Ian "Marvin" Graye’s Reviews > Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School > Status Update

Instead of revolutionising Germany, they revolutionised Marxist theory.

Instead of politicising academia, it academicized politics.

Horkheimer insisted that the M word and the R word (Marxism and Revolution) be excised from its papers so as not to scare the Institute's American sponsors

The guilt-hobbled son of patriarchal culture who could never quite measure up to his father's wishes became as it were emblematic of the nature of the capitalist societies that emerged in Europe - his guilt, alienation, self-alienation, propensity for conflict and emotional repression all useful fuels that ensured the efficient running of capitalism.

Marx's belief that the purpose of philosophy was not to interpret the world but to change it, to eliminate the injustice and inequality upon which capitalism is founded.

In many Jewish families of late nineteenth-century Europe, gifted sons turned against the commercial interests of their fathers who were largely assimilated (after moving from the provinces to the more liberal cities) to bourgeois success and, in building their counterworlds in spiritual protest, they incisively shaped the future of science, philosophy and literature.