The
Frankfurt School is a school of
social theory and philosophy associated in part with the
Institute for Social Research at the
Goethe University Frankfurt. Founded during the
interwar period, the School consisted of dissidents who were at home neither in the existent capitalist, fascist, nor communist systems that had formed at the time. Many of these theorists believed that traditional theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of both
capitalism and
Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to
social development.