Max Horkheimer, a German-American philosopher and social theorist, was born in Stuttgart, Germany, to a wealthy industrialist. After receiving a PhD in philosophy at the university of Frankfurt in 1922 with a dissertation on Kant supervised by Hans Cornelius, Horkheimer joined the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) that was established in Frankfurt in 1923 as the first Marxist-oriented research center affiliated with a major German university. Under its director, Carl Grunberg, the institute's work in the 1920s tended to be empirical, historical, and oriented towards problems of the European working-class movement.

Horkheimer became director of the institute in 1930 and gathered around him many talented theorists, including Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and T. W. Adorno. Under Horkheimer, the institute sought to develop an interdisciplinary social theory that could serve as an instrument of social transformation. The work of this era...