Max Horkheimer was born in 1895 near Stuttgart, Germany. His parents were members of the local Jewish community, which had grown steadily during the course of the nineteenth century and had succeeded in becoming an integral part of the city’s economic, political and cultural life. During the economic boom in Wilhelmine Germany, Horkheimer’s father established himself as a successful textile manufacturer. He tried to prepare his only son to take over his factory one day, but Horkheimer was determined from an early age to follow his own path. In 1911, Horkheimer met Friedrich Pollock, whose father was also a wealthy manufacturer, and the two of them quickly became inseparable friends. As Friedrich Engels’ parents had done some 70 years earlier, Horkheimer and Pollock’s parents sent them abroad to learn French and English and to study the most advanced techniques in textile production. While living in Belgium, France and England, Horkheimer and Pollock pursued their burgeoning interests in literature and philosophy and cultivated a bohemian lifestyle. With the outbreak of World War I, they were forced to return to Germany, and Horkheimer begrudgingly took a position working in his father’s factory. Having already lived abroad and realizing that other Europeans were no better or worse than the Germans, Horkheimer rejected the nationalist hysteria that accompanied the outbreak of the war. As the war and his labors in his father’s factory dragged on, Horkheimer’s already significant disaffection with the bourgeois world of his parents and the career path his father had chosen for him grew to fever pitch. Horkheimer passionately expressed his disdain for the war and the society that had produced it in a series of novellas, short plays and diary entries.2 After being drafted into the military and serving briefly as a non-combatant, Horkheimer was sent to a sanatorium near Munich to recover from a debilitating illness. While there, Horkheimer became acquainted with Germaine Krull, an avant-garde photographer and a leading figure in the radical leftist, bohemian circles that would spearhead the Munich Council Republic in 1919.3 Horkheimer became close friends with Krull and presented his novellas and plays at social gatherings in her atelier, which were attended by prominent members of Munich’s literati, such as Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig and Rainer Maria Rilke. After the brutal suppression of the Council Republic by the Freikorps in May 1919, Horkheimer decided that the possibility for a mass-based social revolution was foreclosed for the time being. Horkheimer’s explorations of bohemia and his self-understanding as an artist were brought to an end by his decision to move to Frankfurt with Pollock in order to get a rigorous theoretical education, which he now viewed as the prerequisite for any serious social critique.
Horkheimer’s first genuine philosophical interest was Schopenhauer, but he also became interested in Marxist theory toward the end of the war. Although he chose psychology and philosophy as his major fields of study at the recently founded J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, he continued to study Marx on the side with Pollock, who would complete a dissertation on Marx’s theory of money in 1923. In the fall of 1919, Horkheimer and Pollock met Felix Weil, with whom they shared the unlikely combination of a bourgeois family background and a serious interest in socialist theory and politics. The sustained discussions between the three of them, along with the generous financial support of Weil’s father, Hermann, led to the formation of the Institute for Social Research in 1923. Although Horkheimer – unlike Pollock – was not directly involved with the Institute during its early years, he did play an important role in conceiving the idea of the Institute. Horkheimer’s critical theory developed independently in the mid and late 1920s and would not become the guiding force of the Institute until 1931, when he became its director. In the early 1920s, Horkheimer became acquainted with several of the other figures who would play an important role in the Institute’s later endeavors, such as Leo Lowenthal and Theodor W. Adorno, but neither played an important role in the development of Horkheimer’s Critical Theory at this time. The most important figure in Horkheimer’s academic studies at the University of Frankfurt in the early 1920s was Hans Cornelius, an idiosyncratic and polymathic professor of philosophy, whose primary interest was neo-Kantian epistemology. Horkheimer wrote both his dissertation and Habilitationsschrift4 under Cornelius’ guidance. Both works addressed Kant’s Critique of Judgment and both criticized Kant – and implicitly German academic neo-Kantianism as well – from a standpoint that reflected Cornelius’ philosophical arguments.5 Although Horkheimer learned some important lessons from these academic writings, they remained within the horizon of Cornelius’ philosophy of consciousness. As we shall see, Horkheimer’s Critical Theory took shape in the period between 1925 and 1930 as an explicit critique, not only of Cornelius but of consciousness philosophy as a whole.
In the late 1920s, Horkheimer offered a series of lectures and seminars as a Privatdozent in the philosophy department at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. In addition to his official academic duties, he continued to develop a radical theory of contemporary society in a series of aphorisms, Dämmerung, which he would not publish until 1934 and then under the pseudonym of Heinrich Regius.6 When the first director of the Institute for Social Research, Carl Grünberg, suffered a stroke in January of 1928, Horkheimer emerged as the best candidate to replace him. In order to qualify for the directorship and the new chair in social philosophy that had been established for him, Horkheimer published in 1929 a lengthy essay on ‘The Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History’, which explored the role of psychology, natural law, utopia and myth in various early modern conceptions of history, including Machiavelli, Hobbes and Vico. During this time, Horkheimer was undergoing psychoanalysis – with his friend and former student of Freud’s, Karl Landauer – and establishing a working relationship with Erich Fromm. With the support of Landauer, Fromm and his wife, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Horkheimer founded the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute in February 1929 – the first psychoanalytic Institute officially affiliated with a German university.7 Because Fromm had been trained not only as a psychoanalyst but had also earned a PhD in sociology – from the University of Heidelberg – and was sympathetic to historical materialism, Horkheimer was eager to harness his expertise for his own plans to shift the focus of the Institute from the history of the European workers’ movement to a critical theory of contemporary society, which would draw on Marx, Freud and empirical social research. Even before Horkheimer was inaugurated as the new director of the Institute for Social Research in January of 1931, he and Fromm had begun work on what would be its first large-scale empirical project – a study of the conscious and unconscious attitudes of blue- and white-collar workers in Weimar Germany.
In 1931, Horkheimer also established a new journal for the Institute, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, which he would edit until its discontinuation in 1941. The Zeitschrift became a primary locus of Horkheimer’s attempts to realize his vision of interdisciplinary materialism, which would draw upon the most advanced research in traditional academic disciplines, while at the same time integrating this research into a more comprehensive and radical Critical Theory of history and contemporary capitalist society. Many of the essays by Horkheimer, Fromm, Adorno, Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Franz Neumann and others that have come to define Frankfurt School Critical Theory were published in the Zeitschrift in the 1930s.8 When the National Socialists came to power in Germany in January 1933, Horkheimer and the Institute – most of whose affiliates were Jewish and/or socialists –were forced to flee. Fortunately for them, Robert Lynd and the Sociology Department of Columbia University in New York were willing to welcome them as associates and to provide them with the facilities they needed to continue their work in exile.9 During the mid 1930s, the Institute completed its second major empirical research project –the Studies in Authority and Family – and Horkheimer continued to publish substantial theoretical essays in the Zeitschrift. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, both the institutional and the theoretical development of the Institute underwent significant changes. When Horkheimer’s theoretical collaboration with Erich Fromm began to sour, Horkheimer forged a closer working relationship with Adorno, whom he invited in 1938 to join the Institute in New York (Adorno had been living in exile in Oxford, England for several years). During this time, the Institute was undergoing a financial crisis, which precipitated a final break with Fromm and led to a dramatic reduction of its operations in New York and of his own administrative responsibilities. Horkheimer was now free to focus his attention on a major work on ‘dialectical logic’, which he hoped to carry out in collaboration with Adorno in the following years. Seeking a climate more conducive to Horkheimer’s frail health and a location with fewer distractions, Horkheimer and Adorno moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1941, where they began work on the major theoretical project that would eventually become Dialectic of Enlightenment. During their time in Los Angeles, Horkheimer and the Institute continued to apply for funding for major empirical research projects, although they were unsuccessful at first. It was not until 1943 that they received funding from the Jewish Labor Committee and the American Jewish Committee to carry out a major study of anti-Semitism among American workers.10 Although this study was never published, it did lead to the more ambitious Studies in Prejudice, in which members of the Institute collaborated with American sociologists and social-psychologists to examine the conditions that gave rise to prejudice and authoritarian social movements in modern capitalist societies. The Studies in Prejudice were published in five separate volumes in 1949 and 1950.11
Horkheimer’s respect for American democracy increased during his years of exile, and he was deeply ambivalent about returning to Germany after the war. But several factors ultimately convinced him to move back to Frankfurt in 1950. These included the prospect of re-establishing the Institute in Frankfurt, with the financial support of the American occupying authorities and the city of Frankfurt; restoring the traditions of critical philosophy and the social sciences, which had been interrupted by the Nazis; and contributing to the reconstruction of democracy in West Germany, particularly by influencing the education of a new generation of students. That same year, Horkheimer was elected chair of the Philosophy department and the Institute was reopened under his renewed directorship. The following year, the Institute moved into a newly constructed building on the campus, and Horkheimer was elected rector of the university. He served as rector –the first unconverted Jew ever to hold this position at a German university – until 1953. In his capacity as rector, and director of the Institute, Horkheimer established and maintained contacts with some of the leading figures of both the American High Commission –such as John J. McCloy – and of the new West German government – such as Theodor Heuss and Konrad Adenauer. In 1953, the city of Frankfurt bestowed upon him its highest honor, the Goethe Award. In 1954, he was offered a part-time guest professorship at the University of Chicago; he taught there two or three months per year until 1959. In 1955, the first substantial fruits of the collective labors of the refounded Institute appeared, including Group Experiment – an innovative large-scale empirical study of the attitudes of West Germans toward the contemporary political situation and their own recent catastrophic past.12 In 1956, Horkheimer organized – along with the Frankfurt-based psychoanalyst and author Alexander Mitscherlich – a series of lectures by foreign and émigré scholars on Sigmund Freud, on the occasion of his one-hundredth birthday. These influential lectures and Horkheimer’s key role in the following years in the founding of a new Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt – with Mitscherlich as its first director – were crucial in re-establishing the tradition of psychoanalysis in Frankfurt and Germany more generally.
In the post-war period – after Auschwitz –Horkheimer paid closer attention than he had prior to his exile to specifically Jewish concerns in his own life, in Germany and in the world as a whole. In 1951, Horkheimer became an official member of the Jewish Congregation in Frankfurt. In the mid 1950s, he organized a series of lectures at the university by international scholars on the history and culture of Judaism, which he viewed as part of his larger task of helping the next generation work through the recent past and learn more about the history of Jews in Germany and Europe. As Horkheimer’s notes from this period reveal, he was also a relatively close and not uncritical observer of Israel during this time. He believed that Zionist nationalism did not have the right to speak for all Jews, but also that it was a justified response to anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere. He viewed the existence of Israel as legitimate insofar as it offered an asylum for persecuted persons, but not as the realization of a homeland for all Jews.13 Horkheimer also criticized Israel’s handling of the trial of Adolf Eichmann.14 As the Institute’s empirical study Group Experiment had revealed, anti-Semitism remained widespread in post-war Germany and was particularly virulent in German universities.15 After becoming the target himself of anti-Semitic comments from one of his faculty colleagues in 1956, Horkheimer put in a request for early retirement, which resulted in a substantial reduction of his teaching responsibilities. In 1957, he, his wife Rosa Riekher and Friedrich Pollock moved to Switzerland. Until his full retirement in 1961, Horkheimer divided his time between Switzerland and Germany. In 1958, Adorno replaced him as director of the Institute.
Horkheimer’s sharp critique of Soviet communism and his commitment to the Allies’ aim of reconstructing liberal democracy in West Germany caused him to become more conservative politically in the 1950s and 1960s. The discrepancy between his public statements and academic persona, on the one hand, and his private reflections on the current state of Germany and the world, on the other – a continuation of the discrepancy between the ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ that had characterized his work from the very beginning – became even more pronounced in the post-war decades. Publically, Horkheimer frequently offered interviews, gave well-attended lectures and spoke on the radio on a wide range of philosophical and sociological topics. For the most part, however, Horkheimer’s public pronouncements moved increasingly within the rigid tracks of Cold War liberalism. Horkheimer’s response to some of Jürgen Habermas’ early writings provides a good example of his increasingly conservative political attitudes during this time. One year after Habermas had become an assistant at the Institute in 1956, he published what he thought was a scholarly review essay on the secondary literature on Marx and Marxism. Horkheimer reacted allergically, accusing him of defending an anachronistic theory of revolution, and ultimately forced Habermas to complete his Habilitation at a different university. In the 1960s, Horkheimer continued to articulate surprisingly conservative positions, such as criticizing the Algerian struggle for independence, viewing the US war in Vietnam as a defense of ‘human rights’ against barbarism, and raising concern about the effects of birth-control pills on love and marriage. Horkheimer long resisted pleas to republish his writings from the 1930s and 1940s, and when he finally acceded, in 1968, he stressed in a new introduction that they were no longer directly relevant to the changed historical conditions of the present. Not surprisingly, Horkheimer demonstrated little sympathy for radical students in the 1960s who were circulating pirate editions of Dämmerung and his other earlier writings in order to justify their criticisms of the authoritarian structure of German universities, the fascist tendencies they believed existed in West German society, the US war in Vietnam and ‘capitalist imperialism’ more generally. By this time, however, Horkheimer’s appearances in Frankfurt were rather infrequent, and it was left to Adorno and Habermas – who had in the meantime returned to Frankfurt, with the support of Adorno – to represent the Institute in its contentious dealings with the students.16
At the same time as Horkheimer’s public pronouncements became increasingly indistinguishable from the Cold War liberalism that guided the reconstruction of West Germany, he continued to preserve a private, interior intellectual sphere in which he could express his more authentically critical, pessimistic and skeptical thoughts. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Horkheimer wrote thousands of short notes, a sampling of which he collected and prepared for publication shortly before his death in 1973. Stylistically, they represent a continuation of his early novellas, the aphorisms in Dämmerung and the ‘notes and sketches’ at the end of Dialectic of Enlightenment in their unsystematic and frequently passionately polemical nature. The notes cannot be seen as a final philosophical work, because they were composed over a long period of time and were so fragmentary; nonetheless, when read systematically, a number of themes reappear regularly. These include sharp criticisms of the repression of the recent past in Germany and of the unbroken preservation after 1945 of German nationalism;17 dark reflections on the ongoing collapse of classical bourgeois-liberal ideals, and the ideals of Western civilization itself;18 a critique of the affluent society, mass democracy, technology, the totally administered society and the disappearance of individual autonomy;19 strong reservations about the transformation of traditional gender roles, the increased entry of women into the workforce and the dissolution of the bourgeois family, marriage and – allegedly – love itself;20 a sharp critique of the subordination of science to the interests of dominant social groups and the reduction of philosophy to an esoteric and meaningless academic specialty;21 a lament about the current powerlessness of intellectual activity in general;22 and scattered positive reflections on religion and theology which, at their best, preserve a ‘longing for a completely different state of things’ even in the face of the catastrophes of the twentieth century.23
Considering the pessimistic tone of Horkheimer’s later, private reflections, it should not come as a surprise that he also returned during this time to his first philosophical love, Arthur Schopenhauer. Horkheimer emphasized the contemporary relevance of his thought on several different occasions.24 At the same, Marx – who played a much more important role than Schopenhauer during the most productive and interesting phases of Horkheimer’s thought – remained a central presence in Horkheimer’s writings until the very end of his life. Not unlike the European New Left, of which he was frequently critical, Horkheimer combined a sharp criticism of the Soviet Union with an stubborn insistence on the ongoing relevance of many aspects of Marx’s Critical Theory – not only his critique of political economy but also his critique of ideology.25 Where the late Horkheimer was perhaps most interesting – and went beyond both Soviet Marxism and the New Left – was his interpretation of Marx’s theory as a continuation of the Enlightenment tradition and his insistence that efforts to revive critical Marxism today need to reintegrate the best aspects of that tradition.26 Horkheimer passed away in 1973 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Bern, Switzerland, next to his wife, Rosa Riekher, and his lifelong friend Friedrich Pollock, who had preceded him in death in 1969 and 1970 respectively.
In the following section, I present a more detailed account of the emergence and development of what I call the ‘Early Model of Critical Theory’ in Max Horkheimer’s writings from approximately 1925 until 1940. Erich Fromm, in particular, but also Herbert Marcuse and Leo Lowenthal contributed to the formation and elaboration of this model of Critical Theory, although there can be no doubt that Horkheimer was its principal architect.27 As we have already seen, when Fromm left the Institute, at the end of the 1930s, and Horkheimer began working more closely with Adorno and, at the same time, adopted significant aspects of Friedrich Pollock’s ‘state capitalism’ thesis, the stage was set for a substantial shift in the content and aims of Critical Theory. The shifts would be on full display in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was finished and first published in a limited edition in 1944. In what follows, I will not address Dialectic of Enlightenment, or any of Horkheimer’s other writings after 1940, and not only because this volume already contains an essay on Dialectic of Enlightenment. I have chosen to focus on Horkheimer’s early writings, first, because they were – in my own view and that of several other prominent commentators28 – his best. Second, I am convinced that the early model of Critical Theory is still, or has become once again, relevant to contemporary concerns, in a way that Dialectic of Enlightenment and Horkheimer’s other writings from 1940 to 1970 are not. Whereas the latter reflected many of the assumptions of the state-centric, Fordist capitalism that existed in the mid twentieth century, his earlier writings were still directly concerned with the threat of capitalist crisis and its links to the emergence of right-wing populist and authoritarian social movements – conditions that have re-emerged with a vengeance in the post-Fordist, neoliberal period of global capitalism in which we have been living since the 1970s. I have made the case elsewhere for revisiting the early model of Critical Theory in light of contemporary concerns, so I will not elaborate upon these brief remarks here.29 I will say, however, that the currently widespread view of Dialectic of Enlightenment as the magnum opus of the ‘first generation’ of the Frankfurt School is misleading, because it obscures the differences not only between Horkheimer and Adorno’s independent trajectories before 1940 but also between Dialectic of Enlightenment and the early model of Critical Theory from the 1930s. The following remarks are part of an ongoing effort on my part to restore the memory of the latter, as it flashes up in the current moment of danger.
In contrast to Jürgen Habermas, who has argued that the model of early Critical Theory ‘failed not as a result of this or that coincidence, but because of the exhaustion of the paradigm of consciousness philosophy’,30 I would like to argue here that Horkheimer’s Critical Theory took shape in the period between 1925 and 1930 as an explicit critique not only of his academic mentor, the neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius, but of consciousness philosophy as a whole. Horkheimer’s move beyond consciousness philosophy proceeded along two interrelated yet distinct axes: a diachronic-historical and a synchronic-social axis.31
The best example of Horkheimer’s move beyond consciousness philosophy and into history can be found in a remarkable series of lectures and unpublished essays from the late 1920s, in which he developed a sophisticated materialist interpretation of the history of modern philosophy, from Bacon and Descartes all the way up to contemporary schools such as neo-Kantianism, phenomenology and vitalism. Implicitly following Marx, Horkheimer demonstrated how modern European philosophy represented a mediated expression of the uneven development of bourgeois society. He argued, for example, that the Enlightenment achieved its paradigmatic form in France rather than Britain or German-speaking central Europe, due to the particular constellation of social, economic and political forces there. Whereas Britain had already carried out a bourgeois political revolution in 1688, and was well on the way to establishing a modern market society during the eighteenth century, the development of bourgeois economic and – to an even greater extent – political institutions lagged behind in continental Europe. Horkheimer interpreted the affirmative character of British political economy and the resigned skepticism of David Hume as expressions of a triumphant bourgeois society. He viewed the remaining elements of theology and metaphysics in the German Enlightenment (which he sees, for example, in Kant’s efforts to rescue a metaphysics of morality) as an expression of the relatively weak state of bourgeois society. The spread of market relations in eighteenth-century France testified to the growing strength of a bourgeois class eager to emancipate itself from the remaining constraints of the ancien régime and gave Enlightenment ideals a self-consciously political form. Horkheimer believed that the critical and tendentially materialist principles of the philosophes – the right of all men and women to freedom, equality and happiness in this life – were universal ideals: they were not only an expression of ascendant bourgeois society but also pointed beyond it. Horkheimer’s lectures demonstrated that a critical, historically specific concept of Enlightenment – very different from the transhistorical concept of Enlightenment that he and Adorno would develop later32 – was central to his thought from early on. Horkheimer placed the Enlightenment, along with the rest of modern European philosophy, within the larger context of the uneven development and subsequent transformation of bourgeois society. In so doing, he insisted that ideas could not be understood purely from the standpoint of consciousness, but were always historically mediated.
If Horkheimer’s lectures represented a decisive step beyond consciousness philosophy along an historical-diachronic axis, then the theory of contemporary society, which he developed during the same period, represented its synchronic counterpart. Horkheimer’s critical theory of contemporary society consisted of three main components: Marx’s critique of political economy and ideology, empirical social research and psychoanalysis. Horkheimer explored the continuing relevance of Marx’s ideas in Dämmerung: Notizen in Deutschland.33 Stylistically and thematically, Dämmerung represents a continuation of his early novellas, a form of ‘interior’ writing in which he could freely express his most radical, passionate and experimental ideas. In his ‘exterior’ academic lectures and writings in the late 1920s, one finds relatively few or significantly mediated expressions of his interest in historical materialism. But this collection of aphorisms, which was written between 1926 and 1931, makes clear that Horkheimer’s interest in Marx – and in social revolution – remained lively during this time.34 The collection was not published until 1934, after Horkheimer had already fled Germany, and even then only under the pseudonym of Heinrich Regius.35 The aphorisms rely on micrological observations of the inequities of everyday life to demonstrate the concrete ways in which people experienced and unconsciously reproduced abstract social domination. Many of them address the social situation in the final years of the Weimar Republic. For example, in ‘The Impotence of the German Working Class’,36 Horkheimer analyzes how the composition of the German working class has been altered by technological developments in production. He focuses, in particular, on the political and ideological divide that had emerged between workers with stable jobs, who tended to support the Social Democratic Party, and the mass of unemployed, who tended toward the German Communist Party. Although his unflinching diagnosis of the deep divisions among German workers seemed to cast doubt on Marx’s predictions about the increasing pauperization, homogenization and unification of the proletariat, Horkheimer did not abandon Marx’s theory. Instead he recalled Marx’s argument that ‘there is a tendency in the capitalist economic process for the number of workers to decrease as more machinery is introduced’37 in order to explain the rise of a large unemployed underclass and the resulting schism in workers’ social conditions and consciousness. He also objected to the widespread belief that Marx had advocated a progressive, or even deterministic, philosophy of history. His early study of Schopenhauer and the traumatic experience of World War I had immunized Horkheimer to the idea that progress toward a more free and just society was inscribed in the logic of modern capitalism itself, as many revisionists and Social Democrats had interpreted Marx. Horkheimer recognized that the rational tendencies introduced by capitalism had long since been eclipsed by the irrational tendencies identified by Marx, such as imperialist wars, periodic crises and commodity fetishism. Progressive historical change could be brought about only through conscious intervention, not passive reliance on the ‘logic’ of history or capital. As he would put it later, ‘as long as world history follows its logical course, it fails to fulfill its human purpose’.38 Horkheimer’s rejection of progressive philosophies of history was one example of his efforts to revitalize Marx’s ideology critique. Another can be found in his sharp critique in 1930 of Karl Mannheim’s efforts to relativize Marx’s concept of ideology by interpreting it from the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge.39 But his penetrating observations of the discordant state of the German working class made clear that Critical Theorists should test and, if necessary, reformulate Marx’s concepts in light of changed historical conditions.
This insistence upon a rigorous understanding of present social conditions explains Horkheimer’s interest in empirical social research, which had been sparked during his university studies in the early 1920s. This interest also grew out of Horkheimer’s interpretation in the late 1920s of the history of philosophy, which clearly displayed more sympathy for the empiricist than the rationalist tradition. Furthermore, he believed that an empirical deficit existed in the young discipline of sociology in Germany, which prompted him to turn to the work of US sociologists, such as Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown, as models for the integration of empirical social research into his own incipient Critical Theory.40 In 1929–30, Horkheimer was able to put his ideas about empirical social research to the test for the first time when he and Erich Fromm organized an empirical study for the Institute of the conscious and unconscious political attitudes of German blue- and white-collar workers. Horkheimer and Fromm’s interest in psychoanalysis informed their conceptualization of the study. Horkheimer wondered why substantial sections of the German working class had initially supported World War I and had proven to be reluctant revolutionaries in 1918–19. With the rising threat of National Socialism, Horkheimer also wondered how the German working class would respond if the National Socialists attempted to seize power. With these concerns in mind, Horkheimer and Fromm used psychoanalytic techniques in their design of the questionnaires and their interpretation of the responses. They distributed over 3,000 questionnaires in 1929, and by 1931 over 1,000 had been returned. Based on the preliminary results of the study, Horkheimer and Fromm were able to identify a divergence between blue- and white-collar workers’ professed political views and their unconscious attitudes, which were, in many cases, deeply authoritarian. The preliminary conclusion of the study, that the German lower-middle and working class would not offer substantial resistance if the National Socialists attempted to seize power, was soon borne out by historical events.
The third component of Horkheimer’s theory of contemporary society was psychoanalysis. Horkheimer’s abiding interest in psychology emerged in the early 1920s, when he was exposed to Gestalt psychology at the J.W. Goethe University of Frankfurt, which was more open than any other German university to innovative research in this field. After abandoning a plan to write a dissertation on a topic relating to Gestalt psychology, Horkheimer’s interest shifted to psychoanalysis. In 1927, he underwent analysis with Karl Landauer, a Frankfurt-based psychoanalyst who had studied with Freud and become a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1913. Horkheimer’s analysis was motivated primarily by intellectual rather than therapeutic reasons. At about the same time, Horkheimer established a working relationship with Erich Fromm, which would prove decisive for the further development of Critical Theory. After undergoing analysis in 1924 with his future wife, Frieda Reichmann, Fromm decided to become a psychoanalyst. He completed his training in Frankfurt with Karl Landauer. Soon afterwards he became an active participant in the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association, which was conducting path-breaking discussions of the social and political implications of psychoanalysis.41 As we have already seen, Horkheimer was drawn to Fromm not only because of his knowledge of psychoanalysis, but also because he had completed a PhD in sociology and was thus in a position to help Horkheimer integrate psychoanalysis into his critical theory of society. Fromm’s later split with the Institute and his subsequent acrimonious debates with Adorno and Marcuse have obscured Fromm’s crucial role in the early formation of Critical Theory. Horkheimer’s enthusiasm for Fromm was apparent in his decision to appoint him as director of the empirical study on the attitudes of German workers and his offer to make him a permanent member of the Institute.
By the time Horkheimer had been installed as the new director of the Institute in January 1931, the basic components of his Critical Theory were already in place: a materialist interpretation of the history of modern philosophy as the mediated expression of the uneven development and transformation of bourgeois society, and a theory of contemporary society based on a critical synthesis of Marx, empirical social research and psychoanalysis. The further development of Horkheimer’s Critical Theory in the 1930s should be seen as the attempt to carry out, test and refine these ideas. In his inaugural address as the new director of the Institute, Horkheimer outlined ‘The Current Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research’ in precisely these terms.42 He began by showing how Hegel laid the groundwork for modern social philosophy by moving beyond Kant’s consciousness philosophy. Nevertheless, Hegel remained beholden to a metaphysical philosophy of history, which justified the newly emergent bourgeois society as part of a preordained process of the historical realization of reason. Since the emancipatory ideals of the bourgeoisie had given way to the reality of class conflict, economic crisis, imperialism and social catastrophes – such as World War I – Hegel’s faith in the inherent rationality of history was no longer tenable. But Horkheimer also objected to the two principal contemporary philosophical responses to this situation: a rejection of social philosophy in the name of ‘rigorous’ positivist social research or a rejection of science in the name of metaphysics. As an alternative, Horkheimer argued that social philosophy should grasp bourgeois society as a totality but not assume that this totality was already rational. To this end, Horkheimer proposed an interdisciplinary research program based on the ‘continuous, dialectical penetration and development of philosophical theory and specialized scientific praxis’.43 Of particular interest for the Institute’s future work would be ‘the question of the connection between the economic life of society, the psychical development of individuals and the changes in the realm of culture’.44 By this time the study of the attitudes of German workers was already well underway; Horkheimer would soon initiate a second major empirical research project on the relationship between authority and family structure in Europe and the United States, which would be published in 1936.45
In addition to directing these collective projects of the Institute, Horkheimer continued to develop the philosophical and historical foundations of Critical Theory in a series of remarkable essays he published over the course of the 1930s. The main themes of Horkheimer’s essays from this time were materialism, the anthropology of the bourgeois epoch and dialectical logic.46 In the essays ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’ and ‘Materialism and Morality’, which were both published in the second volume of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1933, Horkheimer developed a thoroughly historical concept of materialism, in order to elucidate the philosophical foundations of Critical Theory.47 Horkheimer recognized that materialism has usually been a pariah in the history of philosophy, a seemingly easily refuted metaphysical dogma that higher mental processes can be derived from ‘matter’. Horkheimer argues that this definition contradicts the basic anti-metaphysical tendency of materialism to locate reason within history and society and to see it as a means of improving the quality of human life and not as an end in itself. Philosophical materialism is less concerned with absolute truths – such as the primacy of ‘matter’ over ‘mind’ – than with the possibilities of augmenting human freedom and happiness at a particular time and place. Materialism has practical, political implications and has often been associated with concrete freedom movements. Its aims and content are derived from the barriers to human freedom and happiness that exist at any given time and its efforts to comprehend and overcome them.
Horkheimer’s 1936 essay ‘Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Epoch’ contained the first comprehensive formulation of the theoretical results of his collaboration with Fromm in the early 1930s.48 Although Horkheimer had already applied psychoanalysis to empirical studies of contemporary society, by this time he had integrated psychoanalysis into his theory of history as well. He had moved from the ‘history of bourgeois society’ – which served as the foundation for his lectures on modern philosophy in the late 1920s – to the ‘anthropology of the bourgeois epoch’. Horkheimer’s use of the concept of anthropology must be distinguished from the tradition of philosophical anthropology, which maintains the possibility of determining fundamental characteristics of human beings outside of history. Horkheimer, in contrast, analyzes the origins and function of the characteristics of man which have become dominant during the bourgeois epoch. Drawing upon Fromm’s efforts in the late 1920s and early 1930s to synthesize psychoanalysis and historical materialism,49 Horkheimer demonstrates how common historical experiences can create similar psychic structures among members of the same social group. Since these psychic structures have relative autonomy from the dynamic economic base of society, they can play a crucial role in either advancing or – as is more frequently the case – retarding historical progress. Insofar as Marx’s theory of history presupposed a relatively straightforward interest psychology, it needed to be supplemented by the more sophisticated insights of psychoanalysis, which could account for the relative autonomy of psychic structures and the frequent willingness of the lower classes to act in ways that ran contrary to their own best interests.
Through a close historical examination of several typical ‘bourgeois freedom movements’ in the early modern period – ranging from Cola de Rienzo and Savanarola to the Reformation and French Revolution –Horkheimer demonstrates how bourgeois leaders mobilized the masses as allies in their struggle against feudal, aristocratic and/or absolutist institutions, while at the same time never allowing their demands to progress to a point that would call into question bourgeois hegemony. Horkheimer views these exceptional instances of open political struggle and mobilization as providing insights into the more fundamental and longer-term process of the emergence and consolidation of a historically unprecedented form of society – modern bourgeois, capitalist society. The dominant character structures of both the bourgeoisie and the lower classes were formed in this historical process. Following Marx, Weber, Nietzsche and others, Horkheimer recognized that both the bourgeoisie and the lower classes were subjected to exceptionally high levels of socially mediated repression. But the function of this repression differed for the two groups, insofar as the self-repression of the bourgeoisie was at the same time its self-assertion, whereas the repression of the lower classes was tantamount to sacrifice. Horkheimer points to the various ways in which the lower classes were compensated for their sacrifices, from the reward of membership in the imagined community of virtuous citizens to the tacitly sanctioned permission to persecute internal or external ‘enemies’ who refuse – or are simply accused of refusing – to make the sacrifices demanded of them. The latter point, in particular, reflected Horkheimer’s effort to move beyond Freud’s naturalization of aggression in a ‘death drive’ by grasping the historically specific forms of cruelty in the bourgeois epoch. But Horkheimer’s critique of Freud also drew heavily upon his pioneering analysis of the mutability of libidinal drives. Again following Fromm, Horkheimer showed how the partial and compensatory satisfaction of repressed drives could be used to reinforce existing relations of social domination. Finally, it is important to note that Horkheimer’s social and social-psychological analysis of the historically specific forms of demagogy in ‘Egoism and Freedom Movements’ provided the theoretical foundations for much of the Institute’s later work on prejudice and authoritarianism;50 the essay can still shed much light on the mechanisms involved in right-wing populist and authoritarian movements today.51
The third key concept in Horkheimer’s Critical Theory at this time was dialectical logic. It represented a much richer reformulation of his reflections on materialism from the early 1930s and a continuing effort to flesh out the philosophical foundations of a Critical Theory adequate to twentieth-century societies. In letters from the 1930s, Horkheimer speaks repeatedly of his ‘long-planned work on dialectics’52 and makes it clear that he viewed the essays he was writing at this time as ‘in truth merely preliminary studies for a larger work on a critical theory of the social sciences’.53 Horkheimer’s seminal conceptualization of Critical Theory in his most familiar and influential essay from this period, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1937),54 should be seen as the culmination of the first stage of this larger project, which would eventually become – in a much different form – Dialectic of Enlightenment. This larger project can only be understood by examining the other substantial essays Horkheimer wrote during this period, including ‘The Rationalism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy’ (1934), ‘Bergson’s Metaphysics of Time’ (1934), ‘On the Problem of Truth’ (1935), ‘The Latest Attack on Metaphysics’ (1937) and ‘Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism’ (1938).55 When one reexamines these essays together, the contours of Horkheimer’s larger project on dialectical logic emerge. Horkheimer developed further his criticism of consciousness philosophy, with its reified notion of the ego, which exists outside of history and society, and its static and dualistic concept of knowledge, which is unable to conceptualize qualitative change or the relationship of knowledge to society. Horkheimer also put forth the argument that the philosophy of the bourgeois epoch as a whole is characterized by a recurring dichotomy between science and metaphysics. Horkheimer showed how this antinomy attains its most consequential formulation in Kant’s philosophy; for example, in his efforts to limit the natural sciences’ claims to absolute knowledge while at the same time preserving certain key metaphysical principles in the sphere of practical reason. According to Horkheimer, this antinomy appears in different forms throughout the history of modern philosophy: from Montaigne all the way up to vitalism and logical positivism. Although Hegel’s philosophy moved decisively beyond the static and dualistic character of traditional logic, he too ultimately reproduced the antimony of science and metaphysics, with his notion of history as the preordained self-realization of Absolute Spirit. Only with Marx’s determinate negation of Hegel was the groundwork laid for a genuinely dialectical and materialist critical theory of modern capitalist society. Horkheimer stressed, in particular, how Marx integrated the findings of the most advanced bourgeois theories of society (Hegel and classical political economy), while at the same time developing a critical conceptual apparatus which pointed beyond the existing social totality. Horkheimer drew upon Hegel’s distinction between understanding (Verstand) and Reason (Vernunft), and Marx’s distinction between research (Forschung) and presentation (Darstellung) to conceptualize the division of labor in a dialectical Critical Theory of society. In the 1930s, in other words, Horkheimer still believed that Critical Theory should keep abreast of and – when beneficial – integrate the most advanced findings of traditional theory into its own larger, critical theory of history and society. For Horkheimer, critical still meant – as it had already for Kant –self-reflexive theory; but Horkheimer went beyond Kant in his insistence that the guiding concepts of critical theory be dialectical in a specific historical sense. In contrast to traditional concepts, which presuppose the existing form of society as a given, dialectical concepts grasp the given form of society as historical and subject to transformation in the future. Dialectical concepts – such as Marx’s concept of capital or surplus value –not only grasp the essential mechanisms at work in the current society and historical epoch, but they also link these mechanisms to exploitation and social domination, and they call for the practical, historical realization of a different society in which these mechanisms – and thus also the concepts that grasp them – would no longer exist. The concepts of Critical Theory are dialectical, in other words, because they grasp a historically given state of affairs, while at the same aiming for its abolition – that is, a qualitatively new society in which the concepts would no longer have an object. In short, Horkheimer’s dialectical logic project was an attempt to flesh out the philosophical foundations of Marx’s critical theory and, where necessary, to reformulate it in light of changed historical conditions.
The contours of Horkheimer’s concept of dialectical logic can be seen clearly in ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, which can be interpreted as an attempt to update and elaborate upon Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in order to provide a critical theory of knowledge and its relation to emancipatory social praxis. According to Horkheimer, the two main ways in which critical theory differs from traditional theory are its historical self-reflexivity and its recognition of the active role it plays in reproducing and – potentially –transforming society. Just as Marx had criticized Feuerbach’s static and passive concept of materialism and had drawn on German idealism to reconceptualize the relationship between theory and praxis, so Horkheimer characterized traditional theory as lacking any awareness of its historical specificity or the active role it plays in reproducing existing social relations. Traditional theory accepts uncritically the existing division of labor in the sciences and accepts passively its own role within it. It posits the given methods –of subsuming particulars under general principles and thereby contributing to the gradual expansion of knowledge – as trans-historical. Critical theory, in contrast, reflects consciously upon the form and function scientific knowledge has assumed within a particular historical epoch. It also recognizes the active role it plays in reproducing this historically specific form of human social relations. Horkheimer described critical theory as a ‘human activity [menschliches Verhalten] which has society itself as its object’.56 By this, Horkheimer meant that critical theory is aware that it forms one active element within a larger social totality that has come into being historically and that could be transformed into a qualitatively different society at some point in the future.
One of the principal tasks of critical theory, then, is to identify the essential, defining characteristics of society in the current historical epoch, which Horkheimer referred to as the ‘bourgeois epoch’. Horkheimer distinguished further between the modern epoch as a whole –which begins with the gradual ascendance of bourgeois society in early modern Europe and its concomitant expansion throughout the globe57 – and specific historical periods within the modern epoch. Following Marx, Horkheimer identifies the private ownership of the means of production and the division of society into antagonistic classes as a defining characteristic of the bourgeois epoch as a whole. But Horkheimer was also attentive to the transformations bourgeois society has undergone over its long history and continues to undergo in the present. The following macrohistorical description of transformation of bourgeois society illustrates some of the key assumptions guiding Horkheimer’s early Critical Theory.
To put it in broad terms, the theory says that the basic form of the historically given commodity economy on which modern history rests contains in itself the internal and external contradictions of the modern era; it generates these contradictions over and over again in an increasingly heightened form; and after a period of progress, development of human powers, and emancipation of the individual, after an enormous extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism.58
One sees here a historically specific notion of the dialectic of bourgeois society, which differs quite markedly from the tendentially transhistorical notion of a dialectic of Enlightenment that would soon come to dominate Horkheimer’s thought.59 In the essay, though, Horkheimer also moved beyond such macrohistorical descriptions of the bourgeois epoch as a whole, in order to determine more recent and specific transitions within it. He described the transition from liberal to monopoly capitalism that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which brought with it – among other things – the concentration of capital, the emergence of a powerful new group of economic leaders distinct from the owners of the means of production and the possibility of new, more directly and consciously produced forms of ideology.60 We shall see below how Horkheimer would also soon adopt the concept of state capitalism, to signal the emergence in the 1930s of new forms of global political economy and ideology. In short, Horkheimer’s early Critical Theory is a form of critical historicism,61 insofar as it emphasizes periodization; but it differs from traditional, bourgeois historicism – sharply criticized by Benjamin62 – in its emphasis on self-reflexivity and its ambition to guide concrete historical praxis that will usher in a new historical epoch.
Although ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ makes clear that Horkheimer still accepted many key aspects of Marx’s critical theory of modern capitalist society, it also displays his willingness to question reigning Marxist orthodoxies. For example, Horkheimer criticized the tendency among many Marxists –articulated most clearly by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness – to view the ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ as the ultimate source of truth in theoretical questions.63 Critical Theory must be willing to oppose the immediate aims or unreflective consciousness of the working class if such aims and/or consciousness undermine the larger, long-term aims of emancipatory praxis. Accordingly, Horkheimer did not hesitate to criticize the ‘bureaucratic’ socialism of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.64 But Horkheimer’s arguments here do raise the questions of how he justified the truth claims of Critical Theory and what he viewed as its long-term aims. The first question is what led Horkheimer to elaborate at length his theory of dialectical concepts, or dialectical logic, which we discussed above. To reiterate, dialectical concepts differ from their traditional counterparts insofar as they not only grasp the forms of social domination specific to current historic epoch but also seek to guide a historical praxis that would abolish these forms through the creation of a qualitatively new society. The question of the justification or verification of the truth claims of Critical Theory cannot be resolved in the same manner as traditional theory because those claims presuppose a transformation of the existing, ‘factual’ conditions which would be used to judge them.65 As Marx put it in his second thesis on Feuerbach, ‘The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth […] of his thinking in practice’.66 In this regard, Critical Theory reveals its affinity with the imagination and its opposition to positivism, pragmatism and reified ‘common sense’, which are unable to transcend the given state of affairs.67 Regarding the closely related second question, Horkheimer did offer a number of different formulations of the long-term aims of Critical Theory. He spoke, for example, of a ‘new organization of labor’,68 a transformation of the blind necessity of capitalism into conscious planning69 and a future society as a ‘community of free men’.70 Yet, in the end, Horkheimer remained true to Marx’s critique of utopian socialism, insofar as he refused to provide any concrete blueprints for a future, emancipated society. Only through identifying and striving practically to eliminate the essential features of the existing capitalist society, can a different society be brought about. Horkheimer wrote, ‘critical theory cannot appeal to any specific authority, other than its inherent interest in the abolition [Aufhebung] of social injustice. This negative formulation […] is the materialist content of the idealist concept of Reason’.71
Whereas the concepts of the anthropology of the bourgeois epoch and dialectical logic marked the culmination of the model of early Critical Theory in Horkheimer’s thought, the period 1938–41 witnessed a significant shift in some of his basic positions and set the stage for a new phase in the development of Critical Theory. This important theoretical shift cannot be fully understood without first examining certain crucial changes in Horkheimer’s life during this time. Foremost among these changes was Horkheimer’s split with Erich Fromm and his increasingly intimate working relationship with Adorno. Fromm had been Horkheimer’s most important theoretical interlocutor from their collaboration on the empirical study of German workers in 1929 through the publication of the Studies on Authority and Family in 1936. During this time, Horkheimer remained distant from Adorno and, to a surprising extent, critical of his work.72 But when Fromm began to move away from his earlier, more or less orthodox psychoanalytic position in the mid 1930s, serious tensions began to develop between him and Horkheimer. Fromm had become increasingly critical of Freudian drive theory and he began increasingly to privilege social over sexual factors in the formation of character and the etiology of neuroses. Adorno, who was living in exile in Oxford at the time, attacked Fromm’s revisions of Freud in a letter to Horkheimer in March 1936, claiming that they represented a ‘genuine threat to the line of the Zeitschrift’.73 The final break between Horkheimer and Fromm was precipitated by a financial crisis at the Institute in the late 1930s. In the meantime, Horkheimer had patched up his relationship with Adorno, who left Oxford in February 1938 and finally became an official member of the Institute upon his arrival in New York. Horkheimer’s theoretical collaboration with Adorno in the following years would lead to a reconfiguration of his own thought of the tradition of Critical Theory as a whole, which found its first full expression in 1944 with the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment.74
Horkheimer’s theoretical shift in the late 1930s and early 1940s has been variously described as a ‘pessimistic turn’,75 a ‘rephilosophization of Critical Theory’76 and a shift from ‘the critique of political economy to the critique of instrumental reason’.77 The most important overall factor in this shift was Horkheimer’s adoption of a modified version of the state-capitalism thesis, which had been worked out over the course of the previous decade by his long-time friend and Institute colleague Friedrich Pollock.78 Pollock and Horkheimer viewed state capitalism as the logical conclusion of a process that had begun with the rise of liberal capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continued with the transition to monopoly capitalism around the turn of the century. Whereas liberal capitalism had been defined by a large number of small- and medium-sized privately owned firms, which competed with each other in both domestic and international markets and whose relations were regulated by formal law, under monopoly capitalism increasingly large corporations and cartels came to dominate domestic markets and compete with each other at the international level, beyond the restraints of formal law. State capitalism reinforced and completed these tendencies by bringing the large corporations and cartels under state control, for the purposes of more efficient, planned domestic production and distribution and more effective international competition. Horkheimer identified the ‘integral statism’ of the Soviet Union as the purest form of state capitalism, but he viewed fascism and the new state-interventionist economies of Western Europe and the United States as different versions of the same basic form. What characterized state capitalism everywhere, according to Horkheimer, was the tendential elimination of the economic, social and cultural forms of mediation peculiar to bourgeois society in its liberal phase. These included not only the market, the rule of law and replacement of individual owners by shareholders or the state, but also relatively autonomous spheres of bourgeois cultural life, such as art, the family and even the individual him or herself. Social domination had, in other words, become much more direct under state capitalism. The independent economic dynamism of capitalism had been replaced by the primacy of politics. The operations of politics came increasingly to resemble a common ‘racket’: survival and protection were secured through obedience to the most powerful groups.79 Capital and large labor unions collaborated in the planning of the economy and divided up the spoils between them. Insofar as surplus value continued to be produced and appropriated by a dominant social class, capitalism still existed, but the political and ideological integration of the working class eliminated the possibility of any serious opposition emerging in the future.
Horkheimer’s acceptance of the state-capitalism thesis reflected the changed historical realities of state-interventionist economic models which arose in the mid twentieth century. From our contemporary perspective, it is clear that state capitalism was not ‘the end of history’ – as Horkheimer and Adorno feared at the time – but rather a new phase in global capitalist development which would give way to the current post-Fordist, neoliberal phase of global capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s. But Horkheimer’s adoption of the state-capitalist thesis brought with it a fundamental rethinking of many of the basic assumptions that had informed his Critical Theory in the 1930s. First, the focus of Critical Theory shifted from a historically specific critique of social domination within modern capitalism to a transhistorical critique of instrumental reason and the domination of nature.80 Second, this shift was reflected in the increasing prominence of a negative philosophy of history, which Adorno had adopted from Benjamin in the late 1920s.81 Third, Horkheimer became increasingly skeptical about the emancipatory character of the Enlightenment ideals that had guided his earlier work. During the early phases of his project on dialectical logic, Horkheimer still believed in the possibility of a materialist reinterpretation and realization of basic Enlightenment principles. Dialectic of Enlightenment demonstrated clearly his new conviction that only a radical critique of these principles could create a new, self-reflexive concept of Enlightenment that could transcend its inherent limitations. Fourth, Horkheimer’s new-found pessimism about the Enlightenment also translated into a radical critique of science in its traditional forms. Whereas Horkheimer’s model of Critical Theory in the 1930s rested heavily upon a critical integration of research from a wide variety of scientific and scholarly disciplines, in Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno stated unambiguously that they had to abandon their trust in the traditional disciplines.82
In conclusion, many of the basic assumptions of the model of early Critical Theory, which had guided Horkheimer and the Institute’s work in 1930s, had been called into question by the early 1940s. A new phase in the history of Critical Theory had begun. Beyond what was mentioned in the overview above, I will not seek to describe that new phase in Horkheimer’s work here. I would like to reiterate, however, that the model of early Critical Theory may well be more relevant to contemporary concerns, insofar as it reflected the particular dynamics of liberal and monopoly but not yet state capitalism. More than any other single historical experience, the emergence of fascism during a period of capitalist crisis and, in particular, a failed attempt to re-establish liberal capitalism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, shaped the formation of early Critical Theory. Horkheimer and Fromm paid particularly close attention to the social and social-psychological dynamics of authoritarianism and right-wing populism that made the triumph of fascism possible. At a time when the prosperity and security of the ‘Affluent Society’ and the ‘Golden Age’ of post-World War II capitalism have become a distant memory, and nearly four decades of the hegemony of global neoliberal capitalism have recreated the social and social-psychological conditions for the emergence of authoritarian and right-wing populist movements on a scale unprecedented since the 1930s, the analyses of early Critical Theory have become unheimlich aktuell once again.83 Of course, the social and historical conditions are qualitatively different today from the 1930s, and substantial analysis of new forms of capitalist crisis and its relationship to new authoritarian and right-wing populist movements in Europe, the United States and elsewhere would need to be based on extensive empirical studies of those movements. But the uncanny persistence of such phenomena makes it all too clear that we are still living in the bourgeois epoch and that Horkheimer and the Institute’s analyses of the social forms characteristic of that epoch are still a valuable theoretical resource and one eminently worthy of reconsideration.
1. This essay draws in places upon an earlier essay of mine: John Abromeit, ‘The Origins and Development of the Model of Critical Theory in the Work of Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse’, The History of Continental Philosophy, vol. 5, Critical Theory to Structuralism: Philosophy, Politics and the Human Sciences, ed. David Ingram (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 47–80. Any of the content reproduced in this essay is done so with the permission of Sage Publications.
2. Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Alfred Schmidt (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1988). Hereafter, I will refer to the Gesammelte Schriften edition of Horkheimer’s writings as MHGS. Horkheimer’s earliest writings have not been translated. For an overview of them and their relation to Horkheimer’s biographical and intellectual development at the time, see John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 27–41. Hereafter, I will refer to this book as MHFFS.
3. On Krull see Kim Sichel, Germain Krull: Photographer of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
4. A second dissertation that one had to write in order to become a professor in the German university system.
5. For a summary of the arguments in Horkheimer’s first and second dissertations, see Abromeit, MHFFS, 65–84.
6. Dämmerung: Notizen in Deutschland, MHGS, vol. 2, 312–454. An incomplete and unsatisfactory English translation of Dämmerung does exist: Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury, 1978), 17–112.
7. As Freud himself confirmed with gratitude in a letter to Horkheimer at the time, the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute was the first time that a German university had recognized psychoanalysis as a legitimate academic discipline.
8. True to Horkheimer’s emphasis on interdisciplinarity and on keeping abreast of recent developments in the ‘traditional’ sciences, the Zeitschrift also offered a truly extensive array of reviews of recent publications in the social sciences and humanities.
9. On Horkheimer and the Institute’s transition to New York and their relationship to Lynd and other members of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, see Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 35–94.
10. On the Institute’s study of anti-Semitism among US workers, see Mark Worrell, Dialectic of Solidarity: Labor, Antisemitism and the Frankfurt School (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009).
11. The Studies in Prejudice consisted of the following five volumes, all published by Harper & Brothers, in New York. Volume 1: Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Volume 2: Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, Dynamics of Prejudice: A Psychological and Sociological Study of Veterans (1950). Volume 3: Nathan W. Ackerman and Marie Jahoda, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (1950). Volume 4: Paul W. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (1949). Volume 5: Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949).
12. For my own review of a recent English translation of Group Experiment, see Journal of Modern History, vol. 85, no. 1 (March 2013), 161–8.
13. For Horkheimer’s views on Israel, see Jack Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives and Antisemitism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 133–42.
14. Max Horkheimer, ‘The Arrest of Eichmann’, Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1996), 119–23; ‘Zur Ergreifung Eichmanns’ and ‘Zu Eichmann’, MHGS, vol. 6, 347–50, 364.
15. Among the different professional and educational groups studied in Group Experiment, university graduates scored second only to peasants in their levels of anti-Semitic prejudice. Group Experiment and Other Writings: The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany, trans. A.J. Perrin and J.K. Olick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 92–3.
16. On Adorno’s (and Marcuse’s) shifting relationships to the student protest movements in the late 1960s, see my essay, ‘The Limits of Praxis: The Social Psychological Foundations of Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno’s Interpretations of the 1960s Protest Movements’, Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in the 1960s/70s West Germany and U.S., eds. B. Davis, W. Mausbach, M. Klimke and C. MacDougall (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 13–38.
17. MHGS, vol. 6, 233–4, 302–3, 345–6, 361–2, 404, 411.
18. Ibid., 246, 301, 322–3, 332–3.
19. Ibid., 229, 232–3, 236–7, 278, 285–6, 291, 415.
20. Ibid., 189, 209–10, 224–5, 389, 406.
21. Ibid., 207, 281–2, 298–300, 417–18.
22. Ibid., 322–3.
23. Ibid., 288, 319–21, 329–31, 417.
24. Max Horkheimer, ‘Schopenhauer Today’, Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1996), 63–83.
25. MHGS, vol. 6, 191–2, 213, 395–6, 410–11. See also, ‘Marx Heute’, MHGS, vol. 8, 306–17.
26. Ibid., 241, 414.
27. I will discuss Fromm’s role briefly in what follows. For a fuller discussion of Fromm and Marcuse’s roles in the formation and continuation of Critical Theory, see my essay, ‘The Origins and Development of the Model of Critical Theory in the Work of Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse’, cited above in note 1.
28. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, ‘Remarks on the Development of Horkheimer’s Work’, On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, eds. S. Benhabib, W. Bonss and J. McCole (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1993), 51.
29. John Abromeit, ‘Critical Theory and the Persistence of Right-Wing Populism’, and ‘Right-Wing Populism and the Limits of Normative Critical Theory’, in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, vol. 15, no. 2–3 (Summer, 2016) and vol. 16, no. 1 (January, 2017). http://logosjournal.com/2016/abromeit/.
30. Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 518 (my translation).
31. For a more detailed discussion of Horkheimer’s critique of consciousness philosophy, see MHFFF, 85–90.
32. For an extended analysis of this point, see John Abromeit, ‘Genealogy and Critical Historicism: Two Concepts of Enlightenment in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Writings’, Critical Historical Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (Fall, 2016), 283–308.
33. See note 6.
34. Because it expressed Horkheimer’s theory at its most radical, Dämmerung was circulated widely in pirate editions among radical students in the 1960s – much to the elder Horkheimer’s chagrin.
35. Regius (1598–1679) was a professor of medicine in Utrecht and a materialist student and critic of Descartes.
36. Dawn and Decline, 61–5.
37. Ibid., 61.
38. Max Horkheimer, ‘The Authoritarian State’, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (London: Bloomsbury), 117 (translation modified).
39. Max Horkheimer, ‘A New Concept of Ideology?’ in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Essays, trans. and eds. John Torpey, Matthew S. Kramer and G. Frederick Hunter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 129–50.
40. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929).
41. On the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, see Psychoanalyse in Berlin: Beiträge zur Geschichte, Theorie und Praxis (Meisenheim: A. Hain, 1971) and Veronika Füchtner, Berlin Psychoanalytic: Culture and Psychoanalysis in Weimar Republic Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011).
42. Between Philosophy and Social Science, 1–14.
43. Ibid., 9.
44. Ibid., 11. Horkheimer’s emphasis here on the ‘relative autonomy’ of the culture and psychic character structures illustrate the important difference between his Critical Theory and the mechanistic ‘base–superstructure’ model advocated by many Marxists (if not Marx himself). On Horkheimer’s concept of culture, see John Abromeit, ‘Max Horkheimer et le concept matérialiste de la culture’, Les Normes et le possible: Héritage et perspectives de l’École de Francfort, eds. P.F. Noppen, G. Raulet and Iain Macdonald (Paris: Maison de Science de l’homme, 2012), 53–70.
45. Studien über Autorität und Familie: Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1936).
46. For a more detailed examination of the concepts of materialism, anthropology of the bourgeois epoch and dialectical logic in Horkheimer’s writings in the 1930s, see MHFFS, chapters 6, 7 and 8, respectively.
47. ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New York: Continuum, 1992), 10–46; ‘Materialism and Morality’, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 15–48.
48. ‘Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Epoch’, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 49–110. For a more detailed discussion of the theoretical premises that informed this essay, see also his 1932 essay ‘History and Psychology’ in the same volume, 111–29.
49. See, for example, ‘The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology’, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 477–96.
50. Eminent Frankfurt School scholar Martin Jay has written of Horkheimer’s ‘Egoism and Freedom Movements’ that ‘as a seed-bed for much of the Frankfurt School’s later work, it is virtually unparalleled’. Martin Jay, ‘Introduction to Horkheimer’, Telos, no. 54 (December 1982), 5.
51. See, for example, John Abromeit, ‘Critical Theory and the Persistence of Right-Wing Populism’.
52. Here in a letter to Walter Benjamin from September 6, 1938, MHGS, vol. 16, 476.
53. Ibid., 490.
54. ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, Critical Theory, 188–243.
55. ‘On the Problem of Truth’, ‘The Rationalism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy’ and ‘Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism’, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 177–216, 217–64 and 265–312 respectively. ‘The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,’ Critical Theory, 132–87. An English translation of ‘Bergson’s Metaphysics of Time’ appeared in Radical Philosophy: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy, vol. 131 (May/June 2005), 9–19.
56. Critical Theory, 206.
57. For Horkheimer’s elaboration of this concept of the historical epoch, see his theoretical introduction to the Studies on Authority and Family, in Critical Theory, 47–54.
58. Critical Theory, 227.
59. On the concept of a ‘dialectic of bourgeois society’, see MHFFS, 4, 394–5, 429–32.
60. Ibid., 234–6.
61. For an elaboration of this interpretation of Horkheimer’s early Critical Theory as a form of ‘critical historicism’, see John Abromeit, ‘Genealogy and Critical Historicism: Two Concepts of Enlightenment in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Writings’.and John Abromeit, ‘Reconsidering the Critical Historicism of Karl Korsch and the Early Max Horkheimer‘, in Karl Korsch zwiscen Rechts- und Sozialwissenschaft: ein Beitrag zur Thüringischen Rechts- und Justizgeschichte, eds. A. Seifert, K. Vieweg, A. Ecker and E. Eichenhofer (Stuttgart: Boorberg, 2018), 151–76.
62. For Benjamin’s critique of bourgeois historicism, see his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 253–64.
63. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 149–222.
64. Critical Theory, 218.
65. For this reason, Horkheimer makes a distinction between what he calls the ‘existential’ judgments of Critical Theory: the ‘classificatory’ judgments of the pre-bourgeois world, which accept the world as unchangeable, and the ‘hypothetical’ or ‘disjunctive’ judgments of the bourgeois world, which state that ‘under certain circumstances this effect can take place; it is either thus or so’. Ibid., 227. Again, one sees Horkheimer’s reliance upon a ‘critical historicist’ periodization in order to support his claims. Horkheimer discusses this problem of verification in even greater detail in his 1935 essay ‘On the Problem of Truth’, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 177–216.
66. The Marx–Engels Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 144 (emphasis Marx’s own).
67. Ibid., 221.
68. Ibid., 209 (translation amended).
69. Ibid., 229.
70. Ibid., 217.
71. Ibid., 242 (translation amended).
72. For a detailed examination of the divergence, estrangement and eventual rapprochement that occurred over the course of the 1930s at both the personal and political levels between Horkheimer and Adorno, see MHFFS, 349–93.
73. MHGS, vol. 15, 498.
74. Dialectic of Enlightenment was republished in a larger, revised edition in 1947. For a discussion of Dialectic of Enlightenment, see Marcel Stoetzler’s article in this volume.
75. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 104ff.
76. Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, trans. B. Gregg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 106.
77. Andrew Arato, ‘Introduction’ to The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 20.
78. For a good examination of the ways in which Pollock’s ‘state capitalism’ thesis informed Dialectic of Enlightenment, see Manfred Gangl, ‘Capitalisme d’Etat et dialectique de la raison’, in La Dialectique de la Raison: Sous bénéfice d’inventaire, ed. Katia Genel (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2017), 105–16.
79. On Horkheimer’s theory of ‘rackets’, see Peter Stirk, Max Horkheimer: A New Interpretation (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 131–54.
80. For an illuminating examination of this important shift of emphasis, see Gerd-Walters Küsters, Der Kritikbegriff in der Kritischen Theorie Max Horkheimers (Frankfurt: Campus, 1980). See also my own essay, mentioned in note 29.
81. See, for example, Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 253–80.
82. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 14. The fact that Horkheimer and Adorno continued to carry out empirical research projects in the 1940s (most notably, the five-volume Studies in Prejudice) and that empirical research remained a crucial aspect of the Institute’s work after its re-establishment in Frankfurt after the war, demonstrated that Horkheimer never completely abandoned his early model of ‘interdisciplinary materialism’. Nonetheless, Dialectic of Enlightenment does represent a substantial break from Horkheimer’s position in the 1930s and a model of Critical Theory which is more consonant with Adorno’s overall philosophical trajectory.
83. Uncannily relevant.