Max Horkheimer

The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research began as a Marxist study group that Felix Weil, using his inheritance, set up to support leftist scholarship. It was founded in 1923 with money from Hermann Weil and his son Felix and formally opened in 1924 under the Austrian Marxist scholar Carl Grünberg. When Grünberg soon fell ill, Horkheimer, appointed professor of social philosophy at the University of Frankfurt in July 1930, became the Institute’s director that October.

In his inaugural lecture of 24 January 1931, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” he set out the Institute’s course: interdisciplinary research in which philosophy and the specialized sciences continuously penetrate each other. Researchers in sociology, psychology, economics, law, literary and cultural studies and political science would investigate empirical facts together, and philosophy would weave the results into a “theory of present society as a whole.” Unlike his predecessor, a scholar of the “specific discipline” of political economy, the director of the Institute ought to hold a chair in social philosophy, he said, because it was the philosopher’s job to plan and guide the interdisciplinary work. Jürgen Habermas later summed up that between 1932 and 1941 Horkheimer invested his theoretical energy in this “interdisciplinary materialism,” a “sublation of philosophy into social theory,” where sublation means not abolishing philosophy but carrying it forward at a higher level.

The vehicle for this programme was the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, which he edited from 1932, and its showpiece was the collective Studies on Authority and the Family, published in Paris in 1936, which looked for the reasons people submit to authority in the family and in the formation of character; Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse took part. The scholars of Marxist and Freudian outlook gathered around the Institute are called in the literature the “Horkheimer circle” and later the Frankfurt School.

From the start the programme was obstructed by political upheaval. When the Nazis took power in 1933, the Institute was closed, its building seized by the Gestapo, and Horkheimer lost his professorship and directorship. The Institute moved to the branch it had already opened in Geneva and then, in July 1934, to a building provided by Columbia University in New York. In exile scholars such as Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer also worked for the Institute for a time. Several historians judge, however, that the interdisciplinary programme never really integrated empirical research and theory, and that Horkheimer spent much energy explaining why they should be combined but very little explaining how. He returned to the University of Frankfurt in 1949, re-established the Institute the following year, and was rector of the university in 1951 and 1952.

“Traditional and Critical Theory,” published in exile in 1937, is the most famous and widely read of Horkheimer’s essays of the 1930s. It is often called “programmatic” because it sums up the philosophy and method behind the Institute’s work, and it is where the Institute’s theory acquired the name critical theory; until then Horkheimer had called his position “materialism.”

The essay sets two kinds of theory against each other. “Traditional theory,” as in René Descartes’s Discourse on Method, builds a system of logically connected propositions and fits it to empirical facts; natural science is its model. Horkheimer mockingly calls the traditional theorist “the savant.” Such theorists fail to see the society in which their work takes place, for “bringing hypotheses to bear on facts is an activity that goes on, ultimately, not in the savant’s head but in industry”: the capitalist structure of the economy decides what is researched and what the results are used for. Traditional theory misses the suffering this structure causes and the complicity of science in that oppression. Relying on a formal logic that files facts under universal concepts as “classes and instances,” it also locks the actual shape of society into a rigid frame.

“Critical theory” takes Marx’s critique of political economy as its model. It is “a human activity which has society itself for its object.” It deliberately examines how theory is embedded in a particular historical and social setting, and it criticizes that setting to serve emancipation. Its starting point is to grasp the meaning of the suffering of the oppressed and develop it into a coherent critique of existing society. The critical theorist’s real function emerges, Horkheimer wrote, when the presentation of social contradictions is not merely an expression of the historical situation but a force within it that stimulates change.

Yet the essay also shows the optimism of the early 1930s waning. “Even the situation of the proletariat is no guarantee of correct knowledge,” Horkheimer wrote, and he described the critical theorist’s task as reducing the tension between his own insight and the oppressed humanity in whose service he thinks: the oppressed strive for happiness but do not know how to reach it, so the theorist must help bring them to critical consciousness. He also warned that the commodity economy, after first ushering in progress and enormously extending human control over nature, finally hinders further development and drives humanity into “a new barbarism.” This theme carried over into the 1940s, into Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason. In the latter he warned that a reason which asks only about means to given ends, never about the ends themselves, turns technology into an end in itself and makes people slaves of their instruments. Jürgen Habermas chose “Traditional and Critical Theory” as the starting point of his inaugural lecture at Frankfurt in 1965, “Knowledge and Human Interests.”