The utopia against the Grand Hotel Abyss: reflections on Stuart Jeffries’s Frankfurt School choral biography

Abstract

The following text is a critical point around the reading of the work of Stuart Jeffries, Gran Hotel Abismo. Choral biography of the Frankfurt School. It highlights the undeniable informative value and controversial zeal of the British journalist to bring to the general public a question as complex as the introduction of the authors that make up the Frankfurt School (from Th. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, to W. Benjamin , E. Fromm, H. Marcuse or J. Habermas, among others). It also serves to reflect on the historical context that they all went through, especially in the interval between the Great War and the end of the Second World War, which has been defined by some historians as the Age of Catastrophes or the European Civil War. Also to make an assessment around the role of the critical thinking and the left political thought after the end of utopias, as one of the central elements advocated by this school.