The Frankfurt School
Melvyn Bragg and guests Raymond Geuss, Esther Leslie and Jonathan RA(c)e discuss the Frankfurt School.This group of influential left-wing German thinkers set out, in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, to investigate why their country had not had a revolution, despite the apparently revolutionary conditions that spread through Germany in the wake of the 1918 Armistice. To find out why the German workers had not flocked to the Red Flag, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and others came together around an Institute set up at Frankfurt University and began to focus their critical attention not on the economy, but on culture, asking how it affected people’s political outlook and activities. But then, with the rise of the Nazis, they found themselves fleeing to 1940s California. There, their disenchantment with American popular culture combined with their experiences of the turmoil of the interwar years to produce their distinctive, pessimistic worldview. With the defeat of Nazism, they returned to Germany to try to make sense of the route their native country had taken into darkness. In the 1960s, the Frankfurt School’s argument - that most of culture helps to keep its audience compliant with capitalism - had an explosive impact. Arguably, it remains influential today.
→ Listen on BBC Sounds website
Guests
-
Raymond Geuss No other episodes
Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge - Esther Leslie
2 episodes
Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London -
Jonathan RA(c)e No other episodes
Freelance historian and philosopher, currently Visiting Professor at Roehampton University and at the Royal College of Art
Related episodes
-
Walter Benjamin
10 Feb, 2022 190 Modern Western Philosophy -
Hannah Arendt
25 Jun, 2020 320 Political science -
Bauhaus
10 Nov, 2022 700 Arts -
Psychoanalysis and Democracy
11 Jul, 2002 150 Psychology -
Hitler in History
5 Oct, 2000 940 History of Europe -
The Continental-Analytic Split
10 Nov, 2011 100 Philosophy -
Existentialism
28 Jun, 2001 100 Philosophy -
Sturm und Drang
14 Oct, 2010 830 German and related literatures -
Modern Culture
21 Jan, 1999 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism -
Logical Positivism
2 Jul, 2009 190 Modern Western Philosophy
Programme ID: b00pr54s
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pr54s
Auto-category: 300 (Social sciences)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.