by the proliferation of products on the marketplace. It is also important to note that Horkheimer collaborated with Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.
Through critical theory, a social theory focusing on critiquing and changing society, Horkheimer "attempted to revitalize radical social, and cultural criticism" and discussed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis and the poverty of mass culture. Horkheimer helped to create critical theory through a mix of radical and conservative lenses that stem from radical Marxism and end up in "pessimistic Jewish transcendentalism". Horkheimer developed his critical theory by examining his own wealth while witnessing the juxtaposition of the bourgeois and the impoverished. This critical theory embraced the future possibilities of society and was preoccupied with forces which moved society toward "rational institutions". He was convinced of the need to "examine the entire material and spiritual culture of mankind" in order to transform society as a whole.
Horkheimer sought to enable the working class to reclaim their power in order to resist the lure of fascism. Horkheimer stated himself that "the rationally organized society that regulates its own existence" was necessary along with a society that could "satisfy common needs". To satisfy these needs, it would need to engage with the social conditions within which people lived and in which their concepts and actions were formed. Through this, critical theory develops a "critique of bourgeois society through which 'ideology critique' attempted to locate the 'utopian content' of dominant systems of thought". Above all, critical theory sought to develop a critical perspective in the discussion of all social practices.
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents, Rosa (Krause) and Naphtali Fromm. Fleeing NSDAP takeover of power in Germany, Fromm moved first to Geneva and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York. Together with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought. Horney and Fromm each had a marked influence on the other's thought, with Horney illuminating some aspects of psychoanalysis for Fromm and the latter elucidating sociology for Horney. Their relationship ended in the late 1930s.
Erich Fromm
After leaving Columbia, Fromm helped form the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943, and in 1946 co-founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. He was on the faculty of Bennington College from 1941 to 1949, and taught courses at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1941 to 1959. When Fromm moved to Mexico City in 1949, he became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and established a psychoanalytic section at the medical school there. Meanwhile, he taught as a professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and as an adjunct professor of psychology at the graduate division of Arts and Sciences at New York University after 1962.
Fromm's thesis of the "escape from freedom" is epitomized in the following passage. The "individualized man" referenced by Fromm is man bereft of the "primary ties" of belonging (i.e. nature, family, etc.), also expressed as "freedom from":
"There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.... However, if the economic, social and political conditions... do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom".
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom [N.Y.: Rinehart, 1941], pp. 36–7. The point is repeated on pp. 31, 256–7.)
Fromm's best known work, Escape from Freedom, focuses on the human urge to seek a source of authority and control upon reaching a freedom that was thought to be an individual's true desire. Fromm's critique of the modern political order and capitalist system led him to seek insights from medieval feudalism. In Escape from Freedom, he found value in the lack of individual freedom, rigid structure, and obligations required on the members of medieval society:
What characterizes medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom…But altogether a person was not free in the modern sense, neither was he alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need for doubt…There was comparatively little competition. One was born into a certain economic position which guaranteed a livelihood determined by tradition, just as it carried economic obligations to those higher in the social hierarchy.
The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of a humanistic and democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the early works of Karl Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism and more frequently found in the writings of libertarian socialists and liberal theoreticians. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing, and which resulted in the virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation. He became one of the founders of socialist humanism, promoting the early writings of Marx and his humanist messages to the US and Western European public.
Leo Löwenthal
Born in Frankfurt as the son of assimilated Jews (his father was a physician), Löwenthal came of age during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic. He joined the newly founded Institute for Social Research in 1926 and quickly became its leading expert on the sociology of literature and mass culture as well as the managing editor of the journal it launched in 1932, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Heterodox and independent Marxists, open to new intellectual currents such as psychoanalysis, and predominantly Jewish, the Institute's members swiftly fled Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. After a year in Geneva, they settled in New York, where Columbia University gave them shelter.
Leo Löwenthal
Löwenthal maintained a close relationship with his colleagues, even during the war when several of them moved to California and he began to work with the Office of War Information in Washington. Although Horkheimer, Adorno, and Friedrich Pollock returned to Frankfurt to reestablish the Institute after the war, Löwenthal, like former members Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Erich Fromm, chose to remain in the United States. After seven years as research director of the Voice of America, and another year at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, he joined the Berkeley Speech Department in 1956 and shortly thereafter the Department of Sociology. Although officially retiring in 1968, Löwenthal remained vigorously active in departmental and University affairs until virtually the end of his life. From 1968 to 1972, he served on the Budget Committee, and in 1973-74, chaired the Sociology Department.
As the final survivor of the Frankfurt School’s inner circle, Löwenthal achieved international recognition as a symbol of its remarkable collective achievement.
Walter Benjamin
Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg (1895–1942) and Dora (1901–1946), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in the Berlin of the German Empire (1871–1918). Benjamin's uncle William Stern (born Wilhelm Louis Stern; 1871-1938) was a prominent German child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ), and Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders (born Günther Siegmund Stern; 1902-1992) was a German philosopher and anti-nuclear activist who studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.
Walter Benjamin
In 1923, when the Institute for Social Research was founded, later to become home to the Frankfurt School, Benjamin published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens. At that time he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács, whose The Theory of the Novel (1920) much influenced him. Meanwhile, the inflation in the Weimar Republic consequent to the war made it difficult for Emil Benjamin to continue supporting his son's family. At the end of 1923 Scholem emigrated to Palestine, a country under the British Mandate of Palestine; despite repeated invitations, he failed to persuade Benjamin (and family) to leave the Continent for the Middle East.
Walter Benjamin corresponded much with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer, even from their New York City residence. The competing influences—Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory, Gerschom Scholem's Jewish mysticism—were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover, the critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin's writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplary synthesis is "Theses on the Philosophy of History". At least one scholar, historian of religion Jason Josephson-Storm, has argued that Benjamin's diverse interests may be understood in part by understanding the influence of Western Esotericism on Benjamin. Some of Benjamin's key ideas were adapted from occultists and New Age figures including Eric Gutkind and Ludwig Klages, and his interest in esotericism is known to have extended far beyond the Jewish Kabbalah.
Friedrich Pollock
Friedrich Pollock was born to a leather factory owner in Freiburg im Breisgau. Pollock's Jewish-born father turned away from Judaism, and raised his son accordingly. Pollock was educated in finance 1911 to 1915. During this time he met Max Horkheimer, with whom he became a lifelong friend. He then studied economy, sociology and philosophy in Frankfurt am Main, where he wrote his thesis on Marx's labor theory of value and received his doctorate in 1923. The Institute for Social Research was founded in 1923 by Pollock and fellow Marxist Felix Weil, who funded the group. Weil was inspired to found the institute after the success of his week-long conference, the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche (First Marxist Workweek), in 1923. Weil's goal was to bring together different schools of Marxism, and included György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel, and Friedrich Pollock.
Friedrich Pollock
In 1927/1928 Pollock traveled to the Soviet Union in honor of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. His research there led to his treatise: Attempts at Planned Economy in the Soviet Union 1917–1927. Thereafter he took a post as lecturer at the University of Frankfurt and he replaced the ill Carl Grünberg as Director of the institute from 1928–1930. Prior to the NSDAP seizure of power, Pollock had used his contacts in the International Labour Organization to establish a Geneva branch of the Institute. In 1933, Pollock and Horkheimer moved into exile, first in Geneva, then to London, Paris, and finally New York City.
In 1950, he was finally able to return to Frankfurt, taking part in the reestablishment of the Institute, again taking the role of director. From 1951 to 1958 he was professor of economics and sociology at the University of Frankfurt. In 1959, Pollock and Horkheimer moved to Montagnola, Ticino, Switzerland, although Pollock held a position as professor Emeritus at the University of Frankfurt until 1963. He died in Montagnola in 1970.
Otto Kirchheimer
Otto Kirchheimer (11 November 1905, Heilbronn – 22 November 1965, Washington, D.C.) was a German jurist of Jewish ancestry and political scientist of the Frankfurt School whose work essentially covered the state and its constitution. Kirchheimer worked as a research analyst at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, starting in World War II and continuing to 1952
Otto Kirchheimer
On 11 November 1937 Kirchheimer emigrated to the United States. In New York, Kirchheimer continued form 1937 to 1942 his work for the Institute of Social Research as a research assistant in law and social sciences. At the same time, he was a lecturer at Columbia University. Initially Kirchheimer worked part-time for a year (1943 to 1944), then full-time from 1944 to 1952 as a research analyst in the Research and Analysis Branch of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. His intelligence reports were later republished in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort.
On 16 November 1943 Kirchheimer received American citizenship. He was a visiting lecturer in sociology at Wellesley College (1943). He also worked as a lecturer at the American University (1951 to 1952) and at Howard University (1952 to 1954). From 1952 to 1956 Otto Kirchheimer was head of the Central Europe Section in the State Department. Kirchheimer left the OSS and accepted a visiting professorship at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research (1954). The next year he became full professor of Political Science there (until 1961). Here he wrote his book Political Justice. The Use of Legal Procedures for Political Ends, which was completed in 1961. From 1960 to 1965 Kirchheimer was Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. From 1961 to 1962 he was also Fulbright Professor at the University of Freiburg.
Franz Neumann
Neumann was born on May 23, 1900, in Kattowitz (Katowice), Silesia, German Empire (present day Poland) to a Jewish family. As a student Neumann supported the German November revolution of 1918 and joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Neumann was instrumental in organizing the Socialist Students Society in Frankfurt am Main, where in 1918 he met Leo Löwenthal, a future colleague in the Institute for Social Research in New York under Max Horkheimer. At Breslau (the present-day Wrocław in Poland), Leipzig, Rostock, and Frankfurt am Main, Neumann studied law and earned a doctorate in 1923 with a thesis on method in the theory of punishment.
Franz Neumann
Neumann was active from 1925 to 1927 as law clerk and assistant of Hugo Sinzheimer, the foremost reformist labor law theorist, who also engaged him as a teacher at the trade union academy affiliated with the University of Frankfurt. Throughout the Weimar years, Neumann's political commitment was to the labor wing of the Social Democratic Party. From 1928 to 1933 he worked in Berlin in partnership with Ernst Fraenkel as an attorney specializing in labor law, representing trade unions and publishing briefs and articles, and a technical book in this innovative field. In 1932–33 he became lead attorney for the Social Democratic Party and published a brief, itself suppressed by the Nazis, against the suppression of the principal Social Democratic newspaper.
n the weeks after the assumption of power by the National Socialists, Neumann was warned of his imminent arrest and he fled to England. There he studied under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, and with the former Frankfurt sociology professor, Karl Mannheim. He earned a second doctorate with a study of the rise and fall of the historical epoch of the rule of law. On Laski's recommendation, Neumann was employed by the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research (in exile at Columbia University] in New York City after some years in Geneva and Paris) in 1936, initially as administrator and legal advisor, and later as research associate, although he was never as well established in the group led by the Director, Max Horkheimer, as Friedrich Pollock and Theodor Adorno.
He participated in the Institute's debates about national socialism in the New York years. His well-known study of the Nazi regime, however, was written without the scrutiny of the Institute's review procedures. Neumann played an important part in helping the Institute to secure the backing of the American Jewish Committee for its well-known study of anti-Semitism.
The reception of Behemoth laid the foundation for Neumann's wartime career in Washington after the Institute's leadership declared itself financially unable to retain his services. Until the first months of 1943, Neumann served as a part-time consultant to the Board of Economic Warfare, staffing routine studies of trade patterns. He then became deputy head of the Central European Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, amid numerous younger American professors, seconded to Washington for the duration.
The position also allowed him to place a number of his Institute associates, who had been made redundant by the core group around Horkheimer. Neumann was instrumental in producing intelligence reports on the Nazis for the OSS, later published in a single volume Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort. Neumann's friend, Paul Massing, a Soviet spy, reported to Moscow that Neumann had told him that he had produced a study of the Soviet economy for the OSS's Russian Department. In April 1943, Elizabeth Zarubina, a Soviet spy in the United States, and the wife of Vassily Zarubin, met with Neumann: "(Zarubina) met for the first time with (Neumann) who promised to pass us all the data coming through his hands. According to (Neumann), he is getting many copies of reports from American ambassadors... and has access to materials referring to Germany." Neumann's code name was "Ruff".
Neumann, Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer worked on numerous projects, including the analysis of political tendencies in Germany. They were "specifically assigned to the identification of Nazi and anti-Nazi groups and individuals; the former were to be held accountable in the war crimes adjudication then being negotiated between the four Great Powers, and the latter were to be called upon for cooperation in post-war reconstruction. For his source materials he drew upon official and military intelligence reports, extensive OSS interviews with refugees, and special OSS agents and contacts in occupied Europe; it was his duty to evaluate the reliability of each of the items of intelligence that reached him, and assemble them all into a coherent analysis of points of strength and weakness in the Reich." (Katz, 1980:116).
At the end of 1944, Neumann, Marcuse, and Kirchheimer were involved in preparing materials for use by eventual occupation authorities, including a De-nazification Guide. Most of this effort was rendered irrelevant by the priorities of the incipient Cold War policy at the end of the war. Neumann was detached from Washington Service until September 1945, to assist the head of OSS in preparing for the War Crimes Prosecutions. Just before the beginning of the trials, Neumann returned to Washington, to take up a position on the Central European Desk of the Department of State.
In the service of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal under the Chief Prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson, Neumann prepared analyses of the twenty two Nuremberg defendants and of various Nazi organizations. From mid-September 1945, Neumann's team prepared and supervised materials for a series of indictments with other OSS colleagues responsible for both interrogation and document analysis.
The report's analysis of "the problem of establishing criminal responsibility" contributed to the prosecutorial strategy. The thinking was to show that measures taken against the Christian churches were an integral part of National Socialism. It also attempted to show that measures were criminal from the standpoint of German or international law, depending where a given act was committed. The report claimed key articles of the Weimar Constitution "were never formally abrogated by the National Socialist regime, … were left untouched and still remain theoretically in force." Furthermore, "respect for the principle of religious freedom" continued to be reiterated in various official policy statements of the Nazi regime, and in various "enactments of the National Socialist state, particularly the Concordat of 20 July 1933."
The material on religious persecution is placed in the wider context of how these agencies committed crimes against humanity as an integral part of the Nazi's master plan, its conspiracy to seize and consolidate ideological control and totalitarian power within Germany by eradicating sources of actual and potential opposition. This material formed part of the evidence on which these agencies were judged to be criminal organisations. Neumann's group wrote:
"The Nazi conspirators, by promoting beliefs and practices incompatible with Christian teaching, sought to subvert the influence of the Churches over the people and in particular over the youth of Germany. They avowed their aim to eliminate the Christian Churches in Germany and sought to substitute therefore Nazi institutions and Nazi beliefs and pursued a programme of persecution of priests, clergy and members of monastic orders whom they deemed opposed to their purposes and confiscated Church property."
Times of Israel, Miriam Shaviv 18 June 2013
The emphasis on the persecution of Christian churches rather than on the far more destructive actions against Jews was a matter of strategic and political decision by the four-party prosecution. Neumann also took charge of revising the first draft prosecution brief detailing the personal responsibility of Hermann Göring, the most senior defendant. Neuman believed that German war criminals should be tried before German courts according to Weimar law as an important part of the wider effort to demonise the Germanic people.
Like other disillusioned veterans of the Weimar Social Democratic Party, Neumann hoped for a more radical and more unified labor and socialist movement in the immediate post-war period, but he quickly accepted the view shared among his old party associates in Berlin that the Communists' subservience to the Soviet Union required the Social Democratic Party to pursue an independent course. No one has ever suggested that there was any connection between the actions that led to his being quite possibly the person mentioned in the well-known Venona Papers as a Soviet "spy" for some months during 1944 and any of his writings or public acts. What evidence there is suggests that at most Neumann found it important for political reasons that had little to do with Soviet designs to give them knowledge of certain events or happenings. At the time, he was especially well informed on possible American dealings with elements in German religious, military and economic circles who were interested in a separate peace.
In 1948 Neumann became a professor of political science at Columbia University and helped establish the Free University of Berlin. Neumann was highly regarded at Columbia and played a prominent part in attempts by the Rockefeller Foundation to strengthen political theory as a component of political science in American universities. He published several seminal articles arising out of his attempts to develop a democratic theory consonant with modern political and social changes. Neumann died in an automobile accident in Visp, Switzerland, on September 2, 1954. His widow, Inge Werner, married his closest friend and intellectual companion, Herbert Marcuse, in 1955. Franz's oldest son, Osha Thomas Neumann, is a prominent civil rights attorney in Berkeley, California. Michael Neumann, his younger son, is a logician and radical political philosopher, and is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.
Henryk Grossman
Grossman was born as Chaskel Grossman into a relatively prosperous Polish-Jewish family in Kraków, Poland (then part of Austrian Galicia). Although his parents were assimilated into Krakow society, they nevertheless ensured their sons were circumcised and registered as members of the Jewish community.
Henryk Grossman
Grossman's key contribution to political-economic theory was his book, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, a study in Marxian crisis theory. It was published in Leipzig months before the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
He joined the socialist movement around 1898, becoming a member of the Social Democratic Party of Galicia (GPSD), an affiliate of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria. The GPSD, led by Ignacy Daszyński, was formally Marxist, but dominated by Polish nationalists close to the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). When the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party in Galicia (USPD) was formed in 1899, the GSPD became the Polish Social Democratic Party (PPSD) and the Polish nationalist current was strengthened.
Grossman led the resistance of orthodox Marxists to this current. Along with Karl Radek, he was active in the socialist student movement, particularly in Ruch (Movement), which included members of the PPSD as well as of the two socialist parties in the Kingdom of Poland, the PPS and the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL – led by Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches). He was the main figure in the newspaper Zjednoczenie (Unification), which took a line close to the SDKPiL, against the pro-PPS politics of Ruchs main organ, Promień for which he was censured by the PPSD and its newspaper Naprzód.
During this period, Grossman learned Yiddish and became involved in the Jewish workers' movement in Kraków. Grossman was the founding secretary and theoretician of the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia (JSDP) in 1905. The JSDP broke with the PPSD over the latter's belief that the Jewish workers should assimilate to Polish culture. It took a position close to the Bund, and was critical of the labour Zionism of the Poale Zion as well to assimilationist forms of socialism. The JSDP sought to affiliate to the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria (the General Party), but this was refused. However, the JSDP was active alongside the General Party, for example for universal suffrage.
Grossman gained his Juris Doctor in 1908 from the Jagiellonian University. At the end of 1908, he went to the University of Vienna to study with the Marxian economic historian Carl Grünberg, withdrawing from his leadership role in the JSDP (although he remained on its executive until 1911 and had contact with the small JSDP group in Vienna, the Ferdinand Lassalle Club). With the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of World War I, Grossman became an economist in Poland, and joined the Communist Party of Poland.
Ernst Bloch
Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, the son of a Jewish railway-employee. When NSDAP came to power, the couple had to flee, first into Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally the United States. He lived briefly in New Hampshire before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was there, in the reading room of Harvard's Widener Library, where Bloch wrote the lengthy three-volume work The Principle of Hope. He originally planned to publish it there under the title Dreams of a Better Life. In 1948, Bloch was offered the chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and he returned to East Germany to take up the position. In 1955 he was awarded the National Prize of the GDR. In addition, he became a member of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin (AdW).
Ernst Bloch
Bloch's work became very influential in the course of the student protest movements in 1968 and in liberation theology. It is cited as a key influence by Jürgen Moltmann in his Theology of Hope (1967, Harper and Row, New York), by Dorothee Sölle, and by Ernesto Balducci. Psychoanalyst Joel Kovel has praised Bloch as, "the greatest of modern utopian thinkers". Robert S. Corrington has been influenced by Bloch, though he has tried to adapt Bloch's ideas to serve a liberal rather than a Marxist politics.
Bloch's concept of concrete utopias found in The Principle of Hope was used by José Esteban Muñoz to shift the field of performance studies. This shift allowed for the emergence of utopian performativity and a new wave of performance theorizing as Bloch's formulation of utopia shifted how scholars conceptualize the ontology and the staging of performances as imbued with an enduring indeterminacy, as opposed to dominant performance theories found in the work of Peggy Phelan, who view performance as a life event without reproduction.
Siegfried Kracauer
Kracauer was born to a Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main, Kracauer studied architecture from 1907 to 1913, eventually obtaining a doctorate in engineering in 1914 and working as an architect in Osnabrück, Munich, and Berlin until 1920. Near the end of the First World War, he befriended the young Theodor W. Adorno, to whom he became an early philosophical mentor. In 1964, Adorno recalled the importance of Kracauer's influence:
"[f]or years Siegfried Kracauer read the Critique of Pure Reason with me regularly on Saturday afternoons. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers. [...] If in my later reading of philosophical texts I was not so much impressed with their unity and systematic consistency as I was concerned with the play of forces at work under the surface of every closed doctrine and viewed the codified philosophies as force fields in each case, it was certainly Kracauer who impelled me to do so".
From 1922 to 1933 he worked as the leading film and literature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung (a leading Frankfurt newspaper) as its correspondent in Berlin, where he worked alongside Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, among others. Between 1923 and 1925, he wrote an essay entitled Der Detektiv-Roman (The Detective Novel), in which he concerned himself with phenomena from everyday life in modern society. Kracauer continued this trend over the next few years, building up theoretical methods of analyzing circuses, photography, films, advertising, tourism, city layout. In 1927, he published the work Ornament der Masse (published in English as The Mass Ornament) which emphasizes the tremendous value of studying the masses and popular culture.[3] His essays in Ornament der Masse shows Karacauer's fascination with popular culture, particularly within the capitalist society of the United States.
Siegfried Kracauer
In 1930, Kracauer published Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses), a critical look at the lifestyle and culture of the new class of white-collar employees. Spiritually homeless, and divorced from custom and tradition, these employees sought refuge in the new "distraction industries" of entertainment. Observers note that many of these lower-middle class employees were quick to adopt National Socialism, three years later. In a contemporary review of Die Angestellten, Benjamin praised the concreteness of Kracauer's analysis, writing that "[t]he entire book is an attempt to grapple with a piece of everyday reality, constructed here and experienced now. Reality is pressed so closely that it is compelled to declare its colors and name names."
With the rise of NSDAP in Germany in 1933, Kracauer fled and migrated to Paris. In March 1941, thanks to the French ambassador Henri Hoppenot and his wife, Hélène Hoppenot, he emigrated to the United States, with other German refugees like John Rewald. From 1941 to 1943 he worked in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, supported by Guggenheim and Rockefeller scholarships for his work in German film. Eventually, he published From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), which traces the birth of Nazism from the cinema of the Weimar Republic as well as helping lay the foundation of modern film criticism. In 1960, he released Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, which argued that realism is the most important function of cinema. In the last years of his life Kracauer worked as a sociologist for different institutes, amongst them in New York as a director of research for applied social sciences at Columbia University.
György Lukács
Lukács was born Löwinger György Bernát in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, to the investment banker József Löwinger (later Szegedi Lukács József; 1855–1928) and his wife Adele Wertheimer (Wertheimer Adél; 1860–1917), who were a wealthy Jewish family.
Whilst at university in Budapest, Lukács was part of socialist intellectual circles through which he met Ervin Szabó, an anarcho-syndicalist who introduced him to the works of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), the French proponent of revolutionary syndicalism. In that period, Lukács's intellectual perspectives were modernist and anti-positivist. From 1904 to 1908, he was part of a theatre troupe that produced modernist, psychologically realistic plays by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Gerhart Hauptmann.
Gyorgy Lukacs
In 1915, Lukács returned to Budapest, where he was the leader of the "Sunday Circle", an intellectual salon. Its concerns were the cultural themes that arose from the existential works of Dostoyevsky, which thematically aligned with Lukács's interests in his last years at Heidelberg. As a salon, the Sunday Circle sponsored cultural events whose participants included literary and musical avant-garde figures, such as Karl Mannheim, the composer Béla Bartók, Béla Balázs, Arnold Hauser, Zoltán Kodály and Karl Polanyi; some of them also attended the weekly salons. In 1918, the last year of the First World War (1914–1918), the Sunday Circle became divided. They dissolved the salon because of their divergent politics; several of the leading members accompanied Lukács into the Communist Party of Hungary.
In light of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lukács rethought his ideas. He became a committed Marxist in this period and joined the fledgling Communist Party of Hungary in 1918. As part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács was made People's Commissar for Education and Culture (he was deputy to the Commissar for Education Zsigmond Kunfi). It is said by József Nádass that Lukács was giving a lecture entitled "Old Culture and New Culture" to a packed hall when the republic was proclaimed which was interrupted due to the revolution.
During the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács was a theoretician of the Hungarian version of the red terror. In an article in the Népszava, 15 April 1919, he wrote that "The possession of the power of the state is also a moment for the destruction of the oppressing classes. A moment, we have to use". Lukács later became a commissar of the Fifth Division of the Hungarian Red Army, in which capacity he ordered the execution of eight of his own soldiers in Poroszlo, in May 1919, which he later admitted in an interview.
After the Hungarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Lukács was ordered by Kun to remain behind with Ottó Korvin, when the rest of the leadership evacuated. Lukács and Korvin's mission was to clandestinely reorganize the communist movement, but this proved to be impossible. Lukács went into hiding, with the help of photographer Olga Máté. After Korvin's capture in 1919, Lukács fled from Hungary to Vienna. He was arrested but was saved from extradition due to a group of writers including Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Thomas Mann later based the character Naphta on Lukács in his novel The Magic Mountain.
As a Hungarian exile, he remained active on the left wing of Hungarian Communist Party, and was opposed to the Moscow-backed programme of Béla Kun. His "Blum theses" of 1928 called for the overthrow of the counter-revolutionary regime of Admiral Horthy in Hungary by a strategy similar to the Popular Fronts that arose in the 1930s. He advocated a "democratic dictatorship" of the proletariat and peasantry as a transitional stage leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat. After Lukács's strategy was condemned by the Comintern, he retreated from active politics into theoretical work.
In 1930, while residing in Budapest, Lukács was summoned to Moscow. This coincided with the signing of a Viennese police order for his expulsion. Leaving their children to attend their studies, Lukács and his wife ventured to Moscow in March 1930. Soon after his arrival, Lukács was "prevented" from leaving and assigned to work alongside David Riazanov ("in the basement") at the Marx–Engels Institute. Lukács returned to Berlin in 1931 and in 1933 he once again left Berlin for Moscow to attend the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. During this time, Lukács first came into contact with the unpublished works of the young Marx.
In 1956, Lukács became a minister of the brief communist revolutionary government led by Imre Nagy, which opposed the Soviet Union. At this time Lukács's daughter led a short-lived party of communist revolutionary youth. Lukács's position on the 1956 revolution was that the Hungarian Communist Party would need to retreat into a coalition government of socialists, and slowly rebuild its credibility with the Hungarian people. While a minister in Nagy's revolutionary government, Lukács also participated in trying to reform the Hungarian Communist Party on a new basis. This party, the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, was rapidly co-opted by János Kádár after 4 November 1956.
Alfred Schmidt
Schmidt studied history and English as well as classical philology at the Goethe University Frankfurt and later philosophy and sociology. He was a student of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer and gained his doctorate with his The Concept of Nature in Marx.
Train station poster in Frankfurt U-Bahn with Alfred Schmidt (1980s).
Schmidt was professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt from 1972 and was made emeritus in 1999. Schmidt's primary research topics were the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, philosophy of religion, and Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy. Schmidt was a member of the International PEN and an honorary member of the Schopenhauer Society.
Ed: They have kept the life of this brainwasher very quiet!
Branko Bošnjak
Branko Bošnjak (14 January 1923 – 18 June 1996) was a Croatian philosopher, member of the Praxis school in the former Yugoslavia. Bošnjak was a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb and for a period a head of the Department for History of Philosophy and a dean of the faculty. He was a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He died in Zagreb and was buried in Mirogoj Cemetery.
Branko Bošnjak
Bošnjak's main fields of interest were religion and history of philosophy. His major works are:
History of Philosophy as a Science (1958)
Logos and Dialectics (1961)
Philosophy and Christianity (1966)
The Greek Philosophical Criticism on the Bible (1971)
The Meaning of the Philosophical Existence (1981)
Philosophy and History (1983)
History of Philosophy (1993)
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1968), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978), as well as the fictional works The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America (1999).
Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, the daughter of Mildred (née Jacobson) and Jack Rosenblatt, both Jews of Lithuanian and Polish descent. Her father managed a fur trading business in China, where he died of tuberculosis in 1939, when Susan was five years old. Sontag began her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley but transferred to the University of Chicago in admiration of its prominent core curriculum.
At 17, Sontag married writer Philip Rieff, who was a sociology instructor at the University of Chicago, after a 10-day courtship; their marriage lasted eight years. At Chicago, she undertook studies in philosophy, ancient history, and literature alongside her other requirements. Leo Strauss, Joseph Schwab, Christian Mackauer, Richard McKeon, Peter von Blanckenhagen and Kenneth Burke were among her lecturers. At 17, Sontag married writer Philip Rieff, who was a sociology instructor at the University of Chicago, after a 10-day courtship; their marriage lasted eight years.
While studying at Chicago, Sontag attended a summer school taught by the sociologist Hans Heinrich Gerth who became a friend and subsequently influenced her study of German thinkers. The Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse lived with Sontag and Rieff for a year while working on his 1955 book Eros and Civilization. Sontag researched for Rieff's 1959 study Freud: The Mind of the Moralist before their divorce in 1958, and contributed to the book to such an extent that she has been considered an unofficial co-author.
"If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far.... The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."
Susan Sontag, Partisan Review, 1967
Sontag was awarded an American Association of University Women's fellowship for the 1957–1958 academic year to St Anne's College, Oxford, where she traveled without her husband and son. There, she had classes with Iris Murdoch, Stuart Hampshire, A. J. Ayer and H. L. A. Hart while also attending the B. Phil seminars of J. L. Austin and the lectures of Isaiah Berlin. Oxford did not appeal to her, however, and she transferred after Michaelmas term of 1957 to the University of Paris (the Sorbonne).
F Scale
The California F-scale is a 1947 personality test, designed by Theodor W. Adorno and others to measure the authoritarian personality. The "F" stands for "fascist". The F-scale measures responses on several different components of authoritarianism, such as conventionalism, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness," destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and sex. Scores acquired from the F-scale could be directly associated with background components, educational level, and intellectual capacity.
It is an indirect type of test that ensures the result would not be due to the individual's fake responses; this is possible because the purpose of the measurement and which attitude is being measured are initially concealed from the participants. The existence of this correlation could possibly affect the way in which the F-scale accurately measures the authoritarian personality syndrome. The F-Test has two principal purposes: it aims to measure prejudice and anti-democratic tendencies at the personality level.
The scale specifically examines the following personality dimensions:
Conventionalism: conformity to the traditional societal norms and values of the middle class;
Authoritarian submission: a passive notion towards adhering to conventional norms and values;
Authoritarian aggression: punishing and condemning individuals who don’t adhere to conventional values;
Religion and Ethics;
Superstition
Power and "toughness";
Anti-intraception, i.e. "rejection of all inwardness, of the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded, and of self-criticism";
The scale has attracted a great deal of criticism, since it is ideological and associates societal processes with personality characteristics. Among the criticisms of the F-scale is its sensitivity to respondents with acquiescent response styles due to being worded so that agreement always indicated an authoritarian response. A number of related scales such as the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale and the Balanced F-scale have been created in an attempt to fix the shortcomings of the F-scale. Bob Altemeyer's Right-wing authoritarianism Scale is the most frequently used, contemporary descendant of the F-scale.
Another criticism of the test is the assumption that users with a high score are unsophisticated and may lack social intelligence. According to Kelman and Barclay (1963), the experience of the participant is reflected on the test score; i.e., they may not be able to see the obvious pattern and motives recurring in the test and be ignorant of it.
Danko Grlić
He was born in Gračanica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He moved to Zagreb with his family in 1931. During the Second World War he joined the anti-fascist struggle. He appreciated freedom above all, so due to his liberal expression, he often came to conflict with the government, which ended very badly for him. Because he opposed the resolution of Cominform, he was sentenced to three months in the prison camp Goli otok in 1948. Grlic did not accept the resolution, but for one part he held that it was correct, - where it says there is not enough democracy in the Yugoslav Communist Party.
Danko Grlić
From 1950 to 1955 Grlić studied philosophy at the University of Zagreb. In 1959 he accepted Miroslav Krleža's offer to work at the Yugoslavian Lexicographic Agency. In 1965 he was one of the founding members of the Praxis journal. From 1966 to 1968 Grlić was president of the Croatian Philosophical Society. In 1969 he earned the PhD degree with his work “The Founding Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche”.
Grlić started his academic career in 1962 teaching aesthetics at the Academy of Arts in Zagreb. He taught there until 1968, when he was forbidden to teach at this institution. He continued his academic career in 1971, when he was elected for professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy, and in 1974 he moved to the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, where he was head of the department of aesthetics until his death in 1984.
His Selected Works in four volumes were published in 1988, and in 1989 a collection of articles in his honour were published in Zagreb, titled The Art and the Revolution.
Milan Kangrga
Milan Kangrga (1 May 1923 – 25 April 2008) was a Croatian and Yugoslav philosopher who was one of the leading thinkers in the Praxis School of thought which originated in the 1960s in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Kangrga was born in Zagreb, where he attended elementary and grammar school. In 1950, he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, where he commenced his work as a teaching assistant working in the fields of ethics and aesthetics. Between 1962 and 1964, he studied in Heidelberg, Germany. He became a tenured professor in 1972 and he held this position until his retirement in 1993.
Milan Kangrga
Kangrga started his confrontation with the Yugoslav communist leadership during his undergraduate studies in February 1948, before the clash of Joseph Broz Tito with Joseph Stalin. Then, he published his first philosophical article entitled On Ethics in Studentski list (Zagreb), which the League of Communists of Yugoslavia bureaucrats found provoking. In 1953, Kangrga became a member of the LCY but in 1954 he was expelled from the party because he announced that he was inspired to become a communist by the works of Miroslav Krleža, who still wasn't wholly rehabilitated by the regime.
In 1964, Kangrga was one of the founders of the journal Praxis. Together with Rudi Supek, he has established the Korčula Summer School, which was a unique meeting place for philosophers from the East and the West between 1964 and 1974. It is around these two institutions that the Praxis school took shape. The defining features of the school were: 1) emphasis on the writings of young Marx; and 2) call for freedom of speech in both East and West based upon Marx's insistence on ruthless critique of everything existent. Milan Kangrga emphasized creativity as well, but also the understanding of human beings as producers humanizing nature.
While he was critical of the Communist party in Yugoslavia, mainly for not implementing self-management socialism, he rejected non-Socialist reactions against SFR Yugoslavia, the most notable one being the Croatian Spring. Milan Kangrga has lectured in Bonn, Munich, Prague, Budapest, Moscow, and Kiev among other cities. His articles have been published in Germany, Italy, the United States, France, Spain, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Mexico.
Rudi Supek
Supek studied philosophy in Zagreb and graduated in 1937. He went to study clinical psychology in Paris, where he was when World War II erupted. He joined the resistance movement, but soon was captured and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he took part in the Buchenwald Resistance.
Rudi Supek
After the liberation, Supek went back to Paris to continue living and studying there. In 1948, after the Informbiro Resolution against Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia, the leader of the French Communists Maurice Thorez asked Supek, who was a member of the French Communist Party, to attack Titoism. Supek refused to comply and returned to Yugoslavia. However, he did not become a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.
Supek took his PhD from the Sorbonne in 1952 and started to work as a professor at the Department of Psychology of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, and at the Institute for Social Research in Zagreb. He founded the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in 1963. Supek became the first president of the Yugoslav Society of Psychologists, and for a period he was the president of the Yugoslav Society of Sociologists.
Supek was chief editor of the journal Pogledi (Viewpoints) which was published from 1952 to 1954. In 1964 Supek and several colleagues from the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences founded the Praxis journal. Supek was co-editor of the journal from 1967 to 1973. He initiated and became president of the Management Board of the Korčula Summer School.
Gajo Petrović
Gajo Petrović (12 March 1927 – Zagreb, 13 June 1993) was one of the main theorists in the Marxist humanist Praxis School in the SFR Yugoslavia. He was the only one among the editors of the Praxis journal to stay in this position throughout the journal's publication. He is credited by Milan Kangrga to be the mastermind behind the Korčula Summer School, which was a meeting place for Marxists and other philosophers from the East and the West in the 1960s and 1970s.
Gajo Petrović
Petrović was one of the leaders of the Yugoslav criticism of the Stalinist philosophical theses since the early 1950s. In the early 1960s, his philosophical views evolved towards an interpretation of Marxism based on the philosophical works of the young Karl Marx. This was in line with the creative line of thought of a self-management socialism which dominated the Yugoslav political landscape at the time. However, his continuous radical criticism of the dogmatic ideology of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia led to an open conflict. In 1968 Petrović openly supported the student protests, which was a pretext for his expulsion from the Party at June 8 meeting of the Zagreb University Party Committee.
Predrag Vranicki
Vranicki was born in 1922, in Benkovac, Croatia. During World War II he fought with the National Liberation Army against the Fascist occupation of Yugoslavia. He received a diploma in philosophy from the University of Zagreb in 1947 and earned his PhD from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy in 1951.
Predrag Vranicki
From 1964 to 1966 he was dean of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, and rector of the Zagreb University from 1972 to 1976. Vranicki became president of the Yugoslav Society for Philosophy in 1966, and in 1979 he was elected as a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. When the dissident Praxis journal was initiated in 1965, he joined its editorial board.
Danilo Pejović
Pejović was born in Ludbreg. During the World War II, in 1943, Pejović joined the National Liberation Army in its fight against the occupying forces of Yugoslavia. He continued his education after the war, graduating with a degree in philosophy at the University in Zagreb in 1953. He earned his PhD degree at the same university in 1958 with a dissertation about the ontology of Nicolai Hartmann. Until 1966 Pejović was president of the Croatian Philosophy Society.
Danilo Pejović
Pejović was part of the wing of Yugoslav philosophical thought that was defending critical, unorthodox views. When the journal Praxis was established in 1964, Pejović joined its editorial board, becoming a co-editor of the journal, together with Gajo Petrović. However, Pejović's cooperation with the Praxis School didn't last too long. After the attacks of the regime politicians against Praxis in summer 1966, Pejović resigned from his post as a co-editor of the Praxis and he broke his cooperation with the Praxis School, attacking his former colleagues. Later, unlike his former colleagues in Praxis, he condemned the Yugoslav student demonstrations in 1968.
Ivan Kuvačić
Ivan Kuvačić (January 12, 1923 – July 20, 2014) was a Croatian Marxist sociologist and a professor emeritus at Zagreb University. He was a member of the advisory board of Praxis.
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Monmouthshire, United Kingdom, into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy. His parents, Viscount and Viscountess Amberley, were radical for their times. Lord Amberley consented to his wife's affair with their children's tutor, the biologist Douglas Spalding. Both were early advocates of birth control at a time when this was considered scandalous. Lord Amberley was an atheist, and his atheism was evident when he asked the philosopher John Stuart Mill to act as Russell's secular godfather.
Russell won a scholarship to read for the Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, and commenced his studies there in 1890, taking as coach Robert Rumsey Webb. He became acquainted with the younger George Edward Moore and came under the influence of Alfred North Whitehead, who recommended him to the Cambridge Apostles. He quickly distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy, graduating as seventh Wrangler in the former in 1893 and becoming a Fellow in the latter in 1895.
Russell began his published work in 1896 with German Social Democracy, a study in politics that was an early indication of a lifelong interest in political and social theory. In 1896 he taught German social democracy at the London School of Economics.] He was a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb. At the age of 29, in February 1901, Russell underwent what he called a "sort of mystic illumination", after witnessing Whitehead's wife's acute suffering in an angina attack. "I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty ... and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable", Russell would later recall. "At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person."
In 1910, he became a University of Cambridge lecturer at Trinity College, where he had studied. He was considered for a Fellowship, which would give him a vote in the college government and protect him from being fired for his opinions, but was passed over because he was "anti-clerical", essentially because he was agnostic. During World War I, Russell was one of the few people to engage in active pacifist activities. In 1916, because of his lack of a Fellowship, he was dismissed from Trinity College following his conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914. He later described this as an illegitimate means the state used to violate freedom of expression, in Free Thought and Official Propaganda.
Russell was reinstated to Trinity in 1919, resigned in 1920, was Tarner Lecturer in 1926 and became a Fellow again in 1944 until 1949. In August 1920, Russell travelled to Soviet Russia as part of an official delegation sent by the British government to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution. He wrote a four-part series of articles, titled "Soviet Russia—1920", for the US magazine The Nation. He met Vladimir Lenin and had an hour-long conversation with him. In his autobiography, he mentions that he found Lenin disappointing, sensing an "impish cruelty" in him and comparing him to "an opinionated professor".
Russell's lover Dora Black, a British author, feminist and socialist campaigner, visited Soviet Russia independently at the same time; in contrast to his reaction, she was enthusiastic about the Bolshevik revolution. The following autumn, Russell, accompanied by Dora, visited Peking (as it was then known in the West) to lecture on philosophy for a year. He went with optimism and hope, seeing China as then being on a new path. Other scholars present in China at the time included John Dewey and Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel-laureate poet.
Before World War II, Russell taught at the University of Chicago, later moving on to Los Angeles to lecture at the UCLA Department of Philosophy. He was appointed professor at the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1940, but after a public outcry the appointment was annulled by a court judgment that pronounced him "morally unfit" to teach at the college due to his opinions, especially those relating to sexual morality, detailed in Marriage and Morals (1929).
In 1942, Russell argued in favour of a moderate socialism, capable of overcoming its metaphysical principles, in an inquiry on dialectical materialism, launched by the Austrian artist and philosopher Wolfgang Paalen in his journal DYN, saying "I think the metaphysics of both Hegel and Marx plain nonsense—Marx's claim to be 'science' is no more justified than Mary Baker Eddy's. This does not mean that I am opposed to socialism.". In 1943, Russell expressed support for Zionism: "I have come gradually to see that, in a dangerous and largely hostile world, it is essential to Jews to have some country which is theirs, some region where they are not suspected aliens, some state which embodies what is distinctive in their culture".
n September 1961, at the age of 89, Russell was jailed for seven days in Brixton Prison for "breach of peace" after taking part in an anti-nuclear demonstration in London. The magistrate offered to exempt him from jail if he pledged himself to "good behaviour", to which Russell replied: "No, I won't.". In 1962 Russell played a public role in the Cuban Missile Crisis: in an exchange of telegrams with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev assured him that the Soviet government would not be reckless.
According to historian Peter Knight, after JFK's assassination, Russell, "prompted by the emerging work of the lawyer Mark Lane in the US ... rallied support from other noteworthy and left-leaning compatriots to form a Who Killed Kennedy Committee in June 1964, members of which included Communist spy Michael Foot MP, Caroline Benn, the publisher Victor Gollancz, the writers John Arden and J. B. Priestley, and the Oxford history professor Hugh Trevor-Roper.". Russell spent the 1950s and 1960s engaged in political causes primarily related to nuclear disarmament and opposing the Vietnam War. In 1966–1967, Russell worked with Jean-Paul Sartre and many other intellectual figures to form the Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal to investigate the conduct of the United States in Vietnam.
Early in his life Russell supported eugenicist policies. He proposed in 1894 that the state issue certificates of health to prospective parents and withhold public benefits from those considered unfit. In 1929 he wrote that people deemed "mentally defective" and "feebleminded" should be sexually sterilized because they "are apt to have enormous numbers of illegitimate children, all, as a rule, wholly useless to the community." Russell was also an advocate of population control. Russell is generally credited with being one of the founders of analytic philosophy. He was deeply impressed by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), and wrote on every major area of philosophy except aesthetics. He was particularly prolific in the fields of metaphysics, logic and the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, ethics and epistemology.
Colonna family of Roman Emperors
The House of Colonna, also known as Sciarrillo or Sciarra, is an Italian noble family, forming part of the papal nobility. It was powerful in medieval and Renaissance Rome, supplying one pope (Martin V) and many other church and political leaders.
The family is notable for its bitter feud with the Orsini family over influence in Rome, until it was stopped by papal bull in 1511. In 1571, the heads of both families married nieces of Pope Sixtus V.
Thereafter, historians recorded that "no peace had been concluded between the princes of Christendom, in which they had not been included by name". According to tradition, the Colonna family is a branch of the Counts of Tusculum — by Peter (1099–1151) son of Gregory III, called Peter "de Columna" from his property the Columna Castle in Colonna, in the Alban Hills.
In 1297, Cardinal Jacopo disinherited his brothers Ottone, Matteo, and Landolfo of their lands. The latter three appealed to Pope Boniface VIII, who ordered Jacopo to return the land, and furthermore hand over the family's strongholds of Colonna, Palestrina, and other towns to the Papacy. Jacopo refused; in May, Boniface removed him from the College of Cardinals and excommunicated him and his followers.
The Colonna family (aside from the three brothers allied with the Pope) declared that Boniface had been elected illegally following the unprecedented abdication of Pope Celestine V. The dispute led to open warfare, and in September, Boniface appointed Landolfo to the command of his army, to put down the revolt of Landolfo's own Colonna relatives. By the end of 1298, Landolfo had captured Colonna, Palestrina and other towns, and razed them to the ground.
The exiled Colonnas allied with the Pope's other great enemy, Philip IV of France, who in his youth had been tutored by Cardinal Egidio Colonna. In September 1303, Sciarra and Philipp's advisor, Guillaume de Nogaret, led a small force into Anagni to arrest Boniface VIII and bring him to France, where he was to stand trial. The two managed to apprehend the pope, and Sciarra reportedly slapped the pope in the face in the process, which was accordingly dubbed the "Outrage of Anagni". The attempt eventually failed after a few days, when locals freed the pope.
The Colonna family have been Prince Assistants to the Papal Throne since 1710, though their papal princely title only dates from 1854. The family residence in Rome, the Palazzo Colonna, is open to the public every Saturday morning. The main 'Colonna di Paliano' line is represented today by Prince Marcantonio Colonna di Paliano, Prince and Duke of Paliano (b. 1948), whose heir is Don Giovanni Andrea Colonna di Paliano (b. 1975), and by Don Prospero Colonna di Paliano, Prince of Avella (b. 1956), whose heir is Don Filippo Colonna di Paliano (b. 1995).
Valeria Merlini and Prince Prospero Colonna.Princess Lucrezia Colonna di Stigliano, younger daughter of Prospero Colonna, Prince of Stigliano, tied the knot with Baron Andre del Marmol on April 24th.Princess Frances Colonna di Stigliano – born Frances Loftus in Connemara – with her Dalmatian, in front of her 17th century home located in Ashford, Co Wicklow, Ireland.
The 'Colonna di Stigliano' line is represented by Don Prospero Colonna di Stigliano, Prince of Stigliano (b. 1938), whose heir is his nephew Don Stefano Colonna di Stigliano (b. 1975) principe frederico giuseppe born 1954.
Abraham Foxman
Abraham Henry Foxman is an American lawyer and activist. He served as the national director of the Anti-Defamation League from 1987 to 2015, and is currently the League's national director emeritus. From 2016 to 2021 he served as vice chair of the board of trustees at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City in order to lead its efforts on antisemitism.
Foxman, an only son, was born in Baranovichi, just months after the Soviet Union took the town from Poland in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and incorporated it into the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The town is now in Belarus. Foxman had Polish Jewish parents Helen and Joseph Foxman. Foxman's parents left him with his Polish Catholic nanny Bronisława Kurpi in 1941 when they were ordered by Germans to enter a ghetto. Foxman was baptized into Christianity by the Catholic Church, given the Polish Christian name of Henryk Stanisław Kurpi, and raised as a Catholic in Vilnius between 1941 and 1944 when he was returned to his parents. Foxman also holds a J.D. degree from the New York University School of Law. He did graduate work in Jewish studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and in international economics at The New School.
Foxman has received criticism from Jewish and non-Jewish quarters for his antagonist approach to the 2004 film The Passion of the Christ and its director, Mel Gibson. In September 2003, during the pre-release controversy, Foxman called Gibson "the portrait of an anti-Semite". The next day he said, "I'm not ready to say he's an anti-Semite", but that Gibson "entertains views that can only be described as anti-Semitic". In July 2007, Foxman's opposition to a congressional resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide drew much criticism. "I don't think congressional action will help reconcile the issue. The resolution takes a position; it comes to a judgement", said Foxman in a statement issued to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. "The Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past.
Books:
The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control, Palgrave MacMillan, ISBN 1-4039-8492-1, ISBN 0-230-60404-8
Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 ISBN 978-0-230-62385-9
A Nation of Immigrants, John F. Kennedy (Foreword), Harper Perennial, ISBN 0-06-144754-4
Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, Harper Collins, 2003, ISBN 0-06-073069-2
Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet, written with Christopher Wolf, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan (February 4, 1921 – February 4, 2006) was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men".
Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein on February 4, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, to Harry and Miriam (Horwitz) Goldstein, whose Jewish families were from Russia and Hungary. As a young girl, Friedan was active in both MarXist and Jewish circles; she later wrote how she felt isolated from the latter community at times, and felt her "passion against injustice...originated from my feelings of the injustice of anti-Semitism".
In 1943 she spent a year at the University of California, Berkeley on a fellowship for graduate work in psychology with Erik Erikson. She became more politically active, continuing to mix with MarXists (many of her friends were investigated by the FBI). After leaving Berkeley, Betty became a journalist for leftist and labor union publications. Between 1943 and 1946 she wrote for Federated Press and between 1946 and 1952 she worked for the United Electrical Workers' UE News. One of her assignments was to report on the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Ai Weiwei
Ai's father was the Chinese poet Ai Qing, who was denounced during the Anti-Rightist Movement. In 1958, the family was sent to a labour camp in Beidahuang, Heilongjiang, when Ai was one year old. They were subsequently exiled to Shihezi, Xinjiang in 1961, where they lived for 16 years. Upon Mao Zedong's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the family returned to Beijing in 1976.
Alex Honneth
Axel Honneth is a German philosopher who is the Professor for Social Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Jack B. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Columbia University. He was also director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany between 2001 and 2018. Honneth was born in Essen, West Germany on 18 July 1949, studied in Bonn, Bochum, Berlin and Munich (under Jürgen Habermas), and taught at the Free University of Berlin and the New School before moving to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University of Frankfurt in 1996.
Honneth's work focuses on social-political and moral philosophy, especially relations of power, recognition, and respect. One of his core arguments is for the priority of intersubjective relationships of recognition in understanding social relations. This includes non- and mis-recognition as a basis of social and interpersonal conflict. For instance, grievances regarding the distribution of goods in society are ultimately struggles for recognition justice. His recent work Reification reformulates this key "Western Marxist" concept in terms of intersubjective relations of recognition and power. For Honneth, all forms of reification are due to intersubjectively based pathologies rather than the structural character of social systems such as capitalism as argued by Karl Marx and György Lukács.
Works:
Social Action and Human Nature, co-authored with Hans Joas (Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1980]).
The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (MIT Press, 1991 [1985]).
The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1995 [1990]).
The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Polity Press, 1995 [1992]).
Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange, co-authored with Nancy Fraser (Verso, 2003).
Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Polity Press, 2007 [2000]).
Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (2009).
The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory (2010).
The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition (2012).
Freedom's Right (2014).
The Idea of Socialism (2016).
Bill Donohue
William Anthony Donohue is an American Roman Catholic who has been president of the Catholic League in the United States since 1993. While Donohue was in college in New York, Virgil C. Blum, a Jesuit at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, founded the Catholic League to counter anti-Catholicism in American culture. Blum died in 1990; in 1993, Donohue became the director of the organization. Donohue publishes The Catalyst, the Catholic League journal. He formerly served on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars. He serves on the board of advisers of the Washington Legal Foundation, the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, Catholics United for the Faith, the Ave Maria Institute, the Christian Film and Television Commission and Catholic War Veterans.
In 2009, after the release of the official report of the Ryan Commission, whose findings included multiple instances of rape and persuasive evidence of endemic sexual, emotional, and physical abuse throughout the Catholic School system in Ireland, Donohue publicly denied these criminal charges and characterized the media response to the Ryan Report as "hysterical". He argued that most offenses occurred before 1970 when "corporal punishment", as Donohue termed it, was not thought unacceptable, and referred to the victims as "miscreants".
On March 30, 2010, Donohue appeared on CNN's Larry King Live on a panel discussing sexual abuse of children by priests. Donohue contended that the decades-old problem consisted mostly of offenses involving post-pubescent boys aged 12 or more, which offenses therefore, according to Donohue, should be considered the acts of homosexual priests, rather than the actions of pedophiles. Donohue also pointed to the independent John Jay Report, which stated that 81% of the victims were male and 78% were post pubescent.
In August 2018, Donohue responded to a report by a Pennsylvania grand jury that revealed rampant sexual abuse of children by some 300 priests by stating that the victims weren't raped because they were only groped, not penetrated. "There is no on-going crisis," he tweeted. "In fact, there is no institution, private or public, that has less of a problem with the sexual abuse of minors today than the Catholic Church.".
Works
The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union (Transaction Publishers, 1985), ISBN 978-0-887-38021-1
The New Freedom: Individualism and Collectivism in the Social Lives of Americans (Transaction Publishers, 1991)
Twilight of Liberty: The Legacy of the ACLU, (1994)
Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America (NY: FaithWords, 2009), ISBN 978-0-446-54721-5
Why Catholicism Matters: How Catholic Virtues Can Reshape Society in the Twenty-First Century (2012)
The Catholic Advantage: Why Health, Happiness, and Heaven Await the Faithful (2015)
Unmasking Mother Teresa's Critics (2016)
Common Sense Catholicism: How to Resolve Our Cultural Crisis (2019)
The Truth About Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and Causes (2021)
André Breton
André Robert Breton was a French writer and poet, the co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism". Along with his role as leader of the surrealist movement he is the author of celebrated books such as Nadja and L'Amour fou. Those activities, combined with his critical and theoretical work on writing and the plastic arts, made André Breton a major figure in twentieth-century French art and literature.
In 1924, Breton was instrumental in the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research. In Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), a collaboration with Soupault, he implemented the principle of automatic writing. He published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and was editor of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste from that year on. Eager to combine the themes of personal transformation found in the works of Arthur Rimbaud with the politics of Karl Marx, Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927, from which he was expelled in 1933.
In December 1929, a new book by Breton appeared, the Second manifeste du surréalisme (Second manifesto of surrealism), which contained a phrase often quoted and reproached to Breton, in particular by Albert Camus:
“The simplest surrealist act consists, with revolvers in hand, of descending into the street and shooting at random, as much as possible, into the crowd”.
In 1935, there was a conflict between Breton and the Soviet writer and journalist and propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg during the first International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which opened in Paris in June. Breton had been insulted by Ehrenburg—along with all fellow surrealists—in a pamphlet which said, among other things, that surrealists were "pederasts".
In 1938, Breton accepted a cultural commission from the French government to travel to Mexico. After a conference at the National Autonomous University of Mexico about surrealism, Breton stated after getting lost in Mexico City (as no one was waiting for him at the airport) "I don't know why I came here. Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world". However, visiting Mexico provided the opportunity to meet Leon Trotsky. Breton and other surrealists traveled via a long boat ride from Patzcuaro to the town of Erongarícuaro. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were among the visitors to the hidden community of intellectuals and artists. Together, Breton and Trotsky wrote the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art (published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera).
Breton was again in the medical corps of the French Army at the start of World War II. The Vichy government banned his writings as "the very negation of the national revolution" and Breton escaped, with the help of the American Varian Fry and Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV, to the United States and the Caribbean during 1941. He emigrated to New York City and lived there for a few years. In 1942, Breton organized a groundbreaking surrealist exhibition at Yale University.
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1968), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978), as well as the fictional works The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America (1999).
Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, the daughter of Mildred (née Jacobson) and Jack Rosenblatt, both Jews of Lithuanian and Polish descent. Her father managed a fur trading business in China, where he died of tuberculosis in 1939, when Susan was five years old. Sontag began her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley but transferred to the University of Chicago in admiration of its prominent core curriculum.
At 17, Sontag married writer Philip Rieff, who was a sociology instructor at the University of Chicago, after a 10-day courtship; their marriage lasted eight years. At Chicago, she undertook studies in philosophy, ancient history, and literature alongside her other requirements. Leo Strauss, Joseph Schwab, Christian Mackauer, Richard McKeon, Peter von Blanckenhagen and Kenneth Burke were among her lecturers. At 17, Sontag married writer Philip Rieff, who was a sociology instructor at the University of Chicago, after a 10-day courtship; their marriage lasted eight years.
While studying at Chicago, Sontag attended a summer school taught by the sociologist Hans Heinrich Gerth who became a friend and subsequently influenced her study of German thinkers. The Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse lived with Sontag and Rieff for a year while working on his 1955 book Eros and Civilization. Sontag researched for Rieff's 1959 study Freud: The Mind of the Moralist before their divorce in 1958, and contributed to the book to such an extent that she has been considered an unofficial co-author.
"If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far.... The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."
Susan Sontag, Partisan Review, 1967
Sontag was awarded an American Association of University Women's fellowship for the 1957–1958 academic year to St Anne's College, Oxford, where she traveled without her husband and son. There, she had classes with Iris Murdoch, Stuart Hampshire, A. J. Ayer and H. L. A. Hart while also attending the B. Phil seminars of J. L. Austin and the lectures of Isaiah Berlin. Oxford did not appeal to her, however, and she transferred after Michaelmas term of 1957 to the University of Paris (the Sorbonne).
Alexey Brodovitch
Alexey Vyacheslavovich Brodovitch was a Russian-born American photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for his art direction of fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar from 1934 to 1958.
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