The Frankfurt School of Social Research, founded Max Horkheimer at the University of Frankfurt, comprised such well known figures as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse , as well as Horkheimer himself, and, on the fringes of the School, the cultural critic Walter Benjamin . The School relocated in America after the Nazi takeover in 1933 had caused its members, basically Marxist in orientation, to leave Germany. While Adorno returned to Germany after the Second World War, Marcuse remained in America, where he became an inspiration to the student protest movement that grew up in the 1960s. The school is famous for developing the method of analysis called ' critical theory ', which until the rise of structural Marxism in the 1950s and 60s was arguably the dominant form of critique in what has come to be known as Western Marxism.
Critical theory seeks to uncover the underlying power relations within cultural phenomena.
Marcuse , too, ultimately moved away from the tenets of classical Marxism in his later career, when he became a champion of the new social movements that sprang up in the 1960s.