Group of thinkers associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), founded in Frankfurt in 1923 by Felix J. Weil, Carl Grünberg,
Other important members of the school are Theodor Adorno , Walter Benjamin , Herbert Marcuse , and Jürgen Habermas . After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Horkheimer moved the institute to Columbia University in New York City, where it functioned until 1941; it was reestablished in Frankfurt in 1950. Though the institute was originally conceived as a centre for neo-Marxian social research, there is no doctrine common to all members of the Frankfurt school. Intellectually, the school is most indebted to the writings of G.W.F. Hegel and the Young Hegelians (see Hegelianism ), Immanuel Kant , Karl Marx , Wilhelm Dilthey , Friedrich Nietzsche , and Sigmund Freud . See also {{link=critical theory">critical theory .