Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist best known for his role in developing critical theory as director of the Institute for Social Research, commonly associated with the Frankfurt School.
Advancing a materialist theory of reason and society, Horkheimer analyzed the rise of instrumental reason, the erosion of the concept of truth, the decline of individual autonomy, the social-psychological roots of authoritarianism, and the reproduction of domination under modern capitalism. These concerns became fundamental to critical theory.
His most influential works include Eclipse of Reason, Dialectic of Enlightenment, and a series of foundational essays written in the 1930s for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, later collected in Between Philosophy and Social Science and Critical Theory: Selected Essays. He also composed aphoristic reflections between the late 1920s and the 1960s, published posthumously as Dämmerung. As director of the Institute, Horkheimer planned, supported, and made possible many other significant works.
Biography
Early life
On 14 February 1895, Horkheimer was born the only son of Moritz and Babetta Horkheimer. Horkheimer was born into a conservative, wealthy Orthodox Jewish family. His father was a successful businessman who owned several textile factories in the Zuffenhausen district of Stuttgart, where Max was born. Moritz expected his son to follow in his footsteps and own the family business.Max was taken out of school in 1910 to work in the family business, where he eventually became a junior manager. During this period he would begin two relationships that would last for the rest of his life. First, he met Friedrich Pollock, who would later become a close academic colleague, and who would remain Max's closest friend. He also met Rose Riekher, his father's personal secretary. Eight years Max's senior, a Christian, and from a lower economic class, Riekher 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.
In 1917, his manufacturing career ended and his chances of taking over his family business were interrupted when he was drafted into World War I. However, Horkheimer avoided service, being rejected on medical grounds.
Education
In the spring of 1919, after failing an army physical, Horkheimer enrolled at Munich University. While living in Munich, he was mistaken for the revolutionary playwright Ernst Toller and arrested and imprisoned.After being released, Horkheimer moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he studied philosophy and psychology under Hans Cornelius. There, he met Theodor Adorno, several years his junior, with whom he would strike a lasting friendship and a collaborative relationship. After an abortive attempt at writing a dissertation on Gestalt psychology, Horkheimer, with Cornelius's direction, completed his doctorate in philosophy with a 78-page dissertation titled The Antinomy of Teleological Judgment. In 1925, Horkheimer was habilitated with a dissertation entitled Kant's Critique of Judgment as Mediation between Practical and Theoretical Philosophy. There, he met Friedrich Pollock, who would be his colleague at the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. The following year, Max was appointed Privatdozent. Shortly after, in 1926, Horkheimer married Rose Riekher.
Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung)
In 1926, Horkheimer was an "unsalaried lecturer in Frankfurt." Shortly after, in 1930, he was promoted to professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt am Main. In the same year, when the Institute for Social Research's directorship became vacant, after the departure of Carl Grünberg, Horkheimer was elected to the position "by means of an endowment from a wealthy businessman". The Institute had had its beginnings in a Marxist study group started by Felix Weil, a one-time student of political science at Frankfurt who used his inheritance to fund the group as a way to support his leftist academic aims. Pollock and Horkheimer were partners with Weil in the early activities of the institute.Horkheimer worked to make the Institute a purely academic enterprise. As director, he changed the institute from an orthodox Marxist school to a heterodox school for critical social research. The following year publication of the institute's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung began, with Horkheimer as its editor.
Horkheimer intellectually reoriented the institute, proposing a programme of collective research aimed at specific social groups that would highlight the problem of the relationship between history and reason. The Institute focused on integrating the views of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. The Frankfurt School attempted this by systematically hitching together the different conceptual structures of historical materialism and psychoanalysis.
During the time between Horkheimer's being named Professor of Social Philosophy and director of the Institute in 1930, the Nazi party became the second largest party in the Reichstag. In the midst of the violence surrounding the Nazis' rise, Horkheimer and his associates began to prepare for the possibility of moving the Institute out of Germany. Horkheimer's venia legendi was revoked by the new Nazi government because of the Marxian nature of the institute's ideas as well as its prominent Jewish association. When Hitler was named the Chancellor in 1933, the institute was thus forced to close its location in Germany.
He emigrated to Geneva, Switzerland, and then to New York City the following year, where Horkheimer met with president of Columbia University Nicholas Murray Butler to discuss hosting the institute. To Horkheimer's surprise, the president agreed to host the Institute in exile as well as offer Horkheimer a building for the institute. In July 1934, Horkheimer accepted an offer from Columbia University to relocate the institute to one of their buildings.
In 1940, Horkheimer received American citizenship and moved to the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles, California, where his collaboration with Adorno would yield the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In 1942, Horkheimer assumed the directorship of the Scientific Division of the American Jewish Committee. In this capacity, he helped launch and organize a series of five Studies in Prejudice, which were published in 1949 and 1950. The most important of these was the pioneering study in social psychology entitled The Authoritarian Personality, itself a methodologically advanced reworking of some of the themes treated in a collective project produced by the Institute in its first years of exile, Studies in Authority and Family.
Return to Germany
In 1949, he returned to Frankfurt, where the Institute for Social Research reopened in 1950. In the years that followed, Horkheimer did not publish much, although he continued to edit Studies in Philosophy and Social Science as a continuation of the Zeitschrift. Between 1951 and 1953 Horkheimer was rector of the University of Frankfurt am Main. In 1953, Horkheimer stepped down from director of the Institute and took on a smaller role in the institute, while Adorno became director.Horkheimer continued to teach at the university until his retirement in the mid-1960s. In 1953, he was awarded the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt, and was later named an honorary citizen of Frankfurt for life. He returned to the United States in 1954 and 1959 to lecture as a frequent visiting professor at the University of Chicago.
Personal life and death
Max and Maidon married in 1926 and remained together until her death in 1969. They moved to Montagnola, Ticino in 1957. He died after a routine examination in Nuremberg in 1973 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Bern next to his wife.In the late 1960s, Horkheimer supported Pope Paul VI's stand against artificial contraception, specifically the pill, arguing that it would lead to the end of romantic love.
Legacy
He remained an important figure until his death Max Horkheimer with the help of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Leo Löwenthal, Otto Kirchheimer, Frederick Pollock and Franz Neumann developed "Critical Theory". According to Larry Ray "Critical Theory" has "become one of the most influential social theories of the twentieth century".Thought
Horkheimer's work is marked by a concern to show the relation between affect and concepts. In that, he responded critically to what he saw as the one-sidedness of both neo-Kantianism and Lebensphilosophie. He did not think that either was wrong, but he insisted that the insights of each school on its own could not adequately contribute to the repair of social problems. Horkheimer focused on the connections between social structures, networks/subcultures and individual realities and concluded that we are affected and shaped by the proliferation of products on the marketplace. It is also important to note that Horkheimer collaborated with Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin.Critical theory
Through critical theory, a social theory focusing on critiquing and changing society, Horkheimer "attempted to revitalize radical social, and cultural criticism" and discussed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis and the poverty of mass culture. Horkheimer helped to create critical theory through a mix of radical and conservative lenses that stem from radical Marxism and end up in "pessimistic Jewish transcendentalism".He developed his critical theory by examining his own wealth while witnessing the juxtaposition of the bourgeois and the impoverished. This critical theory embraced the future possibilities of society and was preoccupied with forces which moved society toward rational institutions that would ensure a true, free, and just life. He was convinced of the need to "examine the entire material and spiritual culture of mankind" in order to transform society as a whole. Horkheimer sought to enable the working class to reclaim their power in order to resist the lure of fascism. Horkheimer stated himself that "the rationally organized society that regulates its own existence" was necessary along with a society that could "satisfy common needs". To satisfy these needs, it reached out for a total understanding of history and knowledge. Through this, critical theory develops a "critique of bourgeois society through which 'ideology critique' attempted to locate the 'utopian content' of dominant systems of thought". Above all, critical theory sought to develop a critical perspective in the discussion of all social practices.