Max Horkheimer ( HORK-hy-mər; German: [ˈhɔɐ̯kˌhaɪmɐ]; 14 February 1895 – 7 July 1973) 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 (1947), Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947, with Theodor W. Adorno), 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 (Dawn and Decline). As director of the institute, Horkheimer planned, supported, and made possible many other significant works.
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 military service, being rejected on medical grounds.
In the spring of 1919, after failing an army physical, Horkheimer enrolled at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. 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 (Zur Antinomie der teleologischen Urteilskraft). In 1925, Horkheimer was habilitated with a dissertation entitled Kant's Critique of Judgment as Mediation between Practical and Theoretical Philosophy (Über Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft als Bindeglied zwischen theoretischer und praktischer Philosophie). 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 (specifically the working class) 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.
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.
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.