Max Horkheimer

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), German social theorist, who rejected empiricism and positivism and believed that technology posed a threat to culture and civilization. He claimed that the physical sciences upon which technology is based ignored human values.

In 1930 Horkheimer became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt, Germany (see Frankfurt School). After the National Socialist (Nazi) party came to power in 1933, he moved with the institute to Columbia University, New York, and later to California. He returned to Frankfurt in 1949 and became rector of the university there in 1951. In his seminal papers of the 1930s, collected under the title Kritische Theorie (Critical Theory: Selected Essays, 1968), Horkheimer argued that only a radical transformation in social theory and practice can cure modern civilization of its sickness. He claimed that critical theory must discover and describe the social origins of knowledge in order to emancipate human beings. Horkheimer collaborated with, among others, German Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno on Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947), and also with German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse.