a school of social theory and philosophy associated in part with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University Frankfurt; consisted of dissidents who felt at home neither in the existent capitalist, fascist, nor communist systems that had formed at the time
The term ‘critical theory’ has a long history. Traditionally – often in the singular and upper case – it refers to the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, the generations of philosophers and sociologists who have succeeded one another at the helm of that city’s Institut für Sozialforschung