Horkheimer, Max b. February 14, 1895; Stuttgart- Zuffausen,Wurttemberg d.July 7, 1973; Nurnberg, Bavaria
German philosopher and sociologist who was a cofounder of the Frankfurt School and who presided over the exiled Institute of Social Research in the United States. Horkheimer became the director of the Institute of Social Research in 1931.
He remained its general manager for nineteen years—even after it was relocated to Geneva and then, in 1935, to New York City, where it became affiliated with Columbia University, until it moved back to Frankfurt am Main in 1950. From 1932 until 1939 he also served as the editor of the institute’s journal Zeitschrift fur Sozial- forschung (Journal for Social Research); from 1940 until 1942 he continued as editor of the journal’s successor, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science.While in Germany, Horkheimer studied psychology and philosophy at the universities in Munich, Freiburg im Breisgau, and Frankfurt am Main from 1919 until 1922. In 1925 he finished his second doctoral dissertation (Habilitation) with a thesis on “Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft als Bindeglied zwischen theoretischer und praktischer Philosophie” (Kant’s Critique of Judgment as the Connective Element between Theoretical and Practical Philosophy). After becoming a lecturer at Frankfurt University in 1926, he was appointed a professor for social philosophy in 1930.
In 1933 Horkheimer emigrated first to Switzerland and then to the United States. At Columbia University, which became a safe haven for him, he set up a new home for the Institute of Social Research. During a brief visit to Europe in 1937, he encountered Walter Benjamin. In 1940 Horkheimer moved to California, where he collaborated with Theodor W. Adorno on their Dialektik der Aufklarung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) between 1940 and 1944. In 1943 Horkheimer accepted an offer to become the director of the research department of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), an organization founded in 1906 as a response to the pogroms in tsarist Russia that campaigns to enhance human rights and fundamental freedoms by using research, strategic planning, and social as well as political action to reduce intolerance and discrimination, at its headquarters in New York City.
There, he was put in charge of a comprehensive research project (from 1943 until 1949) on antisemitism and prejudice in light of the frightening and dehumanizing events in his native Germany. A work in five volumes titled Studies in Prejudice with a wealth of information published by the AJC was the outcome. In 1949, however, Horkheimer returned to West Germany, where he was appointed professor of social philosophy at Frankfurt University and from 1954 to 1959 president of the university.Horkheimer outlined his theoretical approach in his programmatic essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), in which he made the case for integrating philosophy and social science and for developing a relationship of integrity between critical theory and political science. This first stage in his thinking is characterized by a positive utopianism and optimism toward the possibility of a revolutionary change. However, in his second stage of thinking, Horkheimer seems to have lost hope that his vision would ever be realized; his later writings contain evidence of the utmost difficulty and impossibility of reaching the original goal. The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) sharply critiqued “enlightened” reason and Western rationality. This publication manifests a negative utopianism and a critique of Karl Marx and orthodox Marxism. This shift was caused by Horkheimer’s move from Marx to Arthur Schopenhauer and from revolution to a commitment to education. After World War II, Hork- heimer’s view of society became even more pessimistic, due to the influence of the war experience and the Holocaust. The conceptual possibilities of the Enlightenment dissolved into instrumental rationality instead of the tradition of objective reason. Instrumental rationality was entirely devoted to the calculation of relating means to ends, which were usually unquestioned, and to pure commercialism. Within this context of power relations and groups, life becomes a mission and within a dialogical setting, the struggle over self-constitution and rearticulation of identity, knowledge, and intersubjectivity becomes concrete—even within a completely constructed and controlled reality.
Claudia A. Becker
See also Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund;
Antisemitism; Frankfurt School
References and Further Reading
Benhabib, Seyla, ed. On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1993.
Gumnior, Helmut. Max Horkheimer: Mit Selbstzeugnissen in Bilddokumenten, dargestellt von Helmut Gumnior und Rudolf Ringguth. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1997.
Loffler-Erxleben, Barbara. Max Horkheimer zwischen Sozialphilosophie und empirischer Sozialforschung. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1999.
Sattler, Dieter. Max Horkheimer als Moralphilosoph: Studie zur Kritischen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1996.
Wiggershaus, Rolf. Max Horkheimer zur Einfuhrung. Hamburg: Junius, 1998.