Critical Theory Consolidated: Foreword Regression in the Late Work of Max Horkheimer and Its American Reception

The ascendance of critical theory to the status of a global intellectual paradigm is the result of a half-century-long search for the Frankfurt School’s foundations in philosophy and religion rather than its previously recognized source in contemporary social problems and the tradition of Marxism. Initiated by Max Horkheimer’s turn to religion and political conservatism in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then defended by West German contemporaries, the resulting canonization of critical theory has been more recently consolidated by leading American representatives of Frankfurt School intellectual history. To reconstruct this process, this essay returns Horkheimer’s late work to its context in Cold War–era debates about American militarism, political emancipation, women’s rights, the “Third World,” and related social struggles before showing how the controversies surrounding his religious rewriting of critical theory continue to inform influential accounts of Frankfurt School history.