Max Horkheimer Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) was a German philosopher and sociologist. His name is primarily linked to the Frankfurt school, of which he is considered to be one of the founding fathers. Born in Stuttgart to a Jewish family, Horkheimer studied philosophy and psychology in Munich. He then moved to Frankfurt where, under the supervision of neoKantian philosopher Hans Cornelius, he wrote his habilitation dissertation entitled “Kant’s Critique of Judgement as Mediation between Practical and Theoretical Philosophy” (1925). In 1930, he became chair of social philosophy at Frankfurt University and was elected director of the Institute for Social Research. The latter attracted important Marxist scholars of the time whose work has become known as that of the Frankfurt school.

Horkheimer’s role as director of the institute was crucial. In his contributions to the Zeitschriftfür Sozialforschung, the institute’s main intellectual organ, he promoted the sort of multidisciplinary intellectual endeavour he named critical theory. This became a point of reference for the members of the institute and, later on, for all those pursuing a critical theory of society. Horkheimer defined critical theory as a theory that seeks to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them, and, as such, he opposed it to a traditional theory, which is contrarily aimed at perpetuating these enslaving circumstances.

After the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Horkheimer went first to Switzerland in 1933 and then to the United States in 1935, like many of the other members of the institute. At first, he lived in New York, and the whole institute was relocated to Columbia University. In 1940, Horkheimer moved to California. He came back to Frankfurt in 1949 after the end of World War II (1939–1945). One year later, the institute reopened after thirteen years of exile.

Prior to the war, in Frankfurt, Horkheimer also met philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno, the other major animating personality of the Frankfurt school. Adorno’s friendship and intellectual collaboration were crucial to Horkheimer. During their exile in the United States, Horkheimer and Adorno together wrote the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, a few copies of which were first published in 1947 in Amsterdam before becoming a very influential work in the 1970s. The book, which reflects the authors’ experience of the advent of Nazism and the rise of American mass society, puts forth a radical critique of Western rationality, by arguing that the latter, far from realizing the Enlightenment’s promise of emancipation, had turned into a radical form of domination. Adorno and Horkheimer thus suggest that the entire Western Enlightenment is based on an instrumental concept of reason as domination over nature. As such, Enlightenment risks resulting in the opposite of reason, that is, myth and barbarism. The critique of reason remained a crucial theme of Horkheimer’s writings, which are devoted to the development of a general critique of modern Western civilization and its logic of domination.

The last twenty years of Horkheimer’s life were characterized by the recognition of his intellectual prestige (he was rector of the University of Frankfurt and lectured at the University of Chicago) and by an increasing metaphysical pessimism. In the prosperous West Germany of the postwar period, Horkheimer felt the decline of the revolutionary possibilities he had identified during the 1930s and the years of his exile.

Bibliography:

Adorno,Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London:Verso, 1997.
Horkheimer, Max. Between Philosophy and the Social Science: Selected Early Writings. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993.
Critical Theory: Selected Essays. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969. New York: Seabury Press, 1978.
Eclipse of Reason. New York: Continuum, 1947.

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