Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment

Max Horkheimer became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) at Frankfurt am Main in 1930, and under his leadership the loosely Marxist institute, founded in 1923 with funding from the grain merchant Felix Weil, developed into the intellectual center now known as the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer's 1937 essay "Traditionelle und kritische Theorie" ("Traditional and Critical Theory"), published in the institute's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, gave the emerging project its name: unlike "traditional theory," modeled on the natural sciences and claiming a neutral, disinterested standpoint, "critical theory" openly acknowledges its own position within society and aims at human emancipation from relations of domination, drawing on Marx's critique of political economy, Freud's psychoanalysis, and Hegelian dialectics. Forced into exile by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the institute relocated first to Geneva and Paris, then in 1934 to Columbia University in New York, before Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno moved to Los Angeles in 1941, where, amid the war and in close proximity to the Hollywood culture industry they would soon anatomize, they composed their most influential joint work.