Critical theory
Traditional theory describes society as a given object; critical theory treats it as a human product to be changed, and theory itself is part of emancipatory practice.
The Twentieth Century to Today · 1895 – 1973
Max Horkheimer
霍克海默
Founder of critical theory and organiser of the Frankfurt School: Enlightenment turns into its opposite, reason becomes instrumental, and critical theory keeps hope for emancipation alive.
Whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.
Source: The Jews and Europe (1939)
Horkheimer was the only son of a Jewish textile manufacturer in Stuttgart who meant him to inherit the factory and took him out of school at sixteen to work there; contact with the workers and reading Schopenhauer made him a rebel. Called up in the First World War, he entered university afterwards against his father's wishes, studying psychology and philosophy at Munich and Frankfurt, taking his doctorate in 1922 on Kant's Critique of Judgement and his habilitation in 1925.
In 1930 he became director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, founded with a merchant's son's money to study Marxism, and changed its course: no longer orthodox political economy but interdisciplinary work in philosophy, sociology, psychology and economics, supplementing Marx with Freud to ask why the working class had not made its revolution. His inaugural lecture of 1931 and Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) defined the programme. The Nazis closed the Institute in 1933, but he had already moved its funds abroad, first to Geneva and then to Columbia University in New York.
In American exile he and Adorno moved to Los Angeles and completed Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, formally published in 1947. Its thesis: Enlightenment aimed to free people from fear and make them masters, and produced new barbarism instead. Reason was from the start an instrument for dominating nature, and domination of nature requires domination of people; myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth; the culture industry tames the masses with entertainment; antisemitism is the eruption of this logic. Eclipse of Reason the same year framed the diagnosis as the victory of 'instrumental' over 'objective' reason.
He returned to Frankfurt in 1949 to rebuild the Institute, became rector of the university in 1951, the first Jewish rector in post-war Germany, and critical theory became a central force of West German intellectual life, with Habermas as his assistant. In old age he grew conservative and pessimistic, turning to Schopenhauer and to a longing for the 'wholly Other', opposed the student movement's use of his early writings, and for a time refused to have them reprinted. He died in 1973 and is buried in the Jewish cemetery at Bern.
Key Ideas
The dialectic of Enlightenment
Enlightenment sought to escape myth through reason, but reason became an instrument of domination and returned to the barbarism it fled. Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth.
Instrumental reason
Reason no longer asks whether ends are right, only whether means are efficient. When reason is merely instrumental, any end can be pursued rationally, including the worst.
The culture industry
Film, radio and magazines turn culture into standardised commodities, and the freedom they offer the masses is the freedom to choose what is always the same.
Longing for the wholly Other
Late in life he said the impulse of critical theory was a theological longing: that the murderer should not finally triumph over the innocent victim.
Influenced by
- Karl Marx
He broadened Marx's critique of political economy into a 'critical theory' of society as a whole, opposed to 'traditional theory' that merely describes what is.
- Immanuel Kant
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Arthur Schopenhauer
He read Schopenhauer as a boy and returned to him in old age: compassion for suffering and doubt about progress were the roots of his departure from orthodox Marxism.
- Theodor W. Adorno
Their collaboration ran from the 1930s to his death; Dialectic of Enlightenment bears both names, and he said their thoughts could no longer be separated.