Blackwell Reference Online

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Max Horkheimer is best known as the long-time director of the Frankfurt School and co-author of the Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Theodor W. Adorno). In the 1930s Horkheimer defined the Frankfurt School's agenda of interdisciplinary empirical research, guided the Institute through the years of exile, and succeeded in its reestablishment in Frankfurt after World War II. There is a remarkable continuity in Horkheimer's thought, which some have characterized as a Schopenhauerian Marxism. Although Schopenhauer and Marx had a great impact on Horkheimer, he was also profoundly influenced by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, the French Enlightenment philosophers, and three of his contemporaries: lifelong friend and political economist Friedrich Pollock, his university mentor Hans Cornelius, a phenomenologist philosopher with left-Christian leanings, and Theodor W. Adorno, who became his close collaborator. There were four major stages in Horkheimer's work: (1) formative years from World War I to the late 1920s, in which he sought the conceptual tools for understanding human suffering and exploitation; (2) a brief but ambitious period of setting the agenda for interdisciplinary research during the later years of the Weimar Republic; (3) the years in exile, initially in Switzerland, then in New York and California; and (4) the reestablishment of the Institute in Frankfurt after the Nazi defeat. ... log in or subscribe to read full text