Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Philip Crone looks two articles about the Frankfurt School: Ben Morgan’s “The Project of the Frankfurt School,” from Telos 119 (Spring 2001), and James Gordon Finlayson’s “Morality and Critical Theory: On the Normative Problem of Frankfurt School Social Criticisms,”from Telos 146 (Spring 2009).
In an earlier post on the TELOSscope blog, Nicole Burgoyne highlighted a 2001 interview with Paul Piccone in which he discussed the appearance of Telos in the 1960s. Piccone listed a number of ideological currents that played major formative roles in the early years of Telos, including Frankfurt School critical theory. Forty years after the first issue of Telos was published the journal is still going strong, but can the same be said of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School? The Frankfurt School itself long predates Telos; the beginnings of its program can be traced to the 1920s when the Institute for Social Research was founded by Carl Grünberg. The Frankfurt School, or at least what is known as its “first generation,” reached its apex with the publication of the second edition of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947. While thinkers influenced by this first generation continue to exert enormous intellectual influence, the ideas of the original group itself have waned.
Why do we obey? Even when people rebel, it seems they simply reconstitute a form of obedience. We all know the old cliché “they aren’t rebels, they’re just following a ‘rebellious’ social code.” The way people dress, their hairstyle, tattoos, earrings, piercings, etc., only seem to reinforce our belief in their obedience to well-defined social practices. Even if we aren’t all playing by the same rules, we are all playing by rules. Do we even know what it would mean anymore to rebel? In the meantime, cultural critics admonish our decline, criticizing us for adhering to more philistine, insipid, or self-defeating values. But doesn’t this criticism amount to saying that we are just obeying the wrong thing, whereas obedience itself is simply presupposed? Could obedience really be ubiquitous, and if so, how did we get this way? On the other hand, how can we describe a legitimate form of autonomy? 
In all honesty, children playing under the shadow of the presidential statue in the Lincoln Memorial, sweethearts embracing behind the slabs of the World War II plaza, or families picnicking in the shade of the Vietnam Memorial, seem odd and incongruous. Monuments are rarely expected to act as recreational spaces. Rather, the heavy subject matter solemnified in each should lend to reflection and concentration. The opposite, however, is the case with the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where the plaza filled with uniform rectangles of various heights provides visitors with a place to sunbathe, to cuddle, to play, to eat. In her article 
Even the first-time reader of Freud recognizes some outdated theory, in part because he or she has already heard Freudian psychology made fun of as part of the pop culture understanding of psychotherapy. But has Freud’s legacy—talk therapy—become obsolete in education as well as in practice? In his 2002 article 
How long ago was 9/11? Is this really a new era? What does it look like? For many, for perhaps all of us, the terrorist attacks eight years ago came as a surprise and brought us to question our understanding of the world around us. Our answers have emerged in renewed and reinvigorated passions for social and international justice. Collectively, however, there is no one vision we can all subscribe to. Some blame the United States for the terrorist attacks; others call for the government to hunt down the terrorists and kill them. In the heat of the moment, emotions flare and opinions are erratic. 
