Max Horkheimer - Criticisms

Criticisms

Horkheimer's work has been largely debated over time. It has been said that after he moved to Los Angeles, his view that "money is the best protection" made him manipulate other members of the Institute by keeping them on low salary or dropping them and played Adorno and Marcuse off against each other, creating enemies out of them. Perry Anderson sees Horkheimers attempt to make institute purely academic as “symptomatic of a more universal process, the emergence of a ‘Western Marxism’ divorced from the workingclass movement and dominated by academic philosophers and the 'product of defeat’” because of the isolation of the Russian Revolution. Rolf Wiggerhaus, author of The Frankfurt School believed Horkheimer lacked the audacious theoretical construction produced by those like Marx and Lukas and that his main argument was that those living in misery had the right to material egoism. In his book, "Social Theory", Alex Callinicos claims that in working in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno offer no systematic account of conception of rationality, rather profess objective reason intransigently to an extent. Charles Lembert discusses in his book Social Theory that in writing 'Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno lack sufficient sympathy for the cultural plight of the average working person, unfair to criticize the tastes of ordinary people, and that popular culture does not really buttress social conformity and stabilize capitalism as much as the Frankfurt school thinks.