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This article provides information about the analysis of materialism and idealism and supra-disciplinary as a major feature of Frankfurt school:
Critical theory is thus primarily a European social theory, influenced by the German tradition of Marx and Weber and by the experience of fascism, but also by the changing aspects of modern capitalism. Critical theory began by putting Marxian political economy at the centre of analysis, and thus the early critical theory was materialist and committed to socialism.
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One of the major features of this perspective was that all of social life is a reflection of the economic system and the role of social theory was to investigate the ways in which this changed and affected people. “Rather, critical theory describes the complex set of ‘mediations’ that interconnect consciousness and society, culture and economy, state and citizens”.
Critical theory thus developed an approach which incorporated both the economic and material, and an analysis of individuals and their social psychology, attempting to deal with aspects of what we might refer to as the agency-structure issues today. But neither the material nor consciousness was primary in determining the other. Rather, these theorists paid much attention to culture, law, ethics, fashion, public opinion, sport, life style, and leisure, topics which had not previously been incorporated into Marxian analysis. Calhoun notes how “Marx shared with the young Hegel an attempt to conceptualise the absolute creativity of the human being through the example of art, but unlike Hegel he extended this into a more general analysis of labour”.
The Frankfurt school theorists took up this challenge once again and made art and aesthetics a central feature of their analysis. Critical theorists are critical of Marxism when it is mechanically materialist or too determinist. They were especially critical of branches of philosophy, especially positivism and scientific methods associated with it. They are also critical of sociology and other social sciences for being insufficiently critical and having only partial analyses.
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They thus set very high standards for social science, ones that they themselves were ultimately unable to meet. Given that the initial concern of these theorists was to understand the reason why class consciousness had not developed among the working class, their first project was to conduct an empirical study of the white-collar working class in Germany, to obtain information concerning their psychological, social, and political attitudes and combine this with theoretical ideas from the various social sciences.
The findings of this study were that “the actual revolutionary potential of the German working class was less than what usually assumed, and that, while the workers might resist a fascist attempt to take over the government, it was unlikely that they would undertake the sacrifices necessary for a socialist revolution”. While this approach provided interesting results, it is not clear that in studies of this type, the approach of these critical theorists differed all that much from some of the conventional social science approaches.