Max Horkheimer

1. Introduction

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) is widely regarded as one of the principal architects of the Frankfurt School and of modern critical theory. Working at the intersection of philosophy and social research, he sought to understand how advanced capitalist societies could combine unprecedented material progress with persistent domination, authoritarianism, and the degradation of individuality.

From his early leadership of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt to his later, more pessimistic writings, Horkheimer developed a distinctive approach that combined Marxian social analysis, German idealism, and psychoanalysis. He argued that forms of rationality, culture, and subjectivity that were once associated with enlightenment and emancipation had become complicit in new modes of control. His work thus aims to diagnose historically specific pathologies of modernity while preserving a fragile horizon of social transformation.

A central focus of Horkheimer’s philosophy is the critique of instrumental reason and the contrast between “traditional” and “critical” theory. He proposed that social theory must be self-reflexive, historically situated, and practically oriented toward emancipation, in contrast to accounts that present themselves as neutral and purely contemplative. Together with Theodor W. Adorno, he advanced influential theses about the dialectic of enlightenment and the culture industry, which have shaped debates in philosophy, sociology, political theory, and cultural studies.

Interpretations of Horkheimer vary sharply. Some emphasize his enduring commitment to Marxism; others stress his later turn toward metaphysical and religious motifs. This entry presents these developments and controversies systematically, section by section, without endorsing any single reading of his work.

2. Life and Historical Context

Horkheimer’s life unfolded against the upheavals of the first three quarters of the twentieth century, and commentators generally see his thought as closely bound to these contexts.

Biographical outline and historical benchmarks

Intellectual formation in historical perspective

Many scholars argue that three experiences decisively shaped Horkheimer’s orientation:

• The disillusionment after World War I, which undermined faith in liberal progress and nationalist ideals.
• The failure of revolutionary movements and the instability of Weimar democracy, which led him to question both orthodox Marxism and parliamentary liberalism.
• Nazism, exile, and the Holocaust, which intensified his focus on authoritarianism, antisemitism, and the capacity of modern societies to regress into barbarism.

In the post-war Federal Republic, Horkheimer’s position as a prominent Jewish intellectual returning from exile resonated with broader efforts at democratization and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). Commentators disagree on how far the prosperous, administratively complex societies of the post-war era confirmed or modified his earlier fears of a “totally administered world”, but most agree that his biography and the wider history of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined in his work.

3. Education and Early Influences

Horkheimer’s educational path deviated from the standard academic route, yet it provided him with a dense mix of philosophical and cultural influences that would later feed into critical theory.

From family business to philosophy

Initially destined to take over his father’s textile factory, Horkheimer left Gymnasium early and worked in the family firm. After World War I, however, he decided to pursue academic study, enrolling at the University of Frankfurt. This atypical trajectory—from bourgeois businessman-in-training to philosopher—has been interpreted as sharpening his sensitivity to the intertwining of economic life and intellectual production.

University training and intellectual mentors

At Frankfurt he studied under the neo-Kantian philosopher Hans Cornelius, completing a dissertation on Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1922) and a Habilitation in social philosophy. Early writings stay close to:

• Kantian and neo-Kantian epistemology, especially issues of judgment, objectivity, and the conditions of knowledge.
• Phenomenology and life-philosophy currents then circulating in German academia.

Alongside formal study, Horkheimer encountered Hegel, Marx, and Schopenhauer, as well as the emerging disciplines of sociology and psychoanalysis. Many commentators highlight the simultaneous presence of:

These strands did not yet form a unified system but prepared the way for Horkheimer’s later project: an historically conscious, interdisciplinary critique of society. Some scholars also stress the milieu of Weimar experimental culture and debates in Jewish intellectual life as additional formative contexts, though direct textual evidence for their impact on his early work is more fragmentary.

4. The Frankfurt Institute and the Birth of Critical Theory

The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), founded in 1923 and affiliated with the University of Frankfurt, became the institutional home of what came to be known as the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer’s appointment as director in 1930 marked a decisive reorientation of its agenda.

Reorganizing the Institute

Under his leadership, the Institute shifted from a primarily economic and historical focus, associated with its first director Carl Grünberg, toward an interdisciplinary program combining:

• Philosophy and social theory
• Empirical sociology and economics
• Psychoanalysis and social psychology
• Cultural and literary criticism

In his 1931 inaugural lecture, The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research, Horkheimer outlined a vision in which philosophical reflection and empirical research would mutually inform each other.

Formulation of “critical theory”

In the mid-1930s, Horkheimer’s programmatic essays, especially “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), provided a theoretical name and self-understanding for the Institute’s work. “Critical theory” designated a form of social inquiry that:

• Treated society as a historically developing totality.
• Reflected on its own social conditions and interests.
• Remained oriented to the possibility of emancipation.

The Institute’s journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, edited by Horkheimer, published studies that attempted to exemplify this approach. Scholars generally consider this period (1930–1933 in Frankfurt, continuing in exile) as the “classical” phase in which critical theory was institutionally and conceptually consolidated, even though the label “Frankfurt School” was applied only retrospectively.

5. Exile, Nazism, and the American Years

The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 forced Horkheimer, a Jewish Marxist-associated academic, to leave Germany and relocate the Institute. This experience of exile is widely seen as pivotal for the content and tone of his work.

Forced migration and institutional relocation

Horkheimer was dismissed from his chair at Frankfurt, and the Institute’s assets were frozen. After a brief period in Geneva, he moved the Institute’s base to New York City, establishing an affiliation with Columbia University. From 1934 onward, the Institute operated in exile, with Horkheimer coordinating research, publications, and funding in a radically altered environment.

Nazism and the focus on authoritarianism

Confronted with fascism in Europe and rising antisemitism in the United States, Horkheimer redirected much of the Institute’s work toward:

• Analyses of authoritarian movements and propaganda.
• Studies of antisemitism and prejudice.
• Investigations into the relationship between monopoly capitalism and fascist regimes.

Empirical projects, such as the studies later feeding into The Authoritarian Personality, were initiated or overseen during this period.

American context and theoretical shifts

Living and working in the United States exposed Horkheimer and his colleagues to:

• American mass culture, advertising, and radio.
• New opportunities and constraints for empirical social research.
• The political climate of the New Deal and, later, early Cold War anti-communism.

Many scholars argue that this context contributed to the development of the culture industry thesis and to a more pessimistic assessment of the prospects for revolutionary change. Others emphasize that exile also broadened the Institute’s empirical and methodological resources.

Horkheimer’s key works of the 1940s—especially Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Adorno) and Eclipse of Reason—were drafted or delivered in the United States, reflecting both preoccupations with European catastrophe and critical engagement with American modernity.

6. Major Works and Key Texts

Horkheimer’s corpus is relatively compact but diverse in genre, ranging from programmatic essays and lectures to aphoristic notebooks and collaborative empirical studies. The following table sketches central texts and their main foci:

Interpretive perspectives

Commentators often distinguish three partially overlapping strands:

1. Programmatic and methodological writings (1930s), which define critical theory’s aims and methods.
2. Exile-period critiques of reason and enlightenment (1940s), central to debates about rationality and modernity.
3. Late aphorisms and essays (post-1950), where religious and metaphysical themes become more pronounced.

Some interpreters stress strong continuity across these phases, arguing that concerns with suffering, domination, and the limits of rationality are present from early on. Others highlight sharper breaks, especially between the more Marxist orientation of the 1930s and the darker, quasi-metaphysical tone of the post-war writings. The collaborative character of several works, particularly Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Authoritarian Personality, also raises ongoing questions about the precise distribution of authorship and the relationship between Horkheimer’s contributions and those of his colleagues.

7. Core Philosophy: Traditional vs. Critical Theory

Horkheimer’s influential distinction between “traditional” and “critical” theory, formulated most explicitly in his 1937 essay of that title, provides a central framework for his philosophy.

Traditional theory

For Horkheimer, traditional theory models itself on the natural sciences. It assumes:

• Knowledge as a neutral representation of an independent reality.
• A sharp separation between theoretical activity and social practice.
• A subject–object relationship in which the theorist stands outside society.

He associates this posture with certain strands of positivism, neo-Kantianism, and mainstream economics. Proponents of this self-understanding see it as guaranteeing objectivity; Horkheimer argues that it obscures the historical and social conditions under which knowledge is produced.

Critical theory

By contrast, critical theory:

• Treats society as a historically developing totality shaped by relations of domination.
• Sees theory and theorists as themselves embedded in these relations.
• Aims not merely to describe but to criticize and potentially transform society.

Horkheimer links this approach to Marx’s critique of political economy, but broadens it to include culture, law, and psychology. Critical theory employs immanent critique, exposing contradictions between a society’s professed ideals (e.g., freedom, equality) and its actual institutions.

Some readers interpret critical theory as a normatively grounded successor to Marxism; others emphasize its skepticism and self-reflexivity, seeing it as a more open-ended project. Debates also concern whether Horkheimer provides sufficient justification for the normative standpoint from which critique is conducted, an issue that later Frankfurt School figures would revisit.

8. Reason, Enlightenment, and Instrumental Rationality

A central axis of Horkheimer’s philosophy is his analysis of reason and the historical project of Enlightenment. He maintains that modern rationality contains a self-destructive tendency that transforms it into an instrument of domination.

Objective vs. subjective/instrumental reason

In Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer distinguishes:

• Objective reason, which refers to a conception of reason as embodying substantive norms and a rational order of ends. It can evaluate not only means but also goals.
• Subjective or instrumental reason, which restricts rationality to the efficient calculation of means to given ends, without questioning the ends themselves.

He argues that in modern societies, subjective/instrumental reason has largely displaced objective reason, leading to a situation where the rationality of actions is gauged solely by success, utility, or profitability.

Dialectic of Enlightenment

In Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Adorno), this analysis is radicalized into the thesis of a “dialectic of enlightenment”. Enlightenment, understood as the drive to demythologize and master nature, is said to:

• Undermine traditional myths and authorities.
• But simultaneously generate new forms of myth-like domination, including bureaucratic control, technological rationalization, and mass culture.

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“What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men.”

— Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Interpretations diverge on the scope of this critique. Some see it as condemning reason as such; others argue that Horkheimer targets only a historically specific instrumentalization of reason, implying the possibility of a non-dominating rationality. Critics have charged the theory with determinism or cultural pessimism, while defenders view it as an anticipatory analysis of technocratic and bureaucratic modernity.

9. Metaphysics, Religion, and the Wholly Other

Alongside his critique of enlightenment and secular rationality, Horkheimer developed a complex, often controversial relationship to metaphysics and religion, especially in his later work.

Suspicion of positive metaphysics

Early and mid-period writings tend to reject traditional metaphysics as speculative and authoritarian. Horkheimer aligns with a broadly critical, post-Kantian stance that questions claims to know transcendent realities. He also criticizes institutional religions for their historical complicity with domination, even as they articulate ideals of justice and redemption.

Negative metaphysics and the “wholly Other”

In his later essays and interviews, however, Horkheimer introduces the notion of the “wholly Other” (das ganz Andere). This is not presented as a knowable entity but as a negative, non-dogmatic name for:

• A horizon of justice beyond existing social conditions.
• The memory of suffering and the longing that wrongs might not be ultimate.

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“If by religion we understand the longing for the wholly Other, then it is true that we are religious.”

— Horkheimer, late interview

Some interpreters describe this as a form of negative theology, a way to preserve moral protest without endorsing concrete religious doctrines. Others see it as a quasi-metaphysical residue that sits uneasily with his earlier materialist commitments.

Relation to Judaism and Christianity

Commentators have debated how far Horkheimer’s reflections draw on Jewish and Christian theological motifs:

• Certain readings emphasize affinities with Jewish messianism and its emphasis on remembrance and redemption.
• Others highlight parallels with Christian negative theology and the critique of idolatry.

There is no consensus on whether Horkheimer underwent a “religious turn” or whether these motifs are better understood as metaphors for a secular utopian aspiration that critical theory cannot fully ground yet refuses to abandon.

10. Epistemology and the Critique of Positivism

Horkheimer’s epistemology is closely bound to his social theory. He challenges epistemic models that present knowledge as detached from social life and criticizes positivism for masking its own historical and practical interests.

Knowledge as socially mediated

Drawing on Marx and German idealism, Horkheimer maintains that:

• Forms of knowledge are historically and socially conditioned.
• The separation between knower and known is itself a social product.
• Theory is entwined with praxis, even when it denies this entanglement.

In “Traditional and Critical Theory,” he argues that social theory must reflect on its own conditions of possibility, including the class structure, institutions, and cultural forms that shape both problems and methods.

Critique of positivism

Horkheimer associates positivism with:

• A focus on observable facts and regularities.
• The exclusion of value judgments and metaphysical questions.
• An ideal of neutrality and technical control.

He contends that this stance:

• Reduces reason to instrumental calculation.
• Treats existing social arrangements as given, thereby reinforcing them.
• Obscures the role of power, interests, and ideology in the production of knowledge.

Some defenders of positivism argue that Horkheimer caricatures its complexity and underestimates its self-corrective capacities. Later sociologists and philosophers have also questioned whether his own position risks relativism. Supporters of Horkheimer, in turn, claim that his critique anticipated debates over the social construction of knowledge, ideology, and the politics of expertise.

11. Ethics, Suffering, and the Possibility of Emancipation

Horkheimer does not present a systematic ethical theory, yet concerns about suffering, justice, and emancipation permeate his work.

Ethics without foundations?

Given his suspicion of traditional metaphysics and skepticism toward comprehensive ethical systems, Horkheimer is often read as advocating a negative ethics. Instead of positive moral blueprints, he emphasizes:

• The experience and memory of suffering.
• The duty to prevent the recurrence of atrocities such as fascism and the Holocaust.
• A refusal to treat existing injustice as natural or necessary.

Some interpreters liken this to an ethics of solidarity with the victims of history, grounded in sensibility to pain rather than in a formal moral law.

Emancipation and its ambiguities

In his early programmatic texts, Horkheimer speaks of critical theory’s commitment to emancipation—the transformation of social relations that perpetuate domination, exploitation, and reification. However, he avoids specifying a detailed positive image of a just society, in part to resist repeating the dogmatism he criticizes.

Over time, especially after World War II, his tone grows more pessimistic about:

• The feasibility of radical social transformation.
• The capacity of late capitalist societies to absorb critique.

Yet he maintains that the idea of emancipation cannot be relinquished without betraying the victims whose suffering motivated critique in the first place.

Debates over normativity

A major line of interpretation concerns the normative basis of Horkheimer’s ethics:

• Some scholars argue that he implicitly relies on remnants of objective reason or on universalizable interests in freedom and happiness.
• Others think his grounding is more affective and historical, rooted in concrete experiences of injustice and in the “longing for the wholly Other.”
• Critics suggest that his reluctance to articulate positive norms leaves critical theory vulnerable to charges of moral ambiguity or relativism.

These tensions later shaped attempts by subsequent Frankfurt School thinkers to reconstruct a more explicit normative framework.

12. Social Psychology and the Authoritarian Personality

Horkheimer played a key role in integrating social psychology, particularly psychoanalysis, into critical theory’s analysis of modern society. This integration culminated institutionally in the large-scale empirical study published as The Authoritarian Personality (1950).

Theoretical motivation

Horkheimer and his colleagues argued that understanding fascism and antisemitism required more than economic or institutional analysis. They posited that:

• Certain character structures—marked by submission to authority, aggression toward out-groups, and conventionalism—predispose individuals to authoritarian movements.
• These structures are shaped by family dynamics, cultural patterns, and socialization processes in modern capitalist societies.

The Authoritarian Personality study

The research project, co-initiated and supervised by Horkheimer, and written primarily by Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, combined:

• Questionnaires and scales (most famously, the F-scale for fascist potential).
• Clinical interviews.
• Statistical analyses.

It aimed to correlate certain personality traits with prejudiced and fascist attitudes.

Reception and critique

The study has been both influential and controversial:

• Supporters praise it as a pioneering attempt to synthesize psychoanalytic theory and empirical research in the service of diagnosing authoritarian tendencies.
• Critics have questioned its sampling methods, potential response biases, and the cultural specificity of the traits measured.
• Some argue that it pathologizes conservative attitudes; others maintain that it offers a crucial warning about latent authoritarianism in democratic societies.

Within Horkheimer’s broader project, social psychology serves to explain how macro-structures of domination are reproduced at the level of individual psyches and everyday behavior, thereby complementing economic and institutional analyses.

13. Culture Industry, Mass Society, and Aesthetics

Horkheimer, especially in collaboration with Adorno, devoted substantial attention to culture as a key medium through which modern domination is reproduced. Their analysis of the culture industry has been particularly influential.

The culture industry thesis

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, they argue that under monopoly capitalism, culture is transformed into an industry:

• Cultural products (films, radio programs, popular music) are standardized and mass-produced.
• Audiences are segmented and managed as consumers.
• Entertainment is organized to maintain passivity and conformity.

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“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises.”

— Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

The term “culture industry” contrasts with notions of “mass culture” or “popular culture” by stressing deliberate production and control rather than spontaneous collective creativity.

Mass society and individual autonomy

Horkheimer contends that in mass society, individuals are increasingly shaped by media and cultural consumption:

• Preferences and identities are molded by standardized offerings.
• The distinction between art and advertising, information and propaganda, becomes blurred.
• Space for critical reflection shrinks, contributing to the emergence of a “totally administered world.”

Aesthetics and autonomous art

Despite this critique, Horkheimer and Adorno retain a complex appreciation for autonomous art—art that resists straightforward integration into commodity circuits—as a site where contradictions of society can be negatively revealed. Interpretations differ on how central this aesthetic dimension is for Horkheimer himself, compared to Adorno, but many scholars see him as sharing the view that:

• Certain modernist or difficult artworks preserve a non-reconciled stance.
• Aesthetic experience can keep alive the possibility of critique and imagination of other forms of life.

Critics of the culture industry thesis argue that it underestimates audience agency and the diversity of cultural production. Others credit it with anticipating contemporary analyses of media conglomerates, branding, and the commodification of everyday life.

14. Late Thought: Pessimism and Negative Theology

Horkheimer’s post-war writings, particularly those collected in Dawn & Decline and related essays, are often characterized by a tone of pessimism and the emergence of a negative-theological vocabulary.

Growing pessimism

Returning to West Germany in the 1950s, Horkheimer observed:

• Rapid economic growth and consumerism.
• Political stabilization along liberal-democratic lines.
• The intensification of bureaucratic administration and Cold War tensions.

He increasingly doubted the likelihood of radical transformation and spoke of a world in which critical impulses were more thoroughly absorbed by existing structures. Some commentators interpret this as a departure from his earlier Marxist hopes; others argue that the pessimism was already present and merely intensified by historical disappointments.

Turn to negative theology

In this context, Horkheimer’s references to the “wholly Other” and to a non-dogmatic religiosity become more frequent. This has been described as negative theology because:

• It denies the possibility of positive knowledge about God or ultimate reality.
• It uses religious language to express longing, non-identity, and protest against injustice rather than to assert doctrines.

He treats this stance as a way of safeguarding a moral transcendence over existing reality without reintroducing traditional metaphysical systems.

Debates over continuity and change

Scholars disagree about how to interpret this late phase:

• Some see it as a conservative turn, noting Horkheimer’s increasing distance from radical politics and his focus on preserving limited spaces of decency within an unchangeable world.
• Others emphasize deep continuities, arguing that his late negative theology is another form of the earlier commitment to the memory of suffering and an unattainable but necessary utopian horizon.
• A further line of critique holds that the increasing pessimism risks paralyzing praxis, while sympathizers suggest that it honestly registers the resilience of domination in advanced capitalist societies.

These debates make Horkheimer’s late thought a key reference point for discussions about the possibilities and limits of critical theory after historical catastrophes and failed emancipatory projects.

15. Legacy and Historical Significance

Horkheimer’s legacy is closely tied to the development of the Frankfurt School and the broader trajectory of critical theory, but it also extends across multiple disciplines.

Influence on later critical theory

Horkheimer’s conceptualization of critical theory and his analyses of instrumental reason, authoritarianism, and the culture industry formed a starting point for later Frankfurt School figures such as Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and others. They often:

• Retain his insistence on the self-reflexivity and emancipatory orientation of social theory.
• Criticize or revise his diagnosis of reason, seeking more constructive accounts (e.g., communicative rationality, recognition).

Thus his work functions both as a foundational resource and as a foil against which subsequent theories define themselves.

Interdisciplinary and global impact

Beyond philosophy and social theory, Horkheimer’s ideas have influenced:

• Sociology: analyses of domination, ideology, and the social construction of knowledge.
• Political theory: critiques of technocracy, authoritarianism, and depoliticization.
• Cultural and media studies: debates on mass culture, commodification, and audience agency.
• Psychology: especially in discussions of authoritarianism and prejudice.

His concepts—critical theory, instrumental reason, culture industry, authoritarian personality—have entered standard vocabularies, though often detached from their original contexts.

Contested evaluations

Assessments of Horkheimer’s historical significance diverge:

• Some regard him as a central figure of Western Marxism, whose fusion of Marx, Freud, and Weber provided powerful tools for analyzing advanced capitalism.
• Others criticize his alleged pessimism, arguing that it underestimates possibilities for democratic renewal and social movements.
• Debates persist over whether his late religious and metaphysical motifs enrich or undermine the critical project he helped inaugurate.

Despite such controversies, Horkheimer is broadly recognized as a key twentieth-century thinker who reshaped understandings of reason, modernity, and the role of theory in society, and whose work continues to inform contemporary critical and emancipatory thought.