Max Horkheimer and the Original Paradigm of Critical Theory

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reconstructs the original paradigm of critical theory, conceived by the young Max Horkheimer at the head of an interdisciplinary group of philosophers, psychologists, economists, and literary scholars associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the interwar Weimar Republic. The young Horkheimer maintained a firm yet undogmatic commitment to a fairly orthodox interpretation of historical materialism, while his perhaps most original contribution to social theory was his and Erich Fromm’s synthesis of the Marxian critique of political economy and Freudian psychoanalysis in an account of the basic structure of monopoly capitalism and its deep-seated forces of reification and cultivation of authoritarian personality types. However, his truly lasting philosophical contribution is the idea of critical theory itself, which was first formulated as an interdisciplinary programme of dialectical ‘interpenetration’ of philosophy and social inquiry and a materialist Ideologiekritik of the distorted expressions that the truth content of bourgeois concepts and moral ideas receive in bourgeois thought. This programme informed an ambitious empirical research project into the revolutionary ‘readiness’ of the German proletariat, which proved disappointing, however, and gradually transformed into the more defensive project of explaining the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Moreover, the chapter argues that the most overlooked part of Horkheimer’s original paradigm is his attractive but underdeveloped normative idea of a ‘reasonable society’ and his conception of critical theory as itself a theory of justice, albeit distinct in important ways from bourgeois or traditional theories of justice that also predominate in the contemporary academy.