Abstract

Max Horkheimer's essay, “Authoritarian State,” was written in 1940 and issued two years later as part of a limited-circulation pamphlet compiled by the Institute for Social Research, then located in Los Angeles. The pamphlet bore the title, To the Memory of Walter Benjamin, and was intended as a private tribute to this writer and associate of the ‘Frankfurt School’ who had just taken his own life following imprisonment by fascist police. That the essay has never been given authorized publication other than in its original, mimeographed form is but one of its outstanding features. Only in the late 1960s, when the German Movement began releasing it in pirate editions, of which there are now several, did “Authoritarian State” pass beyond a tiny circle of readers.