DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.

12726

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The Institute for Social Research on its 100th

birthday. A former director’s perspective

Axel Honneth
Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, USA

Correspondence
Axel Honneth, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, USA.
Email: ah2952@columbia.edu

There comes a point in the life of any tradition when the question arises whether it deserves to be pursued further
or whether it is more advisable to leave it behind in order to set out for new theoretical shores, and be it because of
the irritating fact of its 100th birthday or because of it having reached a boiling point in the accumulation of internal
problems, I assume that the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School must also be exposed to this question today. By
raising this question, I do not intent to cast any doubt on the political and intellectual value of the Institute for Social
Research in Frankfurt, which was founded a century ago, or on the value of similar research institutions that aim at
critically investigating the social and economic crises of the present under the normative perspective of human eman-
cipation and democratic inclusion; the importance of such institutions is beyond question because they contribute by
their research to a better understanding of the causes of the prevailing economic–political situation, the normative
alternatives contained in it, and, by virtue of this, the possible ways out of the social injustices, pathologies, and suf-
ferings that the overall crisis is increasingly producing. All organizationally administered activities that have as their
result an increase of such practical knowledge and intellectual clarification have a right on their own and deserve the
strongest defense by anyone interested in supporting the struggles of the victims against social exclusion and disem-
powerment. But what has to be asked today with urgency and in full seriousness is whether the Critical Theory of the
Frankfurt School that guided the research within the Institute for Social Research intellectually for more than 90 years
is still the best theoretical framework for the empirical and social-theoretical work to be done today.
There are some perfectly obvious, but not very deep, reasons for responding to the question just raised in the neg-
ative. One might, for example, say that the fact that the Frankfurt School never succeeded in overcoming its internal
split into two opposing camps—the first one conceiving capitalism as a self-reproducing, highly integrated social for-
mation, the second one conceiving it as battlefield of social forces fighting over legal and political power—is already
sufficient indication for the enormous difficulties one has to face to continue its tradition; if the first division, repre-
sented mainly by Horkheimer and Adorno, was emphasizing almost exclusively the success of the capitalist system in
integrating the population by means of psychic manipulation, the fabrication of social illusions, and the use of disci-
plinary methods, and the second division, represented by Neumann, Kirchheimer, Fromm, and possibly Benjamin, was
stressing the conflictual side of the capitalist system by focusing its attention on legal, cultural, and political struggles,
it is almost impossible to see how to integrate these two perspectives in a coherent theory of society. What results
from this split today is, as I see it, a bifurcation of the attempts to reactualize Critical Theory into a group that is doing
political theory with an emphasis on the legal instruments of social emancipation, and a group that is investigating
neoliberal capitalism with revolutionary hopes and transformative expectations, and such a split may already be taken
as an indication that the attempt to continue this tradition today is a dead end.

Constellations. 2023;1–6. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cons © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1

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2 HONNETH

Another sign of the growing difficulties to continue the tradition of the Frankfurt School in a consistent way can be
seen in the fact that its philosophical spirit and foundations are interpreted nowadays in the most diverse ways: We
have, all represented here at our conference, a Kantian, a Left-Hegelian, a Marxian, and a Nietzschean–Foucauldian
version of Critical Theory, none of which is incapable of finding some resources for justifying its own interpretation
in one or the other writings of the former representatives of the school, and it is at the moment completely unclear
whether these different versions of one and the same tradition can ever be reintegrated into the consistent whole of a
philosophical theory that is meant to guide the sociological research of contemporary societies. It would probably not
be wrong to assume that such a dispersion of a tradition into several opposing variants is a clear sign that it has lost in
the course of time its binding authority and interpretative force.
Finally, a third indication of the increasing dissolution of the Frankfurt School tradition can be seen in the ten-
dency of its current students and proponents to reduce themselves in their work of appropriation almost exclusively
to the writings of Theodor W. Adorno, as if this School of critical thinking had no other representatives than
this single, doubtlessly outstanding figure. One tends to take his work for the whole, projects on to it all what
seems philosophically and sociologically of actuality, and forgets in consequence of this the numerous other mem-
bers of the group despite their enormous merits within the fields of legal studies, political research, or cultural
studies—no wonder, therefore, that Habermas is rarely mentioned today, when it comes to the reconstruction of the
Frankfurt-School—tradition, even when he did the most to keep it alive after the death of Adorno and Horkheimer.
But, as I said before, these are only the most obvious, not very subtle indications of the state of crisis that the Critical
Theory of the Frankfurt School is going through these days. There are deeper, less superficial reasons for being skep-
tical today with regard to the potential of this tradition to guide us in our social–theoretical attempts to comprehend
the present situation in a fruitful way, both philosophically sound and empirically productive. In the following, I want
to discuss three challenges resulting from structural changes in our social and intellectual environment that make it
more and more difficult to preview a fruitful, productive, and energizing future for Critical Theory in its traditional
form. These three challenges stem from (1) the growing awareness of the endurance of the colonial past of Western
societies, (2) the unmistakable importance of the ecological question, and, finally, (3) the growing uncertainties about
the exact format and arrangement of interdisciplinary research. Although I am sure that there are more difficulties for
any attempts to reactualize Critical Theory today, I will restrict myself to these three points.
(1) There is no question that the central representatives of the Frankfurt School operated from within a horizon
that was deeply Eurocentric. Not only their aesthetic judgments and cultural preferences but also their philosophical
and sociological thinking were based on the assumption that all developments in Europe would indicate the direction
that the other regions of the globe would have to take in order to achieve that little bit of freedom and small degree
of reflexivity that was thought to have already been achieved in the European part of the world. Consequently, also
the normative expectations and hopes the members of the Institute shared, when not overcome by a pessimism about
the present, were directed toward the goal of a liberation from those social pathologies that seemed to be caused by
and typical of Western capitalism. This would perhaps not be a fundamental problem as such, because the normative
perspective could probably be opened up to other affected parties through a radical widening of its frame of reference,
were it not for the fact that all the social theoretical concepts of Critical Theory are derived solely from the social con-
ditions in Western capitalism; neither in their concept of “work” nor in that of “domination,” not in their notion of the
“state,” “family,” or “class-system” is reflected the fact that there were and are other variants of the same institutions
existing that could not simply be understood as being external to Western capitalism, but had to be taken as prod-
ucts and fabrications of its own colonial expansion. The problem Critical Theory is confronted with today, in view of
the increasing awareness of this colonial past of the West, is therefore not so much its normative perspective, but the
social–theoretical framework in which it is embedded.
To rework the social categories employed by Critical Theory in order to incorporate also the institutional realities,
a state-run colonialism has been created in other parts of the world, which is not as easy a task as one might expect.
All the central sociological categories Critical Theory had employed in its social theory were infused, as already men-
tioned, with historical experiences that could be made only in the narrow context of Western civilization: “Work” was
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HONNETH 3

understood with Marx as “wage labor” as opposed to the seemingly much earlier existing slave or enforced labor, the
state was conceived of with Max Weber as a bureaucratic agency with monopoly over physical power allowing to con-
trol social integration within a national territory, the family was understood with Freud as a tripartite unity where the
father has moral authority over his wife and their children, and social classes were characterized following Marx solely
by their place in the relations of production; at no point did these categories reveal that in other, non-Western regions,
there were alternatives to these institutional patterns that the same domestic capitalism had created there through
its own economic and political makings. To cure these conceptual deficits and theoretical blindness, it does not help at
this point to simply add to the hitherto applied concepts some further institutional features or alternatives as if they
exist only next or parallel to the former ones; such a strategy would not be capable of articulating the fact that these
other institutional variants were created at the same time as the original ones by the same economic–political sys-
tem but not in the interest of internal regulation and governance, but in the interest of enlarging external control and
increasing exploitation of enslaved people. What one has to master, therefore, is to create a social–theoretical vocab-
ulary that helps to understand how one and the same political–economic system was able to establish itself in two
institutional forms, one serving domestic purposes by using a mixture of liberal means and physical force, the other
one serving imperial purposes by using a mixture of spiritual proselytization and brutal power.
This task of reconfiguring the social categories applied so far within Critical Theory is additionally in need of a whole
set of new terms and notions because it does not suffice to only express the multi-faceted institutional realities that
colonial capitalism has created over time in the world, but also of explaining the mechanisms by which it was able to
spread its power in almost all niches of the globe. Here social theory has to take lessons from a global history that has
developed many terms over the last couple of years aiming at identifying such mechanisms of spreading power over
long distances: notions such as imperial extension and circulation, political networking and concentration of power,
cultural standardization and universalization of behavioral patterns, and spatial asymmetry of domination would have
to play a central role in the conceptual framework of such a revised social theory. The question that then quickly arises
is whether a theory of society reconfigured in such a way would still be in any continuity with the social theory of the
Frankfurt School or whether it would be something so different and unfamiliar that it would be wrong to use the old
name for it.
(2)The situation is similar with regard to the second challenge that I have mentioned before, the tremendously
increasing ecological crisis. Here also, it might be argued in a first response that Critical Theory is relatively well
equipped, at least in the version Adorno and Horkheimer gave it, to cope normatively with the enormous problems
and difficulties that the ecological disaster confronts us with today; their idea of a more responsive attitude toward
nature and their allusions to the concept of a mimetic rationality, all this might direct us to the kind of relationship to
nature that will be required in the future to change our instrumental attitudes and to stop the relentless exploitation of
natural energies and resources. The problem, however, is that the possibility of such alternative stances toward nature
is not articulated or even thematized as a practical dimension within the social theory of the Frankfurt School. Some 40
years ago, Johan Arnason already reproached Adorno and Horkheimer for having anchored their concept of an alter-
native, mimetic rationality so one-sidedly in the work of art that they had shown no interest whatsoever in everyday
practical forms of noninstrumental behavior toward nature; thus, according to Arnason, there had been no room in
their social theory for the possibility of distinguishing social practices of working upon nature in the past or present
according to whether they relate to the natural environment in a more resonant, communicative or in an instrumental,
manipulating way.
This conceptual gap in the social theory of the Frankfurt School has even widened as time has progressed; if one
takes Adorno’s sociological writings from the postwar period, the political–theoretical studies of Neumann and Kirch-
heimer, or the “Theory of Communicative Action” by Habermas, one always has the impression that the concentration
on the tasks of social and system integration has extinguished almost any interest in questions of the reintegration
of society into its natural environment. With this one-sidedness, however, Critical Theory is hardly in a position to
provide the conceptual means a social theory would be in need of today to adequately locate and thematize the eco-
logical challenge; for this would require that in addition to the task of social integration and system integration, the
task of ecological integration also be included in the conceptual framework of social theory; with this third type of
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4 HONNETH

functional requirements, it is referred in recent studies about the ongoing challenge to societies to integrate social
processes into the natural environment in such a way that social continuance is not risked by the overexploitation of
natural resources. This turn, in contemporary social theory, has in the meantime led to numerous studies on the differ-
ent worldviews and ontologies by which societies have understood and organized their relation toward their natural
environment in the past and in the present; there were cultures that due to their ontological presuppositions had a
more responsive attitude to nature, treating it as being on a par with human subjects, and there were cultures the
ontologies of which allowed a robustly instrumental relation to nature, treating it as a mere resource for plundering
and supply extraction. However, none of this important research is either anticipated by or mirrored in the Frankfurt
School’s social theory; to correct this lacuna again, more is needed than a quick addition of such a third dimension of
the reproduction of societies; instead, it is necessary to integrate this third task into the conceptual framework of a
critical social theory in such a way that the intersectionality between all three levels of social reproduction becomes
theoretically understandable and transparent: What kind of image of nature are children supposed to learn in their
socialization processes, how do we relate to nature in our everyday practices, in the organization of production and
in the routines of politics, and how do we represent nature in our cultural self-understanding and in our ontological
vocabularies? Without being able to even raising questions like these on a sociological level, no social theory will be in
the position today to deliver the conceptual framework necessary for a critical analysis of our existing societies. And
the question then is the same as at the end of the preceding paragraph: Can a social theory capable of sufficiently inte-
grating the dimension of ecological integration into its conceptual framework still be referred to as the social theory of
the Frankfurt School—or would it not in the end only lead to a restriction of one’s own creativity and productivity if one
did everything possible to remain within the conceptual framework of the grown-old Grand hotel of Critical Theory?
(3)The third challenge, to which I referred earlier, is more difficult to describe because two developments are of
relevance here that are only loosely connected. To implement the kind of interdisciplinary research that was constitu-
tive for Critical Theory from early on is incomparably more difficult today than before, not only because the individual
disciplines have become far more specialized but also because it is in the meantime less clear which disciplines to com-
bine in what way to carry out critical research. When the requirement of interdisciplinary research was for the first
time formulated by Horkheimer, the individual sciences that had to be combined in order to explain the actual social
transformations were much less specialized and disciplinarily enclosed than in our days; the economy was not yet
a fully formalized and quantified discipline, psychoanalysis was open to the implementation of social categories due
to its narrow alliance with Marxism, the study of mass-culture, literature, and film was mostly harbored in sociology
because it was not yet a discipline of its own, and in law, there were heated debates on the legal requirements for fos-
tering democratic inclusion. This situation of disciplinary openness and steady contact between the disciplines made
it relatively easy for Horkheimer to design a research program in light of his philosophical ideas that envisaged a close
cooperation between some selected disciplines for the purpose of investigating the perpetuation of class-domination
via the functional interplay between different social spheres; due to their conceptual closeness and thematic overlaps,
the aligned disciplines could effortlessly intersect at those points in their research fields where structural changes
in one social sphere led to certain reactions in an other—where, for example, transformations in the organization of
capitalist production seemed to induce alterations in the socialization process of the child. Such cooperation between
different disciplines was relatively easy to establish because they overlapped to a certain degree in their vocabulary,
themes, and attentions.
But it is not only the growing specialization and self-enclosure of the individual disciplines—sociology has become
less philosophical, psychoanalysis less sociological, and economy far more mathematical and quantitative—that have
made such interdisciplinary cooperation incomparably more difficult than in the times up until the early 1960s; in
addition to this process within the science and research system there are also some transformations within society
itself that have led to an increasing perplexity about how exactly to combine which disciplines to critically study the
societal changes and conflicts of our times. This theoretical helplessness is not only a question about which disciplines
to combine in order to gain empirical insight into the functioning and the ruptures of the existing society but also
about how to connect these disciplines organically—such that the mutual influence of and interpenetration between
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HONNETH 5

different social sectors come to light and can be productively investigated. Both questions are internally connected in a
complicated way which makes the design of an interdisciplinary research program so enormously difficult today: If one
decides, for example, out of good reasons to include global economy in the interdisciplinary cluster because it helps
to understand the spatial asymmetries of economic domination, then the follow-up question is how to connect the
objects and themes of this discipline internally with the research-fields of the other disciplines within the envisioned
cooperation; if one believes, to give you another example, that the internet has meanwhile gained an educative role in
the formation of individual subjects so that its exact functioning should be investigated by an appropriate discipline,
then the next question that immediately arises is how to link this new research field with psychoanalysis which was
traditionally seen as the representative of any research on the formation of the psyche; but from here the question
immediately arises what role psychoanalysis should play more generally in such an interdisciplinary research-program,
that of stimulating empirical research on changes in the socialization process, a quasi-philosophical metatheory of
subjectivity, or a placeholder for the irrational impulses within the empirical subject.
I mention these problems here only to indicate that it would be wrong and even intellectually irresponsible to
believe that the interdisciplinary program Horkheimer had designed for a critical analysis of capitalist societies can
be adopted today without deep changes and radical revisions, given the many transformations in individual socializa-
tion, economic structures, and social domination capitalism has gone through over the last 100 years. The design of the
interdisciplinary research program of Critical Theory is to the same degree in need of a radical reworking, adaptation,
and adjustment as is the conceptual framework of its social theory; therefore, the question is, as before, whether the
result of such a thorough revision and fundamental reworking will be in the end still similar enough to the original to
be given the name of the Frankfurt School? Could it not even be, to put it differently, that the intent to remain theo-
retically in continuity with the old tradition does in the end lead to a constriction of one’s own intellectual productivity
and creativity?
To be clear, I am not proposing to abandon the central, left-Hegelian idea of the Frankfurt School to see itself as
the reflexive consciousness of current efforts at emancipation and to contribute to their advancement and success
through its own critical analyses; a fortiori, I do not want to abandon the idea that such a critical analysis is best
served by an interdisciplinary research program, which aims at an investigation of the intersectoral mechanisms of
social domination and the possible conditions of their overcoming by organically linking several disciplines suitable
for this purpose. My concerns, however, are directed at the specific social theory that was intended in the Frankfurt
School to hold together all these various claims and objectives; if this social theory no longer corresponds with the new
economic and social conditions, if it is therefore outdated, then we may be faced with the great challenge of putting
together anew the individual pieces of the puzzle of Critical Theory. In solving this difficult task, we would be much
better off if we stopped constantly asking ourselves whether we still agree with the old father figures and instead
embraced all the theoretical proposals and ideas that surround us today and try to critically decode our social world,
be it studies on epistemic injustices, social ontology, and how ideologies are maintained not by conscious thought but
by routinized practices. All these innovative new ideas do not fit easily into the social theoretical framework of the
Frankfurt School; to make productive use of them, it is necessary to make a decisive break with what we have learned
from its early proponents. We should follow classical Critical Theory in its spirit, but certainly no longer by its letter.

How to cite this article: Honneth, A. (2023). The Institute for Social Research on its 100th birthday. A former
director’s perspective. Constellations, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12726

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Axel Honneth is the Jack C. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities at the Department of Philosophy at Columbia
University. Prior to that he was professor of social philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt and the director
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6 HONNETH

of the Institute of Social Research, also placed in Frankfurt. His main books include a study on the constitutive
function of recognition for struggles and social conflicts within modern societies (The Struggle for Recognition),
a study on the social foundations of democratic life (Freedom’s Right), a study on the idea of socialism (The Idea
of Socialism) and a study on the intellectual history of the notion of “recognition” in modern European thought
(Recognition). His last book, published in Germany in 2022, is on the relationship between work and demo-
cratic citizenship (Der arbeitende Souverän). He has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton in 2018-19 and has delivered the Tanner Lectures 2004-05 at UC Berkeley.