In his radio lectures entitled Art and Anarchy, the German art historian Edgar Wind, who had emigrated to England, describes a countervailing starting point for fruitful theories. He emphasizes, among other things, Plato’s impulse in this direction, because it emerged in a politically and socially torn epoch (Wind 1960: 9–22). A similar starting position applies in this respect to the critical theory of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Max Horkheimer, who is decisively responsible for the emergence of the so-called Frankfurt School, processes in his reflections the horizon of experience of modernity and its dislocations in the First World War. It is about transitions from the feudal empire to the Weimar Republic. Horkheimer’s thinking revolves around the question of justice: “The martyrs of freedom did not seek their peace of mind. Their philosophy was politics.” (Horkheimer 1936: 225). He has in mind a change in social life, to which theory gives him the means: “Critical theory nowhere aims merely at the increase of knowledge, but at the emancipation of man from enslaving conditions.” (Horkheimer 1936: 219). The social philosopher develops this connection, following Marx’s eighth and eleventh Feuerbach theses, especially in his two essays “Materialism and Metaphysics” and “Traditional and Critical Theory” in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Marx and Engels 1981: 535; Horkheimer 1933, Horkheimer 1937a, b). Here the term “critical theory” appears for the first time in 1937.