Max Horkheimer

"self-awareness in contemporary society is directly connected with belonging to some collectivity: to an age group or vocational group, and ultimately to the nation. The divergence between individual and group that is now disappearing continues to show up among stunted individuals, criminals, and people who can assert themselves only by opposition to everything else."      -Max Horkheimer

           Max Horkheimer was born February 14, 1895 and was a Germn philosopher and sociologist. Horkheimer was a member of the Frankfrut school of social research. He was the only son of a wealthy orthodox Jewish family. His father pressured him and wanted him to take over the family business. Horkheimer left school at the age of 16 to work in his fathers company. In 1916 his career ended because he was drafted into WWI. After WWI ended he attended Munich University where he studied philosophy and psychology. Horkheimer moved to Frankfurt am Main where he meet Theodor Adorno. The Institute of Social Researches's directorship became vacant in 1930 Horkheimer was elected to the position he also took over the chair of social philosophy at Frankfurt University. In 1940, Horkheimer received American citizenship and moved to the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles, California, where his collaboration with Adorno would yield the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In 1949, he returned to Frankfurt where the Institute for Social Research reopened in 1950. In 1953, Horkheimer stepped down from director of the Institute and took on a smaller role in the Institute, while Adorno became director.

         Horkheimer continued to teach at the University until his retirement in the mid-1960s. He returned to America in 1954 and 1959 to lecture as a frequent visiting professor at the Univeristy of Chicago. He remained an important figure until his death in Nuremberg in 1973. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery in Bern, Switzerland.

          Horkheimer developed a theory by examining his own wealth while witnessing the placement of the bourgeois and the needy. This theory embraced the future possibilities of society and was preoccupied with forces which moved society toward rational institutions that would ensure a true, free, and just life. He was convinced of the need to "examine the entire material and spiritual culture of mankind" in order to transform society as a whole.

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/h/o.htm#horkheimer-max

Max Horkheimer 1964

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