Published on the occasion of the centenary of the Institute for Social Research, Im Schatten der Tradition (2025) advances a feminist historiography that challenges how the Frankfurt School has been canonized and received. Rather than treating gender as a supplementary topic, the volume approaches feminism as a critical standpoint from which the conditions of theoretical production themselves come into view. Its central concern is not only which women were present at the Institute, but how gender structured what could count as theory, how authority was attributed, and how intellectual labor was rendered visible or invisible. In doing so, the book situates itself within a recent turn in Frankfurt School scholarship, exemplified by Philipp Lenhard’s Café Marx (2024, reviewed in Francia-Recensio 2024/4), which shifts attention from philosophical self-interpretation to the everyday, institutional, and material conditions of academic work.

This orientation is articulated with clarity in Sarah Speck’s opening chapter, »Introduction and Instruction«, which provides the conceptual framework for the volume. Speck situates the project within feminist historiography by identifying a constitutive paradox: the categories through which intellectual history is conventionally written are themselves shaped by gendered regimes of visibility. Against this background, she argues that the Frankfurt School proved especially susceptible to a reception centered on the social figure of the genius. Its canonization took place largely through philosophical interpretation rather than disciplinary sociology, privileging style, depth, and authorship over institutional embeddedness and collective labor. Exile and postwar return further encouraged retrospective narratives that condensed theory into singular figures. Paradoxically, a tradition that placed mediation at its center would later see the conditions of its own production recede from view. From this perspective, the reception of the Frankfurt School did not merely accompany but actively reinforced a mode of historiography that obscured cooperative and gendered forms of intellectual work (24). A feminist history of the IfS must therefore move beyond recovery and inclusion and instead interrogate the institutional and epistemic conditions under which feminist research could not appear as theory in the first place.

The book’s contributions pursue this task along three intersecting lines. A first group reconstructs women’s roles in the institutional and political prehistory of the IfS. Judy Silvi revisits the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche of 1923, demonstrating that women were active participants in the intellectual milieu from which the Institute emerged. Christina Engelmann traces connections between the IfS and the proletarian women’s movement, highlighting figures such as Clara Zetkin and showing how feminist political praxis informed early debates without becoming part of the school’s self-narration. Veronika Duma extends this perspective through a study of Käthe Leichter, whose feminist materialist social research in Vienna was known to the Institute yet never integrated into its theoretical framework an omission that reveals the narrowness of what counted as theory.

A second cluster of essays examines women’s theoretical and aesthetic interventions within and around the Frankfurt School by reconstructing intellectual collaborations obscured by dominant narratives of authorship. Bruna Della Torre’s analysis of the correspondence between Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk is exemplary in this regard. She argues that Lenk’s doctoral work and her engagement with avant garde movements decisively shaped Adorno’s later emphasis on the social character of artistic movements as a criterion of truth content – an emphasis that can be traced back to Lenk’s influence. Other contributions, including those by Bea S. Ricke and Lena Reichardt, turn to feminist empirical research at the IfS in the 1970s and 1980s, situating it within the New Women’s Movement and showing how it challenged both industrial sociology and male dominated Marxist frameworks, while remaining institutionally marginalized.

A third line of inquiry addresses the organization of academic labor itself. Stephan Voswinkel reconstructs how feminist research at the IfS anticipated later debates on subjectivation and reproduction yet was treated as a supplementary field rather than as theoretically transformative. This diagnosis is sharpened in the joint contribution by Voswinkel and Speck, which critiques a »rationalist, objectifying, and individualist conception of work« that obscures its cooperative character (213). Knowledge production appears here as a fundamentally relational process, structured by gendered and classed regimes of recognition.

The volume concludes with a transcribed conversation by the Arbeitskreis »Gender, Kinship, Sexuality«, which reflects on the present and future of feminist and gender theoretical work at the IfS. Rather than offering synthesis, the discussion stages Critical Theory as an open field in dialogue with feminist, queer, postcolonial, and race critical approaches, particularly those addressing imperialism, violence, and kinship. Its refusal of closure is consistent with the volume’s methodological commitments.

The central achievement of Im Schatten der Tradition lies in its refusal of familiar narratives. The volume avoids both apologetic claims that the Frankfurt School was already feminist for its time and dismissive critiques that reduce its history to exclusion. Instead, it takes seriously the question of historical possibility. As several contributions show, there existed a substantial body of materialist feminist empirical and theoretical research at the Institute that did not meaningfully shape the core framework of Critical Theory (14). This absence points to an underlying assumption: that feminist research constituted an additive specialization rather than a perspective capable of articulating social totality – a tension at odds with Critical Theory’s own ambitions since Horkheimer’s inaugural address. In this sense, the book’s feminist critique remains rigorously immanent: it does not oppose Critical Theory from without but confronts it with the implications of its own claims to grasp social totality and mediation.

By tracing how intellectual labor, collaboration, and theoretical innovation were systematically pushed into the shadow of a few celebrated figures, Im Schatten der Tradition offers more than a revisionist history. It advances a compelling case for a different mode of historiography and, implicitly, for a different future of Critical Theory one that recognizes cooperation, mediation, and feminist critique not as supplements, but as constitutive of theory itself.