There are other important thinkers that stand in the Frankfurt School tradition or are close to it, such as Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Siegfried Kracauer, Alfred Schmidt, Claus Ofe, and Oskar Negt. A book only has limited space, however. So the exclusion of these and other authors does not imply that their work is unimportant in the age of the Internet. Updates of these and other critical approaches in cultural Marxism in the context of digital media are much needed today. The book series Critical Digital & Social Media Studies is a space for such engagements.
David Held (1980, 22–23) in his study of Critical Theory (Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas) stresses the important influence of Lukács’ thought on this School’s thinkers:
[C]ritial theorists retained many of Lukács’s concerns: the interplay between history and theory, the importance of theory as a “promotive factor in the development of the masses”, the relation of production and culture, the efects of reification and the way each aspect of society contains within itself “the possibility of unravelling the social whole or totality”. […] the impetus Lukács gave to the interrogation of orthodox Marxism and to the reworking of Marx’s ideas was built upon by each of the critical theorists.
Martin Jay (1996, 175) argues that the Frankfurt theorists and Lukács ‘spoke to similar questions from within a common tradition’.
Introduction: Critical Theory of Communication
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