In the 1960s, Theodor W. Adorno became the most controversial theoretician of the German New Left. He and Max Horkheimer had reestablished the exiled Ins titut fur Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt after the war, and since Horkheimer's retirement in 1959, Adorno had been acting director. The Institute, which spent the Nazi years in the United States, was identified with Critical Theory, an original method of Freudo-Marxist analysis that developed there when Horkheimer first became director in 1931 and Herbert Marcuse was one of its more illustrious members.
Critical Theory looked to Marxism as a method rather than a cosmology, and it considered dialectical thinking to be the core of that method — dialectics as the tool for a critical analysis of society, not for building metaphysical systems. Instead of trying to fit present historical conditions dogmatically into Marxist theory, it applied Marx's method to the present, and its critique of the most contemporary, psychological phenomena of late bourgeois society — the "culture industry," mass media, conformism — spoke to students of the fifties and sixties with an urgency which a classical analysis of wage labor would not have achieved. Its criticism of the patterns of authoritarian domination within bourgeois society applied to the purportedly "revolutionary" societies of Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe as well.

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