Critical theory did not appear from nowhere. Its founders combined ideas from several earlier thinkers to answer a question that troubled them deeply.

The puzzle

Marx had predicted that industrial workers would come to see their common interests and overthrow capitalism, starting in the most advanced countries. By the 1920s and 1930s that had not happened. The one successful revolution took place in Russia, a mostly rural country, and turned into a harsh dictatorship. In Germany and Italy, many workers supported fascism instead. The Frankfurt thinkers wanted to know why people so often accept, or even embrace, social arrangements that work against their own freedom. Answering that needed more than economics.

Hegel: reason, history and immanent critique

G.W.F. Hegel (1770 to 1831) saw history as the slow growth of freedom and reason through conflict, and he stressed that every part of society must be understood in relation to the whole. From Hegel the Frankfurt School took the method of immanent critique: judging a society by its own professed ideals. If a society says it values freedom and equality, the critic asks whether its actual institutions deliver them. This avoids simply imposing outside values; it holds society to its own word.

Marx: critique of political economy

Karl Marx (1818 to 1883) gave them the core of their social analysis: capitalism as a system built on wage labor, profit and the market. Especially important was his idea of commodity fetishism. In Capital (1867), Marx argued that under capitalism a relation between people appears as “the fantastic form of a relation between things.” Prices and markets seem to move by their own laws, like the weather, hiding the human choices and relationships behind them. Like Marx, the Frankfurt thinkers believed that philosophy should help change the world, not only interpret it.

Weber: rationalization

The sociologist Max Weber (1864 to 1920) argued that modern life is marked by rationalization: the spread of calculation, efficiency, rules and bureaucracy into more and more areas of life. Weber thought this brought great gains in productivity and predictability, but also a loss of meaning, which he called the disenchantment of the world, and he feared that people would end up trapped in systems they no longer controlled, an image usually rendered in English as the iron cage.

Freud: the psychology of obedience

Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) showed that much of what drives people is unconscious and shaped by family life and repression. The Frankfurt thinkers used psychoanalysis to explain why people might desire authority or turn their frustrations against scapegoats. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm worked at the Institute in the 1930s, and this line of research later produced The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a large study by Adorno and colleagues of the attitudes that make people receptive to fascism.

Lukács: reification

The Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács (1885 to 1971) tied several of these threads together in History and Class Consciousness (1923). He took Marx's commodity fetishism and Weber's rationalization and argued that, as the market spreads, it produces reification (from the Latin res, “thing”). Social relationships come to seem like fixed, natural things. People experience society as a “second nature” that cannot be changed, and they experience even themselves, their time and their skills, as items to be measured and sold. Reification became one of the central ideas of early critical theory.

Putting the pieces together

The result was a distinctive blend: Marx's economics, Weber's account of rationalized modern life, Freud's psychology and Hegel's method of judging society by its own ideals. The aim was to explain how a society can keep people unfree while seeming natural, reasonable and even satisfying.

Worked example: reification in daily life

Consider Maria, who works for a delivery company. Her performance is measured in deliveries per hour, and an app ranks her against coworkers. When her rating drops, her shifts are cut. Over time she starts describing herself the way the app does: “I'm a 4.6 driver,” she tells a friend. When rents in her city rise sharply, she says, “That's just the market,” in the tone people use for the weather.

Lukács would see reification at work in both statements. A social relationship, between Maria and the company that sets the ratings, has come to look like a fixed fact about Maria herself. Housing costs, which result from many human decisions about zoning, investment and lending, appear as a force of nature that no one chose and no one can change.

Now apply immanent critique. Maria's society says it values individual freedom and fair reward for effort. Does a system in which an algorithm she cannot see or question decides her income live up to those ideals? The critic does not need to bring in outside values; she holds the society to its own.

A skeptic might reply that ratings give customers useful information, that markets coordinate millions of decisions no planner could manage, and that calling these arrangements “changeable” does not show that any better alternative exists. That is a fair challenge, and it shows where the real debate lies: not over whether social arrangements are human-made, which nearly everyone accepts, but over which alternatives are possible and desirable.