Panel discussion

Samuel Moyn is just one of several scholars who have called recently for the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory to move beyond its excessive preoccupation in recent decades with political and legal theory, and to return political economy to the center of its concerns. I would like to argue here that such efforts to reincorporate the neglected materialist dimensions of the Frankfurt School would benefit from revisiting the early Critical Theory of its founder, Max Horkheimer. When he became director of the Institute for Social Research in 1930, Horkheimer unveiled his program of “interdisciplinary materialism.” As is well known, this program was an attempt to update Marx’s critique of political economy in light of the changed historical conditions of the early 20^th century, but also to supplement it with the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis and the most advanced techniques of empirical social research. It is much less known, however, that Horkheimer’s program was grounded in a comprehensive theory of modern history and society that he elaborated mainly in unpublished lectures and writings in the late 1920s on the subject of European intellectual history from the Renaissance to the present. Unfortunately, these sources have been overlooked in almost all of the secondary literature on the Frankfurt School. A closer examination of them reveals a remarkably rich and comprehensive model of materialist intellectual history, which demonstrates the centrality of political economy to the project of the early Frankfurt School. At the same time, the early Horkheimer’s model of materialist intellectual history insists upon the “relative autonomy” of culture and politics, and thus avoids the one-dimensional economism characteristic of many recent attempts to return to political economy.