Scott Alexander does something rare in political commentary: he treats a notorious conspiracy theory not as a punchline, but as a distorted mirror reflecting a genuine, complex intellectual history. By examining Martin Jay's classic history of the Frankfurt School, Alexander reveals how a group of Jewish-German philosophers, fleeing the rise of fascism, inadvertently became the architects of the very cultural shifts that the far-right now claims they invented. This is not a defense of their ideas, but a dissection of how history gets rewritten when the victors are too busy fighting ghosts to read the footnotes.
The Ghost in the Machine
Alexander begins by dismantling the popular narrative that the Frankfurt School invented "Cultural Marxism." He notes that the philosophers of this group practiced "negative dialectics," a technique where concepts are defined as much by what you can't say about them as what you can. Appropriately, Alexander writes, "the Frankfurt School has ended up almost entirely defined by what you can't say about them." This framing is crucial. It suggests that the school's obscurity was a feature, not a bug; they feared that explaining themselves too clearly would allow their ideas to be co-opted by the very capitalist system they critiqued.
The author traces the school's origins to 1923 Frankfurt, noting how figures like Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno fled to America when the Nazis took power. There, they found a receptive audience among mid-century Americans who were "suckers for sophisticated European intellectuals" during the crisis of World War II. Alexander points out that while some returned to rebuild Germany, others stayed, influencing the culture of the 1960s and 70s. The irony, as Alexander sees it, is that the school is now blamed for movements they barely recognized. He writes, "You're not supposed to dub them a transitional stage between Communism and postmodernism. You're not allowed to speculate that a lot of the academic humanities, as they're practiced today, descend from the Frankfurt School's brand of critical theory." This prohibition, he argues, is the result of a conspiracy theory that has replaced historical nuance with a caricature.
You can't say that they invented a new form of left-wing thought called Cultural Marxism. This would be (according to Wikipedia) the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, a "far right anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that misinterprets Western Marxism, especially the Frankfurt School, as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness".
Critics might argue that Alexander is too charitable in dismissing the conspiracy theory as purely "anti-Semitic," ignoring the genuine frustration many feel toward the perceived overreach of identity politics. However, Alexander's point is that the conspiracy theory relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of the school's actual, often pessimistic, worldview.
When the Revolution Didn't Happen
The core of Alexander's analysis lies in the historical context of the 1930s. He describes the prevailing mood among intelligent people of the era as one of "cosmic horror." The Marxist prediction of inevitable revolution had failed to materialize. Instead of a utopia, the world saw the rise of "state capitalism" in the form of the New Deal, Stalinist Russia, and Fascist Italy. Alexander captures this disillusionment perfectly: "The old world is dead; the new world is not yet born; now is the time of monsters."
This failure forced the Frankfurt School to rethink the relationship between economics and culture. Orthodox Marxism held that culture was merely a "superstructure" built on the "economic base." If the economy changed, culture would follow. But Alexander explains that the Frankfurters argued the relationship was bidirectional. "Maybe the gears of History were jammed because something was wrong with the culture," he writes. "If you could make the culture better, maybe you could unjam them and get the Revolution at last." This shift is the intellectual precursor to the "long march through the institutions" strategy often cited by critics today, but Alexander frames it as a desperate attempt to understand why the promised future never arrived.
The Mystical Turn
Perhaps the most striking part of Alexander's commentary is his exploration of the mystical undercurrents in the school's thought. He draws a parallel between the Frankfurt School's ideas and the "negative theology" found in various religious traditions, where the divine is defined by what it is not. He notes that Walter Benjamin, a key member of the school, was an "amateur kabbalist" who studied with Gershom Scholem. This connection helps explain the school's focus on the "wound in the world" that runs through all divisions—class, gender, race, and even the psyche.
Alexander suggests that for these thinkers, the Communist Revolution and the "Alchemical Marriage" were the same sort of reconciliation of opposites. He writes, "The fact that history is jammed and failing to progress to Communism is not entirely unrelated to the fact that you have bad sex that never reaches orgasm." While this analogy might seem jarring to a secular reader, Alexander uses it to illustrate the depth of their belief that cultural and psychological liberation were prerequisites for economic change. He argues that the school's ideas were not a simple political program, but a complex, almost religious quest to heal a fractured world.
If you opened schools, what would they teach? Marxism-Lurianism Will Win.
This section highlights a significant vulnerability in the school's legacy: their ideas became so abstract and mystical that they were easily misinterpreted or ignored. As Alexander puts it, "Even when they did speak 'clearly', it was in the sort of German philosophical register where 'the negation of the negation' is a totally normal thing to say." This opacity made their work ripe for distortion by those who wanted to find a simple villain for complex social changes.
Bottom Line
Scott Alexander's review succeeds by refusing to let the Frankfurt School off the hook for their obscurity, while simultaneously exposing the absurdity of the conspiracy theories that have grown around them. The strongest part of his argument is the historical reconstruction of how a group of exiled intellectuals, grappling with the failure of revolution, turned inward to culture and psychology, inadvertently creating a legacy that would be weaponized against them decades later. The biggest vulnerability, however, is the risk that his own sympathetic tone might obscure the very real ways in which the school's ideas have been misapplied in modern political discourse. Readers should watch for how this historical context reshapes the debate on "woke" culture, moving it away from simple blame and toward a more nuanced understanding of intellectual history.