La Scuola di Francoforte e la democrazia liberale: tra critica e proposta

The Institut für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt School) was founded in 1923. From 1931 it was managed by Max Horkheimer. It is characterised as an interdisciplinary research centre, with the aim of achieving a critical understanding of existing reality aimed at change. During the Weimar Republic, the members of Frankfurt School, inspired by Marxism, rejected liberal democracy, regarded as an expression of class domination, believing that only a communist society was true democracy. In the writings of the 1940s, during the American exile, their criticism of liberal democracy expanded to include all forms of human domination over man and nature. After his return to Germany in the fifties and sixties, having abandoned Marxism, Adorno expressed a negativist philosophy of history, while Horkheimer sought in democracy a possible bulwark in defence of the freedom of individuals.