Dethroning the Hidden King: Why Did Horkheimer Never Become a Heideggerian?

The article offers a novel reading of the intellectual origins of the Frankfurt School critical theory by examining its overlooked prehistory in the early 1920s and Max Horkheimer’s encounter with Martin Heidegger. Unlike previous literature, it does not focus on Horkheimer’s criticisms of Being and Time (1927) but rather on his ambivalent impressions as a student of Heidegger’s postwar lectures in Freiburg. The latter, the article argues, served briefly as an inspiration and then as a negative foil to the Frankfurt School’s Freudo-Marxist paradigm that Horkheimer began to articulate at the time. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, the article examines Horkheimer’s Freiburg period more extensively than previous takes on the topic by placing special emphasis on Heidegger’s legendary Aristotle lectures, which brought him fame across Germany. Second, drawing on archival sources, it demonstrates Horkheimer’s awareness of the Aristotle lectures and his negative reactions to them. Third, in the light of recent evidence that Horkheimer had already discovered key components of his Freudo-Marxist paradigm in the early and mid-1920s, it argues that one cannot fully understand these discoveries, and thereby the birth of critical theory, without paying heed to Horkheimer’s concomitant disillusionment with Heidegger.