Max Horkheimer was a philosopher who used Marx's criticism of capitalism to ask why a wealthy, technically advanced society still produced poverty and oppression. He helped turn the Institute for Social Research into a joint inquiry into economic life, culture and human behavior. During American exile, that inquiry joined criticism of society's basic rules to research into how people became open to authoritarian rule. This account follows his early formation and American work through the 1950 prejudice study.[1][2][3][4]
Early life and intellectual formation
A business heir began to question the life planned for him
Horkheimer's first doubts arose before he studied Marx. He grew up in a manufacturing family near Stuttgart and left school at fifteen to prepare for his father's business. He learned accounting, production and the supervision of workers. Historian John Abromeit traces his early letters to Friedrich Pollock, whom he befriended in 1911. The letters describe his growing dislike of the pursuit of wealth and status expected of him. Their friendship gave him someone with whom to question that life.[5]
Pollock also helped him find books through which to express his discontent. In Brussels in 1913, while both men were training for business, Pollock recommended Arthur Schopenhauer. Abromeit describes how Schopenhauer's attention to suffering and compassion gained force for Horkheimer during the First World War. The young writer began to ask what his own comfortable life cost other people. His response was still largely moral and personal: compassion for those who suffered and a search for loving relationships. It was not yet the social theory he would later develop from Marx.[5]
The war made that search more urgent, but it did not give him a ready political answer. Abromeit's reading of Horkheimer's 1917 stories and letters finds both a demand for change and distrust of mass politics. His fictional revolutionaries could be cruel and antisemitic as well as opposed to injustice. By February 1919, however, Horkheimer was urging his future wife, Rosa Riekher, to read an issue of Die Aktion honoring the murdered revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In the letter Abromeit cites, he treated the issue as an outline of their political views. His turn toward socialism developed through these conflicts rather than one recorded conversion.[5]
Study turned moral protest into social inquiry
After the war, Horkheimer sought an explanation for the catastrophe he had lived through. Abromeit links his move to university study to that search. In Frankfurt from 1919, Horkheimer first made psychology his main subject, with philosophy and economics alongside it. He studied how perception worked and became close to the philosopher Hans Cornelius. His planned psychology dissertation was rejected after another researcher published the same findings. Cornelius then helped him change fields. Horkheimer earned his philosophy doctorate in 1923 with a study of Kant and became Cornelius's assistant.[5]
His academic training and his socialist reading developed together. Abromeit records discussions with Pollock and Felix Weil about socialist theory and an independent research institute. He also identifies a seminar paper on historical materialism that Horkheimer gave in November 1922, while noting that the paper itself has not survived. Marx offered a way to examine the social arrangements behind suffering: who owned productive resources, who worked for whom and how those relations had developed. Horkheimer's later 1937 essay makes that approach explicit. His studies under Cornelius were a philosophical training, while his interest in Marx concerned an explanation and transformation of society. Neither establishes membership in a political party.[2][5]
Psychology remained part of the developing approach. Abromeit dates Horkheimer's analysis with Karl Landauer from 1927 and describes his growing collaboration with Erich Fromm in the late 1920s. Psychoanalysis gave them ways to ask why people might defend an authority that made them suffer. Economic pressures mattered, but so did the fears and desires through which people experienced them. The resulting research program joined a criticism of capitalism to inquiry into actual people. In his 1931 address Horkheimer still acknowledged Cornelius as his teacher and insisted that concrete research must be able to change philosophical theory.[1][5]
Ideas and political aims
Why critical theory challenged the whole arrangement
In 1937, Horkheimer explained the political purpose of this approach in “Traditional and Critical Theory [2].” Ordinary specialist research could help a society function without asking whether its basic arrangements were just. Critical theory would examine those arrangements. A factory's rising output, for example, would not settle whether the people doing the work had a fair share in its benefits or control over their lives.[2]
His argument drew on Marx's criticism of capitalism. Work, property and the division between social classes had developed through human activity. Horkheimer therefore treated them as arrangements people could change. He sought a society whose productive power served the whole community and allowed each person to develop. Correcting a single abuse would leave the larger problem intact if the same social rules kept producing it.[2]
This aim did not make every worker a reliable guide to the truth. Horkheimer wrote that workers could be divided by competing interests and could accept ideas that helped preserve their subordination. Intellectuals also had to question their own habits and the organizations on their own side. Party strength, a large following or a successful propaganda machine could not by itself establish that a theory was right.[2]
Horkheimer gave theory a role in changing society, but he did not offer a finished plan for governing the future society in this essay. Nor did he treat teaching a theory as proof that its goal had been achieved. Near its end he stressed that striving to end exploitation was different from bringing that condition into existence.[2]
Career and activities
A joint research program
Speaking as the Institute 's director in his 1931 address, Horkheimer set out a problem that no single discipline could solve. How did economic life, people's mental habits and the culture around them affect one another? An account of wages alone could not explain every belief. A study of feelings detached from work and family would also miss part of the explanation.[1]
He made the question concrete. The Institute would study skilled workers and salaried employees. Researchers would examine economic conditions, published statistics, newspapers and literature. They would also use questionnaires and seek the experience of practitioners. Horkheimer welcomed American work on survey methods, while warning against drawing broad conclusions from questionnaires alone. He wanted research findings to correct theory, and theory to guide what researchers asked.[1]
The Institute moved into exile
The Nazi regime closed the Frankfurt Institute in July 1933. By then the Institute had moved to Geneva. In 1934 it moved to New York, where Columbia University housed it. The Institute's own history describes the exile research as focused on National Socialism, authoritarianism and antisemitism.[3]
Research on prejudice created a different kind of collaboration
Horkheimer's American work also involved research that joined the Institute's questions to American social psychology. He and Samuel H. Flowerman edited the Studies in Prejudice series. One volume, The Authoritarian Personality [4], combined questionnaires with interviews and other psychological methods to investigate susceptibility to antidemocratic propaganda.[4]
That project produced a public research volume with named American collaborators. It is a concrete result of the exile work. The collaboration does not establish that every researcher, funder or host accepted Horkheimer's account of capitalism. The study's authors also placed limits on their findings: their subjects were not a representative sample of the American population.[4]
Major works
Exile changed the setting and the questions
Horkheimer continued to ask how an advanced society could produce destructive forms of rule. In Los Angeles he worked with Adorno on the book first circulated as Philosophical Fragments in 1944 and published as Dialectic of Enlightenment [6] in 1947. The authors dated their wartime preface May 1944 in Los Angeles. They also identified the Institute's financial support and Leo Lowenthal's contribution to the first three theses on antisemitism.[6]
The joint book widened the inquiry. The authors argued that reason could shrink into a tool for calculating effective means, while leaving the purposes of powerful institutions unexamined. Technical skill could then strengthen domination. Their criticism reached commercial entertainment, whose apparent variety they understood as a way of fitting people into established patterns of consumption.[6]
They still attached hope to enlightenment, understood as thought that could expose error and loosen dependence. Their preface says the criticism was meant to prepare a positive form of enlightenment freed from blind domination. The book should therefore be read as an argument over how reason had failed, with a stated wish to recover its freeing power.[6]
Why efficient means could serve harmful ends
Horkheimer presented a related argument in public lectures at Columbia in spring 1944. Those lectures supplied part of Eclipse of Reason [7], published in English in 1947. In its preface he credited Adorno's part in the wider philosophical work, Lowenthal's advice and the Institute's support. He also said the book was not a program of action.[7]
The opening chapter distinguishes reasoning about means from reasoning about ends. A person can calculate how to reach a goal while taking the goal itself for granted. Horkheimer called this subjective reason. A second understanding, objective reason, asks whether a purpose belongs within a reasonable order of human life. He traced that second understanding through older philosophical systems, while acknowledging that the two forms had existed together.[7]
His concern was what happened when calculation displaced judgment about purposes. A business could devise a faster production method without asking whether the work served human needs. Horkheimer argued that reason became subordinate to existing interests when it gave up the right to question those ends. His criticism asked readers to judge the purposes that efficiency served, rather than treating efficiency as enough.[7]
Influence and criticism
Educational purpose and the evidence of use
Horkheimer and Flowerman wanted the prejudice research to help change conduct. In their series foreword, Horkheimer and Flowerman connected the removal of prejudice with planned education based on scientific understanding. Horkheimer's separate preface called for a better grasp of the conditions that formed authoritarian attitudes, so that educators could work against them. Those statements establish an intended use. They do not show which schools adopted a program or whether any program reduced prejudice.[4]
The intended educational use leaves a concrete next question: which American programs used the research, what did their organizers change, and what results did they record? The authors' stated hopes cannot answer those questions for the recipients.