the early 1920s Weil was politically close to the Spartacists, although he later acknowledged that he was always a “salon Bolshevik” who was never jailed and never considered renouncing his fortune.22 He used his position instead to support many left-wing causes, including the Malik Verlag, the theater of Erwin Piscator and the corrosive art of Georg Grosz, who in fact painted his portrait in 1926 while Weil read the proofs of a German translation of Upton Sinclair’s book on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Among his projects was the “First Marxist Work Week,” which took place near the Thuringian town of Ilmenau at Whitsun in 1923. The participants, mostly from the orbit of the newly formed German Communist Party, included Korsch, Lukács, Karl August Wittfogel, Konstantin Zetkin (son of the KPD luminary Clara Zetkin), Julian and Hede Gumperz, Béla Fogarasi, Richard Sorge, Eduard Alexander, Fukumoto Kuzuo, Friedrich Pollock and four young friends from Weil’s student days in Tübingen.23 Here, papers were given on such subjects as socialist planning and the theory of imperialism, with Lukács’s recently published History and Class Consciousness as a major source of discussion. Although the meeting was apparently a success, a second week the following year did not ensue because of Weil’s founding of the more permanent institution. According to Friedrich Pollock, who was later married to one of Weil’s cousins, it was conceived in conversations with a third figure, who had not been in Ilmenau, in the castle garden in the Taunus mountain town of Kronberg in 1922.
That third figure was, of course, Max Horkheimer, who, with Pollock, had been introduced to Weil by Konstantin Zetkin in the fall of 1919 in Frankfurt. Horkheimer’s important role in the early years of the Institute has not always been recognized. But as his most recent biographer, John Abromeit, has noted, “Horkheimer was instrumental in the planning of the Institute from the very beginning, a fact that is often overlooked due to his lack of involvement in the Institute’s affairs under its first director, Carl Grünberg. It was not a mere formality that Horkheimer was listed as one of the nine original members of the Society for Social Research, the organization formed to found the Institute.”24
Horkheimer brought to their deliberations a growing identification with socialism without any particular party affiliation, combined with a strong commitment to academic studies, which manifested itself in a successful philosophical apprenticeship first with Edmund Husserl in Freiburg and then Hans Cornelius in Frankfurt. Although not as wealthy as Hermann Weil, Horkheimer’s father, Moritz, was a successful factory owner from Stuttgart and a liberal assimilated Jew who patriotically supported the German war effort. His mother was entirely devoted to domestic pursuits, the most avid of which, by all reports, was providing her only son with unconditional love. Trained to succeed his father at the factory, the young Horkheimer was, however, motivated more by aesthetic yearnings than commercial ones. Although growing increasingly alienated from his parents’ values, he never broke with them personally, even when they disapproved of his love for the “unsuitable” woman he eventually married and objected to his academic career. Through the lifelong friendship he began at the age of sixteen in 1911 with Pollock, also the son of an assimilated Jewish industrialist, Horkheimer seems to have found a microcosmic foretaste of the egalitarian community of like-minded souls for which he clearly yearned.25 Although a sympathetic observer of the political turmoil after the war, he merely watched the events unfolding in Munich with the group around radical bohemian photographer Germaine Krull rather than participating directly in them. Nor was he swept up in the quest for religious authenticity that would inspire future Institute colleagues like Leo Löwenthal and Erich Fromm, who were for a while part of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus directed by Franz Rosenzweig.
During the Institute’s first few years, when Carl Grünberg served as director and its focus was on the history of the labor movement, Horkheimer was occupied primarily with his university studies, working with mentors like Cornelius and Gestalt psychologist Adhémar Gelb. However, he resisted becoming absorbed into the world of academic careerism, which Fritz Ringer would later call the realm of German mandarins in decline.26 As Adorno recollected about his first encounter with Horkheimer in Gelb’s seminar, he was “not affected by the professional deformity of the academic, who all-too-easily confuses the occupation with scholarly things with reality.”27 In addition to his more scholarly writings, he wrote a steady stream of aphoristic ruminations that only appeared pseudonymously in 1934 under the ambiguous title Dämmerung, which means both “dawn” and “twilight.” Wrestling with a number of issues—the relationship between theoretical and practical reason, the materialist underpinnings of philosophy, the complex interaction of theory and empirical research, the contribution psychoanalysis might make to social theory—Horkheimer came to the conclusion that only interdisciplinary work guided by a common goal might provide answers to questions that traditional scholarship and conventional politics had failed to address. When the opportunity came to replace Grünberg as Institute director following his debilitating stroke in 1928, Horkheimer was ready to launch an ambitious program whose outlines he spelled out in the inaugural address he gave in 1931 on “The Current Condition of Social Philosophy and the Task of an Institute of Social Research.”28 Two years earlier, Weil had succeeded in convincing the minister of education to transfer Grünberg’s chair in political science, originally endowed by his father, to one in social philosophy. Horkheimer, author of a newly published Habilitationschrift titled The Origins of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History, was selected to fill it and assumed the directorship in January 1931.
From this very sketchy portrait of Horkheimer, whose acceptance of the directorship might be considered more properly the origin of the Frankfurt School than of the Institute of Social Research, it is clear that the institutional founding of Critical Theory was as scattered, uneven and diffuse as its theoretical point d’appui. Financially, it was dependent on the inadvertent largess of the class whose hegemony it sought to undermine. Politically, it kept its distance from the parties or movements that might provide the historical agency to realize its hopes. Academically, it was only obliquely integrated into a university system whose advocacy of scholarly neutrality and disinterested research it could not embrace. Personally, its leadership was unsettled and uncertain, at least initially. Even its name—the bland “Institute of Social Research”—covered over its deeper agenda expressed in an earlier candidate, “Institute for Marxism,” which had been rejected as too provocative.29
Although for some unfriendly commentators, such as Brecht, these anomalies smacked of hypocrisy and self-deception, it might be more useful to see them as enacting the very uneasiness with seeking a firm theoretical ground that also eluded Critical Theory. In fact, over time, the very need for an explicit foundation from which critique might be launched lost its exigency. Instead, the search for origins as ground from which thinking might securely begin became itself an explicit target of Critical Theory. In his consideration of phenomenology, Adorno condemned the quest for an “ur” moment from which all else followed. “The concept of the absolutely first,” he wrote in his book on Husserl, “must itself come under critique.”30 Whether it be the concept of Being or the priority of the Subject, philosophies that sought a first principle—prima philosophia or Ursprungsphilosophien—were guilty of privileging one moment in a totality of relations that could only be entered in medias res. Dialectics, even negative ones, understood that nothing was ever immediate and logically prior to the mediation of the whole.
The search for foundations and origins, the Frankfurt School came to argue, is not only problematic from a purely theoretical point of view; it is also politically suspect. As Adorno made clear in Minima Moralia, particularly in the aphorism “Gold Assay” and later in Jargon of Authenticity, there was a sinister link between prioritizing the assertion of origins and the fascist cult of blood and soil.31 The search for authenticity and genuineness contains the “notion of the supremacy of the original over the derived. This notion, however, is always linked with social legitimation. All ruling strata claim to be the oldest settlers, autochthonous.”32 Here the angry voice of the exile, expelled from any connection to his original home, can be heard, but there were earlier sources for Critical Theory’s distrust of foundationalist claims, both historical and philosophical.
Although
