Reconsidering the Model of "Early Critical Theory" in the Work of Max Horkheimer

Although generally recognized as the founder of the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Max Horkheimer has not received nearly as much scholarly attention as his colleagues at the Institute for Social Research.  Today Horkheimer is remembered primarily as the co-author, with Theodor Adorno, of Dialectic of Enlightenment – the putative magnum opus of early Critical Theory.  In my recent study, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge UP, 2011) – which draws on the recently published nineteen-volume German edition of Horkheimer’s Collected Writings and extensive research in the Max Horkheimer Archive and other German archives – I reconstruct Horkheimer’s Critical Theory in the 1930s and argue that it represents a very different model than the one he and Adorno put forth in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The new social, political, and intellectual conditions he encountered in American exile, and the catastrophic historical situation of the early 1940s,  led Horkheimer to question some of the most basic theoretical assumptions that had guided him and his colleagues at the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s.  I would like to suggest that Horkheimer’s early Critical Theory, which has been largely forgotten, is worth revisiting today in order to address the shortcomings not only of Dialectic of Enlightenment but also of Habermas’s discourse ethics.  The model of Critical Theory that one finds in Horkheimer’s early work, with its nuanced defense of the historical Enlightenment and its emphasis on interdisciplinary research and historical specificity can help us address some of the limitations of the “linguistic and cultural” turn, which have influenced scholarly discussions in many disciplines since the 1980s.