Horkheimer, Max (1895–1973)

One of the initiators and founders of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, Max Horkheimer’s philosophical importance derives from his programmatic essays of the 1930s in which he conceptualized the Institute’s project of interdisciplinary research, and his later collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno in writing Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Horkheimer’s vision of a ’critical theory’ of society was intended as a reformulation of Marxist theory in which empirical research would be combined with philosophical reflection.