The frankfurt school and its successors

There were three main ways in which the Frankfurt School was initially received and lives on within its various successor discourses. First, it emerged decisively in the world of literary theory through Jurgen Habermas’s skepticism towards various postmodernisms or poststructuralisms (as the abandonment of Enlightenment rationality), and lives on through ongoing defenses of political liberalism and its commitments to the regulative ideals of universal justice and recognition. Second, it lives on within cultural studies and related strands of media studies-discourses which to this day remain caught between Theodor Adorno’s pessimism and Walter Benjamin’s hope concerning the culture industries and the freeing or constraining role of technology in art and everyday life. Finally, it has successors in the ongoing traditions of cultural Marxism and its diagnoses of capitalism, working out the tensions between economic production and cultural production in the present, and assessing the fate of aesthetic experience in a commodified world.