The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical philosophy. It is associated with the Institute for Social Research founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Formed during the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was composed of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the socio-economic systems of the 1930s: namely, capitalism, fascism, and communism. Significant figures associated with the school include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas.
Ágnes Heller was a Hungarian philosopher and lecturer. She was a core member of the Budapest School philosophical forum in the 1960s and later taught political theory for 25 years at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She lived, wrote and lectured in Budapest.
György Márkus was a Hungarian philosopher, belonging to the small circle of critical theorists closely associated with György Lukács and usually referred to as the Budapest School.
The Praxis school was a Marxist humanist philosophical circle, whose members were influenced by Western Marxism. It originated in Zagreb in the SFR Yugoslavia, during the 1960s.
István Mészáros was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Described as "one of the foremost political philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries" by Monthly Review, Mészáros wrote mainly about the possibility of a transition from capitalism to socialism. His magnum opus, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (1995), was concerned not only with this theme but provided a conceptual distinction between capitalism and capital, and an analysis of the current capitalist society and its "structural crisis". He was interested in the critique of the "bourgeois ideology", including the idea of "there is no alternative", and he also elaborated analysis on the failures of "real socialism".
János Kis is a Hungarian philosopher and political scientist, who served as the inaugural leader of the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) from 1990 to 1991. He is considered to be the first Leader Hungarian parliamentary opposition.
Search for a Method or The Problem of Method is a 1957 essay by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the author attempts to reconcile Marxism with existentialism. The first version of the essay was published in the Polish journal Twórczość; an adapted version appeared later that year in Les Temps modernes, and later served as an introduction for Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre argues that existentialism and Marxism are compatible, even complementary, even though Marxism's materialism and determinism might seem to contradict the abstraction and radical freedom of existentialism.
Arnold Hauser was a Hungarian-German art historian and sociologist who was perhaps the leading Marxist in the field. He wrote on the influence of change in social structures on art.
Andrew Arato is a professor of Political and Social Theory in the Department of Sociology at The New School, best known for his influential book Civil Society and Political Theory, coauthored with Jean L. Cohen. He is also known for his work on critical theory and constitutions and was from 1994 to 2014 co-editor of the journal Constellations with Nancy Fraser and Nadia Urbinati.
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that originates in the works of 19th century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism analyzes and critiques the development of class society and especially of capitalism as well as the role of class struggles in systemic, economic, social and political change. It frames capitalism through a paradigm of exploitation and analyzes class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development – materialist in the sense that the politics and ideas of an epoch are determined by the way in which material production is carried on.
Mihály András Vajda was a Hungarian leftist intellectual who took part in the debates surrounding the development of national socialism, Marxism–Leninism, and the state of capitalism in the latter half of the 20th century. Involved in politics in his home country of Hungary, Vajda was expelled along with several other scholars from the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party in 1973 due to allegedly representing views that were "opposed to Marxism–Leninism and to the policy of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party."
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, Post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968. In a broader sense, post-Marxism can refer to Marxists or Marxian-adjacent theories which break with the old worker's movements and socialist states entirely, in a similar sense to Post-leftism, and accept that the era of mass revolution premised on the Fordist worker is potentially over.
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
Soul and Form is a collection of essays in literary criticism by Georg Lukács. It was first published in Hungarian in 1908, then later republished in German with additional essays in 1911. Alongside The Theory of the Novel (1916) it is one of his most famous pre-Marxist critical works. The Brazilian Marxist intellectual Michael Löwy has described it as a text of 'pre-Marxist Romantic anti-capitalism'. The collection primarily features essays on individual writers or philosophers, including Laurence Sterne, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Paul Ernst, Søren Kierkegaard, Theodor Storm, Novalis, Rudolf Kassner, Stefan George and Charles-Louis Philippe.
Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that arose from Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism. The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.
Alabert Fogarasi, also known as Béla Fogarasi was a Hungarian philosopher and politician.
Maria Renata Márkus was a Polish sociologist and philosopher. She was educated in philosophy at the Lomonosov University in Moscow from 1952 to 1957 and was awarded her master's degree in Poland in 1957. She moved to Hungary in 1957 and became a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and was a founding member of the Institute of Sociology at the Academy where she worked closely with András Hegedüs. In 2010, a Festschrift was published in her honour. The journal Thesis Eleven published an issue to commemorate her in 2019.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Marxism:
Marxist cultural analysis is a form of cultural analysis and anti-capitalist cultural critique, which assumes the theory of cultural hegemony and from this specifically targets those aspects of culture that are profit driven and mass-produced under capitalism.
