Max Horkheimer

Max Horkheimer ( ; ; 14 February 1895 – 7 July 1973) was a German philosopher and sociologist best known for his role in developing critical theory as director of the Institute for Social Research, commonly associated with the Frankfurt School.

Advancing a materialist theory of reason and society, Horkheimer analyzed the rise of instrumental reason, the erosion of the concept of truth, the decline of individual autonomy, the social-psychological roots of authoritarianism, and the reproduction of domination under modern capitalism. These concerns became fundamental to critical theory.

His most influential works include Eclipse of Reason (1947), Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947, with Theodor W. Adorno), and a series of foundational essays written in the 1930s for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, later collected in Between Philosophy and Social Science and Critical Theory: Selected Essays. He also composed aphoristic reflections between the late 1920s and the 1960s, published posthumously as Dämmerung (Dawn and Decline). As director of the institute, Horkheimer planned, supported, and made possible many other significant works.

Biography

Early life

On 14 February 1895, Horkheimer was born the only son of Moritz and Babetta Horkheimer. Horkheimer was born into a conservative, wealthy Orthodox Jewish family. His father was a successful businessman who owned several textile factories in the Zuffenhausen district of Stuttgart, where Max was born. Moritz expected his son to follow in his footsteps and own the family business. However, Horkheimer avoided service, being rejected on medical grounds.

Education

In the spring of 1919, after failing an army physical,

After being released, Horkheimer moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he studied philosophy and psychology under Hans Cornelius. In 1925, Horkheimer was habilitated with a dissertation entitled Kant's Critique of Judgment as Mediation between Practical and Theoretical Philosophy (). There, he met Friedrich Pollock, who would be his colleague at the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. The following year, Max was appointed Privatdozent. Shortly after, in 1926, Horkheimer married Rose Riekher. The Institute had had its beginnings in a Marxist study group started by Felix Weil, a one-time student of political science at Frankfurt who used his inheritance to fund the group as a way to support his leftist academic aims. Pollock and Horkheimer were partners with Weil in the early activities of the institute. As director, he changed the institute from an orthodox Marxist school to a heterodox school for critical social research. The following year publication of the institute's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung began, with Horkheimer as its editor.

Horkheimer intellectually reoriented the institute, proposing a programme of collective research aimed at specific social groups (specifically the working class) that would highlight the problem of the relationship between history and reason. The Institute focused on integrating the views of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. The Frankfurt School attempted this by systematically hitching together the different conceptual structures of historical materialism and psychoanalysis.

During the time between Horkheimer's being named Professor of Social Philosophy and director of the Institute in 1930, the Nazi party became the second largest party in the Reichstag. In the midst of the violence surrounding the Nazis' rise, Horkheimer and his associates began to prepare for the possibility of moving the Institute out of Germany. Horkheimer's venia legendi was revoked by the new Nazi government because of the Marxian nature of the institute's ideas as well as its prominent Jewish association. When Hitler was named the Chancellor in 1933, In July 1934, Horkheimer accepted an offer from Columbia University to relocate the institute to one of their buildings.

Return to Germany

In 1949, he returned to Frankfurt, where the Institute for Social Research reopened in 1950. In the years that followed, Horkheimer did not publish much, although he continued to edit Studies in Philosophy and Social Science as a continuation of the Zeitschrift. Between 1951 and 1953 Horkheimer was rector of the University of Frankfurt am Main. In 1953, Horkheimer stepped down from director of the Institute and took on a smaller role in the institute, while Adorno became director.

Horkheimer continued to teach at the university until his retirement in the mid-1960s. In 1953, he was awarded the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt, and was later named an honorary citizen of Frankfurt for life. He returned to the United States in 1954 and 1959 to lecture as a frequent visiting professor at the University of Chicago.

Personal life and death

Max and Maidon married in 1926 and remained together until her death in 1969. They moved to Montagnola, Ticino in 1957. He died after a routine examination in Nuremberg in 1973 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Bern next to his wife.

Legacy

He remained an important figure until his death Max Horkheimer with the help of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Leo Löwenthal, Otto Kirchheimer, Frederick Pollock and Franz Neumann developed "Critical Theory". According to Larry Ray "Critical Theory" has "become one of the most influential social theories of the twentieth century".

Thought

Horkheimer's work is marked by a concern to show the relation between affect (especially suffering) and concepts (understood as action-guiding expressions of reason). In that, he responded critically to what he saw as the one-sidedness of both neo-Kantianism (with its focus on concepts) and Lebensphilosophie (with its focus on expression and world-disclosure). He did not think that either was wrong, but he insisted that the insights of each school on its own could not adequately contribute to the repair of social problems. Horkheimer focused on the connections between social structures, networks/subcultures and individual realities and concluded that we are affected and shaped by the proliferation of products on the marketplace. It is also important to note that Horkheimer collaborated with Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. He was convinced of the need to "examine the entire material and spiritual culture of mankind" Above all, critical theory sought to develop a critical perspective in the discussion of all social practices. Horkheimer was extremely invested in the individual. In one of his writings, he states, "When we speak of an individual as a historical entity, we mean not merely the space-time and the sense existence of a particular member of the human race, but in addition, his awareness of his own individuality as a conscious human being, including recognition of his own identity."

"The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks for an Institute of Social Research" was not only included in this volume, but it was also used as Horkheimer's inaugural speech as director of the Frankfurt School. In this speech he related economic groups to the struggles and challenges of real life. Horkheimer often referenced human struggle and used this example in his speech because it was a topic he understood well.

Horkheimer acknowledges that objective reason has its roots in Reason ("Logos" in Greek) and concludes, "If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate – in short, the emancipation from fear – then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service we can render."

Dialectic of Enlightenment

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno collaborated to publish Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was originally published in 1944. The inspiration for this piece came from when Horkheimer and Adorno had to flee Germany, because of Hitler, and go to New York. They went to America and "absorbed the popular culture"; thinking that it was a form of totalitarianism. Nonetheless, Dialectic of Enlightenment's main argument was to serve as a wide-ranging critique of the "self-destruction of enlightenment".

The similar patterns found in the content of popular culture (films, popular songs and radio) have the same central message; "it's all linked to "the necessity of obedience of the masses to the social hierarchy in place in advanced capitalist societies". These products appeal to the masses and encourage conformity to the consumers. In return, capitalism remains in power while buyers continue to consume from the industry. This is dangerous because the consumers' belief that the powers of technology are liberating, starts to increase. To support their claim, Horkheimer and Adorno, "proposed an antidote: not just thinking the relations of things, but also, as an immediate second step, thinking through that thinking, self-reflexively." In other words, technology lacks self-reflexivity. Nonetheless, Horkheimer and Adorno believed that art was an exception, because it "is an open-ended system with no fixed rules"; thus, it could not be an object of the industry.

Criticisms

Perry Anderson sees Horkheimer's attempt to make the Institute purely academic as "symptomatic of a more universal process, the emergence of a 'Western Marxism' divorced from the working-class movement and dominated by academic philosophers and the 'product of defeat because of the isolation of the Russian Revolution. Rolf Wiggershaus, author of The Frankfurt School believed Horkheimer lacked the audacious theoretical construction produced by those like Marx and Lukács and that his main argument was that those living in misery had the right to material egoism. In his book, "Social Theory", Alex Callinicos claims that Dialectic of Enlightenment offers no systematic account of conception of rationality, but rather professes objective reason intransigently to an extent.<blockquote>Ultimately, both Horkheimer and Foucault only considered the defense of remaining elements of freedom and the identification of "micro-powers" of domination a possibility, but changes in the macro-power structures were out of reach. In other words, a Left was born that was no longer oriented toward "counter-hegemony" (as per Antonio Gramsci), as a way of building toward power, but rather "anti-hegemony" (Horkheimer, Foucault, etc.), as John Sanbonmatsu put it in his critique of postmodernism.</blockquote>

Selected works

Books

Authority and the Family (1936)
Traditional and Critical Theory (1937)
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) – with Theodor Adorno
Eclipse of Reason (1947) (orig. 1941 "The End of Reason", Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences, Vol. IX)
Egoism and the Freedom Movement
The Longing for the Totally Other
Critique of Instrumental Reason (1967)
Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1972)
Dawn & Decline (1978)
His collected works have been issued in German as Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte Schriften (1985–1996). 19 volumes, edited by Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.
A life in letters : selected correspondence / Max Horkheimer ; edited, translated, and with an introduction by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
Dialectic of Enlightenment / Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Gunzelin Schmid Noeri. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2020.

Articles

, in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 8, n°3, New-York, 1939.
"The Authoritarian State". 15 (Spring 1973). New York: Telos Press.

Notes

External links

Max Horkheimer Internet Archive contains complete texts of Enlightenment as Mass Deception (1944), Theism and Atheism (1963) and Feudal Lord, Customer, and Specialist (1964).
Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online: Max Horkheimer
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Max Horkheimer
Encyclopædia Britannica: Max Horkheimer biography