Max Horkheimer facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Max Horkheimer
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Horkheimer in Heidelberg in 1964
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| Born | 14 February 1895 Zuffenhausen (now Stuttgart), Württemberg, German Empire
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| Died | 7 July 1973 (aged 78) |
| Nationality | German, American |
| Era | 20th century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy, Frankfurt School critical theory, Western Marxism |
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Main interests
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Social theory, Counter-Enlightenment |
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Notable ideas
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Critical theory as opposed to traditional theory, culture industry, authoritarian personality, eclipse of reason, critique of instrumental reason |
Max Horkheimer (born February 14, 1895 – died July 7, 1973) was a German thinker, a philosopher and sociologist. He is best known for his ideas on "critical theory" as part of a group called the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer looked at big problems like authoritarianism (when leaders have too much power), militarism (when a country focuses too much on its military), money troubles, environmental issues, and how mass culture (like popular movies and music) can sometimes make people less thoughtful.
He used the idea of how history shapes our thinking to build his critical theory. Some of his most important books are Eclipse of Reason (1947), Between Philosophy and Social Science (1930–1938), and Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which he wrote with Theodor Adorno. Through his leadership at the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer helped many other important works and ideas come to life.
Contents
Max Horkheimer's Life Story
Early Years and Family
Max Horkheimer was born on February 14, 1895. He was the only son of Moritz and Babetta Horkheimer. His family was wealthy and followed the Orthodox Jewish faith. Max's father was a very successful businessman. He owned several textile factories in Zuffenhausen, a part of Stuttgart, Germany, where Max was born. Moritz hoped that Max would take over the family business one day.
In 1910, Max left school to work in his family's factories. He eventually became a junior manager. During this time, he met two people who would be very important in his life. One was Friedrich Pollock, who became a close friend and academic partner. The other was Rose Riekher, his father's personal secretary. Rose was eight years older than Max, a Christian, and from a less wealthy background. Max's father did not approve of their relationship. However, Max and Rose (whom he called "Maidon") married in 1926 and stayed together until her death in 1969.
Max's career in manufacturing ended in 1917. His plans to take over the family business were stopped when he was called to serve in World War I. But Horkheimer did not have to serve in the military because he was rejected for health reasons.
Education and Studies
In the spring of 1919, after being medically rejected from the army, Horkheimer started studying at Munich University. While living in Munich, he was mistakenly arrested and put in prison. People thought he was a revolutionary writer named Ernst Toller.
After he was released, Horkheimer moved to Frankfurt am Main. There, he studied philosophy and psychology with a respected professor named Hans Cornelius. He also met Theodor Adorno, who was a few years younger than him. They became lifelong friends and worked together on many projects. Horkheimer first tried to write about gestalt psychology for his doctorate, but it didn't work out. With Cornelius's help, he finished his PhD in philosophy. His 78-page paper was called The Antinomy of Teleological Judgment.
In 1925, Horkheimer completed another important paper. It was titled Kant's Critique of Judgment as Mediation between Practical and Theoretical Philosophy. This paper allowed him to become a university lecturer. Here, he also reconnected with Friedrich Pollock, who would become his colleague. The next year, Max became a Privatdozent (an unsalaried lecturer). Soon after, in 1926, he married Rose Riekher.
Leading the Institute for Social Research
In 1926, Horkheimer was a lecturer in Frankfurt. In 1930, he became a professor of philosophy at Frankfurt University. In the same year, the Institute for Social Research needed a new director. Horkheimer was chosen for the job. The Institute, also known as the Frankfurt School, was started by Felix Weil. He used his family money to support his ideas about social change. Pollock and Horkheimer were involved with the Institute from its early days.
Horkheimer worked to make the Institute a serious academic center. As director, he changed it from a strict Marxist school to a place for "critical social research." The next year, the Institute started publishing its own journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, with Horkheimer as the editor.
Horkheimer guided the Institute to focus on new research. He suggested studying specific social groups, especially the working class. The goal was to understand how history and reason are connected. The Institute also combined the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. They tried to link together the different ways of thinking from historical materialism (Marx's ideas about society's development) and psychoanalysis (Freud's ideas about the mind).
Around 1930, the Nazi party became very powerful in Germany. Horkheimer and his colleagues began to plan to move the Institute out of Germany. The new Nazi government took away Horkheimer's right to teach. This was because the Institute's ideas were based on Marx, and many of its members were Jewish. When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, the Institute had to close its doors in Germany.
Horkheimer first moved to Geneva, Switzerland. The next year, he went to New York City. There, he met with the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler. They talked about Columbia hosting the Institute. To Horkheimer's surprise, the president agreed to let the Institute move there and even offered Horkheimer a building. In July 1934, Horkheimer accepted Columbia's offer.
In 1940, Horkheimer became an American citizen. He moved to Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, California. There, he worked with Adorno to write Dialectic of Enlightenment. In 1942, Horkheimer became the director of the Scientific Division of the American Jewish Committee. In this role, he helped start a series of studies called "Studies in Prejudice." These were published in 1949 and 1950. The most important of these was The Authoritarian Personality. This study looked at social psychology and built on earlier work by the Institute.
In the years that followed, Horkheimer did not publish many new books. However, he continued to edit Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. In 1949, he returned to Frankfurt, Germany. The Institute for Social Research reopened in 1950. From 1951 to 1953, Horkheimer was the head of the University of Frankfurt. In 1953, he stepped down as director of the Institute. Adorno then became the new director.
Later Life and Contributions
Horkheimer continued to teach at the university until he retired in the mid-1960s. In 1953, he received the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt. Later, he was made an honorary citizen of Frankfurt for life. He visited the United States again in 1954 and 1959. During these visits, he was a frequent guest professor at the University of Chicago.
Max Horkheimer remained an important thinker until his death in Nuremberg in 1973. With the help of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and others, he developed "Critical Theory." This theory has become one of the most important social ideas of the twentieth century.
Max Horkheimer's Ideas
Horkheimer's work often explored how feelings (especially suffering) connect with ideas (which he saw as ways to guide our actions). He looked closely at how social structures, groups, and individual lives are linked. He believed that we are shaped by the many products and ideas we see in the world. Horkheimer also worked with other famous thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin.
Understanding Critical Theory
Through critical theory, Horkheimer tried to bring new life to ways of criticizing society and culture. He talked about problems like authoritarianism, militarism, economic issues, environmental crises, and the lack of depth in popular culture. Horkheimer helped create critical theory by mixing different viewpoints. He combined ideas from radical Marxism with a more "pessimistic Jewish transcendentalism."
He developed his critical theory by looking at his own wealth. He saw the big difference between rich people and poor people. This critical theory looked forward to a better future for society. It focused on forces that could move society toward fair systems. These systems would ensure a truly free and just life for everyone. He believed it was important to "examine the entire material and spiritual culture of mankind" to change society completely. Horkheimer wanted to help the working class regain their power. This would help them resist the pull of fascism (a type of strict, controlling government).
Horkheimer said that a "rationally organized society that regulates its own existence" was needed. This society should also be able to "satisfy common needs." To do this, critical theory aimed for a full understanding of history and knowledge. It tried to "critique bourgeois society" (the middle-class society). It also tried to find the "utopian content" (the ideal parts) within common ways of thinking. Most importantly, critical theory wanted to create a critical way of looking at all social practices.
Important Writings
Between Philosophy and Social Science
The book "Between Philosophy and Social Science" was published between 1930 and 1938. This was when the Frankfurt School moved from Frankfurt to Geneva and then to Columbia University. The book included essays like "Materialism and Morality" and "The Present Situation of Moral Philosophy." It also had "On the Problem of Truth" and "Egoism and the Freedom Movement." Other essays were "History and Psychology" and "A New Concept of Ideology."
These essays were Horkheimer's way of trying to "remove the individual from mass culture." He wanted philosophy to help people avoid being controlled by everything becoming a product to buy. Horkheimer cared deeply about the individual person. He wrote that when we talk about an individual, we mean more than just a person's physical existence. We mean their awareness of being a unique human being. This includes knowing who they are.
"The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks for an Institute of Social Research" was in this book. It was also Horkheimer's first speech as director of the Frankfurt School. In this speech, he connected economic groups to the real-life struggles and challenges people face. Horkheimer often talked about human struggle. He used this example because it was a topic he understood well.
"Egoism and Freedom Movements" and "Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History" are the longest essays. The first looks at the ideas of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Vico. The second discusses how the middle class gained control. In "Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History," Horkheimer explained what he learned from the middle class's rise to power. He also shared what he thought was worth keeping from their ideas.
The book also sees the individual as the "troubled center of philosophy." Horkheimer said that "there is no formula that defines the relationship among individuals, society and nature for all time." To understand the individual better, Horkheimer included two studies. One was about the philosopher Montaigne, and the other was about himself.
Eclipse of Reason
Horkheimer's book, Eclipse of Reason, was started in 1941 and published in 1947. It has five parts: Means and Ends, Conflicting Panaceas, The Revolt of Nature, The Rise and Decline of the Individual, and On the Concept of Philosophy. The book focuses on the idea of "reason" in the history of Western philosophy. Horkheimer believed that true reason can only grow where people can think freely and critically. He also linked a certain type of reason, called "instrumental reason," with the rise of fascism.
He explained three types of reason: objective, subjective, and instrumental reason. He believed we have moved from objective reason to subjective and then to instrumental reason. Objective reason deals with universal truths. It says an action is either right or wrong. It's a clear idea that requires specific ways of behaving. Here, the focus is on the goals, not just the ways to reach them.
Subjective reason is a more abstract idea. It focuses mainly on the ways to achieve something. The goal's purpose doesn't matter; it only serves the person's own aims, usually for self-improvement or survival. To be "reasonable" here means to be good for a certain purpose, to be "good for something else." This type of reason makes everyone conform and easily creates ideology (a set of beliefs). In instrumental reason, the only important thing is how useful or purposeful something is. This makes the idea of truth depend only on what someone prefers.
Because subjective and instrumental reason are so strong, a society's ideals, like democratic ideals, depend on what people "want" instead of on objective truths. Horkheimer wrote, "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 knew that objective reason comes from the Greek word "Logos" (meaning reason). He concluded, "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." This means that if we want to be free from fear and old beliefs, we must question what we now call "reason."
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno worked together to publish Dialectic of Enlightenment. It first came out in 1944. The idea for this book came when Horkheimer and Adorno had to leave Germany because of Hitler and go to New York. In America, they "absorbed the popular culture." They thought it was a type of totalitarianism (a system where the government has total control). The main idea of Dialectic of Enlightenment was to criticize how "enlightenment" (the idea of using reason to improve society) was destroying itself.
The book criticized popular culture. They saw it as "the product of a culture industry whose goal was to stupefy the masses." This industry made endless copies of the same things. Horkheimer and Adorno argued that these mass-produced products only seem to change over time. They said these products were made very standard. This was to help people understand and enjoy them with little effort. They wrote, "the result is a constant reproduction of the same thing." However, they also explained how small differences were added to products. This was called "pseudo-individuality." It was done to make consumers keep coming back for more. They argued that small differences within products of the same type were acceptable.
The similar patterns in popular culture (like films, songs, and radio shows) all had the same main message. This message was about "the necessity of obedience of the masses to the social hierarchy in place in advanced capitalist societies." These products appealed to many people and encouraged them to fit in. In return, capitalism (an economic system where private businesses own most things) stayed powerful. Buyers kept buying from the industry. This was dangerous because people started to believe that technology was making them free.
To support their idea, Horkheimer and Adorno suggested a solution. They said we should not just think about how "things" are related. We should also think about our own thinking. In other words, technology often lacks "self-reflexivity" (the ability to think about itself). However, Horkheimer and Adorno believed that art was different. They thought art "is an open-ended system with no fixed rules." Because of this, art could not be controlled by the industry.
Selected Works by Max Horkheimer
- 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.
See also
In Spanish: Max Horkheimer para niños
