Max Horkheimer Quotes
Max Horkheimer was a 20th-century German philosopher and sociologist, the founder of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt and the central organising figure of what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory set out the programme of a critical theory of society aimed at human emancipation, distinct from the descriptive social sciences. The quotes below are attributed to Max Horkheimer, organized by topic.
Browse Max Horkheimer by topic
Max Horkheimer on Freedom
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“At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which … offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character.”
p. 133. -
“Long after Plato’s time the concept of the Ideas still represented the sphere of aloofness, independence, and in a certain sense even freedom, an objectivity that did not submit to ‘our’ interests.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 46. -
“Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws—this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. … Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.”
"The End of Reason" (1941) | p. 29.
Max Horkheimer on God
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“The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation.”
Thoughts on Religion," Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1995), p. 129.
Max Horkheimer on Justice
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“The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalized, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | pp. 21-22.
Max Horkheimer on Knowledge
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Attributed to Max Horkheimer:
“The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”
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“The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalised, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own.”
pp. 21-22. -
Attributed to Max Horkheimer:
“Logic is not independent of content.”
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“Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to use obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violated the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper.”
p. 133. -
“Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic conception of rationalism, on synthetic a priori judgments, that is, material propositions that cannot be contradicted by any experience, the empiricist posits the forms of being as constant.”
p. 146. -
“In the world of action, we know that it is disastrous to treat animals or human beings as though they were stocks and stones. Why should we suppose this treatment to be any less mistaken in the world of ideas?”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 21.
Max Horkheimer on Life
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“Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 18.
Max Horkheimer on Mind
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Attributed to Max Horkheimer:
“Reason for centuries has meant the activity of understanding and assimilating the eternal ideas which were to function as goals for men.”
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“The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.”
p. 133. -
“Leibniz’s theory on the subject as substantia ideans in the sense of a causative agent of decision and acts stands much closer to a materialist interpretation of history than does a philosophy which reduces the thinking subject to the role of subsuming protocol sentences under general propositions and deducing other sentences from them.”
p. 149. -
“When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.”
"The End of Reason" (1941) | p. 28. -
“With the abolition of otium and of the ego no aloof thinking is left. … Without otium philosophical thought is impossible, cannot be conceived or understood.”
"The End of Reason" (1941) | p. 39. -
“It is as if thinking itself had been reduced to the level of industrial processes, subjected to a close schedule—in short, made part and parcel of production.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 21. -
“Pragmatism … reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of ‘being practical’ as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 52. -
“Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 21. -
“Thought must be judged by something that is not thought, by its effect on production or its impact on social conduct, as art today is being ultimately gauged in every detail by something that is not art, be it box-office or propaganda value.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | describing the pragmatist view, p. 51. -
“If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate—in short, emancipation of fear—then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947)
Max Horkheimer on Nature
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“The disparagement of empirical evidence in favor of a metaphysical world of illusion has its origin in the conflict between the emancipated individual of bourgeois society and his fate within that society.”
p. 138. -
“The hypostasis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science … results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settles by a “crucial experiment” rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has even more general character than a law of nature.”
p. 148.
Max Horkheimer on Politics
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Attributed to Max Horkheimer:
“The function of critical theory is to facilitate the historical process by which mankind becomes conscious of itself.”
Max Horkheimer on Time
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Attributed to Max Horkheimer:
“What is at stake is not the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past.”
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“Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism .”
p. 148.
Max Horkheimer on Truth
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“The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies. … Subjective reason conforms to anything.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | pp. 24-25. -
“Answers determined by the social division of labor become truth as such.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 50: Describing the pragmatist view