Reason, Nostalgia, and Eschatology in the Critical Theory of Max Horkheimer

Author(s): Brian J. Shaw

Source: The Journal of Politics , Feb., 1985, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Feb., 1985), pp. 160-181
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Southern Political
Science Association

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 Reason, Nostalgia,
and
Eschatology
in the
Critical Theory of
Max Horkheimer

Brian J. Shaw
Davidson College

Max Horkheimer's dramatic retreat from youthful radicalism to the nostalgic conservatism
of his later years has prompted considerable bewilderment and consternation among friends
and foes of Critical Theory alike. An examination of the whole of Horkheimer's oeuvre,
however, reveals the common origin of both these tendencies in a constant eschatological im-
pulse. Horkheimer's early hyper-radicalism, his eventual articulation of the fatal "dialectic
of enlightenment," and his final turn to a pessimistic Jewish transcendentalism can all be
traced to the inevitable disappointment of this messianic impulse.

And still I am consumed by the flame of a burning longing.... I cannot master my yearn-
ing, and I will let myself be driven by it my whole life, wherever this mad (tolle) way takes
me. (Horkheimer, Unpublished Diary Entry, 9 July 1915)

Nietzsche in the Antichrist voiced the strongest argument not merely against theology but
against any metaphysics, that hope is mistaken for truth; that the impossibility of living hap-
pily, or even living at all, without the thought of the absolute, does not vouch for the
legitimacy of that thought. (Adorno, 1974, p. 97)

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) is an important and timely thinker. As

director of the Frankfurt-based Institut fur Sozialforschung, Horkheimer
presided over one of the most ambitious attempts of this century to
revitalize radical social and cultural criticism. The problems of liberal

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1983 Annual Meeting of the
Southern Political Science Association. Research for this essay was partially supported by
funds made available to Davidson College by the Mellon Foundation. I am grateful for this
support, as I am for the helpful suggestions of the anonymous reviewers.

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 CRITICAL THEORY OF MAX HORKHEIMER 161

society which occupied Horkheimer and those whom he greatly in-

fluenced-including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm,
and Jurgen Habermas -are still with us. Indeed, one might argue that
authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis,
and the poverty of mass culture are more acute at present than in previous
decades.
Horkheimer addressed each of these concerns within the framework of
a philosophy of history which is informed by wide learning and a bold
willingness to free the critical imagination from the shibboleths of Right
and Left. For all these virtues, however, Horkheimer's Critical Theory is
compromised by some very real deficiencies. Preeminent among these is
the tension between Horkheimer's radical hopes and his essentially
conservative, nostalgic longing for a world free of all movement and con-
tradiction.
This tension is the subject of my paper. It is often alleged that the pro-
gression of Horkheimer from a radical Marxism in the 1930s to a
pessimistic Jewish transcendentalism at the end of his life is the conse-
quence of a decisive break which took place in his thinking in the 1940s. It
is my contention that Horkheimer's characterization of modernity and his
stance towards it, while undoubtedly developing over time, remain fun-
damentally consistent. The Marxist terminology employed by
Horkheimer in his writings of the 1920s and 1930s fails to mask the
pessimism of his general world view. The appearance in Horkheimer's
writings during the 1940s and afterward of a resigned and even despairing
outlook does not announce a radical departure from the earlier critique of
late capitalism and bourgeois culture. As an old man, Horkheimer
lamented the triumph of a "totally administered world" (verwaltete Welt)
in which the alleged "free subjectivity" characteristic of an earlier
bourgeois epoch must inexorably perish. Even in his most messianic
youthful moments, however, Horkheimer could write of the inevitable
victory of "darkness, viciousness and filth. "'
The accentuation of this decidedly pessimistic element in Horkheimer's
writings stems from the inevitable disappointment of the inflated hopes
which Horkheimer presents to the world. Contrary to the claims of some
radical writers, Horkheimer's turn to conservative - and on occasion reac-
tionary - positions at the end of his life is hardly the consequence of a

'"Even the concept of an absolutely just and benevolent authority before which the
darkness of this world, its viciousness and filth would pass away, and the kindness unrecog-
nized and trampled by men might prevail and triumph, is a human thought which will die
and be scattered with those who conceived it. This is a depressing insight" (1978, p. 101).
This little-known work of Horkheimer's was originally published as Dammerung: Notizen in
Deutschland in 1934 under the pseudonym of Heinrich Regius.

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 162 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 47, 1985

merely personal turn away from Critical Theory.2 It arises from the
refusal to abandon the unreasonable and ill-conceived demands made by
Critical Theory itself. The incessant and immoderate "yearning for the
entirely Other" (die Sehnsuch nach dem ganz Anderen) which motivates
all of Horkheimer's writings has to result in disillusionment. Horkheimer's
thought is fundamentally eschatological. The constant intent in his
writing is not to reform the world but to abolish it altogether. Worse yet,
Horkheimer is a "tragic" eschatologist. He can neither master his
chiliastic impulses to remake the world, nor can he hide from himself the
ultimate futility of such an enterprise. The consequence is the self-
indulgent and even masochistic quality which pervades Horkheimer's
philosophy. 3
To make this argument, this essay is divided into three sections. The
first traces the path taken by Horkheimer in developing the "critical
theory of society" as a response to the failure of traditional Marxism ade-
quately to confront the novel dangers of late capitalism. The second sec-
tion sketches the philosophy of history articulated by Horkheimer after
the outbreak of World War II to comprehend the qualitatively new
modes of domination in both the capitalist and socialist worlds. The
paper concludes with an analysis of the reasons for the failure of
Horkheimer to suggest any sort of concrete oppositional activity to com-
bat the emerging "totally administered society."

The leitmotif of Horkheimer's philosophy, the tragic yearning for a

perfectly free and just world which can never be actualized, is sounded
very early in Horkheimer's intellectual development. The "yearning for
the entirely Other," which is the theme and the title of Horkheimer's last
book (1970c), already finds expression in the diary entries and the novellas

2 Dick Howard, a writer who is quite sympathetic to both Critical Theory and the New
Left, voices this opinion in The Marxian Legacy (1977, pp. 91-117). Goran Therborn, a stu-
dent of Althusser, places the blame for Horkheimer's "political collapse" on his turn to
"bourgeois social psychology" and the comforts of a "purely ideological radicalism smugly in-
stalled in the cosy academic institution" (1970, pp. 65-91).
3Eric Voegelin (1970, p. 220) well captures the existential sources of this yearning for
reality to transform itself into something "other" than what it is. "Existence has the structure
of the In-Between, of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything is constant in the history of
mankind it is the language of tension between perfection and imperfection . . . order and
disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence.... If we split these pairs of
symbols, and hypostatize the poles of the tension as independent entities, we destroy the real-
ity of existence ... deform our humanity and reduce ourselves to a state of quiet despair or ac-
tivist conformity."

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 CRITICAL THEORY OF MAX HORKHEIMER 163

of the twenty-year-old man. Horkheimer ar

entry from July 1915.4 Not to follow ...

the flame of this burning longing . . . would be the dea

parching of my thirsting heart.... I must do what my
accordance with my craving for truth, I need to live an
help the tortured, to pacify my hatred of injustice, and
must seek the love and understanding after which every f

The language of this passage is the melodram

romantic youth. The spirit which animates th
all of Horkheimer's writings. Love, justice, t
pain and suffering are the passionate desidera
world which seems to know only misery and
Horkheimer's introduction to the evils of t
He was born not to poverty but into a wealt
man family. His father, a successful manufa
man to assume a position in the family business. To this end,
Horkheimer had commercial training before being drafted into the army
in 1916. Although he was never sent to the front, the young bourgeois
confronted first-hand the senseless carnage which the First World War
visited upon Europe. As he was to do incessantly throughout his life,
Horkheimer fixed upon the glaring discrepancy between the ideals of
bourgeois civilization and the actual conduct of the Western nations in
conflict with one another. Horkheimer turned away from nationalism to
pacifism. As he wrote in 1914, "I cannot believe that an act deemed
criminal for the individual should be a noble one for a nation.... I hate
the armies that are on the march to protect property" (1974a, p. 14).
Even before the war, however, Horkheimer had begun to sense the
yawning gap between the promise and the reality of bourgeois society.
Private property, the market, and the Kaiser had all made possible the
secure and cultivated milieu in which Horkheimer came to maturity. Yet
these same institutions had also generated the misery which Horkheimer
witnessed in the army and in his father's factory. Shocked at the working
conditions in the family business, Horkheimer wrote to a friend about his
revulsion and guilt at benefiting from this suffering. "Who can complain
about suffering, you and I? We are cannibals who complain that the
flesh of the slaughtered gives us stomach aches.... You enjoy your peace
and property for whose sake others have to suffocate, to bleed to death"
(Gumnior and Ringguth, 1973, pp. 7-8).

4Horkheimer, in Gumnior and Ringguth (1973, pp. 17-18). This book is the most com-
prehensive of a number of current German language introductions to the thought and life of
Horkheimer. (All translations from German and French sources, unless otherwise indicated,
are the author's.)

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164 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 47, 1985

Unlike so many other sensitive youths who react to the injustice of their
class by a vehement rejection of their origins in toto, Horkheimer
acknowledged the perverse dialectic at the heart of bourgeois civilization.
There is much good in it, but, as Nietzsche had observed, there is blood
sticking to all good things. Culture itself can flourish only amidst the suf-
fering and deprivation which are its preconditions. Even the family af-
fords succor and support at the price of paternal domination and the
repression of its members. Long before he had heard of Freud, in fact,
Horkheimer confronted this truth in his rebellion against his own
overbearing father who opposed his marriage to a gentile secretary in the
family firm. (The humanitarian and universalistic ideals of the German
bourgeoisie did not extend to one's son marrying outside his class.)
As a young man, then, Horkheimer had perceived the essentially con-
tradictory character of civilization generally and of bourgeois civilization
in particular. Every virtue is not merely opposed by some vice, but car-
ries its opposite, its negation, within itself. The task is not to oppose some
other culture to this culture, but to hope for the establishment of a
qualitatively different state of affairs -to long for an entirely different
world. The present reality is inherently compromised by its very ex-
istence. Redemption from this world can only take the form of a
metaphysical yearning for something qualitatively "other" than the pres-
ent situation. "The positive, the existing is always bad, yet its constitu-
tion is the sole point of reference from which we might proceed to divine
its spiritual content that we cannot grasp but which constitutes its great
beauty.... We wish salvation from the earth and yet we are attached to
it with our whole heart" (Horkheimer, 1974a, p. 22).
Horkheimer, along with many of the sons and daughters of the
bourgeoisie, allowed his hopeful impulses to seize hold of him at the out-
break of the German Revolution in 1918. The Russian proletariat had
already embarked upon a new course by establishing the first Soviet state,
and there was the possibility that the German and Hungarian working
classes might follow its lead. Similarly, in the realm of theory bold new
departures were being made from the stolid orthodoxy of the social
democratic movement -a movement which, in any case, had been badly
discredited by its efforts to stifle the revolutionary enthusiasm unleashed
at the end of the war. The economic determinism of Kautsky and Bern-
stein, with its faith in the automatic workings of autonomous historical
laws, was being vigorously challenged by revolutionary theorizing which
applauded the reemergence of an active proletariat intent upon destroy-
ing the old order and establishing a new one in its place. For all their
differences, Lukacs, Gramsci, Lenin, Luxemburg, and Korsch each
championed the efforts of the reawakened revolutionary subject-the
proletariat-to create a qualitatively new society.

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 CRITICAL THEORY OF MAX HORKHEIMER 165

Yet by 1921 it had to be admitted by even the most optimistic persons

outside the Communist parties that the revolutionary situation had been
successfully (and bloodily) contained by the forces of the old order. For
Horkheimer personally, the murder of Luxemburg in 1919 assured the
survival of the old society. The foulness of her murder - to say nothing of
the willingness of the Social Democratic Party to use the notorious
Freikorps to suppress the revolution - was proof of the brutality which
"civilization" was prepared to unleash to preserve itself.
Horkheimer was too thoughtful to believe that it had been repression
alone which had defeated the revolution. The young man whose first
philosophical experience had been with the metaphysical pessimism of
Schopenhauer could not accept the happy and ultimately disastrous faith
of the Bolsheviks that the recent debacle had been only a temporary set-
back in the course of a historically mandated progress. The failure of the
revolution, on the contrary, had come about not merely due to the power
of the ruling class, but also because the agent of revolutionary
change - the proletariat - was no longer capable of playing this role
under the peculiar conditions of a fully developed industrial society. Marx
had attributed the defeat of the Communards to the "undisguised
savagery and lawless revenge" of the bourgeois order which "comes out in
its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against
their masters" (Marx, 1974, p. 226). Implicit in this analysis is Marx's
belief in the eventual victory of the working class. The doubt which
forced itself upon Horkheimer's mind was that this confidence was no
longer justified, if indeed it had ever been. What if a revolutionary sub-
ject no longer existed? How, then, might this yearning of Horkheimer for
the "entirely Other," the realm of perfect freedom and justice, be
satisfied?
Horkheimer's response to this and other pressing questions was the
development of "Critical Theory," an ambitious reorientation of Marxist
social theory away from orthodox economic studies toward a more
cultural or "totalistic" analysis of late capitalist society. Theoretically,
Horkheimer charged himself and his colleagues at the Institut fur
Sozialforschung with the examination of the "entire material and spiritual
culture of mankind. "5 Practically, Horkheimer directed his coworkers to
provide by their thinking a "critical, promotive factor in the development
of the masses . . . [toward] the transformation of society as a whole"

5 In "Die gegenwartige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts fur
Sozialforschung" (1981, p. 33) Horkheimer defines the concerns of social philosophy in the
following manner: "Sie hat sich daher vor allem urn solche Phanomene zu bekummern, die
nur im Zusammenhang mit dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen verstanden werden
kbnnen: urn Staat, Recht, Wirtschaft, Religion, kurz urn die gesamte materielle und geistige
Kultur der Menschheit fiberhaupt."

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 166 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 47, 1985

(1972, pp. 214-19). Despite the failure of the German Revolution, in the
1920s and 1930s the proletariat still contained the potential to renew the
world and to save it from the descent into barbarism which fascism
threatened. To revive this slumbering giant was to be henceforth the
practical task of Critical Theory.
Horkheimer committed himself to this self-appointed task with the zeal
of a prophet charged with the salvation of a world crowded with
unrepentant sinners. The Pharisees whom he had only imagined in his
youth he now found everywhere in the persons of the Nazis and the
capitalists who supported them. The fascists had succeeded in dulling
the class instincts of the German workers and were effectively yoking the
rage of the oppressed classes to their own drive for power. To reverse this
process - against the will of both the fascists and their deluded vic-
tims -was for Horkheimer a task of world historical import. The alter-
natives were starkly drawn: either Critical Theory might dispel the
hegemony of bourgeois civilization over working class consciousness, or
the "dusk of capitalism" would "usher in the night of mankind" (1978, p.
17).
Horkheimer's analysis of the dangers of fascism and his characteriza-
tion of the struggle against it are permeated with eschatological language.
The conflict between the "truth" which Critical Theory reveals and
authoritarianism in all its contemporary manifestations is a total and un-
compromising one. The critical theorist has no allies in this life or death
struggle, save for the potential aid of the proletariat which must be stirred
into action. Against Horkheimer and his colleagues are ranged the Nazis
and a whole assembly of willing and unwitting allies. Capitalism and
even liberalism support Nazism against the possibility of a better world.
Fascism is not opposed to bourgeois society but is in fact its hidden truth.
"He who does not wish to speak of capitalism should be silent about
fascism.... Fascism is the truth of modern society that Theory had in
mind from the beginning. "6
Against such formidable opponents Horkheimer opposes the idea of a
new and qualitatively different kind of society: "the rationally organized
society which regulates its own existence" (1978, p. 51). This would be a
society unlike previous forms of social organization in that it would be
consciously organized about the satisfaction of common needs. It would
neither be subject to the blind tyranny of anarchic market forces nor

6 "Wer aber vom Kapitalismus nicht reden will, sollte auch vom Faschismus schweigen.
... Der Mythos der Interessenharmonie hat die Theorie zerstbrt; sie hat den liberalistischen
Wirtschaftsprozess als Reproduktion von Herrschaftsverhaltnissen vermittels freer Vertrage
dargestellt, die durch die Ungleichheit des Eigentums erzwungen werden. Die Vermittlung
wird jetzt abgeschafft. Der Faschismus ist die Wahrheit der modernen Gesellschaft, die von
der Theorie von Anfang an getroffen war" (1939, p. 115).

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CRITICAL THEORY OF MAX HORKHEIMER 167

would it allow merely private interests to masquerade as the public good.

The new society ushered in by the violent overthrow of capitalist society
would allow its members, for the first time in history, to develop the
whole of their hitherto repressed human nature. This society would be
populated by "new men." For, Horkheimer explains, with a change "in
the real relations of society, a change takes place not only in political in-
stitutions, law and government, but also in human nature itself" (1970a,
p. 40). Unlike the denizens of the capitalist world, which is a "peniten-
tiary" afflicted with "boundless suffering," these new men would be
spiritually alive and morally autonomous. They would be, for the first
time in history, truly human beings.
Unfortunately, in these writings of the 1930s Horkheimer neither in-
dicates what the Reich der Freiheit actually looks like, nor does he
precisely outline the means which are to be taken to realize it. The goal
at which Critical Theory aims and the means it seeks to assure it remain
shrouded in mystery; they are matters solely of longing and belief. Of the
goal itself, Horkheimer says only that this transformation of the human
condition will be unheralded and catastrophic. There "can be no cor-
responding concrete perception of it until it actually comes about. If the
proof of the pudding is in the eating, the eating here is still in the future.
.. . Critical theory has no material accomplishments to show for itself.
The change which it seeks to bring about is not effected gradually" (1972,
pp. 217-19). About the means to this end Horkheimer is equally reticent
save to indicate that there must be a historical subject to achieve it.
"Everything therefore depends on creating the free subject that con-
sciously shapes social life" (1978, p. 51).
The creation of this revolutionary subject, unhappily, was a well-nigh
hopeless task under the conditions of German society in the 1930s. In the
struggle between the critical theorist and the social and ideological forces
arrayed against him, the outcome was all but assured. Against fascism,
capitalism, and liberalism Critical Theory could offer only a heroic but
suicidal resistance. For this reason the messianic language of
Horkheimer's description of the crisis of contemporary society merges
with a resigned, even masochistic, appraisal of its own chances of success.
The battle between the truth of Critical Theory and the falsehood of the
world had already been decided in the favor of the latter. The only role
left for the critical theorist to assume was that of the martyr who suffers at
the hands of those whom he has come to save. The critical theorist
possesses the "most advanced form of thought at present" which he uses to
"think in the service of a repressed humanity" (1972, pp. 221-32).
Nonetheless, this knowledge avails him little when confronted by the rage
of those he seeks to redeem. The German workers remained indifferent
and even hostile to the agents of revolutionary change. "They are the

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168 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 47, 1985

apes of their wardens, worship the symbol of their

attacking their guardians, stand ready to tear to pieces the person who
undertakes to free them from their tutelage" (1978, p. 89).

II

Horkheimer was compelled to flee Germany in 1933. He found his

way to the United States, where he witnessed the rise and eventual defeat
of Hitler's Reich. Horkheimer arrived in New York a bitter and shaken
man. The inevitable disappointment of the maximalist demands which
he had made of his contemporaries -in a political climate which all but
precluded the most minimal of gains-left him feeling alone and
betrayed. Soon Horkheimer's bitterness yielded to a profound sense of
despair. He became convinced that even his new home was succumbing
to the rule of increasingly repressive forms of political and economic
organization. He believed, in fact, that he had discovered a dialectic at
work within all the advanced industrial nations which mandated the
diminution of "free subjectivity" under the crushing burden of new forms
of technological control. The voluntary slavery of the masses to
authoritarian administration was becoming universal. "Regardless of
how the war ends, the ceaseless militarization leads the world into
authoritarian collectivistic ways of life. . . . A great portion of the
masses, which are led against the totalitarian states, do not oppose fascism
in principle" (1939, p. 132).
The dialectic which Horkheimer believed he had found at the heart of
bourgeois civilization he termed the "dialectic of enlightenment." He
developed this thesis at length during the 1940s in a book of that title
(with Theodor W. Adorno) and in another book, The Eclipse of Reason.
These works convey perhaps better than any others the essentially
eschatological tendencies which pervade Horkheimer's philosophy. For
if the adoption of this thesis undoubtedly allowed Horkheimer some in-
sight into the problems of rationalization and authoritarianism in modern
life, it did so at the cost of introducing a thesis whose structure is
thoroughly chiliastic. The dialectic of enlightenment reiterates
Horkheimer's earlier insistence upon total redemption as the only alter-
native to an imperfect reality. In its denial of the possibility of individual
or collective reform, the dialectic of enlightenment reveals its origin in the
bitterness of a revolutionary eschatologist whose demands are rudely
declined by the political reality he seeks to abolish.
At the heart of this thesis lies Horkheimer's old fear that bourgeois
civilization contains the seeds of its own destruction. Specifically,
Horkheimer came to fear that the idea of reason which has animated
Western aspirations for centuries - and to which Horkheimer himself had

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 CRITICAL THEORY OF MAX HORKHEIMER 169

earlier appealed against the irrational organization of contemporary

society--is essentially self-destructive. According to this view, the hor-
rors of the Third Reich are not aberrations from the general course of
"progress" initiated during the Enlightenment, but are the culmination of
this whole process. The "recent descent into barbarism" is the outcome
not of the defeat of reason but of the "indefatigable self-destructiveness of
enlightenment" (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972, p. xi.). Reason is in-
herently irrational; civilization culminates in barbarism. If this is true,
however, then Horkheimer's youthful yearning for a perfectly reasonable
and just society becomes not simply improbable but anachronistic as well.
Total resignation is the only response to an absolutely bad world. The
violent disappointment of Horkheimer's earlier hopes did not lead him to
acknowledge the immoderate nature of his desires. They prompted him,
on the contrary, to develop a metaphysics and a philosophy of history
which negate hope as a historical possibility in the twentieth century.
Horkheimer's task was to explore the "concept of rationality that
underlies our contemporary industrial culture . .. [whose defects] vitiate
it essentially" (1974c, p. v). For help in this enterprise, Horkheimer
turned away from Marxism to the thought of two other men. The first of
these was Hegel, the philosopher in whom the Enlightenment reached its
apogee. The second was Nietzsche, the arch-critic of the Enlightenment.
The peculiar difficulty of Horkheimer's task was to avoid the
epistemological absolutism of Hegel while simultaneously steering clear o
the nihilism of Nietzsche.
Horkheimer credits both thinkers with having recognized the fatally
antinomous elements in enlightenment thought already at work in the
philosophy of Kant. The Enlightenment is concerned not only with
liberation, but with domination as well. Reason and domination, in
fact, are inextricably intertwined. The dialectic between the two aspects
of reason assumes the following form in Kant:

The transcendental, supraindividual self ... comprises the idea of a free human social life in
which men organize themselves as the universal subject and overcome the conflict between
pure and empirical reason in the conscious solidarity of the whole. This represents the idea of
true universality: utopia. At the same time, however, reason constitutes the court of judge-
ment of calculation, which adjusts the world for the ends of self-preservation and recognizes
no function other than the preparation of the object from mere sensory material in order to
make it the material of subjugation. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972, pp. 83-84)

Reason thereby emerges, on the one hand, as a universal property of real-

ity and as the criterion by which reality is judged, and, on the other hand,
as an instrument for the subjugation of reality in the service of individual
self-preservation. The first aspect of reason harkens back to the Greek
concept of nous, of a reality pervaded by the principle of universal and
transcendent reason. The second aspect, however, which has prevailed

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170 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 47, 1985

in modern thought, locates reason in the individual consciousness alone.

According to this view, reason is entirely a faculty of a subject who con-
fronts a world which, aside from the significance which he imparts to it, is
totally devoid of meaning. It is the view of the world "born from man's
urge to dominate nature . .. [the] calculating contemplation of the world
as prey" (1974c, p. 176).
Horkheimer traces the course over which this latter dimension of
reason, which he terms "instrumental reason," eventually won out over its
dialectical counterpart, which he calls "objective reason." Hegel's in-
sights developed in the Phenomenology of Mind into the enlightenment
concept of reason served Horkheimer here. Hegel had alleged an internal
connection between the Terror of the French Revolution and the
enlightenment idea of reason. What unites both is the conviction that
knowledge is power. In particular, Hegel argues, enlightenment con-
sciousness envisions reality to be an "objective world" of "things" which
are presented to consciousness exactly as they are with "no further deter-
mination of any sort" (Hegel, 1967, p. 590). Aside from the significance
which the positing subject grants to it, reality is conceived materialisti-
cally; it is pure stuff. The relation of the subject to the world is one of
manipulation and domination. The "outcome is . . . materialism and
agnosticism . . . pure utilitarianism" (p. 590). Horkheimer seconds
Hegel's assessment by noting that from now on, "matter would at last be
mastered without any illusion of ruling or inherent powers, of hidden
qualities. For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule
of computation and utility is suspect" (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972, p.
6).
The goal of enlightenment, then, is the "disenchantment" (Weber) of
nature. As such, enlightenment is consciously opposed to myth. Accord-
ing to thinkers as diverse as Diderot, Voltaire, Kant - and Marx - reason
can and should commit itself to the task of demythologizing nature. Myth
in enlightenment thought is equated with superstition, insofar as myth
represents the projection by man of his fears and ignorance onto an-
thropomorphised natural entities. Reason alone, on the contrary, can
emancipate man from the despotism of myth. Enlightenment is self-
consciously progressive, for it frees men from their abject fear of an un-
predictable and malevolent nature. By the same token, it frees them
from the holy domination of religious superstition. If the world can only
be "put to the rack" (Bacon), it can be made to serve man. Science, ac-
cordingly, assumes the place of honor in enlightenment's battle against
superstition. By means of the steady progression of science, man's rela-
tion to nature can be reversed from a position of abject fear to one of total
mastery. The pathway to human emancipation and self-mastery is

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 CRITICAL THEORY OF MAX HORKHEIMER 171

through the domination of nature, th

myth had formerly cast upon nature a
According to Horkheimer, Hegel had
nexus of reason and the domination of
The radical separation in enlightenmen
from the inert, senseless matter which
judges their relation and insures the pe
the former. For Hegel, it is precisely
and object which must be overcome. In
accomplished this reconciliation of reason and reality in the
Phenomenology. Not domination but the self-recognition of reason in
the world must supersede enlightenment thought, just as enlightenme
had previously transcended the mythic relation.
It is at this point that Hegel himself, Horkheimer insists, succumbs t
the charm of enlightenment. By positing the final coincidence of realit
with the cognitive subject (Geist), Hegel reveals the totalitarian intent o
his entire system: the domination of the world by the concept (Begriff
Hegel's goal had been to trace the process in history by which reason f
nally comes to itself by negating the otherness of the world. At the end
this process an "identity" is established between the knower and the
known. Subjectivity, in Hegel's words, has the "highest of claims, since
everything which I am to recognize has also the task of becoming mine
and attaining its validity in me. Subjectivity is insatiably greedy to con-
centrate and drown everything in this single spring of the pure ego" (1975,
p. 232).
According to Horkheimer, Hegel had been right to stress the negative
character of reason by assigning to it the task of revealing the hidden
falsehoods of all claims to knowledge. In disqualifying the pretensions of
both myth and enlightenment to absolute knowledge, Hegel had
demonstrated the proper role of reason. Reason must strive for a total
understanding of reality, for complete identification with the world, but
it must never allow itself to think that it has achieved this identity. Hegel's
error, Horkheimer insists, was to have ignored his own insight and to have
proclaimed the final reconciliation of reason and reality as an accom-
plished fact in his own system.
In succumbing to the charm of enlightenment, Hegel unwittingly
reveals the commonality between enlightenment and the myth which it
seeks to dispel. Both are attempts by man to dominate nature. "Myth is
already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology"
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972, p. xvi). Mythic consciousness seeks to
achieve this end, not by distancing itself from a despiritualized nature, as
does enlightenment, but by projecting its own subjectivity onto nature.

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172 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 47, 1985

Myth is inseparable from mimesis and magic. In the mimetic ritual the
individual seeks to fuse his identity with that of the spirit in nature which
he seeks to control. By overcoming the separation between his own will
and that of an anthropomorphized nature (animism), the subject at-
tempts to bend nature to his will. Myth thus already contains within
itself elements which were to come to preeminence with the development
of enlightenment out of it. "Myth intended report, naming, the narra-
tion of the Beginning; but also presentation, confirmation, explanation: a
tendency that grew stronger with the recording and collection of myths.
. . . Every ritual includes the idea of activity as a determined process
which magic can nevertheless influence" (p. 8);
Indeed, myth and enlightenment share not only the same goal of
domination, but demand a common sacrifice from the individual if he is
to be able to control nature, namely, self-renunciation. "The myths, as
the tragedians came upon them, are already characterized by the
discipline and power that Bacon celebrated as the 'right mark' " (p. 8).
Myth and enlightenment demand domination of nature and self alike as
the price of human liberation. The combination of cunning and self-
denial found in Odysseus, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, already cap-
tures perfectly the urge to domination which motivates the exploits of the
bourgeois factory owner; "there is no work which offers more eloquent
testimony of the mutual implication of enlightenment and myth than that
of Homer, the basic text of European civilization" (pp. 45-46).
Horkheimer's analysis of the "crisis of modernity," then, assumes a
significantly modified perspective as it developed during the postwar
years. The earlier analysis of the ills of the technological and ad-
ministered societies of the twentieth century is not abandoned, but the
scope is widened considerably. Two changes, above all, deserve men-
tion. The first is the subsumption by Horkheimer of domination as it is
manifested in capitalist society under the aegis of a more universal and
persistent form of domination: the mastery of nature. As Martin Jay
characterizes this shift, the "clearest expression of this change was the In-
stitut's replacement of class conflict, that foundation stone of any truly
Marxist theory, with a new motor of history. The focus was now on the
larger conflict between man and nature both without and within, a con-
flict whose origins went back to before capitalism and whose continua-
tion, indeed intensification, appeared likely after capitalism would end"
(1973, p. 256). The second change, related like the first to the articula-
tion by Horkheimer of a new philosophy of history, has to do with his
linkage of thought and domination. Hegel was wrong to believe that ter-
ror and domination belong to the Enlightenment alone. They are, on the
contrary, the inescapable attributes of consciousness itself, whether in a
"scientific" or a mythic manifestation.

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 CRITICAL THEORY OF MAX HORKHEIMER 173

Horkheimer declared himself indebted to

Nietzsche recognizes in all the manifestation
cise of the will to power. In doing so, he exp
any "first principles" of thought. Philosoph
takes as its goal to discover a philosophia pe
uncover and to conform to objectively esta
the world to its dictates. Truth is strictly in
subject is able to impose upon reality as the
goal of achieving the "identity" of reason
systems such as Hegel's is a dishonest one. F
subject and object within the framework of
such attempts only hide the totalitarian im
entirely. " 'Truth' (and identity) does not co
tween consciousness and reality or between
is an instrument imposed on the reality whi
p. 22). Nietzsche relentlessly exposes the real motive behind the
philosophical attempt completely to define the world ("to call things by
their right names") as the will to power. Adorno draws on Nietzsche's in-
sight in his Negative Dialectics: "Great philosophy was accompanied by
the paranoid zeal to tolerate nothing else and to pursue everything else.
. . . The slightest remnant of non-identity sufficed to deny an identity
conceived as total" (1973, pp. 22-23).
It is this quest for identity, this urge totally to master reality, which
eventually compels reason to self-destruct. Both myth and enlighten-
ment share the fear of the unknown and the consequent impetus to bring
all of reality within the explanatory and manipulative framework of the
system. Eventually, Horkheimer asserts, the incessant quest of reason to
bring all into conformity with itself prompts it to turn against itself.
Reason abandons its self-consciousness as something other than the world
and declares itself by fiat to be identical with it. This is strikingly evinced
in Hegel's system, but asserts itself also in the natural sciences and their
self-understanding, positivism. Positivism is the terminus ad quem of
enlightenment: the surrender of reason to the sheer force of brute "facts."

Man imagines himself free from fear when there is no longer anything unknown. That deter-
mines the course of demythologization, of enlightenment, which compounds the animate
with the inanimate just as myth compounds the inanimate with the animate. Enlightenment
is mythic fear turned radical. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is no
more than a so to speak universal taboo. Nothing at all may remain outside, because the
mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972, p. 16)

Positivism, in common with all philosophic systems, seeks to banish, to

7"Nietzsche was one of the few after Hegel who recognized the dialectic of enlighten-
ment" (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972, p. 44).

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174 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 47, 1985

annul, all that refuses to be swept up into it. Unlike most previous
philosophies, however, positivism is blessed with the hubris peculiar to
naive dogmatism. Where previous philosophies, from Platonism through
Scholasticism to Hegel, laboriously sought to bridge the gulf between
reason and reality, positivism by fiat declares the gulf to be nonexistent.
Positivism declares the truth to be self-evident, and itself to be able to ap-
propriate this truth unproblematically. It simply yields to the "facts as
they are." For positivism, no contradiction remains between existence
and essence, or between phenomena and noumena, as Kant still insisted.
Instead, positivism claims the gift of "immaculate perception"
(Nietzsche). Positivism declares itself unqualified to present any
demands of its own to the world, but insists that the disqualified world
assumed a priori by natural science is beyond question. As Horkheimer
explains in the Eclipse of Reason, this "weakness of positivism is covered
by the positivists' implicit assumption that the general empirical pro-
cedures used by science correspond naturally to reason and truth. This
optimistic belief is perfectly legitimate for any scientist engaged in actual,
non-philosophical research, but for a philosopher it seems the self-
delusion of a naive absolutism" (1974c, p. 79).
Thus, for Horkheimer, reason and enlightenment return to the myth
from which they initially emerged. Since reason is itself myth, in turning
against myth it had to destroy itself. Enlightenment begins as the at-
tempt to subject the world to the demands of the conscious subject. It
ends in the surrender of the subject to the world of his own creation. To
master this reality, the individual need only accommodate himself to it.
In order to unlock the secrets of reality, the subject must simply declare
that reality contains no secrets and to embrace the positivist "myth of
things as they actually are." "False clarity is only another name for
myth" (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972, p. xiv). In the working out of the
dialectic of the "self-dissolvent rationality" of enlightenment, Horkheimer
laments, the quest for autonomy culminates in universal heteronomy.

III

As we have seen, as a young man Horkheimer was acutely sensitive to

the presence of suffering in the world. He was insistently hopeful,
nonetheless, that the present form of social organization which needlessly
perpetuates suffering might be abolished. The subject charged by tradi-
tional Marxism with carrying out this task had failed to do so.
Horkheimer's hopes were predicated upon his own success and that of his
colleagues at the Institut in breaking through the false consciousness of
the proletariat which kept it dormant. As Horkheimer wrote in the
"Manifesto" of the Institut, Critical Theory intends "to go beyond the

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 CRITICAL THEORY OF MAX HORKHEIMER 175

prevailing social praxis" to "accelerate a development which should lead

to a society without exploitation."8 Horkheimer did not claim to possess a
vision of the future society which should replace the present capitalist
one. Critical Theory sought not to offer blueprints of a future society but
to negate the falsehoods of the present one and to point out the
possibilities for change. "Critical theory explains: it must not be like this,
men can alter being, the conditions to do so already exist" (1968, vol. 2, p.
175n.).
By the end of the 1940s, on the contrary, Horkheimer had arrived at a
comprehensive philosophy of history which negated the possibility of
change. Not only had the masses shown themselves susceptible to
manipulation and coordination by fascist elites, but even in the "free"
countries the culture industry and other superstructural institutions of
late capitalism had effectively "brainwashed" large sectors of the popula-
tion.9 As far as the socialist nations were concerned, the men whom
Horkheimer called the "murderers in the Kremlin" only managed to
caricature the barbarism of the fascists. Humanity, for whom hope had
always appeared bleak, now seemed beyond redemption; the processes at
work in both East and West "must necessarily lead to dictatorship and the
regression of humanity" (1978, p. 153). The peculiar blend of mes-
sianism and pessimism of the 1930s thus turns into an explicitly tragic
outlook. Man cannot "alter being" but is merely the plaything of social
forces which he can neither understand nor control. "There is no return
to liberalism . . . with the return to the old free enterprise system, the en-
tire horror would start again under new management."10
Worst of all, the perverse dialectic which unfolds in the economic and
political sphere is underpinned by the infinitely more tragic dialectic of
the self-destruction of reason. Domination is not merely a function of the
present economic system but is an inherent component of the necessary
struggle with nature. Thought is totalitarian. The final victory

8 Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory," quoted in Therborn (1970, p. 68).

Therborn's translation is of the original version published in 1937 in the Zeitschrift fur
Sozialforschung. In the version which Horkheimer revised for publication in the 1960s, "in-
justice" (Unrecht) is substituted for the original "exploitation" (Ausbeutung).
9 Horkheimer's indictment of popular culture is developed primarily in "Art and Mass
Culture" (1972, pp. 273-90) and in "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Decep-
tion" (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972, pp. 120-67). In the latter essay Horkheimer alleges a
"brainwashing" effect in Disney cartoons. "In so far as cartoons do any more than accustom
the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous fric-
tion, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society.
Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the au-
dience can learn to take their own punishment" (p. 138).
10 "[E]s kein Zuruck zum Liberalismus gibt . .. mit dem Ruckfall in die alte Privatwirt-
schaft der ganze Schrecken wieder von vorne unter verdnderter Firma beginnen wfirde"
(1967, pp. 78-79).

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 176 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 47, 1985

achieved by the natural sciences and technology over nature carries with
it the -price of domination over human nature as well. To enforce
reason's mastery of nature both society and nature must be totally
organized. Rationalization of all areas of life, from industrial production
to the consumption of cultural goods, is the order of the day. According
to Horkheimer, the submission of individual consciousness to the dictates
of the rational plan is indispensable to its success. Universal
stupidity -of which positivism is the most socially significant manifesta-
tion -is the price of social success. "With respect to the control of both
man and nature we find ourselves in the possession of ever more efficient
means for the accomplishment of ever more obscure ends.""
What course of action, then, does Horkheimer recommend to remedy
this sorry state of affairs? The answer, quite simply, is none. Horkheimer
declares that the disasters of the twentieth century - Auschwitz,
Hiroshima, Vietnam - are not chance occurrences. That the "fully
enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant" is the tragic denouement
of a process set in motion long before the first capitalist exploited the first
proletarian. "One might say that the collective madness that ranges
today, from the concentration camps to the seemingly most harmless
mass-culture reactions, was already present in germ in primitive objec-
tivization, in the first man's calculating contemplation of the world as
prey" (1974c, p. 176). Whereas in the 1920s and 1930s Horkheimer had
held out the possibility, however remote, of altering an irrational social
system, after that time he declares irrationalism and barbarism to be the
consequence of the progress of reason itself.
Despite his best intentions to the contrary, Horkheimer resembles the
Hegel whose identity theory he renounces. Hegel had urged resignation
to the state of affairs which prevailed in his time since resistance would be
irrational; the reasonable had already been actualized in reality.
Horkheimer offers resignation as the only possible course of action
precisely because reality is irrefutably irrational. "For it is an inner
necessity that has led to the self-surrender by reason . . ." (1974b, p. viii).
There is no alternative to universal irrationality. Horkheimer "is not try-
ing to suggest anything like a program of action . .. [since as] understood
in our civilization, progressive rationalization tends, in my opinion, to
obliterate that very substance of reason in the name of which this progress
is espoused" (1974c, p. vi).

"1 Leiss (1974, p. 132). Horkheimer (1978, p. 143) refers to positivism as "stupid." The
"average empirical scientist these days is totally naive vis-a'-vis the prevailing schematism.
Through the concept of 'facts,' he posits as absolute both a form of perception which is condi-
tioned down to the most insignificant detail, and all the conscious and unconscious interests
which organize the world, and then calls 'theory' the systemic presentation of these 'facts.' But
such a theory lacks self-awareness. It is stupid."

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 CRITICAL THEORY OF MAX HORKHEIMER 177

In the place of the collective social action

Horkheimer substitutes a nostalgia for a b
youthful, inchoate yearning for some unar
regard to the first, as time went on Hor
obsessed with somehow preserving the f
liberal past. For all its manifest hypocris
societies in their formative phases had cont
phasis upon the autonomy of the individual
the worth of romantic love all played a posi
freedom and individuality. 12 Liberalism its
the lie to the mass society of the present
liberal ideals by "thoughtful individuals
education represent the only possible oppo
tion. To be radical under the conditions of
ative of the values of a disintegrating age.
against the past. The roles have been tra
becomes suspect, and confidence in the
(1978, p. 143).
By means of this logic, Horkheimer came
society against the young people of the Ne
by his early work. Late in his life Horkhei
control, the women's movement, and critic
Vietnam. Indeed, Horkheimer took his "rad
to urge that Kaiser Wilhelm II's warning o
race ... be taken very seriously today" as a
pp. 73-81; see too 1974b, p. 158).
Aside from a vain nostalgia for a romanticized liberal past, Horkheimer
urges a resurrection of individual religious faith. In an age of universal
administration and heteronomy, religious thought alone holds out an un-
compromising defense of two essential values: absolute truth and genuine
subjectivity. At one time, not religion but atheism and materialism had
been progressive forces since they had undermined the spurious
religiousness of the Protestants and Catholics who stifled the development
of free personality in the nascent bourgeois order. The very success of
atheism and materialism, however, had worked to prevent the actualiza-
tion of the ideals of personality and subjectivity. To be an individual,
Horkheimer argues, is to possess the capacity to distance oneself from the
untruth of prevailing opinion by appealing to something which negates
the falsity of conventional wisdom. Religion "means interior in-
dependence of this world" (1974b, p. 149). The Christians knew this by
taking seriously the concerns of the soul in opposition to the demands of
12 Horkheimer (1970a, 1970b, and 1974b) dwells at some length upon the positive content
of these ideals of bourgeois culture.

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 178 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 47, 1985

daily life. Such autonomy can be secured, however, only if it is grounded

in a truth secure enough to resist the forces fostering heteronomy in the
prevailing social order. "Non-conformity, freedom, self-determined obe-
dience to Someone Other than the status quo may be regarded as typically
Christian realities" (p. 149).
Even materialists have to make an appeal to some standard of judg-
ment, be it to "nature" (Diderot and d'Holbach) or to "man" (Feuerbach).
But nature is mute, and human dignity must be grounded in a
transcendental concept of "authentic" humanity. The only absolute is
God. "Truth - eternal truth outlasting human error - cannot as such be
separated from theism. The only alternative is positivism.... On the
positivist view, truth consists in calculations that work, thoughts are in-
struments, and consciousness becomes superfluous to the extent that pur-
posive behavior, which was mediated by it, merges into the collective
whole. Without God one will try in vain to preserve absolute meaning"
(1974b, p. 47; see 1970b, p. 60).
It is precisely at this point, paradoxically, that Horkheimer's plea for an
absolute reveals its true nature as nihilism. Horkheimer insists upon the
necessity for the existence of the absolute, but at the same time declares
himself entirely ignorant of what it might be. The only thing which he
can say is that it is "wholly other." Accordingly, the sole relation in
which the individual can stand to this absolute is that of a vague yearning
or longing for this incomprehensible and unrealizable transcendent. As
an alternative to the wholly administered society, Horkheimer offers an
"areligious conception of theology," a vague faith without an object of
faith. The desideratum of this yearning must remain unknown and
unactualized in order to retain its totally transcendent character. The
absolute is the absolute negation of the present reality. To move beyond
a purely negative theology to any positive conception of God would be to
rob the deity of transcendence by negating the distance between divine
and mundane existence. Horkheimer wants men to believe, but offers
them nothing to believe in. He proposes merely the "concept of an om-
nipotent and benevolent Being no longer as dogma, but as a longing that
unites all men so that the horrible events, the injustice of history so far
would not be permitted to be the final, ultimate fate of the victims."'s3
This idea of a pure yearning for the entirely "other" as the only possible

13 Horkheimer (1978, p. 239). Horkheimer's recommendation of religion is compromised

by the contemptuous manner in which he treats it. He argues that Christianity is deserving
of men's allegiance but indicates that all religion is simply a convenient fiction. Thus,
Horkheimer argues (1970b, pp. 59-60) that the "teaching of the Christian religion that there
exists a benevolent and omnipotent God, in the face of the suffering which has reigned over
the earth for millenia, is hardly believable." Religion is for Horkheimer little more than a
pious wish. He knows nothing of faith.

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 CRITICAL THEORY OF MAX HORKHEIMER 179

alternative to a world vitiated to its

nihilism. To say, as Horkheimer does in 1970, that a "yearning for
perfect justice" and the creation of the "solidarity of all men to resist
death" are appropriate responses to the existence of evil in the contem-
porary world (1970b, p. 69; 1970c, p. 20) is less than helpful-it is per-
nicious.
For all the dialectical subtlety of his thought, Horkheimer remained
throughout his life strangely uncompromising and dogmatic in his in-
sistence upon total transformation as the only alternative to an imperfect
reality. Even as a young man, Horkheimer's constant pessimism about
the success of a proletarian revolution was never the consequence of a
renunciation of messianism. On the contrary, his pessimism was pre-
cisely the outcome of an insistence upon a total revolution which he knew
was not possible. Far from renouncing a chiliastic view of social
transformation, Horkheimer regarded the alternatives as perfect redemp-
tion from suffering or complete failure. Hence the masochistic tenor of
his writings as he witnessed the success of fascism in Germany. Not at-
tempts at resistance, but only absolute despair and resignation could be
opposed to the triumph of absolute evil.'4
This same masochistic element pervades all of Horkheimer's later
writings as well. The demand is unremittingly made for an entirely just
society, a world completely free of suffering. That such desiderata are
unrealizable is cause for total despair; even if utopia were ushered in
tomorrow, there would still remain the unredeemed suffering of nature
and of past generations.'5 Despite his opposition to identity theory, and
especially to Hegel, Horkheimer's critique of contemporary civilization is
14 Bertolt Brecht sarcastically branded Horkheimer and his colleagues at the Institut as
"Tuis" for precisely this reason. A "tui" was defined by Brecht as the "intellectual of this era
of markets and commodities." Horkheimer fitted this description because of his "purely
passive" or intellectual condemnation of bourgeois society without acting to realize a better
one. After meeting with Adorno in 1940 in California, Brecht wrote the following entry in
his notebook: "This Frankfurt Institute is a real find for the Tui-Novel.... It's really funny
when they come up with things like: 'Robert Walser is very important, because he reflects the
degeneration of bourgeois society.' What a pity that this bourgeoisie degenerates into Panzer
divisions and SS Units!"
Walter Benjamin in 1934 similarly scored those so-called radical intellectuals who offer
only an academic critique of bourgeois society but who nonetheless insist upon a total
transformation of society as the only acceptable outcome of any action. Although Benjamin
was not referring to his friends at the Institut, his description anticipates Horkheimer's later
opposition between the "true" consciousness of the solitary thinker and the hopeless
heteronomy of the mass of men. "The mind, the spirit that makes itself heard in the name of
fascism must disappear. The mind which believes only in its own magic strength (a strength
it opposes to fascism) will disappear. For the revolutionary struggle is not fought between
capitalism and mind. It is fought between capitalism and the proletariat."
Both quotes are contained in Slater (1977, pp. 137, 145).
"5 This idea occurs repeatedly in Horkheimer's writings of the 1930s. As he writes in one

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 180 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 47, 1985

itself predicated upon the demand for identity. The demand, even if
grudgingly acknowledged as unfulfillable, remains always on absolute
reconciliation and redemption. The goal can be no less than the final
overcoming of all antagonisms and contradictions. Anything less than
perfect reconciliation is at best worthless, and at worst pernicious. Mere
reform only allows the ideal to be swept up into the utter depravity of ex-
istence.
To acknowledge the latent nihilism in Horkheimer's thought as a
whole, of course, is not to deny those real flashes of critical insight wh
illuminate even the most obscure and wrong-headed regions of his
philosophy. That Horkheimer mistakenly poses the alternative to con-
temporary society in an uncompromising manner does not automatically
disqualify the validity of each of his insights into its problematic nature.
One does not have to possess the cure to an illness to recognize sickness
when one sees it. But the effectiveness of the cure that is recommended
is, after all, of some consequence. Horkheimer never really offers any
cure at all. His critics on the Left are wrong, then, to accuse him of
abandoning his early radicalism for unabashed reaction late in life. In
truth, insofar as Horkheimer always presented the world with
unreasonable and unrealizable demands, he was never a genuinely
radical thinker. As to whether his critique can be accurately termed
"radical" or "reactionary," Walter Benjamin affords some help. In a
1937 discussion of two leftist bourgeois writers, Benjamin coined a phrase
which captures perfectly the problematic radicalism of Horkheimer:
"melancholy left" (linke Melancholie). The man who adheres to this
position, Benjamin warned, "stands not left of this or that orientation, but
simply left of everything that is possible" (1966, p. 459; see Tar, 1977, pp.
10-11).

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor W. (1973). Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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 CRITICAL THEORY OF MAX HORKHEIMER 181

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