Talk:Frankfurt School

message: Yesterday I made a series of primarily subtractive edits to the article in order to make it more accessible and ultimately useful to readers. Although I did not dig too deeply into the history of the article or its talk archives, one does not have to go back very far to see that this was once the site of political dispute about the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, which is now its own article. My assumption is that much of what I removed was added by one side or the other in the context of that dispute, which had the effect of making the article, from the lead on down, sometimes disproportionate in its coverage and otherwise difficult to follow. I hope that the article in its current state will better serve readers who want to learn what the Frankfurt School is, as well as editors who would like to further expand our coverage.
What I have done is basically just clean-up. In the process, however, I noticed a few topics that would benefit from additional coverage. I'll share the three I would add if I were to do a proper overhaul of the article:
# The Hegelian-Marxist influence is adequately covered under the heading of Dialectical Method. The psychoanalytic and sociological dimensions of FS thought, however, are not discussed as directly. I would make some kind of an influences section with subsections for each.
# The FS is united in the objective of human emancipation. There is, however, considerable disagreement among its theorists as to what this actually means. Indeed, some individual theorists (looking at you, Adorno) arguably do not have a coherent account at all. The article would benefit from an explicit discussion of this disagreement and confusion under its own heading.
# When people refer simply to the FS, they generally mean to refer (at least primarily) to the 1st Gen, which is all the present article covers. It would be nice to have at least a short section at the end, however, describing the basic ideas and defining disagreements of the 2nd and 3rd Gens.
I'm following the article, but please tag me if you have any questions or concerns about the recent changes.
Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 17:00, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: You posted a response to my comment in the lede section, so I responded there. Any future responses will be posted here. Bustamove1 (talk) 19:29, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, this page has become a little bit of a mess. If you posted anything in response to my 1:01 pm, Today (UTC−6) response to your removed comment, I don't see it. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 20:00, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, done. Bustamove1 (talk) 20:14, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

text: Oh wait, now I do. Nevermind. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 20:14, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

text: To clarify for prospective users: there was limited engagement with the second and third "generations" of the Frankfurt School in deleted content, including lists of members organized by "generation." The proposal here, I believe, is to critically reintegrate that content and elaborate on it within a separate section, hopefully for a more nuanced and summative assessment. I would add that Thomas Wheatland's concluding chapters on The Frankfurt School in Exile (2009) would be helpful for North American contexts (Wheatland equated the positivism dispute with Popper---criticism above). Bustamove1 (talk) 22:04, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  a note on recent edits 

message: I don't have enough edits to fix this, can someone more senior grab it?
"The researcher does not understand is that he or she operates within an historical and ideological context." Stevedorex (talk) 14:10, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, done! Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 20:24, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Small copy edit