On Reading Critical Theory II: Notes on Dämmerung.

Heinrich Regius Contra Late Horkheimer.

Portrait of Horkheimer (early-to-mid-1920s). Artist unknown. Cover image from: Arno Münster, Der junge Horkheimer. Ein Essay zum 50. Todestag des Begründers der Frankfurter Schule (Verlag Karl Aber, 2023).

The deathbed confession of the heretic does not refute a single sentence of his atheistic beliefs. While still of sound body, many men of reason set down that nothing pain and illness might make them say should be given weight. That the truth of a sentence must be sealed by martyrdom is an age-old and infamous invention of the ruling classes. It turned the fear of methods of repression into an argument against the truth of freer spirits.¹

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Dämmerung and related texts (1920-1934)

Dämmerung I: Horkheimer's Weimar Journals (ca. 1920-1928). I. Philosophical Journals (ca. 1920-1923); II. Philosophical Journals (1925-1928).

Dämmerung Appendix I: Sketches for a Negative Metaphysics. Herbert Marcuse (ca. 1933). Translations of two previously unpublished fragments on (A.) 'Negative Metaphysics' and (B.) The Materialist Conception of Time, with a Historical-Philosophical Introduction.

Dämmerung II: Notes For Dämmerung (1926-1931). Fragments on the metaphysics of capitalist society, by Max Horkheimer.

Dämmerung III: Aphorisms From Dämmerung (1934). Dispatches in communist counterintelligence from and for times of reaction.

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Note 1: Who is Heinrich Regius?

Thesis: Whereas in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Horkheimer’s writing was divided into offical-academic essays signed by Max Horkheimer and the literary-polemical aphorisms signed by Heinrich Regius, Horkheimer’s ‘search for a style’ throughout the 1930s ends with a rapprochement between the two modes of authorship in the essays published by the ISR’s official organ, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung [ZfS].

Karl Landauer (1887-1945), Horkheimer’s close friend since the mid-1920s—and former analyst: when, in 1927, Horkheimer expressed interest in first-hand experience of psychoanalytic practice, Landauer turned Horkheimer down until he was able to come up with a symptom plausible enough to justify the sessions²—writes in a letter to Horkheimer dated 1/1/1937:

I would like to say just a few words about it [viz., Horkheimer’s 1936 essay on Theodor Haecker]:³ first of all, you have become so much more unreserved and open, even downright combative, in the last year. This makes me extremely happy, for, as you know, in the past I often felt sorry for you when you were so much more accommodating than my temperament allows me to be. To make a second note of this essay and all of your essays from this last year: while you once had so much difficulty with your writing, and really only wrote with ease in a more artistic mode in the stillness of your little room, as in your conversations with Regius, your writing now appears so fluid—better yet, sharp.⁴

In a footnote, the editors of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften explain:

Henricus Regius (Henrik van Roy, Henri de Roy, 1598-1679) was a professor of medicine in Utrecht. After exposing himself as a Cartesian, he was temporarily banned from teaching, but even Descartes later distanced himself from Roy’s theses. For the young Horkheimer, Roy was probably an exemplary model of a free spirit.⁵

For our purposes, there are three things worth noting here: first, that Landauer sees Horkheimer’s growth as an author through the 1930s as a ‘return to form’ in the more polemical and artistic mode of Dämmerung; second, that Horkheimer’s pseudonym was more like an alter ego—Landauer describes the composition of Dämmerung as “conversations with Regius” in “the stillness of your little room;” third, that Horkheimer’s alter is inspired by Henricus Regius—correspondent and disputant of Descartes, thoroughgoing naturalist and materialist, possible libertine, and accused heretic by the academic, ecclesiastic, and civic establishment. In other words, what Landauer’s letter suggests is that if Horkheimer no longer needs the literary persona of Heinrich Regius, this is not because Horkheimer finally outgrew him but because Horkheimer finally grew into him.

In a letter to Horkheimer dated 2/25/1935, Adorno—one of the earliest readers of Dämmerung and perhaps the most enthusiastic⁶—asks for an address where he might send mail without it being flagged for postal censorship (since the mail sent to and from the ISR’s official address in Columbia Heights was at the time),⁷ explaining that he has a sensitive manuscript he’d like Heinrich Regius himself to look over:

Do you have an address reserved for you alone, and from which you might send mail here [viz., Adorno’s residence in Oxford] from America without it having to pass through postal censors? In a few months from now, I would like to send you a second manuscript-in-progress—with the added request that you hold onto it for your own disposal and, possibly, publish it—which you will in no way be able to accuse of having unclear language and which Heinrich Regius, if I am not wrong about him, will not withhold his approval from. It is a little booklet of aphorisms that is directly connected with Regius but thoroughly treats the same situation from the perspective of full-blown fascism. Title: Der gute Kamerad [The Good Comrade]. But as I have said, I cannot send it to you at the official address of the Institute, and I ask you to treat the whole set with the utmost discretion. No one knows about its existence except for you. It has already progressed rather far. I hope things are going well for all of you. My existence is bearable to the extent I have none—i.e., as is clear enough from [my sending you] double the amount of work, I work without intermission and I do so in complete solitude. Write a few words soon to your old and true—T.W.A.⁸

As the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften note, The Good Comrade would never be published, and if Adorno’s progress report was accurate, the manuscript does not appear to have survived, though Adorno’s Minima Moralia [1951] does include an aphorism (§123) titled “The Bad Comrade” [Der böse Kamerad]⁹ and dated 1935.¹⁰ Just as Landauer’s letter implies in the recollection of Horkheimer’s “conversations with Regius,” Adorno speaks of Regius as a personality in his own right. Adorno appeals to Regius’ judgment instead of Horkheimer’s: “I would like to send you a second manuscript-in-progress […] which you will in no way be able to accuse of having unclear language and which Heinrich Regius, if I am not wrong about him, will not withhold his approval from.” It is because of Horkheimer’s association with Regius that he can be entrusted with the safekeeping and dissemination of Der gute Kamerad—surely, any friend of Regius would know how to evade the censors and have the prudence to handle the collection of aphorisms with the “utmost discretion.” Regius is the ideal addressee of sensitive notes on society’s decline into fascism written under its shadow ascendant.

In a letter to Horkheimer dated 3/23/1937, Adorno writes of his excitement upon sitting down to read Horkheimer’s “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,”¹¹ a long-planned critique of positivism for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (ZfS), the Institute’s official organ, and finding passages that could only have been written by Regius:

Dear Herr Horkheimer, I read your Positivismusaufsatz with the greatest joy and most complete agreement; indeed, my agreement extends so far that I find rather difficult to say anything “critical,” i.e. dialectically helpful, about it. Outside of the “Egoism”-essay, I know of almost no other writing of yours I could so unconditionally endorse. […] Still more than the agreement [with my own work], I was gratified by the rapprochement this essay indicates between your own work and that of Heinrich Regius. The gap which once existed between your major essays and his notes is visibly shrinking; the passage on vivisection,¹² which you’d previously shared with me, the passage on the prison,¹³ as well as that on the pseudo-functioning of positivism in a world already organized by certain schemata—these passages are not only extraordinarily successful in their own terms, but also point to a liquidation of the academic element which truly enthuses me.¹⁴

Adorno confirms Landauer’s observation: Horkheimer’s “search for a style” through the 1930s ends in a rapprochement between Horkheimer, the director of the exiled ISR, and Heinrich Regius, the heretic of late Weimar.

Note 2: Horizon of Dämmerung.

Thesis: Dämmerung undermines its prevailing, historicist reception in Horkheimer scholarship by insisting on ‘unswerving’ fidelity to the revolutionary socialist attitude in times of reaction and by reorienting its readers towards struggle in the present against the double temporal horizon of a past that cannot be redeemed and a future that cannot be guaranteed.

Adorno’s remark on the difference of perspective between Der Gute Kamerad and Dämmerung—”a little booklet of aphorisms that is directly connected with Regius but thoroughly treats the same situation from the perspective of full-blown fascism”—deserves our attention, since it relates directly to the problem of the “Prefatory Note,” which seems to qualify Dämmerung into irrelevance in advance. The note has long been interpreted as a refutation of the standpoint of Dämmerung. Werner Brede, editor of S. Fischer Verlag’s 1974 republication of Dämmerung alongside Horkheimer’s late Notizen (1950-1969), asserts in his editorial afterword:

After the victory of National Socialism, the concepts around which the Notizen in Deutschland revolved were, for Horkheimer, a thing of the past. For him, the [early 1930s] struck the final and fatal blow to the society of the liberal bourgeoisie, and, as a consequence, the very idea of his quasi-contrapuntally developed Marxism began to fade before his eyes as well.¹⁵

In his editorial afterword to the republication of Dämmerung in Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 2 (1987), Gunzelin Schmid Noerr casts the “Prefatory Note” as an indication that the author had already transcended the entire theoretical and political horizon of the work by the time it was published:

[T]he book itself, as the “Prefatory Note” states, is already “out of date” by the time of its publication. With the incursion of National Socialism, it was not only the ideas and concepts of the old world of the bourgeoisie which became obsolete for Horkheimer, but those of militant Marxism as well, which had developed within liberal society as its self-corrective. In light of this, his later Critical Theory could be understood as a diagnosis of this historical, social, and philosophical rupture. Whereas Horkheimer’s thinking in the late 1920s and early 1930s was above all concerned with the question of the consequences which should be drawn from the end of metaphysics, and the metaphysically-oriented conceptions of history and society, it was determined in the subsequent period by the question of the consequences which would arise from the non-arrival of that social upheaval the needs and interests of the majority of human beings seemed to demand. Accordingly, his focus increasingly turns from an “anthropology of classes” towards a “philosophy of history for the decay of civilization.”¹⁶

Despite the prevalence of this reading, its discrepancy with the “Prefatory Note” itself is telling. Brede and Noerr claim the “Prefatory Note” constitutes a confession of the irrelevance of Marxism after the victory of National Socialism. Yet the “Prefatory Note” presents the qualitative social transformation in terms of a disappearance not of Marxism but of an intellectual culture characterized by the degeneration and assimilation of Marxism: “social-democratic cultural politics, bourgeois literature in sympathy with the revolution, and the academic reformation of Marxism.” The standard interpretation of Dämmerung must therefore depend on a more fundamental assumption: the conception of Marxism as a counterpoint to liberal bourgeois society (Brede) or even as its “self-corrective” (Noerr). We should accordingly expect to find some confirmation of this in Dämmerung.

What we find, however, is that one of the fundamental motifs in Dämmerung is the anticipatory critique of the historicization of the revolutionary Marxism at its core. If the author of Dämmerung erred in his “Prefatory Note,” it was in his optimism that the impulse to “dismiss Marxism as an outdated error,” to “paint everything in the same grey of relativism, historicism and sociologism” that reflects the limbo of “the grey everyday” of those lucky enough, for now, not to suffer in its hell,¹⁷ was bound to the illusions of pre-National Socialist liberalism. If the later reception of Horkheimer’s own critical theory is any indication, post-National Socialist liberalism is bound to this impulse as well.

In “Temporality and Revolution in Horkheimer’s Early Critical Theory: A Luxemburgian Reading of Dämmerung” (2018), Loralea Michaelis argues the project of Dämmerung is the construction of “the character of the revolutionary” on the model of Rosa Luxemburg herself: ”The revolutionary is the one who is prepared to risk personal well-being for the sake of a cause whose success is by no means assured; the revolutionary is the one who adheres to this cause even when all appears to be lost, as it will be more often than not.”¹⁸ The recurrence of the figure of the ‘ruined revolutionary’ throughout Dämmerung is more than a memorial for the failed and fallen revolutionaries from the German revolution of 1919-1923, since the ruined revolutionary serves as the live criterion for judgment of ‘successful’ reformers: the revolutionary is distinguished from the reformer by the former’s resolve to fight in the ruins of their revolution.¹⁹ For Michaelis, the construction of the model of “the revolutionary as the one who is prepared to fail” accounts for Dämmerung’s repeated invocation of the social failure by the measure of bourgeois society:

[M]urdered, imprisoned, and disgraced revolutionaries stand at one end of the continuum, misfits, flops, and castoffs at the other. All have fallen below the prevailing measures of normality and goodness in bourgeois society because they have been unable or unwilling to adjust their plans and sentiments to its requirements. They are not necessarily morally superior to those who succeed—[…] but their experience yields superior insight into the society that is the real source of their difficulties. The one who has failed knows what the one who has succeeded does not: he knows that “the order which makes it possible that he may slip from his position into misery is ultimately held together by grenades and poison gas.”²⁰ It is this transvaluation of success and failure that Horkheimer translates into the character of the revolutionary for whom success is not self-evidently preferable to failure.²¹

Referring to Luxemburg’s challenge in the pamphlet to both sides of the SPD’s internal debate about whether it would be preferable for Germany to be among the victors or the losers at the close of WWI—

Under the circumstances the question of victory or defeat becomes, for the European working class, in its political exactly as in its economic aspects, a choice between two beatings. [...] Imperialism, and its servant militarism, will reappear after every victory and after every defeat in this war. There can be but one exception: if the international proletariat, through its intervention, should overthrow all previous calculations.²²

—Michaelis concludes:

The failure of the revolution radicalizes rather than deradicalizes Horkheimer’s understanding of its conditions of possibility. […] [F]or Horkheimer as for Luxemburg, under the conditions of capitalist society, the choice between failure and success is nothing but a choice between two beatings: one can either be wrecked by success or one can be wrecked by failure. The critical theorist, inheriting the work of the revolution that has failed along with the work of the revolutionaries who have failed and fallen with it, works to expose this rigged game of winners and losers, holding open the possibility of a third alternative, the possibility of a struggle that overthrows all previous calculations.²³

For Michaelis, this idea of the revolutionary character accounts for the strange, “double temporal horizon” of Dämmerung as presented in the first aphorism, and which is obscured by the standard english translation of the work by Michael Shaw in Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926-1931 and 1950-1969 (Seabury Press, 1978): “This is immediately signaled by the ambiguity in the title of the collection—meaning either dawn or dusk—as well as its opening aphorism, also titled “Dämmerung” (but [the latter is] translated unambiguously as “Dusk” in the English edition.”²⁴ Shaw introduces a second false disambiguation by assigning the title ‘Dawn’ to the collection of aphorisms from Dämmerung he singles out for translation, a decision informed by his need to present them alongside a selection of Horkheimer’s Notizen of 1950-1969, which he titles ‘Decline,’ in keeping with the traditional interpretation, as advocated by Brede, of the teleological arc of Horkheimer’s intellectual development.²⁵

In opposition to the standard interpretation of the pre-established historical irrelevance of Dämmerung, Michaelis argues the the double temporal horizon of the first aphorism poses the problem of the ‘untimeliness’ of the revolution itself: first, it “provides an interpretive lens for the entire volume not only in highlighting the indeterminacy of what the future holds but also in drawing attention to the risks that are borne by those who take the opportunity of this indeterminacy to fight for a better world”; second, it precludes both melancholia over the failed revolutions of the past and any guarantees or any certainty in a future revolution: “The only remedy for a past that can never be completely redeemed and a future that can never be completely assured resides in the present, in the daily struggle on behalf of a better world.”²⁶ This is the orientation Gillian Rose (1992) describes as Rosa Luxemburg’s agon of authorship—the conviction to critically exposit “the ‘unavoidable social conditions’ out of which such dangers arise, and the aporia intrinsic to socialist activity between the daily struggle and the goal beyond the limits of that struggle, which therefore cannot secure itself in advance.”²⁷ More than a decade after the earliest compositions of Dämmerung, Horkheimer redoubles in “The Authoritarian State” [1942]:

Present talk of of inadequate conditions is a cover for the tolerance of oppression. For the revolutionary, conditions have always been ripe. What in retrospect appears as a preliminary stage or a premature situation was once for a revolutionary a last chance for change. A revolutionary is with the desperate people for whom everything is on the line, not with those who have time. Critical theory […] rejects the kind of knowledge that one can bank on. It confronts history with that possibility which is always concretely visible within it. The maturity of an historical situation is the topic probandum and probatum. Although the later course of history ‘confirmed’ the Girondists against the Montagnards and Luther against Münzer, mankind was not betrayed by the untimely attempts of the revolutionaries but by the timely attempts of the realists. […] But the consequence that flows from historical materialism today as formerly from Rousseau or the Bible, that is, the insight that “now or in a hundred years” the horror will come to an end, was always appropriate.²⁸

Note 3: The fight for Dämmerung.

Thesis: The late, anti-communist Horkheimer was right to avoid the task of republishing Dämmerung because it was written to resist the process of canonization-by-domestication/-historicization the late Horkheimer employed to reassert control over his earlier work. In seeing this, Hans Jürgen Krahl was a better reader of Dämmerung than the vast majority of Horkheimer scholars to date.

The fragility of Horkheimer’s late philosophical self-interpretation of his own intellectual biography is evident in both the great lengths he would go to control the reception of his ‘early’ work as a whole and the specific ‘early’ texts which would cause him the greatest distress. In 1967, Horkheimer finally relented to the growing pressure from his publisher, S. Fischer Verlag, to oversee the republication of a selection of his ‘early’ works, but only after Fischer was able to leverage the growing desperation Horkheimer felt to control the distribution and reception of his more radical earlier writings among students,²⁹ as expressed in a letter from early 1965:

[T]he question that has preoccupied me in the past year […] is, the publication of my work from the thirties and early forties. Spurred on by students and others, the big publishing houses are after me, and I finally gave Fischer a kind of promise. What's bothering me are my not infrequent orthodox Marxist analyses. Even if I am still able to affirm what motivated them, they have nonetheless not been proven to be accurate. […] It is difficult for me to contradict the publishers’ statement that these essays have in one way become common property, that photocopies are circulating among the students, and that they can't be stopped. I've written a preface that describes the discrepancy with reality but acknowledges the spirit of the work.³⁰

This is Horkheimer’s late philosophical project of the latter half of the 50s through the end of the 60s: a fundamental redefinition of critical theory to rescue it from its origin in “Scientific Socialism.”³¹ Until his death in 1973, Horkheimer pursued a conscious, revisionist salvage operation of his pre-1950 corpus by imputing a redeemable moral motive to their foundation. By retroactively grounding earlier compositions on such a motive, he was able to grant them relative justification—at the very least, they were well-intended—while historicizing the ‘orthodox Marxist’ form in which these motives were expressed.

A selection of essays from the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung [ZfS] was published in two volumes by S. Fischer Verlag in 1968 under the title Kritische Theorie. Eine Dokumentation., edited by Alfred Schmidt under Horkheimer’s direction. The essays were extensively revised, and to date no systematic study has been made of the differences between the original essays from the ZfS and the ‘authorized’ variants in Kritische Theorie (1968). To give a single but revealing example: in the original 1937 publication of “Traditionelle und Kritische Theorie” in the ZfS, critical theory itself is defined by its “interest in the abolition of class domination” [Interesse an der Aufhebung der Klassenherrschaft];³² in Kritische Theorie (1968), critical theory is redefined by its “interest in the abolition of social injustice” [gesellschaftliche Unrecht],³³ which is retained in the English translation of “Traditional and Critical Theory” by Matthew J. O’Connell and others in Critical Theory (2002).³⁴

On the short list of earlier works Horkheimer and Schmidt elected not to republish at all, there are several student favorites, such as “The Jews and Europe” (1939) and “The Authoritarian State” (1942), two of the most ‘unswerving’ (to use the younger Horkheimer’s preferred term for his revolutionary conviction) essays that Horkheimer would ever author, let alone publish. But it was “Dämmerung (Twilight), a volume of aphorisms published only later (1934), in Switzerland, under the pseudonym Heinrich Regius [that] was to play an important role during the late 1960s, at least in Germany, in the political consciousness formation of student protest groups.”³⁵ Esther Leslie writes in her “Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement” (1999):

Marcuse, heralded in the blurb for the mass-circulation paperback One Dimensional Man as the prophet of the student revolutionary movement ‘along with Mao Tse Tung, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh,’ would be arriving in a volatile Frankfurt scene. Demonstrations and occupations of university buildings were a regular occurrence. Leaflets and pamphlets were issued daily. Seminars turned into political meetings and student strike committees demanded the self-organization of studies or co-control; a grouping called the ‘Spartakus department’ planned alternative courses on left radicalism, revolutionary theory—from Rosa Luxemburg to the use of cobblestones—critical economics, authority and communication, and work prospects. Students versed in critical theory were demanding that theoretical critique turn into practical political action. Theory was a brake on the movement, alleged some, as they denounced fellow students—mocked as Adornites and Habermice—for promoting theory for theory’s sake and disregarding their professors’ function as a left alibi for bourgeois society. The Frankfurt Schülers, ‘left idiots of the authoritarian state,’ had become ‘critical in theory, conformist in practice,’ stated a leaflet put out by sociology students in December, and it quoted Horkheimer’s Dämmerung from 1934: ‘A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.’ In March 1969, a pirate edition of Dämmerung appeared, and on its back cover was a photograph of the sociology department under occupation, renamed Spartakus department and festooned with a banner that quoted words from the book: ‘If socialism appears unrealizable then it is necessary to make it a reality with an even more desperate determination.’ Discussions were heated in Frankfurt. Some activists had been going further, grasping at alarmist tactics. In April 1968, Andreas Baader, Thorwald Proll, Horst Söhnlein und Gudrun Ensslin set two Frankfurt department stores alight, ‘as a protest against the indifference to war in Vietnam.’ At the end of October 1968 they were sentenced to three years imprisonment each.³⁶

In a discussion at the ISR about the politics of the student movement in September, 1968 (recently translated by CTWG’s J.E. Morain: “Authorities and Revolution. A Contribution to a Discussion held September 23, 1968”), Hans Jürgen Krahl (1943-1970), a student of Adorno’s and one of the leaders of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), responds to Jürgen Habermas’ accusation of the ‘authoritarian’ leadership and tactics of the student movement by extending an invitation for Habermas to participate (”if only in an advisory role”) in future deliberations among the students on appropriate political actions. Krahl concludes his counter-critique of Habermas by invoking an aphorism from Dämmerung:

No one is demanding that the critical authorities run out in the streets with us and join in the Ho Chi Minh chant. Surely, however, they should be capable of devoting enough working time to be active not just with their pens, but also in the context of actions, if only in an advisory role. And then, Mr. Habermas, you could indeed—and this is again the typical topos—have said it beforehand and not once again post festum and retrospectively. One must be resolved to participate in the action in an organized manner, even if this organized participation consists only of enlightenment beforehand. Otherwise you will be exactly the type of intellectual that Max Horkheimer was talking about when he said that critique is only legitimate if one decides to participate in the organization and in action, but that bourgeois critique of proletarian struggle is a logical impossibility.

[The discussion ends with von Friedeburg accusing Krahl of demagoguery for this invocation of Horkheimer.]

Krahl is first paraphrasing, then quoting from an aphorism in Dämmerung translated by Shaw as “A Discussion About Revolution,” specifically the following passage:

But a proletarian party cannot be made the object of contemplative criticism, for every one of its mistakes is due to the fact that the effective participation of more qualified people did not prevent it from committing them. Whether or not the contemplative critic would have strengthened such elements in the party by his own activity cannot be determined by his later statements about its actions, for it can never be decided whether his view would have seemed plausible to the masses in the situation at hand, or whether his theoretical superiority was matched by the required organizational talents, whether his policy, in other words, was possible at all, or not. It will be objected that the leaders monopolize power in the party, that the party apparatus makes it impossible for the single individual to prevail, and that consequently any attempt by reasonable people is doomed from the very start. As if any political will throughout history had not always encountered similar obstacles when it tried to assert itself! Today, it may be the intellectual before whom they pile up. But who other than those who overcome practically whatever defects there are can prove that, all things considered, such problems are really the least significant? Bourgeois criticism of the proletarian struggle is a logical impossibility.³⁷

There have been more than a few attempts to save the late Horkheimer from the recoil of Dämmerung. In his editorial afterword to the republication of Dämmerung in the Gesammelte Schriften, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr mounts a defense in two steps. In the first, he asserts that Horkheimer would never “so emphatically profess his commitment to socialism” or “so unreservedly subordinate his theoretical endeavors to this goal” as in Dämmerung. (This claim has become particularly dubious because of Noerr’s own archival-editorial work, such as overseeing the publication of fragments like “Bourgeois World” from the mid-to-late 1930s.) In a second, Noerr surmises that Horkheimer would never profess socialism so emphatically again because of the ‘paradoxical consequence’ which necessarily follows from subordinating theory to the goal of socialism as this profession demands:

In no other time, in no other writing, does Horkheimer so emphatically profess his commitment to socialism as in Dämmerung, nor so unreservedly subordinate his theoretical endeavors to this goal—to the paradoxical consequence of rejecting any all-too high-minded, morally or theoretically elaborate critique of the deficiencies of proletarian-revolutionary leadership with both moral and theoretical arguments of this nature. It is in this context that we find the infamous phrase: “Bourgeois criticism of the proletarian struggle is a logical impossibility.”³⁸

It is not an accident that Noerr formulates his argument about the incoherence of Dämmerung on the pattern of the late Horkheimer’s strategy of self-interpretation of the early work as a whole: recognition of the moral motives of early critical theory is supposed to result at the very least in a conflict between these motives and their Marxian form. However, as Loralea Michaelis observes in “Temporality and Revolution” (2018), the unique problem Dämmerung poses for Horkheimer’s late philosophical self-interpretation is that in it “Horkheimer’s position on the relationship between theory and practice and the question of what the future holds is far more complex than the standard interpretation, including his own [later] self-interpretation, would suggest.”³⁹ Krahl’s interpretation has the upper hand: the late Horkheimer and his students object to the collapse of theory into practice, but the self-conscious volatility of Dämmerung contests the separation of theory and practice as much as their identification.

Note 4: ‘The Marriage of Marx and Schopenhauer.’

Thesis: The interpretation of Horkheimer’s intellectual development as the negotiation of a tension between ‘Marx and Schopenhauer’ in which Schopenhauer wins out is partly endorsed by the late Horkheimer (1) to both ground and relativize his past Marxism as a mere expression of a more fundamental moral-philosophical intuition from Schopenhauer (2) and to give his late project the semblance of a dynamic, internal conflict it does not have.

In the “Preface” to the 1968 republication of his 1930s essays in Kritische Theorie, Horkheimer writes:

Metaphysical pessimism, always an implicit element in every genuinely materialist philosophy, had always been congenial to me. My first acquaintance with philosophy came through Schopenhauer; my relation to Hegel and Marx and my desire to understand and change social reality have not obliterated my experience of his philosophy, despite the political opposition between these men. The better, the right kind of society is a goal which has a sense of guilt entwined about it.⁴⁰

In the rest of the “Preface,” Horkheimer carefully attempts to isolate this motivation, a vague “desire for a better life and the right kind of society, [and] unwillingness to adapt to the present order of things,”⁴¹ from “the doctrine of Marx and Engels,” which, “though still indispensable for understanding the dynamics of society, can no longer explain the domestic development and foreign relations of the nations”;⁴² the Communist Manifesto is said to be “at least as out of date as the ideologies despised by the young.”⁴³ The “Preface” provides us with a basic model for the interpretation of Horkheimer’s philosophical development in at least three stages. An original, Schopenhauerian motive is said to be the ground which explains, and eventually transcends, the Marxist form in which this motive is expressed from the late 20s through late 40s. This is why Dämmerung occupies a unique place in Horkheimer reception. it is supposed to be written during the period in which “the marriage of Marx and Schopenhauer” is said to occur:

During the late 1920s Horkheimer lectured regularly on the history of philosophy, steadily expanding the scope of his work, and he began to move beyond formal and idealist paradigms by reading the history of philosophy in terms of a Marxian model of historical materialism adopted from The German Ideology. At the same time, he was recording an extensive collection of private notes and aphorisms, which he later published under the title of Dämmerung (Twilight) (1934). It was in these years that the marriage of Marx and Schopenhauer, so characteristic of Horkheimer’s work, took place. This turn in Horkheimer’s thinking accorded with a more general philosophical movement of the 1920s: the rising generation rejected what they now regarded as formalism in favor of more engaged philosophical stances, whether existential philosophy or critical Marxism. In Horkheimer’s work this took the form of constructing an alliance between Schopenhauerian pathos and progressive social philosophy. What they shared, to Horkheimer’s way of thinking, was a relentless critique of any transfiguration of suffering—this was one of the keys to his affinity for materialism—and an attempt to ground human solidarity on a shared experience of suffering and creaturely finitude. These principles provide what may be the most consistent themes underlying his work throughout its many transformations.⁴⁴

All of Horkheimer’s subsequent work is to be understood as a negotiation of this tension. Invariably, it ends with Schopenhauer stepping back into the foreground as Marx disappears behind him. Schmidt presents the dynamic as follows: “Conceptual motifs from Marx and Schopenhauer—the latter standing for the malum metaphysicum, metaphysical evil, the former the malum physicum, material evil—are played out against each other on all levels of critical theory.”⁴⁵ Accordingly, Horkheimer’s ‘late philosophy,’ “particularly during the 1960s,” should be understood as an extension and modification of “the early novellas and journals: the explicit adoption of Schopenhauer into critical theory.”⁴⁶ Even in the course of arguing that the “linkage between Schopenhauer and Marx” in Horkheimer’s work “is entirely substantial and not simply a formal analogy,” Schmidt adheres to the same pattern—the Schopenhauerian ethos of the earliest literary and personal writings almost disappears into the Marxian ‘scientific’ works for the ISR it subterraneously informs, discernible only in the skeptical reserve towards the “trans-individual structures and tendencies” of history: “by virtue of the fact that Horkheimer appropriates historical materialism from a Schopenhauerian point of view from the very beginning, he is protected against any pantheistic mystification of History (with a capital H) as a self-activating, teleologically self-unfolding substance.”⁴⁷ Schmidt heads off criticism of any ‘turn’ in the late philosophy by presenting it as a ‘return’ to a fundamental philosophical attitude which Horkheimer never really abandons.

We find the same problem throughout all the most theoretically rigorous and hermeneutically generous efforts to mount a qualified defense of the ‘late’ Horkheimer’s interpretation of his own ‘earlier’ (viz., pre-1950) work. For instance, in the recent “Critical theory under the sign of Schopenhauer: a reconsideration of Horkheimer's interpretative debt” (2023),⁴⁸ Loralea Michaelis contests both “[t]he standard interpretation of Horkheimer’s trajectory [which] invokes the figure of Schopenhauer as a shorthand for his retreat from the original program for critical theory” and late Horkheimer himself—at least insofar as he “seems to have encouraged this narrative, or, at the very least, allowed it to stand unchallenged”—through a careful study of his “actual handling of Schopenhauer in his late writings,” which “tells a different story.”⁴⁹ Michaelis makes a compelling argument that the late Horkheimer’s critical reception of Schopenhauer from the mid-1950s through 1971 is unintelligible apart from the theoretical basis for this critique in Horkheimer’s Marxian anti-metaphysics.⁵⁰

Michaelis claims that the late Horkheimer’s criticism of the metaphysical consolations of Schopenhauer’s thought in “Pessimismus heute” [1971]—”Schopenhauer undertakes to answer this need for metaphysics in a philosophy of the will that endows suffering with positive moral content and by offering an avenue of escape in his teaching on the denial of the will […]”⁵¹—derives from the pessimistic-materialist ethos one of Horkheimer’s earliest and most explicit anti-metaphysical Marxian volleys in “A New Concept of Ideology?” [1930]):

It is central to Marxian materialism to give expression to the unsatisfactory condition of earthly reality as true being, and not to permit vague ideas of humanity to be hypostatized as Being in a higher sense. Materialism is the sworn enemy of every attempt to understand reality on the basis of some idealist paradise or of any purely intellectual order. After Marx, we are forbidden any such consolation about the world.⁵²

Michaelis even argues that Horkheimer “appeal[s] to Marx as a thinker who makes good on Schopenhauer’s failure” to live up to his own anti-metaphysical orientation, since Marx offers “a more recent and so more resolute and less contradictory expression of the pessimistic refusal to be reconciled with the world.”⁵³ For Michaelis, then, the result of this schooling of metaphysical materialism into a more refined, and more earthly, form of pessimism in the acid test of Marx’s anti-metaphysics is thus: “For the materialist, the divide between reason and reality can only be bridged by practical struggle.”⁵⁴ Therefore, Michaelis concludes, “we cannot read Horkheimer here as casting doubt on revolutionary activism” in his criticisms of recent socialist revolutions:

Schopenhauer’s negativity is marshaled not to suggest that efforts on behalf of a better society are misguided or doomed but to bring their conditions of possibility more clearly into view. The real practical yield of Schopenhauer’s vision is not cynicism or despair but activism on behalf of a better world by those who are mindful of “the contradiction between the possibilities of human powers and the situation on this earth,” and who have chosen “identification and solidarity” over “nationalistic fanaticism” and “theories of transcendental justice” (p. 82). All they really need, Horkheimer concludes, is to read lots of Schopenhauer.⁵⁵

Given the care with which Michaelis reads Horkheimer’s work as “a feint, a ruse, another one of those crafty messages in a bottle for which first generation critical theorists are so well known,”⁵⁶ it’s unlikely that the irony of claiming ‘the real practical yield of Schopenhauer’s vision’ amounts to ‘read lots of Schopenhauer’ (admittedly, for the sake of some undefined ‘activism on behalf of a better world’) escaped her. However, even if she recognizes the irony in this, it makes no difference for her argument. Whether a happy marriage or a line of succession, the reconciliation between the respective world-irreconcilabilities of Schopenhauer and Marx seems to require a divorce from socialism and struggle.

Michaelis argues “the Schopenhauer that Horkheimer promotes bears a closer resemblance to Horkheimer,” the Marxian critic of metaphysics, “than Schopenhauer” through interpreting Schopenhauer by “interrogating Schopenhauer, identifying and selecting components of Schopenhauer’s philosophy that he finds compatible and discarding, often with explicit disdain, those components that are incompatible.”⁵⁷ In this process, “aspects of Schopenhauer’s philosophy are made over in the image of critical theory so completely that critical theory appears more faithful to Schopenhauer than Schopenhauer himself,” as “the anti-metaphysical impulses in Schopenhauer’s philosophy are lifted away from his affirmative metaphysics, which Horkheimer rejects on behalf of the more consistent anti-metaphysical materialism.”⁵⁸ In “Critical theory under the sign of Schopenhauer,” Michaelis seems to employ the same interrogative method of interpretation to which Horkheimer subjects Schopenhauer, but with one significant difference: nowhere does she ‘discard,’ let alone with ‘explicit disdain,’ the elements of late Horkheimer’s work which are incompatible with her interpretation of critical theory.

The selectivity of Michaelis’ reading of the late Horkheimer is most evident in her approach to the late ‘Notizen’ (1950-1969).⁵⁹ While offering a close reading of several of the late ‘Notizen’ on the problem of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, Michaelis neglects all of the late ‘Notizen’ in which Marx is accused of an even more vicious metaphysics himself. In order to motivate her argument that the late Horkheimer’s distinctively anti-metaphysical Schopenhauer derives from his ‘Marxian’ materialism, Michaelis focuses on two of the late ‘Notizen’ in particular: “Schopenhauer the Bourgeois,” in which, she argues, Horkheimer “qualifies the value of Schopenhauer’s insight into the irredeemable desolation of existence on account of his moralizing indictment of it,”⁶⁰ and “Schopenhauer as Optimist,” in which “[t]he critique of Schopenhauer is even more devastating”:

The problem is not only that Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the denial of the will to life contemplates an end to suffering in some of its spiritualized iterations; the problem is also that the separation of the individual will from the all-encompassing unity of the Will is construed as a form of “original sin” and its return into that unity as a form of redemption. By this route, Horkheimer says, Schopenhauer “closes his system” and his philosophy “relapses into optimistic dogmatism”. (…) For Horkheimer the eternal nature of suffering means that there can be no remedy beyond what human beings can provide for themselves. There can be no ultimate salvation, no metaphysical consolation; the human desire for a better world finds no higher sanction than the desire itself.⁶¹

By uncovering a resonance between Horkheimer’s Marxian anti-metaphysics of the early 1930s and his critique of Schopenhauer in the late works, Michaelis may rightly claim to be ‘more faithful to Horkheimer than Horkheimer himself.’ To do so, however, Michaelis would have to criticize the late Horkheimer, since he doesn’t just fail to make the Marxian grounds of his Schopenhauerkritik explicit, but in fact insists on the reverse—namely, a critique of Marx’s metaphysical idealism on the grounds of Schopenhauerian pessimism: “Stripped of its idealist delusion, Marxist materialism is closer to Schopenhauer… .”⁶² Throughout the late ‘Notizen,’ Horkheimer will time and time again present Marx as an idealistic—and therefore metaphysical—philosopher of history and a naive, optimistic social theorist in the tradition of self-confident liberalism.⁶³

What is most damning for Michaelis’ interpretation, however, is the fact that in the late ‘Notizen’ Horkheimer explicitly champions Schopenhauer’s anti-utopianism against the Marxian ‘realm of freedom,’ a “pious self-deception.”⁶⁴ In the same note in which Horkheimer writes “Marx and Engel's teaching that the struggle for higher wages and shorter hours of work would finally put an end to the prehistory of mankind is a pathetically secularized Messianism, infinitely inferior to the authentic one,” he separates the analytic framework of the Marxian “critique of political economy [as] a perfectly rational basis for an understanding of social development,” at least for the ‘liberal’ period of capitalist social development.⁶⁵ There is only one mode in which the late Horkheimer finds any rapprochement with Marx: having been expelled from the pantheon of authentic materialists, Marx is readmitted on the condition he leave his socialism at the door. He will even have to learn to play nice with the theologians. The late Horkheimer is not only not opposed to the ideas of ‘ultimate salvation’ and ‘metaphysical consolation,’ but will even endorse a ‘critical’ version of each—that is, after qualifying them into vacuity (as ‘postulates,’ as ‘hopes,’ as ‘wishes,’ as ‘non-scientific,’ etc.).⁶⁶

Pace Michaelis, Horkheimer does indeed ‘cast doubt on revolutionary activism’ as such, wavering somewhere between “the attempt to overcome [the prevailing injustice] has repeatedly led to greater injustice”⁶⁷ and his “clearsighted” resolution to “plot no revolution because it would only end in naked terror.”⁶⁸ If the “marriage” of Schopenhauer and Marx was supposed to be premised on their “ruthless critique of any transfiguration of suffering,” by the ‘Notizen’ of 1957-1958, in the same note where Horkheimer calls for Marxist materialism to be ‘stripped of its idealist delusion’ and become more like Schopenhauer, he identifies the goal of communism as ‘the realm of freedom’ and ‘end of prehistory’ with that very transfiguration: “According to Marx, not to mention Lenin, all misery and horror along the way toward that goal must be put up with for that reason.”⁶⁹ The recognition of ‘the eternal nature of suffering’ which Michaelis finds so radical in Horkheimer’s late philosophy is the basis on which the late Horkheimer argues Marx the revolutionary transfigures suffering—precisely because Marx refuses to eternalize suffering into an anthropological constant. Marx had the audacity to suggest that “[i]f prehistory comes to an end because food, housing and clothing are no longer and nowhere a problem for anyone,” then “real history” could finally begin; to a ‘clearsighted’ anti-utopian like the late Horkheimer, nothing could be more naive: “I believe that mankind will only have so-called nobler needs, needs beyond its natural ones, if these remain unsatisfied.”⁷⁰

To a certain extent, even Schmidt acknowledges the irreconcilability of Horkheimer’s late philosophy with critical theory: on the one hand, he describes “Horkheimer’s often misunderstood late philosophy” as a “modest, but humane perspective […] oriented analytically toward Marx, metaphysically toward Schopenhauer, and yet transcends them both”; on the other, he explains that “[w]hat seems problematic to [late Horkheimer] in Marx […] is his optimistic philosophy of history—the assumption that in the post-capitalist era, which is unquestionably approaching, social equality will be reconciled with fully unfolded individual freedom.”⁷¹ This is the core of Horkheimer’s late philosophy: Marx’s thought is dismissed as ‘undialectical’ for his supposed failure to see that “[t]he freer mankind becomes, the less meaning individual freedom will have,” an oversight Horkheimer attributes to the fact that “[t]he founders of modern socialism did not consider that those abilities”—those which everyone is supposed to have the freedom to develop in a higher form of society—“themselves are part of the bourgeois form of production, of science and technology which society needs in its growth and its struggle with nature.”⁷² In Horkheimer’s late philosophy, it is not just historical accident that ‘the attempt to overcome the prevailing injustice has repeatedly led to greater injustice.’

In what the author of Dämmerung calls the “empty […] pacifism which condemns both a colonial war and a prison uprising because both are violent,”⁷³ the late Horkheimer repeatedly condemns revolutionary action in advance: “even a dubious democracy, for all its defects, is always better than the dictatorship which would inevitably result from a revolution today”;⁷⁴ and: “the horror of colonialism dissolves before the equally horrible rebellion of the suppressed colonial peoples.”⁷⁵ For every concession the late Horkheimer seems to make to historical change, each is traced back to its non-historical foundation in a philosophical anthropology. Revolutionaries can expect to create nothing but dictatorship and horror, for “[m]aterial want was the condition of injustice, of suppression, as it was the condition of longing and imagination,” and nothing remains for that “especially skilled, sophisticated animal species” called humanity but success in eliminating scarcity, which “end is total disillusionment,” or another, more brutal regime of injustice and suppression which threatens to destroy the few human beings alive still capable of longing and imagination at all.⁷⁶ We can agree with Michaelis: Marx or Schopenhauer? is a pseudo-problem. The reason we should dismiss it isn’t because the late Horkheimer’s thought is more complex than such a crude dichotomy, but because it’s one the late Horkheimer himself only entertains to give his thought the semblance of depths it does not have.

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Pietà or Revolution by Night (Pietà ou La révolution la nuit) by Max Ernst. 1923.

1. “Those who have foundered,” in: Dawn and Decline (1978), 57.

2. For a biographical sketch of Landauer and his relationship to Horkheimer, see John Abromeit’s (2011): “Although it is impossible to determine exactly when Lowenthal introduced Fromm to Horkheimer, it was most likely during this time, in 1926 or 1927. In his autobiographical recollections, Löwenthal mentions that he was responsible for bringing Fromm into contact with the Institute, but he does not say exactly when. During his studies in the early 1920s, Horkheimer knew Löwenthal, but he did not meet Fromm until later. It is likely that Horkheimer and Fromm drew closer at this time through their mutual contact with Karl Landauer as well. In 1926, Fromm became a student of Landauer’s and, beginning in 1927, Horkheimer pursued his growing interest in psychoanalysis by undergoing an intense analysis with Landauer. Landauer was born in Munich in 1887 into a family of Jewish bankers that had, since the middle of the eighteenth century, helped the Bavarian royal family finance various projects in the development of Munich as its capital city. In 1912, Landauer, who was studying medicine in Munich at the time, traveled to Vienna to receive psychoanalytic training with Freud. During his first year in Vienna, Landauer was analyzed by Freud himself, and he attended the public lectures that Freud delivered at the Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Vienna. In the fall of 1913, Landauer became at the age of twenty-six a full member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. He also became a regular participant in its weekly meetings, which were held on Wednesday evenings in Freud’s practice until the outbreak of the war. After the war, Landauer moved to Frankfurt, where he continued his psychiatric training at the University Psychiatric Clinic. In 1923, he opened his own private psychoanalytic practice in Frankfurt. Alongside his practice, Landauer became a key contributor to the German Psychoanalytic Society, which had recently emerged out of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society. In October 1924, Landauer organized, along with Karl Abraham, the first German Congress for Psychoanalysis in Würzberg, and in the following year he played a key role in organizing the Ninth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Bad Homburg. After this conference, Landauer was given the opportunity to introduce psychoanalysis to the University Psychiatric Clinic in Frankfurt. The invitation was initiated by, among others, the director of the clinic, Kurt Goldstein, with whom both Frieda Reichmann and Horkheimer had studied in the late 1910s and early 1920s, respectively. Reichmann came from Heidelberg to attend these first lectures on psychoanalysis at the clinic, which continued for three months, and which were greeted with great interest. Out of these first lectures and discussions developed a working group that met once a month under Landauer’s guidance. In 1928, the group renamed itself the Southwest German Psychoanalytic Working Group and began meeting twice a month. At this point, if not earlier, Erich Fromm joined his wife Frieda as a regular participant in the group. They were also joined at this time by the fourth key member of the future Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute, Heinrich Meng—a doctor whom Landauer had met during the war and convinced to undergo psychoanalytic training. […] Horkheimer’s growing interest in psychoanalysis at this time expressed itself most palpably in his decision to ask Karl Landauer to analyze him in the summer or fall of 1927. Horkheimer was not suffering from any acute neuroses at the time; he simply wanted to gain a better understanding of psychoanalysis, and thought that undergoing analysis with Landauer would be one good way to do this. Landauer refused at first, insisting that Horkheimer present him with a symptom to be cured. A few days later, Horkheimer returned to Landauer and told him that he was unable to give lectures without reading directly from a prepared manuscript. Landauer now agreed to an analysis, and thereafter they met for an hour every day, six days a week, for an entire year, even though Horkheimer had been cured of his “symptom” after six weeks. In a later interview, Horkheimer would say the following about his analysis with Landauer: “My analysis never really became psychoanalysis in the strict sense. For a year I told Karl Landauer everything I was concerned with, every day, six days a week. Afterwards he knew a lot about philosophy, but in reality it never developed into a proper analysis.” Landauer agreed with Horkheimer that he was too content at the time for the analysis to be genuinely productive. He suggested that if Horkheimer were, for example, separated from his recently wedded wife, Rosa Riekher, they might have grounds for continuing the analysis; because this was not the case, they stopped after one year. In any case, both men viewed the analysis from the beginning primarily as a learning, not a therapeutic, exercise. After the analysis was over, Landauer and Horkheimer continued to meet regularly, not only in the context of their work at the Institute for Social Research—the newly founded Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute was housed in the same building—but also for long evenings of discussion at Landauer’s house, which were attended by other Institute members as well. Horkheimer’s analysis with Landauer was, in other words, not only the beginning of a productive working relationship, but also a warm friendship, which lasted until Landauer was captured by the Gestapo in Amsterdam and deported to Bergen-Belsen, where he died in January 1945. This friendship was one of the most important prerequisites for the founding of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute (FPI) in February 1929.” In: Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 188-191.

3. Max Horkheimer, “Zu Theodor Haecker’s Der Christ und die Geschichte,” ZfS Vol. 5, No. 3 (1936), 372-383.

4. From: Karl Landauer to Horkheimer 1/1/1937. In: MHGS Bd. 16 (1995), 9-11. Author’s translation.

5. In: Ibid.

6. In the midst of the worst fight on record that Adorno and Horkheimer would ever have with one another, and which could very well have resulted in their permanent falling-out, Adorno nevertheless writes:

… And even if I can match you grudge for grudge, mine does not go so far that it would prevent me from saying what I wrote Leo [Löwenthal] straightaway: that your Dämmerung had the greatest and most profound impression on me and that I give the book my blank signature [Blankounterschrift], if that still means anything to you. …

Adorno to Horkheimer, 11/2/1934. In: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel. 1927-1969. Band I: 1927-1937. [Hereafter: Adorno & Horkheimer BW, Bd. I] Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. (Suhrkamp, 2003), 25. Author’s translation.

7. Philipp Lenhard (2024): “Not that the land of limitless possibilities exactly went out of its way to welcome our leftist Jewish refugees. Far from it. The FBI had a keen eye on the members of the institute in general and its directors in particular and collected hundreds of documents, reports and intercepted telegrams. The bureau was particularly wary of enemy aliens and surveilled numerous European intellectuals, Pollock among them. Cryptographers examined letters and telegrams on the assumption that they contained some kind of code, and individuals involved with Pollock were questioned. Eventually, on 18 July 1941, J. Edgar Hoover personally ordered the termination of the surveillance. ‘The telegram forwarded by your office contains several words that could possibly be code’, he wrote. ‘However, it is suggested that these word in most instances at least are the names of other German-Jewish refugees. ... It is believed that the telegram in its entirety referred to legitimate transactions of the above Institute, or projects in which the Institute is interested, and accordingly it is not desired that any additional investigation be conducted.’ Even so, until ‘Harkheimer’ aka ‘Alright’, as the agents called him (because Horkheimer frequently closed his letters to Pollock with the affirmative ‘Alright’), and his ‘accomplice’ Pollock returned to Europe, they never dropped off the fbi’s radar entirely. To what extent Pollock and Horkheimer were aware of this attention is a moot point. Rumours about the surveillance certainly circulated among German émigrés.” In: Friedrich Pollock: The Éminence Grise of the Frankfurt School. Translated by Lars Fischer. (Brill, 2024 [Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019]), 121.

8. Adorno to Horkheimer, 2/25/1935. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 331-332. Author’s translation.

9. [MM Ed. Fn. No. 1:] Der böse Kamerad: allusion to the song Der gute Kamerad (The Good Comrade) popularized by the Nazis.

10. [MHGS, Bd. 15 Ed. Fn.] “Never published. The manuscript for this text does not seem to have survived. However, in Minima Moralia, there is a section titled ‘Der böse Kamerad,’ dated ‘1935,’ which deals with Adorno’s childhood experiences with his classmates at school, who are interpreted as precursors to fascism.” In: Ibid., 332.

The bad comrade. In a real sense, I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood. As a conqueror dispatches envoys to the remotest provinces, Fascism had sent its advance guard there long before it marched in: my schoolfellows. If the bourgeois class has from time immemorial nurtured the dream of a brutal national community, of oppression of all by all; children already equipped with Christian-names like Horst and Jürgen and surnames like Bergenroth, Bojunga and Eckhardt enacted the dream before the adults were historically ripe for its realization. I felt with such excessive clarity the force of the horror towards which they were straining, that all subsequent happiness seemed revocable, borrowed. The outbreak of the Third Reich did, it is true, surprise my political judgment, but not my unconscious fear. So closely had all the motifs of permanent catastrophe brushed me, so deeply were the warning signs of the German awakening burned into me, that I recognized them all in the features of Hitler’s dictatorship: and it often seemed to my foolish terror as if the total State had been invented expressly against me, to inflict on me after all those things from which, in my childhood, its primeval form, I had been temporarily dispensed. The five patriots who set upon a single schoolfellow, thrashed him and, when he complained to the teacher, defamed him a traitor to the class—are they not the same as those who tortured prisoners to refute claims by foreigners that prisoners were tortured? They whose hallooing knew no end when the top boy blundered—did they not stand grinning and sheepish round the Jewish detainee, poking fun at his maladroit attempt to hang himself? They who could not put together a correct sentence but found all of mine too long—did they not abolish German literature and replace it by their ‘writ’ [Schriftum]? Some covered their chests with mysterious insignia and wanted, far from the sea, to become naval officers when the navy had long ceased to exist: they proclaimed themselves detachment and unit leaders, legitimists of the illegitimate. The crabbed intelligent ones who had as little success in class as the gifted amateur constructor without connections had under liberalism; who therefore, to please their parents, busied themselves with fret-saw work or even, for their own pleasure, spun out intricate designs in colored inks at their drawing boards on long afternoons, helped the Third Reich to its cruel efficiency, and are being cheated once again. Those, however, who were always truculently at loggerheads with the teachers, interrupting the lessons, nevertheless sat down, from the day, indeed the very hour of their matriculation, with the same teachers, at the same table and the same beer, in male confederacy, vassals by vocation, rebels who, crashing their fists on the table, already signaled their worship for their masters. They needed only to miss promotion to the next class to overtake those who had left their class, and take revenge on them. Now that they, officials and recruits, have stepped visibly out of my dream and dispossessed me of my past life and my language, I no longer need to dream of them. In Fascism the nightmare of childhood has come true. — 1935

In: Theodor Adorno [1951], Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated from the German by E.F.N. Jephcott. (Verso, 2005), 192-193.

11. Max Horkheimer, “Der neueste Angriff auf die Metaphysik,” ZfS Vol. 6, No. 1 (1937), 4-53.

12. Horkheimer, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” [1937]:

The role of empiricism throughout the world may be illustrated by many examples. The following incident, dealing with the son of Carl Vogt, the critic of Marx, is taken from an article by F. de Spengler: “In his fine book devoted to the memory of his father, he recalls with smug amusement a remark of Professor Schiff to the members of an antivivisectionist society who wished to inspect the university laboratories. He told them that, although the animals were by no means asleep, the visitors would not hear a single sound. A simple transection of their vocal cords had deprived the animals of the ability to give voice to their suffering!” The pleasure which the younger Vogt derived from the gullibility of those good people is a perfect example of the pleasure to be derived from naive empiricism in a world in which everything is attuned to deception.

In: Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Max Horkheimer. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and others. (Continuum, 2002), 152.

13. Horkheimer, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” [1937]:

Empiricism, especially in its latest form which has gone so far as to abandon the criterion of personal observation and which intends, in all strictness, to rely exclusively on the logical perfection of the system and on protocol sentences, can easily come to disaster. We can illustrate this point readily. Let us suppose that in a definite country at a definite time the science of man, economics, history, psychology, and sociology are completely attuned to the principles of empiricism. Its people make careful observations; they possess a highly perfected logistic system of symbols, and in a number of cases they arrive at very acute predictions. The daily occurrences in economic and political life are faithfully recorded and even market fluctuations are accurately calculated in advance, although only at short range. The reflexes and reactions of the human being, from infancy to old age, have been carefully observed and all emotions have been related to measurable physiological processes. It is possible to make correct predictions regarding the conduct of the majority of the inhabitants of that country; for instance, as to their observance of stringent regulations, their frugality during a wartime food shortage, their passivity in the face of the persecution and extermination of their best friends, their manifestations of joy at public festivals and at the favorable outcome of the election of a brutal and deceitful bureaucracy, and so forth. The social sciences may have achieved all this and more in their effort to match the achievements of physics, the empirical science par excellence. The “facts of pure sense experience,” the supporting protocol sentences, pour in upon scientists in the same abundance as the spontaneous demonstrations of approval pour in upon that worthless government which would doubtless know how to use the meticulous classification, collation, and coordination of this science as an instrument of its all-embracing mechanism of control. And yet, the picture of the world and of man produced by these scientific devices might be vastly different from the truth actually attainable at that very time. Because they are harnessed to an economic machine which destroys every inner freedom, because their intellectual development is retarded by cunning methods of education and propaganda and they are driven out of their wits by horror and fear, the inhabitants of that country might very well be subject to distorted impressions, commit acts hostile to their real interests, and produce nothing but deceptions and lies in every feeling, every expression, and every judgment. In all their acts and utterances, they might be possessed, in the strict sense of that word. Their country would then resemble both an insane asylum and a prison, and its smoothly working scientific research would not be aware of it. Their science could improve physical theories, play a prominent part in food and war chemistry as well as in astronomy, and reach unheard of heights in the creation of means for the derangement and self-annihilation of the human race. It would, however, entirely miss the decisive point. It would not notice that it had long become its own opposite. Although some of its departments might have reached the highest eminence, science itself would have turned into barbarous ignorance and shallowness. Empiricism, however, would have to exalt that science which imperturbably continues to discover, label, classify, and predict facts. After all, where else should one learn what science is if not from science itself, from the men engaged in it? And these men are perfectly agreed on the fact that everything is in order.

In: Ibid., 159-160.

14. Adorno to Horkheimer, 3/23/1937. In: Adorno & Horkheimer BW, Bd. I (2003), 322-324. Author’s translation.

15. Werner Brede, “Nachwort des Herausgebers” (München, Juni 1974). In: Notizen 1950 bis 1969 und Dämmerung. Notizen in Deutschland. Edited by Werner Brede, Introduction by Alfred Schmidt [“Max Horkheimer’s Intellectual Physiognomy”]. (S. Fischer Verlag, 1974), 356-357. Author’s translation.

16. Excerpt from: Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, “Nachwort des Herausgebers. Die philosophischen Frühschriften. Grundzüge der Entwicklung des Horkheimerschen Denkens von der Dissertation bis zur ‘Dämmerung,’” in: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 2: Philosophische Frühschriften 1922-1932. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), 455-469. Author’s translation.

17. From Dämmerung’s “The Impotence of the German Working Class.” In: Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, translated by Michael Shaw (Seabury Press, 1978), 63-64.

18. Loralea Michaelis, “Temporality and Revolution in Horkheimer’s Early Critical Theory: A Luxemburgian Reading of Dämmerung.” In: Telos 185 (Winter 2018), 144-145.

19. In: Ibid., 142.

20. Michaelis quotes from the aphorism “Social Space”: “To recognize the space in which one finds oneself, one must discover its limits. At night, when we cannot scan the walls of the room we enter, we have to walk along them and touch them with our hands. That's how we learn whether it is a salon with silken tapestry and large windows or a prison with stone walls and an iron door. As long as someone stays at the center of society, i.e., as long as he occupies a respected position and does not come into conflict with society, he does not discover what it really is. The further he moves away from that secure center because his means, his knowledge, his relations either dwindle or are lost-and it is largely irrelevant whether that happens through his own fault or not—he finds that this society is based on the total negation of all human values. The way the police occasionally treat the workers during an uprising or beat the imprisoned unemployed with the butts of their rifles, the tone the factory porter uses with the man looking for work, the workhouse and the penitentiary, all these function as the limits that disclose the space in which we live. The more central positions can be understood through the more peripheral ones. The offices of a prosperous factory can only be understood when one looks at the workplace of the temporary employees during times of rationalization and crisis, and this workroom where it is a grace to be allowed to work oneself to the bone can only be explained by recourse to armed might. Whether he becomes aware of it or not, all these elements are part of the vague worry of the employee and set the tone of his life. The order which makes it possible that he may slip from his position into misery is ultimately held together by grenades and poison gas. Between the furrowed brow of his superior and the machine guns, there exists a series of continuous transitions each of which derives its weight from the latter.” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 76.

21. In: “Temporality and Revolution” (2018), 142-143.

22. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in German Social Democracy.” In: The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 336.

23. In: “Temporality and Revolution” (2018), 147-148.

24. In: Ibid., 135.

25. It would be difficult to find a more succinct and damning judgment of Dawn and Decline than Abromeit’s (2011): “An incomplete and unsatisfactory English translation of Dämmerung has been published, which also includes notes Horkheimer wrote much later in his life.” In: Max Horkheimer (2011), 16. [Footnote 45.]

26. Michaelis (2018). In: “Temporality and Revolution” (2018), 141.

27. Gillian Rose: “Rosa Luxemburg’s agon of authorship arises out of her awareness of the double danger of these two insinuated ‘authorities’—of ‘judgement’ (reformism) and of ‘culture’ (centralism). The one, reformism, by judging the beginning to be already made, and the other, centralism, by substituting for the beginning, the one, abandoning action, and the other, acting in the name of the collective will, ‘over-anxious’, as she says, but insufficiently anxious, collude in the equivocation of the ethical and political of an even more dangerous kind: the decomposition of bourgeois society which arouses ‘the anguish, rancor and hope (die Gegenwartschmerzen) of this motley aggregatlon… the tumult of nonproletarian protestants.’ Recognized in ‘Reform or Revolution’ (1899), this was restated in ‘Organizational Question of Social Democracy’ (1904), and developed further in ‘The Russian Revolution' (1917-18), which was not published until 1922: “It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform.” This delineation of the double danger of the ‘movement’: that it tends to substitute old or new authority in the place of daily struggle and anxiety over its outcome, cannot itself become a further judgement or ‘culture’: “That is why it is illusory and contrary to historic experience to hope to fix once and for always, the direction of the revolutionary socialist struggle with the aid of formal means, which are expected to secure the labour movement against all possibilities of opportunist digression.” Instead, the ‘unavoidable social conditions’ out of which such dangers arise, and the aporia intrinsic to socialist activity between the daily struggle and the goal beyond the limits of that struggle, which therefore cannot secure itself in advance, [are to] be expounded…” In: The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society. (Blackwell, 1992), 205-206.

Cf. Gillian Rose: “Marx's works can be interpreted deterministically: as formulating the iron laws of history from which the inevitable outcome of class struggle in the victory of the proletariat can be predicted. The same works can be interpreted aporetically: as stressing the gap between theory and practice, which strain towards each other; as insisting on the uncertain course of class struggle, which depends on the unpredictable configurations of objective conditions and the formation of class consciousness; as imagining the multiplicity of eventualities which might emerge between the extremes, ‘Barbarism or Socialism.’” In: Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7-8.

28. “The Authoritarian State” [1942], Translation by Peoples' Translation Service in Berkeley and Elliott Eisenberg. Telos Spring 1973, No. 15 (1973), 11.

29. On the ‘late’ Horkheimer’s anxieties over the republication of his works and the attempt to control their reception, see Gunzelin Schmid Noerr’s “Editor’s Afterword” to Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1987]), 243-246.

30. Horkheimer to Hannah and Paul Tillich, 1/5/1965. In: A Life in Letters. Selected Correspondence by Max Horkheimer. Edited and translated by Evelyn M. Jacobson and Manfred R. Jacobson (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 332.

31. In the “Foreword” (1967) to the collection Critique of Instrumental Reason, Horkheimer writes: “At the end of the Nazi period (I thought at the time) a new day, the beginning of an authentically human history, would dawn in the developed countries as the result of reforms or revolution. Along with the other founders of Scientific Socialism, I thought that the cultural gains of the bourgeois era—the free development of human powers, a spiritual productivity—but stripped now of all elements of force and exploitation, would surely become widespread throughout the world. My experiences since that time have not failed to affect my thinking. The ‘communist’ states, which make use of the same Marxist categories to which my own efforts in the realm of theory owe so much, are certainly no closer to the dawn of that day than are the countries in which, for the moment at least, the freedom of the individual has not yet been snuffed out.” In: Critique of Instrumental Reason: Lectures and Essays Since the End of World War II, by Max Horkheimer. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and others. (Continuum : Seabury Press, 1974), ix.

32. In: ZfS vol. 6, no. 2, (1937), 291-292. Author’s translation.

33. In: Kritische Theorie. Eine Dokumentation. Band II. Edited by Alfred Schmidt. (S. Fischer Verlag, 1968), 190.

34. Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Max Horkheimer. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and others. (Continuum, 2002), 242.

35. Alfred Schmidt: “The radicality of the position Horkheimer had now reached [viz., in the late 1920s] was reflected in Dämmerung (Twilight), a volume of aphorisms published only later (1934), in Switzerland, under the pseudonym Heinrich Regius; it was to play an important role during the late 1960s, at least in Germany, in the political consciousness formation of student protest groups. These “occasional jottings,” as Horkheimer all too modestly described them, lead into the categories of critical theory.” From: “Max Horkheimer’s Intellectual Physiognomy”, in: On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives (1993 [1974]), 27.

36. Esther Leslie, “Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” In: NLR I/233 (January/February 1999), 118-119.

37. English translation from: Dawn and Decline (1978), 40.

38. From: “Nachwort des Herausgebers. Die philosophischen Frühschriften. Grundzüge der Entwicklung des Horkheimerschen Denkens von der Dissertation bis zur ‘Dämmerung,’” in: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 2: Philosophische Frühschriften 1922-1932. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), 455-469. Author’s translation.

39. Michaelis, In: “Temporality and Revolution” (2018), 130.

40. In: Critical Theory (2002), ix.

41. In: Ibid., viii.

42. In: Ibid., vi.

43. In: Ibid., v.

44. John McCole, Seyla Benhabib, and Wolfgang Bonß, “Introduction. Max Horkheimer: Between Philosophy and Social Science.” In: On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives. (1993), 5.

45. Alfred Schmidt. In: “Max Horkheimer’s Intellectual Physiognomy.” On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives. (1993), 26.

46. Ibid., 38-39.

47. Ibid., 31-32.

48. Loralea Michaelis, “Critical theory under the sign of Schopenhauer: A reconsideration of Horkheimer's interpretative debt.” Constellations 30 (4) (2023), 1-14.

49. In: Ibid., 12.

50. Ibid., 2.

51. Ibid., 10-11.

52. Horkheimer, “A New Concept of Ideology?” [1930]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 139.

53. In: “Critical theory under the sign of Schopenhauer” (2023), 11.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., 8.

56. Ibid., 12.

57. Ibid., 2.

58. Ibid., 8-9.

59. Dawn and Decline (1978), 113-240.

60. Michaelis, in: “Critical theory under the sign of Schopenhauer” (2023), 5.

61. Ibid., 6.

62. “The Three Mistakes of Marx”: “Stripped of its idealist delusion, Marxist materialism is closer to Schopenhauer than to Democritus. Marx would probably really have believed that a liberated mankind would send rockets to the moon—because it was curious, or pour passer le temps. But it turns out that rockets are part of the realm of necessity.” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 156-157.

63. In “Hegel and Marx,” Horkheimer presents Marx as an absolute idealist philosopher of history. In: Ibid., 153-155. And again in “Permanent Education,” in: Ibid., 197-198. And again in “Vain Hope,” in: Ibid., 202-203.

Horkheimer attempts to historicize Marx to a bygone era of social theory, specifically the ‘last gasp’ of radical liberal theory in the mid-to-late 19th century, in “Marx as a Phase,” in: Ibid., 157-158. Most explicitly, in “Marx and Liberalism,” Horkheimer writes: “Marx's theory was meant as a critique of liberalism. But it was itself a liberal critique and falls prey to the authoritarian force of history.” In: Ibid., 205.

64. “Utopia as Absurdity”: “Without need no pleasure, without grief no happiness, without death no meaning. The less renunciation, the more desolate reality. Precisely because of this, utopia is an absurdity, and pious self-deception the idea of a realm of freedom that sought to overcome it. And yet we have no choice but the attempt to perpetuate that absurdity. Freedom will ultimately capitulate.” In: Ibid., 224.

65. Horkheimer, ”On the Critique of Political Economy.” In: Ibid., 231.

66. In the late ‘Notizen’: (1) For Horkheimer’s defense of the consolation of religion in Tolstoy from immature Epicurean atheists, see “The Truth of Religion,” in: Dawn and Decline (1978), 177-179. (2) For Horkheimer’s critique of his own earlier criticism of religion, and that of ‘critical theory’ more broadly, for the sake of a ‘true return to religion,’ see “False Return to Religion,” in: Ibid., 184-185. (3) For more of the late Horkheimer’s ‘critical’ defense of theology and religious faith from previous critical theory, see “Belief and Knowledge” and “The Difference Between Critical Theory and the Idea of Faith,” in: Ibid., 234-235; 239. (respectively) As he writes in the letter to Martin Jay that would serve as the ‘Preface’ to the latter’s Dialectical Imagination (1973): “The appeal to an entirely other (ein ganz Anderes) than this world had primarily a social-philosophical impetus. It led finally to a more positive evaluation of certain metaphysical trends, because the empirical “whole is the untrue” (Adorno). The hope that earthly horror does not possess the last word is, to be sure, a non-scientific wish.” In: Dialectical Imagination (University of California Press, 1996 [1973]), xxv.

67. “On Critical Theory”: “The critical analysis of society points to the prevailing injustice. The attempt to overcome it has repeatedly led to greater injustice. To torture a person to death is purely and simply an outrage; to save him, if possible, a human duty. If one wishes to define the good as the attempt to abolish evil, it can be determined. And this is the teaching of Critical Theory.” In: Ibid., 236-237.

68. Horkheimer’s “For an Association of the Clearsighted,” of the 1959-1960 ‘Notizen,’ marks a turning point, beyond which Horkheimer will not be able to endorse any ‘revolutionary’ program except cultural conservatism and defense of the value of the individual in the face of collectivism: “One should found an association in all countries, particularly in Germany, which would express the horror of those without affirmative belief in either metaphysics or politics. As a humane practice in insane post-war Europe, the latter would seem impossible to them, and the former galimatias. For those who are appalled by the economic miracle, the mendacious democracy, the bribery trials with Hitler judges, the luxury and the misery, the rancor and rejection of every form of decency, the admiration of eastern and western magnates, the disintegration of spirit, the slide into parochialism of this old civilization, such an association would be a kind of home. They would plot no revolution because it would only end in naked terror. But they would nonetheless be the—admittedly impotent—heirs of the revolution that did not occur, these pitiful clearsighted ones who are going into the catacombs.” In: Ibid., 166.

69. “The Three Mistakes of Marx,” In: Ibid., 156.

70. “Philosophy of History, a Speculation”: “There has always had to be an insufficiency of some sort lest ideas degenerate into cliches. And here we come to the core of the question concerning the substance of mankind, the actual speculation about the philosophy of history. If prehistory comes to an end because food, housing and clothing are no longer and nowhere a problem for anyone, will the higher, the real history, culture as it is called, begin, or do the movies and the stars in the countries that have arrived show the kind of regression that will then set in? I believe that mankind will only have so-called nobler needs, needs beyond its natural ones, if these remain unsatisfied. Perhaps I am wrong. That would mean that the idea is not tied to a lack, love for justice not to prevailing injustice, magnanimity not to misery and power. The very existence of non-human nature which man could care for without therefore being threatened by it presupposes a fraternal longing which could hardly be understood, were it not for the suppression among men. Even the violence which inheres in education really loses its ground when everything is available and misery at an end. It seems that regression is the only goal of progress. As long as there is suffering that progress can alleviate, however, that very thought is infamous.” In: Ibid., 189.

71. In: “Max Horkheimer’s Intellectual Physiognomy.” On Max Horkheimer (1993), 40-41.

72. “Permanent Education.” In: Dawn and Decline (1978), 197-198.

73. Dämmerung (1934), “Contribution to Characterology”: “A concept of character which pays no attention to the variety of historical roles of those collectivities and therefore does not differentiate between the characters of those that identify with them because all of them affirm the milieu in which they grew up, would be as empty as a pacifism which condemns both a colonial war and a prison uprising because both are violent.” In: Ibid., 55-56.

74. In: Critical Theory (2002), viii.

75. “The End of Morality,” in: Ibid., 160.

76. “On Pessimism,” in: Ibid., 237.