Frankfurt School and Critical Theory 289
consciousness and of Western reason in
general. But the concept of critique as
elaborated by the Frankfurt School must
also be understood in an epistemological
sense, following Marx, who characterized
his analyses as ‘critiques of political econ-
omy.’ In this sense, the Frankfurt School
scholars elaborated the Marxist critique of
bourgeois ideology and critiqued alienated
labour and the exploitation of labour by
means of a dominant mode of communica-
tion, mass culture, negation of contradic-
tion, suppression of dissent, and repressive
intolerance. The scholars saw the cultural
‘products’ of capitalist society as analogous
to manufactured products. These were not
meant to last, as were the great works of
art, but rather to be turned over quickly.
The whole of mass capitalist culture was
thus seen as a ‘culture industry’ producing
music, spectacles, and the like that were
meant to be ephemeral and of little value.
The only logic they served was that of the
marketplace, not of any aesthetic sense.
Augusto Ponzio
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry. Lon-
don: Routledge, 1999.
Habermas, Jürgen. Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dia-
lectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and
Herder, 1972.
Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History
of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social
Research 1923–1950. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996.
Lowenthal, Leo. Literature, Popular Culture and
Society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1961.
Marcuse, Herbert. Studies in Philosophy and Social
Science 9, no. 1 (1941): 414–39.
Shapiro, Jeremy J. The Critical Theory of Frank-
furt. Times Literary Supplement, 4 October 1974.
Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its His-
tory, Theories and Political Significance. Cam-
bridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995.
FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND
CRITICAL THEORY
[See also: Frankfurt School; Marxism]
The term ‘Frankfurt School’ refers to a
group of German-Jewish intellectuals asso-
ciated with the Institut für Sozialforschung,
a private research foundation established
in Frankfurt in 1922 to study the structures
and practices of society from a Marxist per-
spective. In 1931, Max Horkheimer became
the Institute’s director and broadened its
initial emphasis upon history and political
economy to include an explicitly interdis-
ciplinary and holistic investigation into the
social, economic, political, cultural, moral,
psychological, and philosophical founda-
tions of modern social life. Over the next
four decades, those scholars now described
as part of the Institute’s ‘first genera-
tion’ – including, most famously, Horkhe-
imer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse,
Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Leo
Lowenthal – undertook an extraordinary
variety of research ranging from detailed
empirical studies of phenomena such as the
family and social values to more specula-
tive theoretical meditations on philosophi-
cal, historical, and aesthetic themes. In
1933 the Institute was moved to Geneva
to escape Nazi persecution; the following
year, some of its operations were relocated
to the United States, where the majority of
its associates spent the war years. Intrigued
by the prospect of participating in the dem-
ocratic reconstruction of West Germany,
Horkheimer and Adorno returned the Insti-
tute to Frankfurt in 1950.
Although it is impossible to distil a com-
mon theoretical framework or research
program from the diverse array of thinkers
and texts we now associate with the Frank-
furt School (and it is a label they never
used themselves), it is fair to say that the
basic question which guided their work
was why modern societies had largely
failed to realize the enormous potential for
human freedom, individual autonomy, and
material prosperity enabled by advances in
290 Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
their technological and productive capaci-
ties. Inspired by a tradition of philosophi-
cal and social critique from Kant through
Hegel to Marx, they sought to confront
modern societies with the broken promise
of the bourgeois revolutions to achieve
genuine, universal human emancipation.
Critical theory, in other words, was con-
ceived as a form of immanent critique which,
as Marcuse noted in One-Dimensional Man,
‘analyzes society in the light of its used and
unused or abused capabilities for improv-
ing the human condition’ (1964: x).
For the most part, this analysis con-
sisted of an extremely bleak portrait of
mass society in which the vast majority of
individuals were successfully integrated
into systems of economic, political, and
cultural domination, leaving little oppor-
tunity for resistance or social change. In
significant ways, such a gloomy outlook
may be traced to the historical conditions in
which critical theory took shape and which
it was trying to explain between the 1930s
and 1950s. First, the working class had not
become the ‘gravedigger’ of capitalism
as Marx had prophesied, but instead had
been largely co-opted through a combina-
tion of consumer culture and nationalistic
ideology. Second, the emergence of fascism,
culminating in world war, the Holocaust,
and the use of atomic weapons testified to
the frightening capacity of human beings
to use technological rationality for the most
barbaric of ends. Third, the Stalinization
of the Soviet Union and emergence of the
Cold War left little hope for the prospect
of any radical global alternatives to the
one-dimensional societies presided over by
these superpowers and their client states.
The Frankfurt School has often been con-
demned on the basis of its relentless and
totalizing pessimism, which some have
suggested is not only reflective of this spe-
cific historical period (and thus of limited
contemporary relevance) but also sympto-
matic of the personal experience of exile.
Others, though, insist that critical theory’s
analysis of capitalism, technology, instru-
mental rationality, and mass culture identi-
fied important structures and trends within
human society that have grown more
rather than less pervasive and intense over
time. As such, its principle insights remain
useful in making sense of our world today.
Among the most influential, controver-
sial, and often misunderstood elements of
critical theory in media studies is the role it
assigns to mass culture in reducing the hu-
man capacity for critical thought as well as
sustaining the legitimacy of capitalist socio-
economic structures. Writing in the early
1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno coined the
term Kulturindustrie to denote the systemat-
ic application of the principles, procedures,
and values of industrial capitalism to the
creating and marketing of mass culture.
Entertainment corporations, they argued,
were churning out a never-ending supply
of films, magazines, books, and newspa-
pers following the same Fordist logic that
governed the production of other consumer
commodities such as automobiles or cloth-
ing. Contrary to those who claimed that
the use of private market mechanisms to
regulate the exchange of culture and com-
munication promoted the freedom and
independence of the media (as compared to
state censorship), Horkheimer and Adorno
suggested that the growth of a capitalist
culture industry had actually transformed
culture into a staunch ally of existing struc-
tures of power and domination. Unlike
some relatively crude Marxist criticisms,
however, their argument was not based
upon an instrumental conception of media
as a propaganda tool deployed by ruling
elites to inject or impose a passive form of
‘false consciousness’ upon the helpless and
duped masses. Instead, they focused upon
how culture and communication had been
transformed by their integration within
and subordination to the logic of a capital-
ist economy.
What properties do cultural objects ac-
quire when they are conceived, produced,
and promoted, first and foremost, as
commodities for profit? They must be ef-
ficiently produced to minimize costs, effec-
tively promoted to stimulate demand, and

easily consumed to maximize sales. These
priorities elevate a particular dialectic of
sameness and difference as the governing
principle for all cultural products. On the
one hand, cultural commodities must be
standardized: first, it is faster, cheaper, and
more efficient to produce multiple com-
modities according to the same formula;
and, second, such commodities can be
easily consumed because they conform to
the existing cultural habits, expectations,
and stereotypes of the audience. On the
other hand, marketability demands that
repetition be hidden beneath the illusion
of individuality, difference, and novelty.
The trivial differences of a cultural product
must be deliberately foregrounded and
exaggerated to market it as something
‘new’ or ‘different.’ Mass culture becomes a
form of pseudo-individualization in which
trivial differences disguise an underlying
sameness and homogeneity. For Horkhe-
imer and Adorno, the triumph of this basic
logic was ensured by three complementary
developments: first, all cultural production
was increasingly rationalized, coordinated,
and centralized in the hands of large media
corporations; second, each corporation
shared the same objective of maximizing
the extraction of profit from culture; third,
culture and communication were increas-
ingly organized as a promotional arm for
other commodities of consumer capitalism.
Horkheimer and Adorno feared that a
cultural environment dominated by these
principles would fatally compromise the
capacity of individuals to engage in critical
thought. The essence of critical thought,
they believed, was the use of culture and
language to open up a conceptual and/
or aesthetic distance between subject and
object, between people and their social and
material environment. Great works of art,
for instance, do not simply reflect the world
but defamiliarize it, forcing us to concep-
tualize and experience the world around
us in new ways (as well as reflect upon the
deficiencies of all forms of representation).
Culture should challenge and destabilize
prevailing ideas, values, and assump-
Frankfurt School and Critical Theory 291
tions through which we make sense of our
world. Above all, it ought to enable the im-
agination of alternative forms of social life
and thus keep faith with the utopian but
immanent potential of society to become
something other than it is today. Mass
culture, they argued, had precisely the op-
posite effect, betraying culture’s potential
by leaving humanity stranded in the desert
of the real. ‘It is not because they turn their
backs on washed-out existence that escape
films are so repugnant,’ wrote Adorno, ‘but
because they do not do so energetically
enough, because they are themselves just as
washed-out, because the satisfactions they
fake coincide with the ignominy of real-
ity, of denial. The dreams have no dream’
(1996: 222). The ideological effect of the
culture industry was not to distract con-
sumers from reality with escapist fantasy
but instead to confirm that reality as ines-
capable. ‘There are no more ideologies in
the authentic sense of false consciousness,
only advertisements for the world through
its duplication’ (Adorno 1981: 34). In other
words, the Frankfurt School did not attack
the culture industry for being too powerful
or manipulative but rather for being too
weak and ineffective to sustain critical re-
flection or energize the imagination of uto-
pian alternatives to existing ways of life.
Furthermore, they believed that mass
culture could only be properly under-
stood if conceptualized in relation to the
changes that capitalism had brought to
other spheres of social life including, most
notably, the workplace and the family.
The techniques of mass production cou-
pled with the widespread application of
scientific management had systematically
stripped autonomy, creativity, and inde-
pendence from the labour process, forcing
most workers to numb their critical facul-
ties as they performed simplistic and re-
petitive tasks. Bored and exhausted by the
drudgery of the assembly line or the sales
counter, most people craved ‘mindless’
entertainment which could be consumed
without too much thought or concentra-
tion. In order to satisfy this need, however,
292 Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
cultural commodities had to secretly repro-
duce the patterns of cognition, experience,
and feeling that dominated everyday life.
‘They want standardized goods and pseu-
do-individuation, because their leisure time
is an escape from work and at the same
time is molded after those psychological
attitudes to which their workaday attitudes
exclusively habituates them’ (Adorno and
Simpson 1941: 38). The culture industry
did not single-handedly ‘inject’ ideological
support for capitalist society into helpless
individuals. Instead, it organized, rein-
forced, and intensified patterns of thought,
action, feeling, and pleasure that had be-
come socially dominant because of their
embodiment in a wide range of similarly
commodified structures and practices such
as a dehumanizing work life.
Equally as important, early empirical
studies conducted by Frankfurt School re-
searchers on the family suggested that the
psychological processes of identity forma-
tion had been badly damaged in modern
society, leaving many individuals with
undeveloped egos that were incapable of
imposing any real discipline over more
primitive desires. Lacking any real sense
of self-identity, such individuals were ripe
for exploitation by the culture industry’s
pledge to provide instinctual gratification,
thereby intensifying psychological depend-
ence upon the cheap pleasures of mass
culture. Above all, a lack of self-confidence
and personal autonomy left many highly
vulnerable to the promise that social status,
acceptance, and belonging could be easily
secured by imitative assimilation to the
practices and values of consumer culture.
Such promises, though, were infinitely and
openly postponed by a culture industry
that appeared to have successfully locked
consumers into an endless Sisyphyean
cycle of expectation and disappointment.
‘The promissory note of pleasure issued
by plot and packaging is indefinitely
prolonged: the promise, which actually
comprises the entire show, disdainfully
intimates that there is nothing more to
come, that the diner must be satisfied with
reading the menu’ (Horkheimer and Ador-
no 2002: 111). As individuals became accus-
tomed to this pattern, the culture industry
acquired a certain immunity from critique:
at some level, people knew how repetitive,
formulaic, and infantile most of its offer-
ings were, yet continued to consume them
because it was the only option available
to them and they could no longer imagine
doing anything else. ‘The triumph of ad-
vertising in the culture industry [consists
in] the compulsive imitation by consumers
of cultural commodities which, at the same
time, they recognize as false’ (Horkheimer
and Adorno 2002: 136).
The work on mass culture was only
one aspect of the much broader critique of
human reason and social evolution under-
taken by critical theory. Jointly composed
by Horkheimer and Adorno during their
U.S. exile in the early 1940s, Dialectic of
Enlightenment sketched out a sweeping
portrayal of human history in which our
eventual success in using reason to domi-
nate nature has betrayed the original aim
of the Enlightenment to bring freedom and
happiness to all individuals. The origins of
human reason, they argue, can be traced
to a primal fear of the unknown, a hostile,
dangerous, and terrifying natural world.
Born out of the desperate attempt to man-
age and repress this fear, human beings
developed forms of thought and belief
that enclose the world in representative
systems of growing complexity. Myth, for
instance, was propelled by the desire to
conceptualize and explain phenomena in
a symbolic and often anthropomorphized
form that human beings could understand,
to render the unknown into the known.
The Enlightenment developed new forms
of scientific inquiry and instrumental rea-
son that ridiculed and condemned myth
yet were motivated by a similar desire to
predict, manipulate, and control the natural
world. In philosophical terms, the subject
conceives of the object only in terms of
how it can serve the needs or desires of the
subject. Over time this instrumental form
of reasoning had proven remarkably adept

at increasing humanity’s power over nature
and had been embedded within a wide
range of social institutions, practices, and
technologies. However, it also marginalized
or displaced other forms of non-instrumen-
tal reason and understanding that could
not similarly justify themselves as enhanc-
ing human productive capacities. The ra-
tionality of means trumped the rationality
of ends: strengthening instrumental reason
had become an end in itself rather than
subordinated to the satisfaction of real hu-
man needs. For the Frankfurt School, capi-
talism represented the perfection of this
logic insofar as the production of wealth
was organized to increase profit and the
accumulation of capital rather than maxi-
mize human freedom and happiness. The
erosion of critical thought coupled with
the systematic alienation that commodity
fetishism imposed upon experience had
made it virtually impossible for atomized
and isolated individuals to exercise any
rational authority over their environment.
Although the collective power of human-
ity over nature had grown exponentially, it
had also been matched by the emergence
of a reified social world that appeared as
inscrutable, unpredictable, and dangerous
as nature must once have seemed to hu-
manity’s distant ancestors. Enlightenment
dissolved back into myth as human beings,
once again, had little choice but to submit
to forces seemingly beyond their control
or understanding, making a mockery of
Kant’s famous rallying cry ‘sapere aude!’
(dare to know).
Following Adorno’s death in 1969 – he
had taken over as the Institute’s director
after Horkheimer’s retirement in the mid-
1960s – intellectual leadership of Frankfurt
School critical theory passed to a ‘second
generation’ of thinkers. Foremost among
these was Jürgen Habermas and his ongo-
ing attempt to renovate critical theory by
foregrounding the emancipatory potential
embedded within inter-subjective social
relations and communication. Horkheimer
and Adorno had originally conceived Dia-
lectic of Enlightenment as a means of rescu-
Frankfurt School and Critical Theory 293
ing the Enlightenment from itself by distin-
guishing between its positive and negative
dimensions. But the grand, sweeping
nature of their indictment of human reason
as inaugurating self-destructive forms of
social and natural domination was inter-
preted by many, including Habermas, as
marking the project of modernity beyond
redemption: at its outset, the Enlighten-
ment for Horkheimer and Adorno ‘is the
result of a drive to self-preservation that
mutilates reason, because it lays claim
to it only in the form of purpose-rational
mastery of nature and instinct – precisely
as instrumental reason’ (Habermas 1987a:
111). If reason itself was so deeply flawed,
then the very possibility of critical theory,
and the social and political praxis it was to
inspire, fades before a hermetic (and bour-
geois) retreat into the contemplation of aes-
thetics and philosophy. Habermas rejected
these conclusions on the grounds that they
failed to identify both the positive, criti-
cal dimensions of rationality as well as the
many progressive accomplishments of
modernity, including democracy, the rule
of law, aesthetic and cultural diversity, fun-
damental human rights and freedoms, and
so on.
In The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere, initially published in German
in 1962 but not translated into English until
three decades later, Habermas developed
an immanent critique of capitalist moder-
nity through a historically grounded inves-
tigation into the emergence and erosion of
the public sphere between the eighteenth
and twentieth centuries. Originating ini-
tially in the coffee houses of London and
then gradually spreading to other urban
centres in Europe, the public sphere repre-
sented the formation of public spaces (and,
later, printed media) in which individuals
could gather to discuss and debate mat-
ters of commerce, culture, and politics.
Although the actual practices of discussion
were often restrictive and exclusionary (on
the basis of gender, education, class, race,
and religion), the philosophical principles
which regulated the exchange of ideas
294 Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
in these places were drawn from the En-
lightenment’s basic precept that all human
beings have the capacity to use reason to
participate in their own self-government.
This right to personal autonomy, suggested
Habermas, was best exercised in a delibera-
tive fashion: ‘in regard to enlightenment,
therefore, thinking for oneself seemed to
coincide with thinking aloud and the use
of reason with its public use’ (1989: 104).
Four key features of the public sphere can
be identified which, though not always
fully adhered to, constituted its norma-
tive foundations (Calhoun 1992: 12–13).
First, all participants are to be regarded as
formally equal: social or other distinctions
are irrelevant for the purposes of discus-
sion. Second, the quality of discourse and
argument is to be assessed and adjudicated
strictly on the basis of reason alone. Third,
subject matters are not to be restricted or
shaped by external authorities but are to be
entirely dependent upon the autonomous
decisions of the participants. Fourth, any
individual should have the right to partici-
pate. As an ideal if not always in practice,
the public sphere created a protected space
of freedom and autonomy in which people
could debate and discuss the important so-
cial, cultural, and political questions of the
day. However, the expansion of the public
sphere in the form of mass communica-
tion has come at the expense of the quality
and autonomy of political discourse. In a
critique of the perversion of mass commu-
nication that shares much with Horkheimer
and Adorno’s culture industry thesis, Hab-
ermas lamented the ‘structural transforma-
tion’ (and erosion) of the public sphere
under the influence of powerful economic
and political forces. Active participation by
engaged individuals in rational debate is
displaced by the passive consumption of
media spectacle engineered by states and
corporations in the interests of profit and
ideological legitimation. Despite his far
more enthusiastic reception of the Enlight-
enment, Habermas ultimately ended up
unable to ground the principles of the pub-
lic sphere in the historical conditions and
social institutions of contemporary society.
Instead, the concept of the public sphere
served primarily as a tool for criticizing the
failures and shortcomings of existing forms
of communication.
In later work such as The Theory of Com-
municative Action (1984) he shifted away
from this historical mode of investigation
and critique to explore the transhistorical
foundations of reason embedded within all
forms of human communication. Habermas
faults Marxist and non-Marxist critics alike
for failing to adequately distinguish be-
tween an instrumental, strategic, or techno-
logical rationality oriented towards the sub-
ject’s mastery, control, and domination of
objects and the communicative rationality
that governs and coordinates linguistically
mediated interaction between subjects. One
of the properties shared by all acts of speech
is an underlying normative commitment to
reaching a shared understanding between
individual subjects. While this may not
always occur and speech may also be used
to pursue other ends, this commitment is a
necessary precondition for human commu-
nication. In order for people to reach such
an understanding, the legitimacy of each
speech act is dependent upon three validity
claims. First, statements are true insofar as
their representation of objective reality is as
accurate as possible; second, statements are
right insofar as any moral or ethical claims
they offer are legitimate and defensible
according to prevailing social, cultural,
and legal norms; and, third, statements
are sincere insofar as they genuinely reflect
the will, understanding, and feeling of the
speaker. The universal (though implicit)
presence of such criteria enables the use of
reason to facilitate debate, discussion, and
the achievement of consensus as a means of
coordinating social action. Habermas ar-
gues that the rationality of communicative
action takes shape and is sustained within
the lifeworld of human society, the dense but
informal network of shared meanings, cul-
tural traditions, and social interaction that
constitute everyday life. In contrast, instru-
mental forms of rationality are rooted in the

system, which is composed of structures,
institutions, technologies, and patterns of
action that organize the material reproduc-
tion of society: in particular, money (the
capitalist economy) and power (the welfare
state) are identified as the two dominant
‘steering media’ which coordinate human
action in accord with their own systemic
objectives. Problems arise when the frag-
ile balance between these two spheres is
disturbed by the expansionary tendency
of the system to colonize the lifeworld and
thereby erode the basis for human thought
and action based upon communicative ra-
tionality. But unlike the much deeper and
more radical critique of capitalist moderni-
zation offered by first-generation scholars,
Habermas constructs a vigorous defence of
the Enlightenment and modernity, arguing
that the principles of reason immanent to
many of the institutions and practices of
contemporary society continue to furnish
ample grounds for critical theory.
Although Walter Benjamin was never a
formal member of the Institute for Social
Research (but did receive a small stipend
in the late 1930s), his work is often identi-
fied as part of Frankfurt School critical
theory. In media studies, Benjamin is best
known for his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ a
deceptively simple set of observations on
the effect of new media such as film and
photography on the social and political
significance of art and culture. On the one
hand, he was hopeful that increasing ac-
cessibility to culture through reproduction
would empower the masses to grapple
with an exploitative economic and political
reality in new ways and thereby mobilize
previously repressed desires for social
transformation. On the other hand, he also
recognized the danger that in the absence
of such mobilization, these desires could
also be harnessed to more destructive ends.
Horrified by how the spectacular pleasures
offered by films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will and Olympiad could
sabotage critical thought, he concluded
his essay by noting that mankind’s ‘self-
Frankfurt School and Critical Theory 295
alienation has reached such a degree that
it can experience its own destruction as an
aesthetic pleasure of the first order’ (1969:
242). Benjamin’s occasional and often cryp-
tic optimism about new cultural technolo-
gies has often been used to position him as
a foil to Adorno’s far more hostile reception
of mass culture, even as an intellectual pro-
genitor to work in cultural studies. Yet the
aesthetic, intellectual, and normative com-
mitments shared by these two thinkers on
issues of culture, history, and philosophy
far outweigh their differences: most impor-
tantly, both shared a desire to rescue the
possibilities for critical thought and experi-
ence in a world where such possibilities are
increasingly eviscerated by instrumental
reason and capitalist social relations. While
Benjamin was far more willing to speculate
about the irrepressible utopian energies for
revolution scattered throughout the spaces
of everyday life, he was equally liable to re-
flect apocalyptically upon the catastrophic
history of so-called human progress.
In the final decade of his life (which
ended in his suicide in 1940 during a flight
from Nazi occupied France), Benjamin
devoted himself to exploring the transfor-
mation of urban experience in the posthu-
mously published Arcades Project (1999).
Consisting of a massive collection of quota-
tions, aphorisms, and a few schematic es-
says, this unconventional text has exercised
a powerful influence across traditional
academic disciplines. While Benjamin’s
investigations ostensibly focused upon
Paris, his ambition was a critical history
of how capitalist urbanization, and its as-
sociated technologies and cultural forms,
had irrevocably revolutionized the means
through which people experienced, under-
stood, and engaged with social reality. In
the past, dense networks of social relations,
enduring cultural traditions, and recurring
patterns of work, life, and leisure had an-
chored generation after generation within
stable patterns of meaning and experience.
The disruptions of modernity had shattered
these patterns, forcing individuals to devel-
op new social, cultural, and psychological
296 Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
strategies to manage the perpetual shocks
that were now part of everyday life. In
the wake of such changes, an intoxicating
range of utopian impulses for happiness,
freedom, and autonomy were emancipated
from the traditional cultural forms that had
contained them. Yet under the spell of the
commodity form, these possibilities were
routinely petrified into fetishized objects,
practices, and spaces which constituted a
mythic dreamworld for humanity. Mass
consumption of these commodities per-
versely ensured that the collective wish for
a better world they expressed would never
be satisfied. Benjamin’s provocative vision
of capitalist modernity as a hellish fate in
which human beings were bound to infinite
cycles of expectation and disappointment
planted the conceptual seed which would
later ripen into Horkheimer and Adorno’s
Dialectic of Enlightenment. But unlike their
relentlessly negative exposition, Benjamin
insisted that a revolutionary pedagogical
tool described as the ‘dialectical image’
could jolt humanity out of its slumbers
and awaken it to its collective social and
political power to finally make good on the
utopian vision it has possessed for so long
in the form of a dream.
Critical theory has itself attracted many
critics who have attacked the work of the
Frankfurt School for a wide range of faults
from the perceived mandarin elitism of its
principle exponents and the totalizing char-
acter of its indictment of capitalist society
to the historical specificity (and limitations)
of its analysis and its refusal (with the pos-
sible exception of Habermas) to offer any
pragmatic program for social and politi-
cal reform. Many of these criticisms have
substantial merit and there is little ques-
tion that as a comprehensive or systematic
theorization of contemporary social and
cultural life, critical theory fails on many
counts. That being said, however, there
are few scholarly traditions that can match
the Frankfurt School’s rigour, complexity,
and critical force in exploring the social,
cultural, and intellectual foundations and
implications of the Enlightenment, moder-
nity, and capitalism. Beyond the interdisci-
plinary tour de force contained in some of
their best-known work, critical theorists of
the first and second generation also offer
us a wealth of insights in the form of aes-
thetic, literary, and cultural criticism that
addressed the most important intellectual
debates of their day. Finally, the Frankfurt
School has influenced a wide range of
scholars across many disciplines, who con-
tinue to apply, refine, and renovate the key
concepts and ideas of the original scholars.
Shane Gunster
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Adorno, Theodor, with the assistance of George
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FREEDOM OF SPEECH
[See also: Censorship; Defamation; Pornography]
Freedom of speech is the right to express
ideas and opinions in a democratic society
without fear of censorship or punishment.
Although freedom of speech is enforced by
law, the development of new technologies
over the last decade, particularly the inter-
net, has brought the concept under scru-
tiny. With increased diversity and anonym-
ity more people are expressing their ideas
through cyberspace. These ideas sometimes
include pornography and hate speech.
The guarantee of free speech in the
United States began in 1783, when America
became independent from Britain and the
monarchy was replaced with a representa-
tive system of government. As a concept,
freedom of speech originally surfaced from
the seventeenth-century English context of
political activitism, known as the freedom
of the press movement. The First Amend-
ment to the American Constitution states
that Congress shall make no law prohibit-
ing or abridging the free exercise to free-
dom of speech or of the press.
The responsibility of the free press is to
discuss or dispute information. Journal-
ism’s purpose is to search out what is true.
However, in a democratic society, truth
is considered diversely and, hence, is dif-
ficult to pin down and debate. The goal is
to protect freedom of the press by ensuring
diversity and avoiding intimidation from
powerful public or private interests. The
freedom guaranteed by the Constitution
is a freedom to express and communicate
Freedom of Speech 297
ideas without restraint, whether orally, in
print, or by other means of communication.
In the First Amendment, the primary
purpose of the courts is to protect speech
that promotes a robust public debate. For
example, in the late nineteenth century,
Congress had passed laws against ob-
scenity. But court decisions eased such
restrictions right after they were passed,
lifting bans on such books as Ulysses by
James Joyce in 1933 and Lady Chatterley’s
Lover by D.H. Lawrence in 1960. In 1989,
the Supreme Court proclaimed that the
government cannot punish someone for
burning the American flag as a form of po-
litical protest, and in 2000 it ruled that the
government has no right to require cable
systems to limit sexually explicit channels
to late-night hours.
In the twenty-first century, technologies
have emerged to challenge the spirit of the
First Amendment. The internet in particular
poses a serious problem. The term ano-
nymity refers to the ability to conceal one’s
identity while communicating one’s own
political and religious ideas, without fear of
government intimidation or public retalia-
tion. Anonymity is especially appealing to
internet users who engage in unpopular,
controversial, or embarrassing forms of
communication without sacrificing their
privacy or reputations. Since 1998, plaintiffs
allegedly harmed by anonymous internet
postings have filed many civil defamation
lawsuits against ‘John Doe’ defendants. In
the digital age the notion of freedom speech
is taking on a broader definition.
Freedom of speech and of the press has
always been heralded as a vital component
of the political, social, and cultural sys-
tems of democracies. Ironically, it is in the
United States that censorship forces have
frequently surfaced. Nevertheless, the First
Amendment to the Constitution still serves
as a safeguard for the freedom of the news
media. In a democratic society, everyone is
allowed to have freedom of thought, belief,
opinion, and expression.
Barbara Dumanski