Thinking Critically

"Wheatland is interested in the ideas of the School, but he is also interested in the ways that less intellectual factors—like money, personality clashes, and opportunism—shaped those ideas’ development and reception. In a sense, Wheatland has subjected the Frankfurt School to a genuinely Marxist analysis—he shows how the group’s economic substructure affected its ideological superstructure. In the process, he brings these often idolized figures back to human scale, and offers an object lesson in the unedifying ways that intellectual careers are made."

Adam Kirsch in Tablet magazine reviews Thomas Wheatland's The Frankfurt School in Exile.