Horkheimer, Max (1895–1973)

German social theorist. He rejected empiricism and positivism and believed technology posed a threat to culture and civilization because the physical sciences upon which it is based ignored human values.

Horkheimer was director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt from 1930. When the Nazis came to power, he moved with the institute to Columbia University, New York, and later to California. He returned to Frankfurt 1949 and became rector of the university there 1951.

In his seminal papers of the 1930s, collected under the title Kritische Theorie/Critical Theory: Selected Essays 1968, he argues that only a radical transformation in social theory and practice will cure modern civilization of its sickness. The analysis of society is partly a function of social life – its concepts, as well as what it studies, are products of social and economic processes – but it is also autonomous. ‘Critical theory’ has to discover and describe the social origins of knowledge in order to emancipate human beings.

He collaborated with, among others, Theodor W Adorno on Dialectic of Enlightenment 1947, and also with Herbert Marcuse.