Background

Max Horkheimer was born into a conservative Jewish family on February 14, 1895, the only son of Moritz and Babette Horkheimer. A successful and respected businessman who owned several textile factories in the Zuffenhausen district of Stuttgart (where Max was born), Moritz Horkheimer expected his son to follow in his footsteps.

Education

Max was taken out of school in 1910 to work in the family business, where he eventually became a junior manager.

In the spring of 1919, after failing an army physical, Horkheimer began studies at the University of Munich and transferred to the University of Frankfurt (now Goethe University of Frankfurt) a semester later. At Frankfurt, he studied psychology and philosophy, the latter with the neo-Kantian philosopher Hans Cornelius. He also spent a year, on Cornelius’s recommendation, studying in Freiburg with Edmund Husserl. After an abortive attempt at writing a dissertation on gestalt psychology, Horkheimer, with Cornelius’s direction, completed his doctorate in philosophy in 1922 with a dissertation titled The Antinomy of Teleological Judgment. In 1925 he earned his Habilitation from the University of Frankfurt.

Career

In 1925 Horkheimer completed his Habilitation with a work titled Kant’s Critique of Judgment as a Link between Theoretical and Practical Philosophy, and took a position as Privatdozent, or lecturer, at Frankfurt. During this time he would lecture extensively on 18th and 19th Century philosophy, with his research interests moving more in line with Marxian themes.

In 1930, after four years as a lecturer in social philosophy at Frankfurt, Max Horkheimer was named director of the university’s newly founded Institute for Social Research. Under his leadership, the institute attracted an extraordinarily talented array of philosophers and social scientists - including Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and Franz Neumann - who (along with Horkheimer) came to be known collectively as the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer also served as editor of the institute’s literary organ, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung ("Journal for Social Research"), which published pathbreaking studies in political philosophy and cultural analysis from 1932 to 1941.

In the early years of its existence, Horkheimer described the institute’s program as "interdisciplinary materialism," thereby indicating its goal of integrating Marxist-oriented philosophy of history with the social sciences, especially economics, history, sociology, social psychology, and psychoanalysis. The resulting "critical theory" would elucidate the various forms of social control through which state-managed capitalism tended to defuse class conflict and integrate the working classes into the reigning economic system.

The institute’s first study in this vein, "Authority and the Family," was still incomplete when the Nazi seizure of power forced most members of the institute to flee Germany in 1933. Horkheimer moved to New York City, where he reestablished the institute and its journal at Columbia University. Throughout the remainder of the decade, he sought to keep the flame of critical theory burning by writing a number of programmatic essays for the Zeitschrift. Among the most influential of these works was "Traditional and Critical Theory" (1937), in which he contrasted what he considered the socially conformist orientation of traditional political philosophy and social science with the brand of critical Marxism favored by the institute. According to Horkheimer, the traditional approaches are content to describe existing social institutions more or less as they are, and their analyses thus have the indirect effect of legitimating repressive and unjust social practices as natural or objective. By contrast, critical theory, through its detailed understanding of the larger historical and social context in which these institutions function, would expose the system’s false claims to legitimacy, justice, and truth.

In 1941 the institute, which had been beset by financial troubles, was effectively dissolved, and Horkheimer moved to Los Angeles. There he collaborated with Adorno on an influential study, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which traced the rise of fascism and other forms of totalitarianism to the Enlightenment notion of "instrumental" reason. The work's pessimism reflects the defeats that progressive European social movements had suffered since the early 1930s. A more accessible version of the book’s argument also appeared in 1947 under the title The Eclipse of Reason.

With the end of World War II, Horkheimer gradually considered moving back to Germany. In April 1948, he returned to Europe for the first time, to lecture in various cities, including as a visiting professor in Frankfurt. His full return to Germany would follow shortly, and in July 1949 he was restored to his professorship at the University of Frankfurt. The following year the Institute would return as well. After returning, Horkheimer would focus on administrative work, reestablishing the Institute and serving two terms as University Rector in the early 1950s. In 1953 he was awarded the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt, and would later be named an honorary citizen of Frankfurt for life. His academic activities also continued throughout the 1950s and included a period during which he served as a regular visiting professor at the University of Chicago. His work would slow, however, once he retired in 1958 to the Swiss town of Montagnola. Max Horkheimer passed away on July 7, 1973, at the age of 78.

Achievements

• Max Horkheimer was a leader of the "Frankfurt School," a group of philosophers and social scientists associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research) in Frankfurt am Main. As a philosopher, he is best known (especially in the Anglophone world), for his work during the 1940s, including Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was co-authored with Theodor Adorno. While deservedly influential, Dialectic of Enlightenment should not be separated from the context of Horkheimer’s work as a whole. Especially important in this regard are the writings from the 1930s, which were largely responsible for developing the epistemological and methodological orientation of Frankfurt School critical theory. This work both influenced his contemporaries (including Adorno and Herbert Marcuse) and has had an enduring influence on critical theory’s later practitioners (including Jürgen Habermas, and the Institute’s current director Axel Honneth).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Critique of Instrumental Reason

    (These essays, written between 1949 and 1967, focus on a s...)

    1967
  • Eclipse of Reason

    (In Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer discusses how the Nazis ...)

    1945
  • Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings

    (Max Horkheimer is well known as the director of the Frank...)

  • Dialectic of Enlightenment

    (Dialectic of Enlightenment is a work of philosophy and so...)

    1947

Religion

According to Horkheimer, religion is the expression of human anguish and suffering that contains an implicit if not explicit indictment of the existing antagonistic social totality. Religion thereby also gives expression to the human longing for that which is beyond the existing socio-historical totality. Rather than projecting this cry of agony and hope of a better future society or life into the abstract form of a God, Horkheimer materialistically redirects such religious expression back to the economic mode of social production and the social structures from which such suffering comes. Religion as the expression of human misery thereby becomes a practical historical force of resistance against all forms of social exploitation and domination in the hope of creating a better, more reconciled future society.

Views

Horkheimer’s central institutional role as Director of the Institute of Social Research has somewhat overshadowed his own substantial Philosophical work. Although he lacked Adorno's brilliance, he had if anything a broader range of expertisc. including psychology, which he had studied at university before turning to philosophy and sociology. Horkheimer’s combination of synoptic sweep and pregnant formulation, as displayed in particular in his early book on Philosophy of history, his classic essay on Traditional and critical theory (1972) or in The Eclipse of Reason (1947), make him a major figure in twentieth-century thought. Horkheimer’s antimetaphysical conception of philosophy and reason, his radical revision of Marxism, and his conception of the interdisciplinary critical theory were guiding principles of the Frankfurt School’s activity.

With the catastrophe of Nazism and the experience of exile in New York and California, Horkheimer, like Adorno, became increasingly pessimistic. When the Institute was reestablished ln Frankfurt in the 1950s he took pains to play down any connection with its former work, discouraged radical young thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, and adopted an increasingly conservative position.

His later work displays his enduring fascination with the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and the philosophy of religion. Horkheimer felt that Schopenhauer’s pessimistic social philosophy more faithfully reflected the lost prospects for utopia than did the more optimistic social theories of the postwar period.

Quotations: "The Revolution won't happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism."

"Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism."

"The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to the propagation of even the most blatant lies. ... Subjective reason conforms to anything."

"A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief."

"Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite."

"Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete."

"Philosophy is overwhelmingly complicated, its procedure depressingly slow."

"When the great religious and philosophical conceptions were alive, thinking people did not extol humility and brotherly love, justice and humanity because it was realistic to maintain such principles and odd and dangerous to deviate from them, or because these maxims were more in harmony with their supposedly free tastes than others. They held to such ideas because they saw in them elements of truth, because they connected them with the idea of logos, whether in the form of God or of a transcendental mind or even of nature as an eternal principle."

"When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them."

"The facts which our senses present to us are socially performed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception."

Interests

• Philosophy of history, history of philosophy

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Hans Cornelius, Theodor Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer

Connections

During the period Max Horkheimer worked in the family business, he met Rose Riekher, who was his father’s personal secretary. She was eight years Max’s senior, a gentile, and of an economically lower class, Riekher (whom Max called "Maidon") was not considered a suitable match by Moritz Horkheimer. Despite this, Max and Maidon would marry in 1926 and remain together until her death in 1969.

Father:

Moritz Horkheimer

(1858-1945)

Mother:

Babette Horkheimer (Lauchheimer)

(1968-1946)

Spouse:

Rose Riekher

(1888-1969)

colleague:

Theodor Adorno

Friend:

Friedrich Pollock

colleague:

Hans Cornelius

References

• Frankfurt School
  1985
• On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives
  1993