Max Horkheimer was a social philosopher and one of the founders of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), commonly known as the Frankfurt School. He was the director of the institute from 1930 until 1959, during which time the institute was successively located in Frankfurt am Main, Geneva, New York, and Los Angeles. His leadership and influence spanned the social and political backdrop of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi seizure of power, the New Deal, World War II, the McCarthy era in the United States, the restoration of democracy in Germany, and various periods of student protest and reform in West Germany. Although at no time could the Frankfurt School be understood as a "school" in a formal sense, its members began to produce a coherent body of literature in the 1960s, represented by Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas in Germany, Herbert Marcuse...