Max Horkheimer and the Unbridled Capitalism

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Max Horkheimer was striving to offer a proper explanation for the capitalism of his time. Texts such as “The Jews and Europe” (1939) and “Authoritarian State” (1942) were important milestones of a work in progress which resulted in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (concluded in 1944). The discussions within the Institute of Social Research in exile, especially embodied in a debate on National Socialism organized by the Institute at Columbia University in 1941 – which was attended by Friedrich Pollock, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Arcadius R. L. Gurland and Herbert Marcuse –, as well as the collaboration with Adorno, were two key elements for Horkheimer’s theoretical positioning by the mid-1940s. In this paper I will draw on Horkheimer’s claim, which first appeared in “The Jews and Europe”, according to which authoritarian social formations should be interpreted as capitalism’s loss of inhibitions (Hemmungen) to make use of force and violence in order to reach its goals – valorization and expanded reproduction of capital. After introducing this proposition put forth by Horkheimer in the late 1930s, I will suggest that his approach is useful to discuss contemporary capitalism marked by a broad backlash worldwide – populist, authoritarian and seemingly “antisystem” leaders, setbacks in democratic institutions, retreat of rights. Whereas approaches like Habermas’ to a great extent idealize intersubjectivity within Welfare State capitalism, Horkheimer highlights authoritarian tendencies which are intrinsic to capitalism itself and which (re)emerge in periods of crises. I shall place this insight by Horkheimer in dialogue with contemporary approaches developed in both central and (semi)peripheral countries, such as the ideas of deconsolidation of democracy (Foa and Mounk, 2016), crony capitalism (Krugman, 2016), mafioso state (Oh and Varcin, 2002) and the elite of backwardness (Souza, 2017).