Books by Max Horkheimer

In his most important work, Max  Horkheimer surveys and demonstrates the gradual ascendancy of Reason in Western philosophy, its eventual total application to all spheres of life, and what he considers its present reified domination. First published in 1947, Horkheimer here explores the ways in Nazism - that most irrational of political movements - had co-opted ideas of rationality for its own ends. Ultimately, the book is a warning of the ways this might happen again and, as such, this is a book that has never appeared more timely.

A classic of twentieth-century thought, charting how reason regressed back into myth and superstition

These essays, written between 1949 and 1967, focus on a single theme: the triumph in the twentieth century of the state-bureaucratic apparatus and ';instrumental reason' and the concomitant liquidation of the individual and the basic social institutions and relationships associated with the individual.