Abstract

My dissertation is conceived as an intellectual biography of the social philosopher Max Horkheimer. It is structured chronologically and divided into eight chapters, which address Horkheimer's intellectual development during the early and middle phases of his life. The first chapter draws on Horkheimer's early literary writings to reconstruct his upbringing in Wilhelmine Germany, his critique of World War I, and his involvement in the Munich Council Republic. Horkheimer's student years at the newly founded J. W. Goethe University in Frankfurt are the subject of the second chapter. The first half of the chapter focuses on his relationships with Felix Weil, with whom he would lay the foundations for the Institute for Social Research, and Hans Cornelius, his most important academic mentor. The second half examines Horkheimer's first and second dissertations on Immanuel Kant. ;The third, fourth and fifth chapters focus on the crucial period in which Horkheimer began to develop his own critical theory of society. The third chapter examines Horkheimer's published writings and lectures in the late 1920s, in which he develops a materialist interpretation of the history of modern philosophy, from the Renaissance to contemporary debates in the 1920s. The fourth and fifth chapters address Horkheimer's efforts to develop a critical theory of contemporary society. Chapter four begins with an examination of Horkheimer's critiques of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge and Lenin's mechanistic materialism, and continues with an analysis of Horkheimer's own collection of aphorisms, Dawn and Decline. The fifth chapter treats Horkheimer's integration of psychoanalysis into his critical theory. ;Chapters six, seven and eight focus on the three most important concepts Horkheimer developed during the early and mid-1930s---his most productive period. Chapter six examines his efforts to develop a non-mechanistic, anti-foundational concept of materialism appropriate to twentieth-century societies. Chapter explores a further stage in Horkheimer's application of psychoanalysis to history and society: his concept of the anthropology of the bourgeois epoch. The eighth and final chapter treats the beginnings of a long-term project on dialectical logic, which would eventually culminate in Dialectic of Englightenment