An interest in the meaning and actuality of autonomy is fundamental to the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Across its history, from the 1930s to the present, members of the Frankfurt School have construed autonomy variously, and sometimes simultaneously, as an ideological delusion, as a lost possibility, as desirable yet utopian, and as the realizable objective of emancipating social theory. The complex variety of ways in which these characterizations have been reworked, revised, and abandoned have contributed more than anything else to the development of Frankfurt School theory. That development has seen autonomy move from a position of ambivalent significance to one where it now holds a fully positive value.