Max Horkheimer

Max Horkheimer was the director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research who shaped Critical Theory — the twentieth century's most influential synthesis of Marx, Freud, and Hegel — into a coherent intellectual programme. His 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory" defined critical theory as knowledge that seeks not merely to understand but to transform the social conditions that dehumanise people.

His collaboration with Theodor Adorno produced Dialectic of Enlightenment — one of the most powerful and disturbing diagnoses of modernity, arguing that the Enlightenment's drive to master nature had turned back upon humanity itself, producing not liberation but new forms of barbarism. Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason extended this thesis, arguing that the reduction of reason to its merely instrumental form — reason as calculation of means — had evacuated public life of the capacity to judge ends.