The Frankfurt School's leader was a factory owner's son groomed for textiles
Max Horkheimer was pulled out of school at fifteen to learn his father's textile business in Stuttgart. Instead he became the director who turned Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research into the home of critical theory, and steered it into exile when the Nazis took power.
Born on 14 February 1895 into a wealthy, conservative Orthodox Jewish family, Horkheimer became a junior manager in the family firm. There he met two lifelong companions: Friedrich Pollock, his closest friend and future colleague, and Rose Riekher, his father's secretary, eight years older, Christian and from a poorer background. His father disapproved, but the couple married in 1926 and stayed together until her death in 1969. A medical rejection kept him out of the First World War, and in 1919 Munich police arrested him after mistaking him for the revolutionary playwright Ernst Toller.
In Frankfurt he studied philosophy and psychology under Hans Cornelius, befriended the younger Theodor Adorno and wrote a doctorate and habilitation on Kant. In 1930 he became professor and director of the Institute, founded on a Marxist study group funded by Felix Weil's inheritance. Horkheimer shifted it from orthodox Marxism toward a broader critical social research that tried to join Marx's historical materialism with Freud's psychoanalysis, and he edited its new journal.
When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the Institute, suspect for its Marxist ideas and Jewish links, had to close in Germany. Horkheimer went to Geneva and then New York, where Columbia University's president surprised him by offering a building; the Institute moved there in July 1934. After gaining American citizenship in 1940 he settled in Los Angeles, where he and Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment. For the American Jewish Committee he organised the Studies in Prejudice, including the landmark The Authoritarian Personality.
His central themes were the rise of instrumental reason, the weakening of individual autonomy and the psychological roots of authoritarianism. He returned to Frankfurt in 1949, reopened the Institute in 1950, served as university rector from 1951 to 1953 and then handed the directorship to Adorno. Late in life he backed Pope Paul VI's opposition to the contraceptive pill, fearing it would end romantic love. He died in Nuremberg in 1973.
Source: Max Horkheimer
