Max Horkheimer  (14 February 1895 – 7 July 1973) was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research.

Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework. This became the foundation of critical theory. His most important works include Eclipse of Reason (1947), Between Philosophy and Social Science (1930–1938) and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, supported and made other significant works possible.

Biography

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 (whom Max called "Maidon") 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.

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 the respectable 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). Here, he met Friedrich Pollock, who would be his colleague at the Institute of Social Research. The following year, Max was appointed Privatdozent. Shortly after, in 1926, Horkheimer married Rose Riekher.

In 1926, Horkheimer was an "unsalaried lecturer in Frankfurt." Shortly after, in 1930, he was promoted to professor of philosophy at Frankfurt University. In the same year, when the Institute for Social Research's (now known as Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) 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 Frankfurt 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 of 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 the 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 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 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. In 1949, he returned to Frankfurt where the Institute for Social Research reopened in 1950. Between 1951 and 1953 Horkheimer was rector of the University of Frankfurt. 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. 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.

He remained an important figure until his death in Nuremberg in 1973. Max Horkheimer with the help of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal, Otto Kirchheimer, Frederick Pollock and Neumann developed "Critical Theory". According to Larry Ray "Critical Theory" has "become one of the most influential social theories of the twentieth century".

Horkheimer's book, Eclipse of Reason, started in 1941 and published in 1947, is broken into five sections: Means and Ends, Conflicting Panaceas, The Revolt of Nature, The Rise and Decline of the Individual, and On the Concept of Philosophy. The Eclipse of Reason focuses on the concept of reason within the history of Western philosophy, which can only be fostered in an environment of free, critical thinking while also linking positivist and instrumental reason with the rise of fascism. He distinguishes between objective, subjective and instrumental reason, and states that we have moved from the former through the center and into the latter (though subjective and instrumental reason are closely connected). Objective reason deals with universal truths that dictate that an action is either right or wrong. It is a concrete concept and a force in the world that requires specific modes of behavior. The focus in the objective faculty of reason is on the ends, rather than the means. Subjective reason is an abstract concept of reason, and focuses primarily on means. Specifically, the reasonable nature of the purpose of action is irrelevant – the ends only serve the purpose of the subject (generally self-advancement or preservation). To be "reasonable" in this context is to be suited to a particular purpose, to be "good for something else". This aspect of reason is universally conforming, and easily furnishes ideology. In instrumental reason, the sole criterion of reason is its operational value or purposefulness, and with this, the idea of truth becomes contingent on mere subjective preference (hence the relation with subjective reason). Because subjective/instrumental reason rules, the ideals of a society, for example democratic ideals, become dependent on the "interests" of the people instead of being dependent on objective truths. Horkheimer writes, "Social power is today more than ever mediated by power over things. The more intense an individual's concern with power over things, the more will things dominate him, the more will he lack any genuine individual traits, and the more will his mind be transformed into an automation of formalized reason."

Horkheimer acknowledges that objective reason has its roots in Reason ("Logos" in Greek) and concludes, "If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate – in short, the emancipation from fear – then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service we can render."

Selected works

• Authority and the Family (1936)
• Traditional and Critical Theory (1937)
• Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) – with Theodor Adorno ISBN 978-0-8264-0093-2
• Eclipse of Reason (1947) (orig. 1941 "The End of Reason" Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences Vol. IX) ISBN 978-1-4437-3041-9
• Egoism and the Freedom Movement
• The Longing for the Totally Other
• Critique of Instrumental Reason (1967) ISBN 978-0-8264-0088-8
• Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1972) ISBN 978-0-8264-0083-3
• Dawn & Decline (1978) ISBN 978-0-8164-9329-6
• His collected works have been issued in German as Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte Schriften (1985–1996). 19 volumes, edited by Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.

• "The social function of philosophy", in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 8, n°3, New-York, 1939.
• "The Authoritarian State". 15 (Spring 1973). New York: Telos Press.