|
Antonio Gramsci (1891 -- 1937)
Theory: Quiet Revolution, Hegemony
Italian political theorist and activist, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party. He became leader of the party and was elected to the chamber of deputies three years later. Imprisoned by Mussolini's fascists, he spent the next eleven years in prison and died in Rome in 1937. He is best remembered for his political and philosophical writings which deal with the nature of the political process and the role of intellectuals in that process. Gramsci declared the theory of "violent revolution" was dead. His “quiet revolution" would attack the culture, gradually coarsening and weaking it over a period of time. Gramsci's theoretical ideas and practical criticism are stil influential today among left-wing thinkers.
|
|
Max Horkheimer (1895-- 1973)
Theory: Cultural Revolution
Max Horkheimer was the director of the Frankfurt School. became Director of the Institute, and it was Horkheimer who guided the Institute into its innovative exploration of cultural aspects of the development of capitalism. His contention was that the freedom to choose was illusory or impossible to achieve. Humans had been transformed into desirable, readily exchangeable commodities, and all that was left to choose was the option of knowing that one was being manipulated.
|
|
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957)
Theory: Sexual Revolution
You want to corrupt a society? Wilhelm Reich is your guy. Reich, another German rich-kid, was known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. Reich tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism, arguing that neurosis is rooted in sexual and socio-economic conditions and in particular in a lack of what he called "orgastic potency." He believed that orgastic potency was a criterion of sound mental health. Reich was also an outspoken critic of all forms of institutionalized authority and a vociferous advocate of individual freedom and self‐regulation in sexual behavior and in work. Reich advocated the dissolution of the patriarchal family and the authority of the father. His ideas were irresistible to the anti- establishment writers and artists of the fifties and exploded in the sex and drugs and rock-and-roll sixties. Reich coined the phrase "the sexual revolution" and according to one historian acted as its midwife.
|
|
Herbert Marcuse (1898 -- 1979)
Theory: Sexual Revolution
Marcuse would be the one to answer Horkheimer's question from the 1930s: "Who would replace the working class as the new vanguards of the Marxist revolution?" Marcuse believed that it would be a victim coalition of minorities, blacks, women, and homosexuals. The social movements of the 1960s, black power, feminism, gay rights and sexual liberation, gave Marcuse a unique vehicle to release cultural Marxist ideas into the mainstream. Railing against all things "establishment," The Frankfurt School's ideals caught on like wildfire across American universities. Marcuse promoted the “free love” movement in the 1960’s to break down Christian morality and coined the term "liberating tolerance," which called for tolerance of any ideas coming from the Left, but a complete intolerance of those from the Right, a basic trait of today's "useful idiots."
|
|
Erich Fromm (1900 -- 1980)
Theory: Matriarchal Theory
Eric Fromm was the only child of German wine merchant. His father's temper and mother's depression made Fromm rebellious. He renounced his religion to become an atheist. He became a psychiatrist whose interest was the interaction between psychology and society. He believed that by applying psychoanalytic remedies to cultural ills, mankind could develop a psychologically balanced "sane society." His most popular work, "The Art of Loving," was an international bestseller. Fromm was one of the most active advocates of matriarchal theory. Fromm was especially taken with the idea that all love and altruistic feelings were ultimately derived from the maternal love necessitated by the extended period of human pregnancy and postnatal care. Love was thus not dependent on sexuality, as Freud had supposed. In fact, Fromm observed, sex was more often tied to hatred and destruction
|
|
Theodor Adorno (1903 -- 1969)
Theory: Overthrow of Capitalism
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, born in 1903 to affluent parents in central Germany, was one of the foremost continental philosophers of the twentieth century. Although he wrote on a wide range of subjects, his fundamental concern was human suffering -- especially modern societies’ effects upon the human condition. He was influenced most notably by Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. He was associated with The Institute for Social Research, the Frankfurt School, a social science and cultural intellectual hub for promoting socialism and overthrowing capitalism. It was responsible for the creation of the philosophical form called critical theory, which takes the stand that oppression is created through politics, economics, culture, and materialism, but is maintained most significantly through consciousness. Therefore the focus of action must come from consciousness. The Frankfurt School deviated from orthodox Marxism in its argument that social and cultural factors played as important a role as economics in oppression.
|
|
Abraham Maslow (1908 -- 1970)
Theory: Authoritarian Personality, Matriarchal Theory
Maslow was a social psychologist who in his early years did research on female dominance and sexuality. Maslow was a friend of Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University and had met Erich Fromm in 1936. He was strongly impressed by Fromm’s Frankfurt School ideology. He wrote an article, “The Authoritarian Character Structure,” published in 1944, that reflected the personality theory of Critical Theory. Maslow was also impressed with the work of Wilhelm Reich, who was another Frankfurt School originator of personality theory. The belief that matriarchy was the solution to patriarchy flows from Marx’s comments in "The German Ideology," published in 1845. In her book, "The Feminine Mystique," Betty Friedan tied Feminism to Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualisation. Friedan’s reliance on Abraham Maslow’s reflection of Frankfurt School ideology is only one indicator of the belief that matriarchy was the solution to patriarchy.
|
|
Walter Benjamin (1930 -- 2004)
Theory: Cultural Theory
Benjamin worked at the intersection of Marxist cultural theory and the Kabalah, a mystical variety of Jewish theology. Within Marxist theory, Benjamin was pulled between two schools of Marxism: the abstract "high theory" of the Frankfurt School, and the more down-to-earth strategies of consciousness-raising pursued by Bertolt Brecht. In politics, he frequently focused on the issue of sovereign violence and in the political struggle for a change in civil society that moves not toward a totally administered society or the alternative, an entirely militarized society, but rather toward a society in which personal sovereignty and universal solidarity would be reconciled. He sought to overcome the deep contradictions between the religious and the secular, the races, the nationalities, the genders, the individual and the collective, and the social classes, that produce immeasurable human suffering.
|
