Talk:Frankfurt School

Lede too verbose

The lede seems very long and difficult to navigate. Are there good guides about how long is too long? The paragraphs are very chonky. 96.238.41.91 (talk) 19:03, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

I fully agree. Indeed, the whole article needs serious organizational attention. The sources cited are of a high quality, but the presentation of the material could surely be improved a great deal.

I might be able to draft up a better lead, in which event I will post it here for comments. Pretty sure, though, that someone else is going to have to step up for the actual body of the article.

Oh, and to your actual question, @user:96.238.41.91, yes. You can find the relevant guidelines at WP:LEAD.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 22:06, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

"Frankfurt School" is a loose label for an eclectic group of people and ideas. I'm not sure it could be summarized much more concisely. Sennalen (talk) 22:25, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Well! The fact that someone who – to all appearances[1] – is actively editing the article in support of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory would certainly help to explain its at times disjointed character. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 22:36, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

You appear to have a limited editing history, but you should be familiar by now with the policy against casting aspersions. I stand by my edits, so if there's anything in particular you want to discuss, be specific. Sennalen (talk) 23:33, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Fair point. I apologize. I can only offer that I was still too much in polemical mode from debate carried out at Talk:Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory#Topic_sentence_is_unencyclopedic_and_should_be_changed. This explanation, however, obviously does not constitute an excuse.

Best regards, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 00:09, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

A few brief comments to test the waters before doing anything more:

1) It could be more clearly expressed – and probably belongs in the first paragraph – that what unites these in many ways disparate figures is (i) a commitment to the project of human emancipation (ii) theoretically pursued by way of an attempted synthesis of the Marxist tradition, psychoanalysis, and empirical research.

My concern is that (i) is not sufficiently emphasized (though it at least included in the last sentence), and that (ii) is expressed in terms of references that will be obscure and confusing to most readers.

If something along these lines seems to others a good idea, let's discuss the best formulation and how how best to include it.

2) With reference to the preceding, is there any reason not to just completely delete the second paragraph? I'm pretty sure that "applied existentialist methodology" is outright nonsense. And – "The School's sociologic works derived from syntheses of the thematically pertinent works of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx, of Sigmund Freud and Max Weber, and of Georg Simmel and György Lukács." – is so theoretically overloaded as to be nearly impossible to parse.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 23:16, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

There is a lot of excess verbiage that ends up not saying much. I suggest boldness. As far as how to define the group, it's however sources define it of course - but that could be all over the map. Degrees of Kevin Bacon seems just as important as intellectual content in determining who's in the Frankfurt School. Sennalen (talk) 23:48, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick response!

I am going to nix the second paragraph.

Both [2] and [3] strongly support highlighting the goal of emancipation (the meaning of which, of course, the article can only to attempt to unpack). But I am going to mull it over a little more and try to check a few other standard sources before fiddling with the opening paragraph, which we now at least have the happy option of splitting into two without running afoul lead best practices.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 00:36, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Many thanks for addressing my earlier request on the Talk section for your December 11 edits. Bustamove1 (talk) 18:51, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Of course! The fault is mine for not posting the note yesterday night.

Also, since I did write a full response to your previous comment before realizing it had been removed, so I'll share it here anyways. Should it seem appropriate, please feel entirely authorized to simply delete it –

Hi @Bustamove1,

Glad for you to chime in! Contrary to what all of my edits yesterday might suggest, I actually do prefer to work collaboratively. The article just needed such a heavy edit, IMO, that it would have been difficult to know in advance what I would find in need of revision. Hence I opted instead to provide an after-the-fact justification, which you'll see below. It likely only went up as you were writing this.

In any case, we both know that it is quite easy to restore anything from previous versions or revert to one of them entirely. Please do restore anything you think belongs in the article, and, if I disagree, I will discuss here and not remove without consensus.

With respect to my edit descriptions, I will be more mindful in the future that they might be read by the original contributing editors. My apologizes to anyone whose work I so dismissively characterized. I'd be happy to review and remove any actually or potentially offensive descriptions from my summaries, but I do not believe it is possible to edit these after the fact.

My reason for removing the religion section is, first, that I do not see how it contributes to an understanding of the FS, and, second, there is no precedent for it in the high-quality, reliable sources with which I am familiar. (Not that there is no literature on it, just that it does not figure in encyclopedia-length pieces on the FS that I have read.) As I said the edit description, however, if I'm missing something, I invite anyone to tell me what it is. Otherwise, it seems most appropriate to me to leave the religious views of particular members to the bio sections of their individual articles. The FS, after all, was not a religious movement.

I agree entirely that the positivism dispute is important and deserves to be included. I removed it only because I did not see a way to edit what was there into something that would makes sense to the average reader. Entirely fair chance this reflects more a limitation on my part than a shortcoming of the material. If you can put something together on this, that would be great for the article. Full support!

Can you be more specific about what you think is missing from the History section? Or, just restore anything you think should not have been removed? (As to a separate article, may that editor step forward!)

I'd love for there to be some treatment of Habermas in the article, with which I'd be willing to assist if you or anyone else takes the lead; I'm just not interested in taking on the project myself. The only reason I removed the critical material is that it is confusing to criticize views not presented in the article. Readers can't be assumed to be familiar with his philosophical project.

I look forward to your restorations/contributions, and apologize again for the thoughtlessness of some of my edit descriptions.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 19:01, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

I had added three or four paragraphs to three subsections of the article. The first was on religion, the second on the positivism dispute, and the third on criticism of Habermas. The first two were extant, initially authored by previous users and editors. For my part, I extended the subsections (which were then reviewed and revised by other editors) because of, first, previous user implications on religious affiliations of the Frankfurt School as well as, second, a paragraph treatment of the positivism dispute that warranted clarification and elucidation. I attempted to at least address all three "generations" of the Frankfurt School into these discussions.

As you noted, the positivism dispute is important to the history of the Frankfurt School. In the future, I will reinsert only my contributions, with revisions. That stated, I do prefer not to single out the initial author of that topic. Article history is there for public viewing if you or anyone else wishes to confirm. If I remember correctly, the initial content was only on Karl Popper's preliminary perspectives. Had I known that passages in the article serviced the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory debate, I would've avoided the Frankfurt School article altogether. Likewise, users, editors, and yours truly did quote and cite major scholars ---Martin Jay, Peter Gordon, etc.---for the history of religious affiliations. I only wanted to be clear that those scholars would most likely recommend at least a subsection on the topic, as well as including all three "generations" of the Frankfurt School.

I thank you for pasting my third subsection extension on Habermas into the Talk, as well as for recommending its inclusion in any future "treatments of his work." I've already indicated to other editors that I am neither a principal author on this article, nor do I desire to be one, for a variety of non-cryptic reasons. I'll monitor your recent "Edits" section for discussions with additional users...if any(!). Peace out, Bustamove1 (talk) 18:08, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Lede currently doesn't say what the Frankfurt school said or believed, even if that may be plural or ununifoed or whatever. In many other pages of Wikipedia Frankfurt school is noted as one side of a debate, or that Frankfurt school ideas influenced something else. ~~ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A0A:EF40:8B9:D701:9AE5:C971:3CB:864A (talk) 23:32, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

2nd and 3rd gen FS

I removed the below from the lead because the article does not currently cover this material. It would be nice, however, if at some point it did, and so I preserve it here.

Beginning in the 1960s, the critical-theory work of the Institute for Social Research came to be guided by Jürgen Habermas's work in communicative rationality and linguistic intersubjectivity. More recently, a "third generation" critical theorists, Nikolas Kompridis, Raymond Geuss, and Axel Honneth have opposed Habermas's propositions, claiming he undermines the original social-change objective of critical theory.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 01:18, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

And here is some criticism of Habermas to be integrated into any eventual treatment of his work.

Communicative action

Main article: Communicative action

Jürgen Habermas's "reformulation of critical theory" has been accused by philosopher Nikolas Kompridis as solving "too well, the dilemmas of the philosophy of the subject and the problem of modernity's self-reassurance", while creating a self-understanding of critical theory that is too close to liberal theories of justice and the normative order of society. He contended that, while "this has produced an important contemporary variant of liberal theories of justice, different enough to be a challenge to liberal theory, but not enough to preserve sufficient continuity with critical theory's past, it severely weakened the identity of critical theory and inadvertently initiated its premature dissolution."

Similarly, in 2022, historian Samuel Moyn described Habermas' ideas as "retreating from the Frankfurt School's radicalism." Habermas, according to Moyn, was guilty of "abandoning the most promising aspects of the Frankfurt school." Moyn found "some use" in Habermas’ "mid-career social theory", although that had "shown its limits...in the end he becomes a kind of neo-Kantian liberal." For Moyn, Habermas was complicit "in a betrayal of left theory", a "betrayal" that occurred despite twilight efforts to sustain "left theory" by philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In 2010, Moyn had argued that, in the decade prior to publication of Habermas' The Theory of Communicative Action and well before the Habermas–Rawls debate, an "internationalism revolving around individual rights surged, and it did so because it was defined as a pure alternative in an age of ideological betrayal and political collapse. It was then that the phrase 'human rights' entered common parlance in the English language. And it is from that recent moment that human rights have come to define the present day." Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 01:56, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

References

a note on recent edits

Yesterday I made a series of primarily subtractive edits to the article in order to make it more accessible and ultimately useful to readers. Although I did not dig too deeply into the history of the article or its talk archives, one does not have to go back very far to see that this was once the site of political dispute about the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, which is now its own article. My assumption is that much of what I removed was added by one side or the other in the context of that dispute, which had the effect of making the article, from the lead on down, sometimes disproportionate in its coverage and otherwise difficult to follow. I hope that the article in its current state will better serve readers who want to learn what the Frankfurt School is, as well as editors who would like to further expand our coverage.

What I have done is basically just clean-up. In the process, however, I noticed a few topics that would benefit from additional coverage. I'll share the three I would add if I were to do a proper overhaul of the article:

1. The Hegelian-Marxist influence is adequately covered under the heading of Dialectical Method. The psychoanalytic and sociological dimensions of FS thought, however, are not discussed as directly. I would make some kind of an influences section with subsections for each.
2. The FS is united in the objective of human emancipation. There is, however, considerable disagreement among its theorists as to what this actually means. Indeed, some individual theorists (looking at you, Adorno) arguably do not have a coherent account at all. The article would benefit from an explicit discussion of this disagreement and confusion under its own heading.
3. When people refer simply to the FS, they generally mean to refer (at least primarily) to the 1st Gen, which is all the present article covers. It would be nice to have at least a short section at the end, however, describing the basic ideas and defining disagreements of the 2nd and 3rd Gens.

I'm following the article, but please tag me if you have any questions or concerns about the recent changes.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 17:00, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

You posted a response to my comment in the lede section, so I responded there. Any future responses will be posted here. Bustamove1 (talk) 19:29, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, this page has become a little bit of a mess. If you posted anything in response to my 1:01 pm, Today (UTC−6) response to your removed comment, I don't see it. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 20:00, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, done. Bustamove1 (talk) 20:14, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Oh wait, now I do. Nevermind. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 20:14, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

To clarify for prospective users: there was limited engagement with the second and third "generations" of the Frankfurt School in deleted content, including lists of members organized by "generation." The proposal here, I believe, is to critically reintegrate that content and elaborate on it within a separate section, hopefully for a more nuanced and summative assessment. I would add that Thomas Wheatland's concluding chapters on The Frankfurt School in Exile (2009) would be helpful for North American contexts (Wheatland equated the positivism dispute with Popper---criticism above). Bustamove1 (talk) 22:04, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Small copy edit

I don't have enough edits to fix this, can someone more senior grab it?

"The researcher does not understand is that he or she operates within an historical and ideological context." Stevedorex (talk) 14:10, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, done! Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 20:24, 20 December 2023 (UTC)