Max Horkheimer And The Foundations Of The Frankfurt School

This book is the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Max Horkheimer during the early and middle phases of his life (1895–1941). Drawing on unexamined new sources, John Abromeit describes the critical details of Horkheimer's intellectual development. This study recovers and reconstructs the model of early Critical Theory that guided the work of the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s. Horkheimer is remembered primarily as the co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he wrote with Theodor W. Adorno in the early 1940s. But few people realize that Horkheimer and Adorno did not begin working together seriously until the late 1930s or that the model of Critical Theory developed by Horkheimer and Erich Fromm in the late 1920s and early 1930s differs in crucial ways from Dialectic of Enlightenment. Abromeit highlights the ways in which Horkheimer's early Critical Theory remains relevant to contemporary theoretical discussions in a wide variety of fields.

"This book provides an intellectual biography of Max Horkheimer during the early and middle phases of his life and analyzes his model of early Critical Theory"--

Originally published: New York: Wiley, c1977.

This interdisciplinary volume provides the most comprehensive evaluation, to date, of the merits and problems of Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Outstanding repersentatives of several academic disciplines assess from opposite intellectual and political positions the achievements and shortcomings of the social theory that emerged from this school of thought. The volume also includes several newly translated but previously inaccessible essays by leading critical theorists such as Georg Lukács and Jürgen Habermas.

Thomas Wheatland examines the influence of the Frankfurt School, or Horkheimer Circle, and how they influenced American social thought and postwar German sociology. He argues that, contrary to accepted belief, the members of the group, who fled oppression in Nazi Germany in 1934, had a major influence on postwar intellectual life.

A major study of modern culture, Dialectic of Enlightenment for many years led an underground existence among the homeless Left of the German Federal Republic until its definitive publication in West Germany in 1969. Originally composed by its two distinguished authors during their Californian exile in 1944, the book can stand as a monument of classic German progressive social theory in the twentieth century.>

This work offers an introduction to, and an interpretation of, the thought of Max Horkheimer, a leading figure of the Frankfurt School.

The book is based on documentary and biographical materials that have only recently become available. As the narrative follows the Institute for Social Research from Frankfurt am Main to Geneva, New York, and Los Angeles, and then back to Frankfurt, Wiggershaus continually ties the evolution of the school to the changing intellectual and political contexts in which it operated.