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In the summer of 1923, a Soviet spy named Richard Sorge helped organize the library of a new think tank in Frankfurt, Germany. It was called the Institute for Social Research, and it had a bizarre origin story: devoted to Marxist scholarship, funded by a capitalist, housed in a building designed by a Nazi.
Richard Sorge’s association with the Institute didn’t last very long. His handlers sent him on to Britain, China, and ultimately Japan. He sent back the crucial fact that Japan did not intend to join Germany’s invasion of Russia, leaving the Fuhrer’s pincer movement with just one claw. This bit of spying may well have changed the course of the war. It allowed Russia to deploy its anti-Japanese Siberian divisions to the Battle of Moscow for the first, pivotal defeat of the German Army. Sorge was captured by the Japanese, tortured, disavowed by Russia, and hanged in 1944. Twenty years later, the Soviet government recognized him as a “Hero of the Soviet Union.”
Sorge was a Marxist intellectual who turned his convictions into deeds. He was nothing like the other Marxist intellectuals with whom he associated briefly in 1923. In Stuart Jeffries’ new history of the Frankfurt School—a group of thinkers associated at various times with the Institute for Social Research—he brings out the contrast furnished by Sorge’s career:
While Sorge was slipping across borders in Europe, America and Asia, charged with helping foment world proletarian revolution by the Comintern, and tasked by the Soviet Union with assisting its resistance against Nazi invasion, the Institute remained aloof from the struggle, valuing its intellectual independence, preferring its scholars not to be members of political parties.
Jeffries draws this contrast because he thinks that the Frankfurt School embodies a paradox. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Jurgen Habermas, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse are perhaps the most famous European thinkers of the far left in the 20th century, but, for the most part, they seem to have abandoned a central principle of Marxism: we shouldn’t just try to understand the world but to change it. They were social critics uninterested in social change. According to Jeffries, “to explore the history of the Frankfurt School and critical theory is to discover how increasingly impotent these thinkers. . . thought themselves to be against forces they detested but felt powerless to change.”
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