Department to Host Conference on the Frankfurt School

Theorizing Crisis:
The Conceptions of Economy of the Frankfurt School (1924-1969)

Friday, 3/28/2014 - Sunday, 3/30/2014

35 Nicholson Hall
Free, No Registration Necessary

The end of the German Empire in 1918 was, as it is well documented, accompanied and followed by economic crises, by constitutional crises, by revolts and coups d'état. The year of 1924 then not only marked the beginning of a (short) period of relative stability; it was also the year in which the Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt. This overlap is not mere coincidence. Despite crises and unrest, the revolution had not happened and capitalism seemed to have reinvented itself. This can doubtlessly be seen as a major inspiration for the foundation of the institute. A return to Marx and an attempt to theorize the intricate relation between economy, politics, law and culture became the project of the Frankfurt School, made all the more urgent by the rise of National Socialism. The works which perhaps best exemplify this move are Friedrich Pollock's studies on state capitalism and planned economy (1928 and 1932), Henryk Grossmann's crisis theory (1932), Otto Kirchheimer's work on the relation between law and economy (1928 and 1939), and Franz Neumann's book "Behemoth: The Structure and Practices of National Socialism" (1941-1944). A common denominator of these diverse approaches was not only their point of departure: a crisis without redemption, but also the conviction, as Max Horkheimer put it in 1937, that "the economy is the first cause of misery and the theoretical as well as practical critique has to have economy as its main focus" (p. 61). This colloquium attempts to revisit first and foremost the economic thinking of what could almost be called the other Frankfurt School, overshadowed by the later prominence of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In the light of the current crisis of economy we would like to look into the relevance of their economic analyses. Our ultimate concern is for a form of critique that can do justice to our present by neither losing sight of economic forces nor turning them into a modern Fatum, a determination with last and ultimate authority.

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