(born Feb. 14, 1895, Stuttgart, Ger.—died July 7, 1973, Nürnberg) German philosopher and social theorist. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt in 1922.
In 1930 he became director of the university's newly founded Institute for Social Research. Under his leadership, the institute attracted an extraordinarily talented array of philosophers and social scientists, including Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse; collectively (with Horkheimer) they became known as the Frankfurt school. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Horkheimer moved the institute to New York City, where he directed it until 1941; he reestablished it in Frankfurt in 1950. In his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” he contrasted what he considered the socially conformist orientation of traditional political philosophy and social science to the brand of critical Marxism favoured by the institute, an approach known as critical theory. His collaboration with Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), is a pessimistic work that traces the origins of fascism and other forms of totalitarianism to the Enlightenment concept of “instrumental” reason.
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