writings of Marx before the influence of Friedrich Engels, which focused on dialectical idealism rather than dialectical materialism. It thus rejected economic determinism, being instead far more libertarian. Neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to orthodox Marxist thought. Frankfurt School The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist social theory, social research and philosophy. The grouping emerged at the Institute for Social Research () of the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. The term "Frankfurt School" is an informal term used to designate the thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research or influenced by them—it is not the title of any institution and the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School did not use the term to refer to themselves. The Frankfurt School gathered together dissident Marxists, severe critics of capitalism who believed that some of Marx's alleged followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox communist or social democratic parties. Influenced especially by the failure of working-class revolutions in Western Europe after World War I and by the rise of Nazism in an economically, technologically and culturally advanced nation (Germany), they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions. Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud (as in Herbert Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist synthesis in the 1954 work Eros and Civilization). Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, crude materialism and phenomenology by returning to Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on negation and contradiction as inherent properties of reality. Marxist feminism Marxist feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism that incorporates and extends Marxist theory, focusing on the dismantling of capitalism as a way to liberate women. Marxist feminism analyzes the ways in which women are exploited through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property, stating that these give rise to economic inequality as well as dependence, political confusion and ultimately unhealthy social relations between men and women, which are the root of women's oppression. According to Marxist feminists, women's liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the