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[...] Adorno fled first to Oxford where he would spend four years from 1934 to 1938 as an advanced student at Merton College – a demotion from his position as lecturer at Frankfurt. There were worse slights to his self-esteem: at Merton, he was obliged to dine communally. This was ‘like having to r…

For Marcuse fascism was not a break with the past, but a continuation of tendencies within liberalism that supported the capitalist economic system. This was the Frankfurt School orthodoxy – fascism wasn’t an abolition of capitalism, rather a means of ensuring its continued existence. Horkheimer on…

[...] If the Frankfurt School was the last hurrah of German romanticism, then Benjamin was its emblem, revealing the group in all its contradictions – Marxists without party, socialists dependent on capitalist money, beneficiaries of a society they sniffily disdained and without which they would ha…

[...] daddy would not bankroll his son to follow a profession that was premised on not making a living. As his biographers put it: ‘His parents pushed for a career with some earning potential and steadfastly refused the kind of support that would enable Benjamin to live independently while continui…

[...] In two papers on the criminal justice system, he argued that the state presented itself subconsciously as a father and therefore ruled through the fear of paternal punishment; he also contended that it had a class bias and that, by focusing on crime and punishment rather than tackling the opp…